#219 Logan Ury: The Dating Myths You Need to Stop Believing | The Knowledge Project

Your dating app profile is sort of like your billboard. You are telling a story about who you are.

Am I ready to date?

Who should I date? Should I keep dating this person?

Should we move in together?

Should we get married?

Each of these is a pivotal point in your life.

The thing that we think makes us unlovable is often what makes somebody feel comfortable around us, but if we truly feel like we're unlovable, we never open up and give somebody the chance to see that for themselves.

The sooner you learn how to date, the sooner you can stop dating.

It's not about gathering information, it's about having an experience with them.

Imagine that you spend 50 years with someone.

The day that you meet is 0 .0055 % of your total time with them.

You have to shoot your shot.

You have to approach people in public.

You have to take a risk.

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Today's episode is all about rethinking modern relationships from first dates to breakups and everything in between.

My guest is Logan Urie, a behavioral scientist, dating coach, and the director of relationship science at Hinge.

She's the best -selling author of How Not to Die Alone and a leading expert in how we form, maintain and end relationships.

Logan challenges some of our biggest myths about dating, including the idea that you need to wait for the spark.

Instead, she shares what really matters in a long -term partner, someone you're genuinely interested in, who makes you feel good and who brings out the best in you.

We cover how to approach dating apps and first dates with the right mindset, why clear communication is everything, and how to navigate a difficult conversation in love and beyond.

I've gotta be honest, I feel a bit vulnerable putting this conversation out there.

I share more about my personal life and mindset than I have before.

But I'm hoping someone out there can relate and feel less alone in their journey to find a partner.

So whether you're looking for that partner, or trying to strengthen your relationship, or just hoping to better connect with the people in your life, this conversation is filled with insights to help get you there.

It's time to listen and learn.

I want to start at the beginning, which would be a first date.

Great. You've reframed this from, I want to find my soulmate to, do I want to spend more time with this person?

Walk me through that.

A lot of people on a first date put so much pressure on themselves, they're really thinking about could I spend the rest of my life with this person?

I'm really busy, would I want to see them again?

and I'm gonna treat this like a job interview where I ask them, what's your five year plan and what did you study in college and really interviewing this person for the role of spouse?

And then of course, people don't feel any spark or any excitement.

And so I like to take the pressure off of a first date and say, this is really an opportunity to have an experience with somebody else to have some fun.

And then if you have a good time, you can see them again and you don't have to overthink it and think, is this person and who I want to spend the rest of my life with.

So I've been guilty of this in terms of the spark.

You know, you walk away from a first date and you're like, yeah, they're a nice person but maybe they're boring, or you didn't feel that instant romantic connection and what do you think about the spark?

I mean, we all look for the spark.

Yeah, so the spark is very exciting.

Who doesn't want to have that feeling of fireworks and instant chemistry with someone?

But through the work I've done, I've actually come to see The Spark as a bit of my nemesis, because I have coaching clients who say to me, Logan, I went out with this guy.

He was great. We had a good time.

Oh, I'm not going to see him again.

What are you talking about?

And they say, I just didn't feel The Spark.

And so in our culture, people have come to expect that if you don't have that instant feeling, then it must not be your person.

And instead, I teach my coaching clients about the three myths of The Spark.

So the first myth is that if you don't have the spark, then it can't grow, and that's absolutely not true.

So we know from research that only 11 % of people feel love at first sight.

And that means many people are getting to know someone over time.

Maybe they live in the same apartment building, they work in the same place, and that attraction and appreciation grows over time, so the spark can definitely grow.

The second myth is that if you feel the spark, it's definitely a good thing.

actually sometimes certain people give us the spark because we actually don't know how they feel about us.

So sort of that hot cold feeling makes us wonder does he like me, does he not like me and through that we end up feeling what we think of as butterflies or chemistry but is actually anxiety and it's actually alarm bells in our head going off.

Do they like me, do they not like me, am I accepted?

And so sometimes it's actually a sign of either the person giving you a hot cold feeling or it can be somebody who's a narcissist. I've also found that, let's say I go to an event and I talked to some of my girlfriends later and I'll say, oh, I really like that guy.

We really hit it off.

And then they're like, wait, I've really hit it off with that guy.

And we realized we all had what felt like unique connections to this person but they were actually just really sparky.

And I imagine you meet a lot of people through doing this that are really sparky.

And so certain people just give off that spark and it's not about your dynamic with them, It's about who they are.

And then the third myth is that if you have a spark, the relationship is viable.

We also know that that's not true.

Just because you met the right way doesn't mean that it's the right relationship.

And so you can have a very sparchy beginning, but it can fizzle out quickly.

And you shouldn't stay in the relationship because you had a really good we met story.

And so my antidote to the spark is going after the slow burn.

And the slow burn is somebody who you like them more and more as you get to know them.

They may not be instantly the most charismatic person that you've ever met, but they're really a quality person, and they really grow on you.

And not because you're settling, but because you're looking for love in a different package than you originally thought.

You're not just looking for the life of the party person.

That's immediately as charismatic.

And so I feel like I'm married to a slow burn.

I met my husband in college, we met again at Google a number of years later, and now we've been together for almost 10 years.

And so he's somebody where I really feel like as I got to know him more and more, I liked him more and more.

And so I really encourage people to go after the slow burn.

But wait a second, because what ends up happening in this is you go out on a date, and you're like, maybe, maybe not.

And back in 1950, You'd have that maybe, it was good enough to go out again, and then you'd see the person again, but now you go home, and you pick up your app, and you open Hinge, you open whatever app you're using, and you had a average, but maybe slightly above average date that could be a slow burn, and now you got 16 new messages from all these people who are more exciting and how do you do a slow burn in that case when all of these people, oh, look at this person, they're hot, oh, they want to text me and they want to see me.

And this guy or girl that I just went out with is like, oh, they set something up next week, but that's the slow burn.

How do you date in this environment?

Yes. So when I wrote my book, I have a chapter called Make the Second Date the Default.

And this was influenced by one of my mentors, Dan Ariely.

And the idea here was that if you go on a first date and you think about it as I'm going to be evaluating you the whole time, and you're gonna either win a second date or not, it puts you in this evaluative mindset.

Instead, I want people to be in this experiential mindset where they're asking themselves how the moment feels for them if they're connecting with the person.

And so in the book I say, assume that every first date you go on, you'll go on a second date and that will help you identify the slow burns more and to really take the pressure off the first date.

Well, since the book has come out, But I feel like that advice is not that realistic.

People are busy, people sometimes feel like I had no connection with that person.

I'm not gonna go on a second date with them.

So I have changed my advice since the book came out, and instead of thinking about it as make the second date the default, my go -to advice here is really to do the post -date aid.

So the post -date aid is a series of questions that I came up with for a client who was having a hard time deciding if she wanted to see someone again, and also somebody who was having a hard time spotting the slow burn.

So when you finish the date, you look at this, you can have a screenshot on your phone or memorize the questions, and they ask you things like, how did I feel in my body during the date?

Did I feel stiff? Did I feel relaxed?

Did this person make me laugh?

Did this person make me feel heard?

Did I feel curious about the person?

And probably the most important one, what side of me did they bring out?

because whatever side of you you are with that person is who you'll be for a big majority of your life if you end up with that person.

We're so done with New Year, New You.

This year, it's More You on Bumble, more of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with showtunes, more of you finding Jiminize because you know you always like them, more of you dating with intention because you know what you want.

And you know what? We love that for you, someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

Meghan Trainor. Laundry Retrainer.

Megan Trainor? You're tossing out my gunky laundry detergent bottle?

Harmon Hammer Power Sheets.

Toss like this? Arm & Hammer power sheets, more power to you.

And so the Post -8 8 is a great way to see if it was really a dud and you were zero percent interested, forget it.

Don't go on the second date.

But if there was maybe not the most charisma that you've ever encountered or there's been people that you've been more attracted to in the past, it's fine to acknowledge that.

But to think there was a seed of something that was planted that I'd like to give another chance to.

And so the post -date eight is a great way to see when there's potential and to really spot those slow burn people.

Talk to me a little bit more about what side they brought out and you have never thought of it that way, but looking back through some of my dates, through this lens, I'm like, oh, I was defensive.

I was confrontational.

I was... yeah, go through that a little bit more.

Yeah. I'm glad that you're double -clicking into that because it's really something that I think about in a lot of areas of my life.

So when I was just making this career shift into the work that I do now, I met with a lot of different people to learn from them.

And I'm not gonna say her name, but there was one person in particular that whenever I met with her, I would just come home and sort of collapse into the couch and want to watch TV for the next few hours.

I was like, what's going on with me?

And I was like, there's something about the way that she communicates that makes me feel really small and anxious, and like I don't know what I'm doing and not good enough.

There was just something about the words that she used or the questions that she was asking.

And so that's a platonic situation or, you know, it's about career.

But in that moment, I understood I don't really enjoy being around this person because she brings out a side of me that's insecure.

Then I think about my friend, Mikayla, who's one of my favorite people in the world.

When I'm around her, she laughs a lot.

She makes me feel hilarious.

We want to stay up all night talking because she makes me feel creative and generative.

And so I really will do whatever I can to be in the same room as her because she brings out a side of myself that I love.

And so when people are dating, especially as they get older their checklist of what they think they need get longer and longer.

So that checklist might look like must be financially independent, must own their own home, must be this tall, must want exactly this lifestyle.

And so when they go into that date they are really looking at those things which are often who that person is on paper, and then they ignore how they feel around that person.

Because, sure, you need some basic biographical data to decide if you want to go out with someone or not.

But once you're on that date, it's really about paying attention to, who am I around them?

I love that, and that applies to all areas of your life.

Is it your job in that moment to dissect why you're having that response?

Or is it to just, and I just don't want to be around this person, and that's okay.

I mean, my cheeky answer would be it's my job as your dating coach to tell you that, but no, I think that in life, it really is great to dig into things like that.

So it might be, I'm just remembering this story where like early on when I shifted into doing the dating and relationships stuff, I met up with this guy and I thought it was like a peer -to -peer conversation, and when I got there he kind of leaned back and said, so what can I do for you?

And it was like that one statement kind of created a power dynamic, which was like, I have power and I can help you.

And I remember it really threw me off.

And so when I went home and I didn't feel good and I reflected on it, I was like, oh, like maybe our expectations weren't the same going into it, or the person who did the intro didn't set us up for success.

And so I made changes so that in the future, when I had an intro like that, I was clearer with the person introducing us you know, what our goals were, things like that.

or I find that if I'm really tired and I push myself to go to an event I may not have a good time there because I don't have energy to give and so I think for everyone being more in touch with who you are, how you show up in different situations, what personality traits trigger you to feel more anxious or insecure, all of that is data that just helps you be a happier person and so something that I really promote people do is date like a scientist which is this idea of have hypothesis.

So a hypothesis could be, I need to date somebody with a graduate degree, but then test that hypothesis.

Maybe what you actually care about is intellectual curiosity and somebody who listens to the knowledge project, not somebody who has a master's degree or a PhD.

And so really having a hypothesis, testing it, and then being willing to be proven right or wrong, I think if we all live like a scientist and date like a scientist, we learn so much about ourselves, we push ourselves and we actually wind up in a much happier place than if we just follow all the assumptions in our head.

I wanna double -click on the date like a scientist thing a little bit, and maybe I'll bring an anonymous friend into this, who runs a business.

Very successful, very ambitious, very wealthy.

In theory, he checks all these boxes that women would want.

But in reality, I mean, his saying is, they don't want what comes with that.

Is that, what do you mean by dating like a scientist in the checklist and maybe I'm loosely working around this?

So, I would say a majority of my clients, at this point, are sort of more powerful male CEOs.

And I feel like it is interesting to just hear, you know, women are excited about what they have access to, but then they may not understand that, this person works 18 hours a day, or that maybe this person has a chip on their shoulder because when they weren't successful.

They felt like they didn't get a lot of attention.

And so I feel like the unique problems of that situation are something that I've dealt with.

So just breaking down date like a scientist. When I work with people, in my coaching, in my courses, people walk in with assumptions of what they need.

So it might be, I need to date somebody who's six feet or taller because I'm a taller woman, and that's what makes me feel feminine.

So So then I might say to them, hey in the United States only 14 % of men are 6 feet or taller.

So now you are eliminating 86 % of the male population.

You've been actively dating for 12 years, this has not worked out for you so far.

Why don't you change your filter on the dating apps?

Be willing to date somebody who's shorter and see maybe what you actually care about is somebody who's confident where your height doesn't feel like a factor.

Maybe you'll end up with somebody a lot shorter than you and this is what happened to a man and woman that I know Because it's not about how tall the guy is it's about how they make you feel and so her dating like a scientist moment would be Changing her filters on the app Dating some men who are shorter Seeing if she can feel attracted to them and attractive with them and then understanding it wasn't height that was the deal -breaker It was confidence or how attracted she was to them and how attractive they made her That six feet thing is like such a killer.

I'm like 5 '11 and three quarters.

It's like what do you do?

Do you say six feet?

Or do you do five eleven?

In which case every woman has this like six feet?

The height thing is really interesting.

So I would say over the last few years, the posts of mine that have gone the most viral are reels where I've posted about this stat because in the comments, you have a lot of women saying, well, guys lie about their height anyway and then guys say things like, yeah you should change the height filter and then women say, well you filter based on weight.

And so anyway, it's just really interesting to see how much this bothers people and I wish that I could kind of shout from the rooftops to everyone and say imagine that you were in a bar and you were sitting next to somebody and you're both sitting on stools and you have a 45 -minute conversation that is incredible, it's deep, it's soulful, it's mind blowing.

And at the end of the date, the guy stands up, and he's five seven.

Are you telling me that you're not giving him your number now?

No, of course you're gonna give him your number, because you just saw who this person was and what an incredible connection you had.

And in that moment, you're not thinking height first, you're thinking connection first. And I really want people to change their framework and to understand, yes, the filters exist, But you are filtering out so many great potential connections.

Why not date like a scientist, see if these things that you think are deal breakers are really deal breakers.

When most of the time they're not, and move them to the pet peeves or nice to have column.

It strikes me as the difference between how we date now.

So we used to date in a way that a guy would call on you.

You might not know him well, you might have friends.

You might have met through your parents or something.

But you don't know much about him.

and then you spend time with him.

So your first impressions, but now we're filtering before you even get to that point.

We're filtering based on a dating profile.

We're filtering based on pictures.

We're filtering based on politics.

We're filtering based on all of these things.

I wanna come back to the Spark thing.

Is there a difference between the Spark and the Lust?

I've thought about this a lot because you know, when you write a book, you're writing it alone.

Maybe a few people read it and your editor reads it.

And then when it's out into the world, to really get to see what takes off with people.

And so I would say a few things have taken off and one of them is this concept of fuck the spark.

And so people have really strong reactions when I say that because they feel like, oh, Logan's telling me I shouldn't be attracted to the person or it doesn't matter.

Logan's telling me to settle, wait, I said, fuck this spark, and then I met someone I wasn't interested in and I dated them for six months and it didn't work out.

And so, I really wanna talk about what the spark is.

The spark is a huge emphasis on instant chemistry and instant connection versus allowing it to grow over time.

I would say that lust is about attraction and a lot of times, I wanna have sex with this person.

I hope this person wants to have sex with me.

And I think being sexually attracted to someone is of course something that you should look for in a relationship.

But it's slightly different from the spark which is this overall feeling of when I meet someone, I want to be around them more and more.

And the big message I'm trying to get across here is that that feeling of chemistry can grow over time.

What should a first date look like to maximize information gathering or connection, I guess?

Yeah. You know, I will even push on that question and say, I don't think it's about information gathering.

Imagine that you spend 50 years with someone.

The day that you meet is .0055 % of your total time with them.

And so it's not about gathering information, it's about having an experience with them.

So one thing that I've done through my research is look at people who are consistently getting asked on second or third dates.

Look at people who, people really are drawn to.

And when I talk to these people, it's not what you might think.

They're the tallest people, they're the hottest people.

It's often that they're very fun.

They meet up with you on a date and they tell you a funny story or they have a silly interaction with the bartender, or they tell you about what happened at work that day and the funny situation that they got into.

There's something about them that's very vibrant and lively and when people are around them, they feel like they are also having an experience.

They're not just exchanging information.

And so I think if we think that a first date is really about, I need to leave and know your biography, that's not really fun for either person.

If it instead shifts to what I was talking about.

Our first date is about seeing how does it feel to be around the person.

What side of me do they bring out?

Those dates end up being so much more successful because even if they don't lead to a relationship, they lead to you knowing how would it feel to be with this person.

I like that a lot. What are the indicators that I should be looking for or on a date that would lead to emotional connection?

So one thing that I've looked at a lot is this idea of what matters more and less than we think for long -term relationship success.

So a lot of the things that people think matter more than they do include things like looks and money.

So, of course, looks matters, we just talked about lust, you want to feel attracted to the person, but I wouldn't give anyone the advice of try to date or marry the hottest person that you've ever met or the person maybe who you've had the hottest sex within your life because, like many things in life, our brains adapt to them over time.

And so if you think about some of the most beautiful celebrities in the world, there are often people kind of known to humanity who have cheated on them.

And so it's like, if even these people that are considered the most attractive by cultural standards are being cheated on, there's this idea that people adapt over time to somebody's looks, and even if someone's really attractive, we'll get used to that over time.

The same thing is true with money.

I know this amount of money has changed over the last few years, but they used to say, happiness doesn't change over $75 ,000.

Now I think they've raised it, but it's this idea that whatever amount of money you have, you get used to.

A few more things that matter less than people think they do.

So people think, we need to have all the same hobbies.

If I love wine, I want someone who loves wine too.

And you don't actually have to share the same hobbies.

You just need to support the other person's hobbies and have them support yours so that you can continue investing in that hobby.

And you don't have to have the same personality.

Sometimes people will say, I have a big personality.

I love to go out. I want to find a woman who does the same thing.

And I'm like, no way.

Two of you in a room, two of you at a dinner party, two of you in a relationship, that's way too much. I want you to find somebody who grounds you and it's often about being complementary versus being the same So that was really the category of matters less than we think it does For the things that matter more than people think they do.

So the first one is loyalty really Is this somebody who will stick by you?

Of course, that's a hard thing to find out on a first date But one proxy for that that I found is asking people about old friendships people who have friendships from different phases of their life?

Do they hang on to people or when they move?

Do they let those go?

Or are they social climbing and always trying to trade up?

So, does this person keep friends from different phases of their lives?

Another one is emotional stability.

And that's also hard to figure out on a first date, but how does this person deal with adversity?

How does this person deal with frustrations?

Are they somebody who can sort of pause and think before they react.

Another one is the ability to make hard decisions together.

So early in dating or maybe not making a lot of hard decisions together but pay attention to how you talk about things.

Like if one person wants to meet up near their house and the other person wants to meet up there their house are you debating it?

Are you compromising it?

Are they listening to your needs?

So so many ways to really perceive who someone is if you're actually looking for these things.

And then the one that I've been talking about, which is what side of you they bring out and really thinking about the dynamic itself and that understanding that a relationship is not about two instruments on their own, but it's about the music that you're making together and really paying attention to almost this third object of the dynamic between the two of you, as opposed to just who that person is on their own.

I had a friend who made this comment, well, we just adjust to what we have and that we kind of like we are humans we yearn for something different than what we have. Yeah.

My husband is very scientific and he's worked in a lot of different labs and when we first started dating early on he said some quote to me, or he was telling me about some study which is like, there's a male rat in a cage and they put in a female rat and at first they have sex but over time the male rat gets sick of having sex with that female rat.

that, but then if you keep replacing the rat with new female rats, that male rat will have sex with those female rats until it literally passes out from exhaustion.

And so it's just this idea of yes, a lot of what is sexually exciting to people is novelty, and so instead of being disappointed or frustrated by that in a monogamous long -term relationship, you can just think about the fact that I acknowledge that that will happen.

And so I'm not going to spend all of my partner choosing coins just on looks, because that's it's not a good long -term strategy.

Do you think we've sort of broken dating in a way where, I mean, I've been on dates with people.

We all know people who are, I wish people would come up to me and ask me out.

I wish I didn't have to use a dating app.

And my defense of thinking immediately in this is like, society is taught, guy is not to approach women anymore.

What's your reaction to that?

This is something that I'm thinking about a lot, specifically with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

So I was recently speaking to somebody, She's a 16 year old entrepreneur and she's trying to deliver help for teen daters.

And she said by far the number one thing that she gets questions about is how to deal with rejection.

And so I am genuinely concerned that because of different societal factors, because of people who maybe lost out on some social skills during the pandemic, because of people who live a lot of their lives online, there is not that rejection resilience that many of us need in life.

So if you want your dream job, you need to go out there, get a lot of nos, and go after it.

You don't just sit at home waiting for a LinkedIn recruiter to message you about your dream job.

That doesn't happen.

You have to make it happen.

And the same thing is true with dating is that you have to shoot your shot.

You have to approach people in public.

You have to take a risk.

And so I'm encountering a lot of people who are very afraid of rejection and are not taking those risks.

And I think that it's leading to fewer relationships.

I'm a make it happen kind of person I can tell.

in work and in life.

I also know that that can come off as aggressive or assertive.

How do you deal with that?

That's interesting.

So what's the scenario that you feel like could come across the wrong way?

What will make it happen is like you have a great first date or something and then you're instantly like onto the next date.

You know? You're like, I want to see you again, how about tomorrow?

and then the other person, I don't know.

Like, I feel like we're just in a society now where, you know, you're supposed to wait till tomorrow almost. And I hate personally waiting.

I'm sure there's other people out there like me too, where it's like, no, you're in charge.

You have agency and you can make the world happen.

I love this question because I think it speaks to a really real phenomenon where people are experiencing excitement about somebody, but they feel like they need to hold it back to seem cool.

And so I love to talk to people about attachment theory.

Has that come up on your podcast before?

No, let's go into it.

Okay, so attachment theory is something in the world of relationship science that's truly backed by the research. It's something that first came about around 60 years ago with someone named John Bowlby.

And this research was originally done with children to see their attachments to their primary caregiver, but now we have an entire field of adult attachment specifically around relationships.

And so there are people who are anxiously attached.

What happens for them is their story of love is that, I'm gonna chase you.

I have to convince you to like me.

You might pull away and we're gonna have this chase dynamic.

And that I'm constantly worried that you're not gonna be interested in me and you're gonna disappear.

So how those people show up in relationships, and I know because I really was one of these Dators, is if you don't hear back from somebody, you start spiraling, they met somebody else.

They don't like me anymore.

You send a bunch of texts to try to reconnect with them and you're often just in this danger zone where you're not being the person that you want to be because you're trying to have this reconnection moment you think somebody's gonna pull away.

Then there's people who are avoidant attached.

They sort of have the opposite experience.

Their version of love is I'm gonna be smothered, I'm gonna lose my independence, and when they get too close to somebody, they are the ones pulling away.

So they're the ones, you know, great sleepover on a Saturday night, Sunday morning, they wake up, the person hasn't left, and they're like, damn, should I call her an Uber?

Oh my God, that's me.

That's you? Yeah. You have that feeling of like I need my space.

Well I need my space and I don't want to get hurt.

There's like an element of vulnerability.

Absolutely, what you're talking about is complete true.

It's not that those people don't want to be in intimate connection, it's that the fear of being smothered or the fear of being hurt causes them to pull away.

I'm gonna reject you before you reject me.

And so for those avoidant, attached people who think that they're gonna be smothered.

And then for the anxiously attached people who think they're gonna be abandoned, what ends up happening is they often date each other and they reinforce this idea.

So I think that love is a chase, you think that love is being smothered.

So when I go after you, you pull away, that reinforces mine and that reinforces yours.

And anxious, attached and avoidant people keep dating each other in this anxious, avoidant loop that leaves both people feeling pretty unhappy.

But there's a third type of securely attached people.

And these are people who have a healthy relationship with independence and with intimacy.

I want to be close to you but I also respect and need my alone time.

And so often the way that people get out of the anxious avoidant loop is they either become more secure themselves or they date someone who's secure.

And so that's what happened for me.

After 10 years of chasing after different people, being rejected, being disappointed, thinking, well, if only I could prove my value then this guy would like me.

Instead, when I dated somebody who was secure, it broke a lot of those patterns.

And we formed what I feel like is my first really healthy relationship.

What happens is 50 % of the population is secure, which sounds like a good thing, but those people are so good at being relationships that they often get snatched up and you have the anxious and avoidant people dating each other.

But in the example that you described, it can actually be very secure for somebody to follow up after a date and say, hey, I really enjoyed getting to know you.

I'd love to see you again.

When are you free? And in that moment, somebody who's used to dating somebody who's avoidant might be like, whoa, they're coming on too strong or that's so obvious.

They're so obviously interested.

That's boring. But a ton of the work that I do is training people to identify secure partners and to reestablish them in their heads, not as boring, but as secure, and to know that those are the people to go after.

So sometimes that person who pulls away is exciting, that sparky feeling because you don't know if they like you or not, but instead really honoring the person who says, I like you, I'm interested.

When can I see you again?

And so the slight tweak that I would have to yours is not I like you, can I see you tomorrow, that does kind of feel a little bit intense, but being clear about like, hey, that was a really great date, I feel like we really connected, I'd love to see you again.

and then like working together to come up with the next date, and a lot of dating that people miss is that it's about matching somebody's momentum and matching somebody's speed.

So it's a dance where I take a step forward and then you need to take a step forward. If I take 10 steps forward, you might feel overwhelmed and take a step back.

So just paying attention to, are you always the one reaching out?

Are you always the one making plans?

There needs to be momentum matching for the speed to feel right to both people.

So last year I realized something was getting in the way of myself.

What sparked this in our conversation was freedom.

And so I decided to do therapy for the first time as my adult life as a single person.

I did marriage counseling as well, before my divorce.

But it was so fascinating to me because one of the things that led to this was I wouldn't accept compliments from people.

The minute somebody started to say something positive, my brain would turn off.

And I would instantly move to the groceries, what's next in the conversation, I'd stop listening.

And what came out of this is that compliments, in my body I had somehow associated compliments with power over me, because at some point they were taken away.

And so it was like, I'll compliment you as long as you do what I want, and then all of a sudden, And so I would associate these things.

And so I developed this really strong aversion to people having power over me.

And so loss of freedom is a great example of how that manifests itself in dating, where it's like, no, that's really hard in dating context because I default to this state of, I want to continue to do the things that I'm doing and the way I'm continuing to do them.

And that makes it really hard to find somebody and build a life together, and adapt to each other.

That's super interesting.

So for the compliments, was it that you grew up in a home where there was a strong sense of external validation if you did the right thing?

And then you felt like you constantly had to please someone, and the compliments were a sign that you were doing the right thing, but then they could be taken away if you didn't do the right thing?

I don't quite know.

A lot of people remember a ton about their childhood.

Yeah. I don't. I remember certain moments.

And like not a lot before grade eight to be honest with you.

And I was like, I got into a ton of trouble as a kid.

I was a bit of a misfit.

But the thing that I learned at a very young age was just not to pay attention to them.

See, because that can also be a positive thing where you have an internal locus of control that's not looking to other people.

Like even my daughter is one.

And she started doing this toy, maybe you remember it, where it's like there's a stick and then you put the different round things on top of it.

And when she does it, every time she puts one on, she claps.

And she doesn't even smile, she just thinks that that's part of how the toy works.

You put it on and then you clap for yourself because when she does it, we clap for her.

I was like she's a brand new human in the world and she's already learning that she's doing things for external validation or the clapping to me is really bothering me, where I'm like, we're not gonna clap anymore, we cannot reward her for every single thing because then she will be doing it for us and not for herself.

and so it's so interesting that compliments shut you down.

Well, they used to.

I've done much better since then, it sort of being vulnerable.

Like, I never wanted to be vulnerable.

I would get to this point and this goes back to the attachment styles is I needed to feel like somebody else couldn't hurt me or take something away because I'm giving them power over me in a way, power to hurt me.

What was that? I don't know, I messed up, if you're listening to this.

I'm just gonna push into the topic because I think it's so interesting, But on my first date with my husband, he told me that when people tease him or troll him or It actually makes him feel very close to them because something inside of him was like a hamma piece of shit So somebody like somebody sort of like calls that out It makes him feel known and like I don't know it's like you see me Yeah So I don't know that that happens all the time but like it is something that I've seen with certain people who are maybe more powerful or dominant is that when somebody actually calls them out on stuff,

it makes them feel, like, oh, I can trust that person because they see my flaws and they know from the beginning what my flaws are.

I don't have to put up a front of seeming perfect all the time and then disappointing them, like, this is a whole rabbit hole of like, I don't wanna let somebody in because if they knew the real me, then they would reject me.

Yeah, totally. If you saw all of me then you wouldn't, I'm not lovable is effectively what you are.

That is such a big part of the work that I do is this idea of people coming to me and they think I'm undateable.

Yeah. Do you feel that way?

Generally, yeah. You feel undateable.

Well I feel unlovable.

Yeah, I do feel like...

Let's use those words synonymously.

If somebody saw all of me and could see my inner monologue and just had like full access to me, then they wouldn't love me, of course.

I think that's extremely common and it has different ways that it comes up.

So some people say to me, you know, I have a chronic illness.

I'm unlovable. I have an STI, I'm unlovable.

I've never been in a relationship.

I'm unlovable. I've been in too many relationships, I'm unlovable.

And so many people have this inner narrative around how if somebody really, really knew them, they wouldn't love them.

And what's so hard for people to understand is like it's often that vulnerability and that imperfection that connects people.

Because I think about friends of mine or people I know who come across as perfect.

And I'm like, you should have such a glossy exterior that there's nothing for me to grab on to.

Actually need cracks in the wall to grasp on to and to have a connection with you and to feel like, I can be my full imperfect self.

And so it's like the thing that we think makes us unlovable is often what makes somebody feel comfortable around us.

But if we truly feel like we're unlovable, we never open up and give somebody the chance to see that for themselves.

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I want to come back to sort of dating just a little bit, and profiles and like how you end up on a first date.

One thing that I think everybody does these days is they Google the other person.

And for whatever reason, I mean, people think this doesn't happen.

I don't know why. You can upload photos from dating websites and find out who the person is fairly easily.

How does that work for you and against you?

— It's so interesting.

So there's research on the brain that shows when our brain gets an incomplete picture of something, we fill in the gaps in a way that makes it more positive.

So have you ever seen a black and white photo of yourself and think, huh, I look pretty good in that?

— I've never seen a photo of yourself where I think I look pretty good.

— Okay, well I'll take a photo of yourself and make a black and white.

And you might be like, huh, I'm looking pretty good there.

And the point is that by taking out the color and actually some of the information, our brain fills in the gap, and it actually often looks more attractive than it does.

The same thing happens on dating app profiles.

So if somebody says, I love music, our brains fill in the gap and think, oh they love music, you know, I really like hip -hop, I bet they like the same music that I do.

And with this incomplete picture we start building up this fantasy in our head.

And that's why people get into this really bad situation where they start talking to somebody and they're almost penpalling and having all these text conversations and building up this fantasy, and by the time they meet in person that person's great, but they're not the fantasy you had in your head, and so you reject them because they're different from who you thought they were.

And that's why it's so important that people get to the date faster.

Honestly, meet on Hinge, and a few days later we've actually found that the sweet spot is after three days of chatting, should say, hey I always walk my dog at 6 p .m. can I give you a phone call or do you want to turning the digital courtship phase into this weeks long thing, make it much shorter, get on the phone, get on FaceTime, see if you have a connection and then meet up in person as quickly as possible.

And so I actually think the point is to learn who the person is by talking to them directly versus either having your brain fill in the gaps or doing all this external research that might be incorrect or outdated.

So two rabbit holes, I wanna go down here.

Well, actually one comment, It's interesting that you said we fill in our own gaps.

Matthew Dix, who's the Olympic storytelling champion of the world, effectively was on the podcast. And one of the things that you said that just triggered this is when he was describing, he's like, I describe, but vaguely.

So everybody sees their own thing.

If I say kitchen floor, I don't describe green linonium tiles, because the minute I say that, people might have a hard time picturing it.

Yeah, everybody knows what their kitchen was.

So he used this example of, I'm in the back of my school.

My back is up against the wall.

And he's like, it doesn't matter what my school looks like, because everybody has this own image of their school.

And I don't know why but I connected those two things.

Just to comment on that, I definitely want to listen to that episode.

Was it an episode you recorded with him?

Because I love to learn from that.

Because a big part of my job is communicating, and it's so true that stories are really the filing system of our brain.

And I was thinking last night about the story of the boy who cried wolf.

And I was like, it's so smart that we teach kids fables because if somebody had sat me down and said, if you raise a lot of false alarms, when it's a real alarm, no one's gonna listen.

Like, I wouldn't remember it, but the boy who cried wolf, it's so memorable.

It's like that's why we had these oral storytelling traditions and even like, you know, why the Bible is the greatest meme of all time.

People really remember these stories.

And so that is a good tip that I'm going to use, which is, you know, you want to be speaking about visuals, but maybe vague enough details that people can insert their own version of the kitchen floor.

I love that. Listen to the episode I did with Becky Kennedy too.

She talks about how she made up stories to teach her kids lessons.

It's really cool. Which it is so powerful.

It's such a powerful.

Because we remember stories.

We don't remember facts.

Not at all. And that's actually part of dating advice that I give people.

So I have people who come in who are amazing communicators, really charming, they just kind of have a few things holding them back from connecting and we work on that.

I have other people who come in who have never been on a date in their life.

From that starting point, we really have to start talking about how do you have a good conversation.

And so one of the key ideas there, you basically just said these words is, share stories not facts.

And so what's an example of that?

Well, a fact would be that you have a younger brother, A story would be, your younger brother lives across the country from you.

You haven't met your niece yet.

You feel sad about the lack of connection with that person and one of your resolutions is to really get closer to your brother.

And so I think oftentimes when people are less experienced with first date conversations, they share the facts about their lives and it's not memorable and it's boring and really think about the emotions and the feelings and the stories behind those facts because because that's what a good conversation is.

Walk me through a little bit more about good conversations on our first date.

I think a lot of people tend to just have this list of questions on us that they're like, doesn't quite feel like an interview, but it feels like an interview on the same token.

How do you get out of that?

Okay. Let's think of examples.

I think a bad question would be, what did you study in college?

I think then you're just finding out about a fact about somebody about their major.

I think a good question would be something like, oh, you just told me that your job was a marketing manager for this tech company.

Like how is that different from what you thought it would be?

Or can you see yourself doing that for a long time?

Or like, what changes would you want to make to it?

And that one might be a little interviewee.

But I think the point is that if you go on a first date and your information seeking, then what you will get is facts.

If you go on a date and your connection seeking, then what you will get are stories.

I like that. That's a good way to do it.

One of the things you brought up was having a phone call first. Is that like the recommended protocol?

Yeah, so before the pandemic, I did not like the idea of video dates or phone calls before our first date.

To me, it triggered this idea of like a tech job and a phone screen like that 15 -minute call with the Google Recruiter to see if you're crazy or not.

And I felt like it was going to create too much of a feeling of, okay, I saw you were, I'm not interested in you, I'm out.

But during the pandemic that was the only way that people could really date for a while.

And so there was this proliferation of video chats or phone dates, and I actually felt like they were a great technique for people to just see, can we hold a conversation?

Are they who they say they are?

It makes people feel more safe before meeting up for the first time, it helps people who are really busy like executives or single parents feel like, is this somebody who I want to get a babysitter for in order to meet up with them?

And so now I actually think that it's a really helpful technique for a lot of people.

What do you cover on that call, like say it's 15 minutes, like, you're just trying to get a feel for the person like the awkwardness or like what do you Yeah, you know, I think that you could start the conversation and just start talking about at your day.

So for example, I like to tell people about this concept of in media res, which is a Latin term that means in the middle of things.

So a play might open up in the middle of a battle scene, and then it sort of zooms out and later you find out who's in the battle, why are they in the battle?

What's going on? But it really just captures your attention right away.

And so you could enter a date or a phone call and say, hey, I'm Logan.

This is where I live.

This is what I do. And like, I'm already asleep just talking about this, but instead, if you walk in there and you say, so, my sister called me this weekend and she's having this issue at work, and she told me this, but I thought that she was handling it the wrong way, what do you think about that?

It's like, boom, we're friends, we're having an experience.

I'm hearing how you think.

I'm hearing if you give good advice.

I'm learning about you.

I'm not trying to glean information from you and facts about your life, I'm truly trying to get to know you as a person and how you think.

And I feel like for me as someone who's been with my partner for 10 years, who has a new baby, so much of my life is how my partner thinks.

That influences my life.

That influences the decisions we make together.

It influences whether or not I trust him.

And so I really think just creating these conversational dynamics where we're expressing ourselves, we're responding to situations, we're not just repeating the same tape in our head that we press play on and every boring first date, that to me is so much more fun and provides such deeper information.

No, I love that. I want to like also come back, we're sort of in a rabbit hole here a little bit, to attachment.

You know, I feel like I've taken steps individually towards more secure and away from avoident attachment.

What are the things that we can do short of finding a partner who's safe and secure that that reinforces the best in us, and gives us patience and tolerance for the worst in us.

What are the things that people can do individually to put themselves in a better place?

And you don't have to make that leap overnight, but what are the steps that we can take to get to a better place?

Right, so people do tend to have one attachment style, and it's a mixture of genetics and how they were raised, but around 25 % of people are able to shift their attachment over time.

So if you are insecurely attached, there is hope.

It's not just, oh, I need to find one of the securely attached people that's already in a relationship.

So for people who are anxiously attached, it's really important to understand triggers for you.

So a trigger for somebody who's anxiously attached might be, I text the person I'm seeing all day, but I just sent them a meme.

They usually respond to that right away.

They haven't responded in four hours.

Okay, so a trigger was not hearing back from somebody.

What usually happens in that moment is you sort of go down into the danger zone, and you start texting them a bunch of times, hey, what happened?

Or you spiral in your head, they don't like me anymore.

They met somebody else.

When I said this thing two days ago, they thought it was super weird and they're pulling back.

And then they sort of do these behaviors to try to reconnect with the person, which can really turn the other person off.

And so, instead, set yourself up for success us by not getting to the danger zone in the first place.

So when you feel like, oh no, they didn't respond to my text, what are other things you can do?

So you could text a friend and distract yourself with the conversation with them.

You could even tell a friend, oh, this is what I'm feeling, and make me feel better about it, give me a pep talk.

You can give yourself a pep talk.

There's this concept called disconfirming evidence.

So basically explaining to yourself, no, they just have a busy day.

They're at that conference.

they told me that they weren't gonna be in touch, why am I jumping to conclusions?

Let me just wait and see what happens.

And so there's different things that you can do to sort of catch yourself before you start doing those protest behavior things like sending a million texts or calling them and then turning your phone up.

For avoid and attach people, it's the same thing.

The danger zone is when you feel really overcome by them and that you're losing your independence and you might notice strategies that happen for you.

so with anxiously attached people, it's activating strategies and with avoiding attached people, it's deactivating strategies.

So in your head, you start thinking, they're not really that cute.

I'm not interested in them, or, I can't believe she pronounced that word that way.

She must not be that smart.

So it's almost like you're giving yourself a reason why you don't like them to push away.

I wonder if you ever do that?

Oh, totally. Yeah. And so instead, what to do in those moments is to really realize that you need space and just ask for it.

So for example, if you have that Saturday night sleepover and Sunday, you want your space.

You can just say, I had so much fun last night, I actually have a big project at work tomorrow that I was going to spend the majority of today on.

Let's make plans for seeing each other later this week.

So you are creating that space for yourself.

You're not assuming that they are a mind reader and they know that you don't want to spend the day together, but you're basically stopping the problem before it starts.

When I come back, you said texting.

What are the rules around texting and dating?

What do you think the rules are?

I don't know. What are they?

Do you think you're a good texter?

No, I don't think so.

What do you think you could work on intertexting?

With anybody? Or in dating if you're actively dating?

Just communicating better I think.

I'm of an era where I don't pick up phone and so like I think I've answered like five phone calls in the past like two years.

Really? They're all from my mom.

We had a phone call.

I know. It was that shocking.

unless it's scheduled.

Like, if it's unscheduled, I just don't really answer the phone.

And I try to communicate over text, but sometimes your nuance doesn't come across.

I'm a visual person, so when I make a joke I usually do something funny with my face.

But over text that can come off as very dry or cold.

Cuz there's no emotion attached to it.

No emoji sometimes, it's just like a dry, almost sense of humor or very pointed.

Are you a voice -note guy?

Sometimes. I do feel like that helps with sense of humor.

Yeah, totally. It gets better.

But what are the rules around?

And by rules, I mean like, okay, if you've sent two texts and you haven't got a reply.

Are you — you gotta wait — is it like there's three, is it five, is it six, is it one for one at the start?

Like, what is the etiquette around this?

So one of my favorite projects I've done for the last five years was a big GenZ research which project at Hinge, where I followed this group of international Gen Z daters for around six months.

And one of the things that came out of it was this idea of digital body language.

The fact that we talk a lot about body language, right?

I'm sure this is something that you've thought about in your own life.

So if I'm sitting forward, I am really interested in what you're saying.

If I'm leaning back, I might feel defensive.

Am I averting my eyes?

And that your brain is subconsciously interpreting that as whether I'm a threat or whether I'm interested in you.

And so there's a ton of digital body language, these unspoken cues as to my intentions.

And so the hard part about digital body language is we don't all interpret it the same way.

So through this research, there was a woman I remember who said, if somebody says K instead of OK, then she thinks they're mad at them?

And she's like, specifically, I want them to say, OK -A -Y -Y -Y -Y -Y.

Which is like, who would know Oh that that's what she wants, but a K seems rude to her.

Oh, it's just like, sure.

Sure. If you say sure to somebody.

Oh, my God. If my sister says, got it.

I'm like having a mini panic attack, because I'm like, you got it.

You're mad at me. You're just giving up on this conversation.

So I think we all have versions of that.

But we did do research at Hinge looking at to what are the most commonly agreed upon parts of digital body language.

So one of them is that actually the double text is okay.

So if I text you and you know, we're early dating and I say, hey, I'd love to hear about that show you are talking about, how was it?

And then you don't respond.

I might feel like, ah, he's not interested.

I can never send another text.

But sending one more text that either follows up on it or says, hey, do you want to go out this week?

People don't mind that.

People are busy. And they understand that sometimes messages get mixed.

Another one is one -word answers are seen as very rude or curt or the person's not interested.

So if our text messages look like a lot of blue and a little bit of gray, there's probably a problem there.

And so making sure that our messages seem pretty equal, this is kind of going back to the idea of I take a step forward, you take a step forward. Building the momentum together.

The other thing that comes up around text messages and it might surprise people how often people talk to me about texting but a common thing that somebody might say is I hate texting, I have a job where I keep my phone in my pocket I love deep work.

How can I tell somebody that I am interested in them?

I just don't like texting or the opposite which is I really love spending time with this guy in person but he's terrible over text.

And so the way that I've thought about it is I think that you need to understand as a person the maximum amount of texts that you're willing to give and the minimum that you're willing to take.

And if the minimum that you need is not within somebody's maximum, you may not be a fit.

And it sounds so crazy, cause it's like you're really not gonna date someone because of your texting styles.

But look, that's how a lot of people talk for a lot of the day.

And like, as parents, as busy people, it's like I'm texting with my husband more than I'm really talking to him every single day.

And so you need to have some overlap in your minimum and their maximum.

And so, you know, kind of a long -winded way of saying I do think that texting styles are really important since that's such a big part of digital courtship and it's really good to express to somebody what your texting style is and to maybe give them a heads up like in the past I found that sometimes people like can't read my tone over text just to let you know like I'm not the biggest texter but I will do my best to call you or just to make plans and don't read too much into my texting.

Okay let's come back to mind reading because you said that, and I've always had the opinion, I would say until maybe the last year that if somebody knew me and liked me and wanted to be in my life that they would be able to read my mind and know exactly what I was thinking.

Talk to me about how that gets in the way in relationships and how we can be more comfortable just telling our partner or prospective partner what we want.

It's so funny because one of my closest friends in the world is a professional mentalist or a mind reader, and we live together as roommates for a number of years and it's just, I love the concept of mind reading.

People would say, oh, you live with David.

Like, what's it like?

Is he always reading your mind?

And I would say, if he was always reading my mind, he would unload the dishwasher a lot more often.

And so I just think it's so funny how there's this sense of, well, we're close and you know me, so you must know what I want.

And that's something that I've personally worked on a lot in my life, so I've found that with a lot of my female friends, they get frustrated that their husbands or partners didn't give them what they wanted for their birthday of why didn't they know I wanted a surprise party, and what I'd say to them is it's much more important to get what you want than to have the person guess what you want and then not get it right and be disappointed, so I feel like I try to be really explicit with my husband and say, hey, like for Mother's Day, this is what would be a really great day for me.

And it's not like he always delivers on that, but I'm kind of sharing what matters to me or I have friends, one guy is an economist and they have a pretty complicated system but it's basically like, when one of the people in the couple invites the other person to an event at their work, they'll basically say how much it matters to them on a scale of zero to 100 to basically say this invite, I care about it 90 out of 100, please come.

Or I care about it 10 out of 100.

If you don't come, it doesn't matter.

And so I just think that if people get over this kind of romanticized idea of, if you really knew me, you know what I want into what I think is much more romantic, which is I feel safe enough to tell you what I want.

And I hope that you'll be able to honor it to the best of your ability.

I have a theory that the people who expect unconsciously other people to be able to read their mind, and they do that because they're very good at reading other people's minds, but not actually reading their mind.

They're just, they tend to be maybe more thoughtful when they pay attention to a lot more nuance or details.

Do you think that's true?

I haven't thought about that before but it resonates with me.

Something that I'm working on with my business coach is I make a lot of assumptions about what people want and then I get really nervous about saying something that I think will disappoint them.

and then I just avoid the conversation.

But the feedback that I'm getting from my coach and from these people that I'm dealing with is you're actually getting wrong what I want, and so by not having the conversation with me, you're making decisions on my behalf, and if you actually just told me what was going on, we could come to a happy medium about it.

But because you think you know what I want and then you wanna avoid discomfort for me, you're not even bringing it up.

And so I think for me, the work that I'm doing there is to have uncomfortable conversations sooner instead of saying, Well, I'm so good at knowing what everyone wants, I must be right.

And instead being more curious and asking them what's going on.

It's kind of like a kind versus nice thing, right?

Like a kind person will tell you you have spinach on your teeth, but a nice person won't.

Oh, I haven't heard of that.

But I do like that.

And I absolutely resonate with that where I always want to be the person who's telling somebody that there's food in their teeth.

And rather than finding that it embarrasses people, special, I find that, especially like a first meeting that it really makes them feel closer to me because it's like they feel comfortable enough to tell me the slightly embarrassing thing therefore I'm safe with them.

Yeah. I like that a lot.

I want to come to priorities in terms of life and dating, especially post, I don't know 30.

A lot of people are divorced.

Maybe they have kids.

Not in San Francisco.

I mean fewer and fewer people have kids.

Yeah. I just feel like it's like, you know, in San Francisco, 30 and single and dating is kind of the norm without kids.

So, but I mean, you're at a point in your life where you have a lot of competing priorities.

Like, you could make an argument at the risk of offending people that having kids younger is better because you learn to be less selfish and that's better for society.

And all of a sudden, the world's not about you.

But if you go through your 20s, you can also make an argument that you tend to be more focused on your career and you have priorities and dating has to fit into those priorities, but it's not the number one thing anymore.

How do you think about priorities in dating?

So many of the people that I work with are very career oriented.

These maximizers who are trying to strategize their way through life.

And oftentimes, they come to me when they have been prioritizing their career for the last 12 years and then are like, oh wait, I'm not where I want to be relationship wise.

And that's why when I do get the opportunity to speak to younger people, I really encourage them, start prioritizing dating when you're younger.

You have a more flexible lifestyle, you have a bigger population of single people to choose from.

And you know, in the last few years as there's been more and more layoffs, I feel like a lot of people have had the reality check of this company that I dedicated 10 years of my life to, and that I I missed a lot of dates because I had to travel for my job.

Guess what? We were not in a long -term relationship.

We were in a 10 -year -long relationship and now I'm single and I don't wanna be.

And so sometimes when I talk to people, it's not just what do you wanna add to your plate a day to week, it's what are you willing to take away from your plate in order to make time for that?

And so work is such a compelling system, right?

If I work harder, I get promoted.

If I get promoted, I make more money.

If I make more money, I get to have a nicer apartment and my mom gets to brag about me.

I get to update my LinkedIn, it's the perfect gamified system to find self -worth through achievement.

And dating is a lot harder.

There's a lot of constant rejection.

It costs time, it costs money.

It might take away from that gamified career.

And so I love to help people understand that the sooner you learn how to date, the sooner you can stop dating.

And why not do that when you're younger and there's a larger pool of people to date.

Is there an age difference that it becomes too much?

You'd probably see everything at hinge from like the 60 -year -olds going for the 20 -year -olds to everything in between.

What's an appropriate age gap that people should be looking for?

Most of my research has been with Gen Z and millennial daters who are sort of dating for for their first marriage or dating to have kids, depending on the situation.

But then when I - But that covers up to maybe 50, right?

Like, I mean, they're younger, but their partner, the person that they're looking for might be older.

Potentially, but what I was gonna say is, I did this Netflix show, The Later Daters, and that was where I worked with people, 55 plus.

And so that was sort of my first exposure to that age group.

And it was really interesting to see the different age differences.

And if people were dating somebody at the same life stage as them, and so I think what came up a lot on the show and in the kind of coaching conversations that maybe didn't make it onto the show was that sometimes if you look younger, you might go on a date with somebody younger and that feels really good from an ego perspective.

But then you're just in a different life stage.

And so I think what really matters is, do you have the same values?

Do you like spending time the same way?

you know if you're retired and you can travel and the other person is hustling and building their business then maybe you just Aren't a good match because you're not going to be spending the majority of your time together and so I think instead of the you know, one of those funny calculations like I don't even remember it but it's something like Half of your age minus seven like I don't believe in any rules like that I think people mature at different rates people have different life experiences but instead really tuning in to am I dating this person because they're younger and hotter and an ego

boost or do I actually feel like this is somebody I wanna partner with in life.

Okay, so we go on a first aid.

We're not interested.

What do we say? We say, in a text, probably, and not ghosting, hey, it was really great to meet you.

It was so fun to hear about your podcast and the cool people that you're interviewing this year.

I don't think we're a romantic match, but it was great meeting you.

I don't owe you feedback.

I don't need to get into a long conversation about what you did right or wrong.

I'm acknowledging you that you're a person we had an experience together and I don't wanna move forward. And that's it, you just leave it there.

Yeah, I think the most important thing kind of going back to your word of kindness is to be kind but firm.

So if you write back and say, I really don't think I was my best self, I was kinda jet -lagged, I wanna see you again, maybe that's not what feels right for me.

And so I can respond or not respond But I feel like I did my duty by saying to you I met you.

We had an experience I'm not interested and what's so hard about ghosting and it truly has become more and More common over as hey the last five years that I've been tracking it is that it leads people in this Ambiguity, Oh, maybe he likes me But he just is busy and he hasn't gotten back to me So I'm not gonna get back to this person in case this person wants to see me And so in the research that I did on this at Hinge, what we found is that 86 % of people say when it comes to rejection, I'd rather you tell me.

It hurts but I want to know.

So you have this problem where people want the facts, they want the truth so that they can move on.

But then the other people don't share the truth because they say, oh, I don't wanna hurt their feelings.

But you're actually hurting them more by not being upfront from the beginning about how you feel.

Do you block the person after you send this text?

I don't think that's necessary.

Do you block the person?

We're going to come back to this maybe, actually let's dive into this now.

A lot of people text their exes, is that healthy?

In general, the research shows that moving on from your ex is the best way to find a new relationship because when we keep all of these doors open, it actually prevents us from finding a new door to open.

And so if you have these five people from your past that you sleep with when you're in a certain city or you wonder, oh, maybe I should get back together with her, I'll keep her on the back burner, what we call like orbiting, it can actually prevent you from focusing and finding somebody new.

And I even find this is especially true with sex. So if you are somebody who craves a lot of sex, but you occasionally sleep with your exes, you almost don't have the motivation to find somebody new to be in a partnership with.

Because you're getting some of those needs met by other people.

And what if you actually were dating in a different way where you're like I'm gonna focus all of my time, energy, really even life force on a new person because that's aligned with my goals versus just getting some of those needs met in the short term.

Let's double click on that again.

So if your needs are getting met outside of a relationship then there's no incentive to be in a relationship.

Is that what I? You know, living in the Bay area, there is such a big community of people who are polyamorous or in open relationships, and I'm personally not in one of those, but I see a lot of value in it.

I think that with the divorce rate being at 40 -50 % over the last 40 years, we've really seen that this one -size -fits -all version of marriage doesn't work for most people.

So if you have a product and 50 % of people are returning it, then maybe you need to rework that product.

So anyone who's rethinking the structure of marriage, I am a fan of, so relationship fluidity, all those things I think are great.

And so in a polyamorous relationship, you might have somebody where you have more of a sexual relationship with them, somebody with more of an intellectual connection with them, there's so many different ways of doing it.

And so I wouldn't say that you need to get all of your needs met by one person, and you should not get those needs met by other people, because I believe in these open relationship structures.

But what I'm saying here is when you're single and you have limited time and you really want to find someone, ask yourself, is this ongoing relationship with my ex something that's pushing me forward or pulling me backwards?

And if the answer is that it's pulling you backwards, then I would cut ties for the time being and really focus on the next person that you could have a relationship with.

Interesting. I have a friend who's a GP and she's mentioned in the past that one of the biggest reasons to our office for anti -depressants is because they're in an open relationship.

Really? Yeah, and they don't want their partner to know that it's causing them all this anxiety and all of this.

Wow. And I don't know if that's true or not.

I mean, I'm personally not a fan of them.

Okay. Yeah, I do feel like your body language changed a little bit.

Oh yeah. Oh, interesting on the body language.

But I'm all for people doing whatever they want to do.

Yeah. You know, everybody's a consenting adult.

Like I'm in favor of it.

You're not breaking a law as you're not hurting people and everybody's aware of the situation and that's fine.

I do wonder like what emotional toll it takes on people over time.

I'm very far from an expert on polyamory, but I'm just thinking about one of my friends who's very proudly polyamorous and kind of, I can hear her in my head sort of being like, that person may not be a good fit for an open relationship and why are they in one?

because in an ideal world, there's this concept of comparison.

Have you heard of that?

It's a word that means I get pleasure when you get pleasure.

So like kind of the first Pauli Amersk couple that I got to know about 10 years ago, I remember the guy describing to me, oh, tonight my wife has a date with her boyfriend and I'm really excited for her.

And like my anxious brain, my jealous brain, was like, I cannot relate to that on any level.

That is a nightmare.

That's instantly where my brain went.

Right, and I think I'm just way too jealous and anxious and insecure of a person to really be a good fit for an open relationship, because I think that the part of my brain that would be thinking about, am I gonna be rejected?

Am I gonna be abandoned?

Would just be so loud in my head that it would overcome any pleasure that I might get from having my own relationships outside the marriage.

For other people, they are truly not there.

That's not where the brains are.

I know people very intimately who feel like I'm so happy when my partner gets this other need met, or maybe it's like, I'm really busy at work right now and I'm not feeling that sexual.

I'm so happy that my partner has this outlet.

And so, that story about the GP, I would say that doesn't resonate with the experiences that I've heard, and it kind of goes back to why is that person in an open relationship in the first place?

Is it because they think that that's the only way their partner should stay?

And probably instead of talking to the GP about it, or maybe in addition, they should talk to their partners and say either this isn't working for me or we need to change the stipulations of this because it's currently causing me more pain than it is pleasure.

Just thinking out loud, I wonder if it would feed this side of me that doesn't feel enough, or doesn't feel lovable.

And so it would just cause like this endless torment in my head.

That's what I think it would feel like for me, but I find polyamory really endlessly fascinating because it's basically alerting me to a different brain chemistry and it's sort of like in our society we've accepted extroverts and introverts.

So like I know that I could be in a terrible mood and then go to a party and then have the time of my life.

And it's like, why was that party bringing me so much energy?

Well, I'm extremely extroverted for my husband, it's the opposite.

So why can't we all think there are people for whom deleted as possible and amazing for them, it's okay that I'm not like that instead of this assumption that for everyone, they would have the same experience around it.

And the other term that you mentioned that I've never heard of before is orbiting.

What does that mean?

Okay, so orbiting is a term that a reporter from Mashable, Anna Iovine came up with and it's about this idea of keeping a bunch of people or several people in orbit around you sort of to increase your opportunities.

So you're sort of not committing to any of them, but they're all there sort of on your bench as people that you could interact with.

And instead of keeping all of these balls in the air, sorry I'm like totally mixing metaphors here, it's much better to commit to somebody, see how the relationship goes, then decide if you wanna stay in the relationship or not, and then move on, versus feeling like, well the more possibilities I have, the more freedom I have, the more chances of success I have. Actually, success comes from committing to something, seeing if it works and then moving on, if it doesn't.

There's so many parallels between that and business, right?

Where, you know, a lot of people just tend to dabble in all of these different projects and they don't actually get things done versus people who commit to a project, focus on it and make it a priority.

There's a great concept from Dan Gilbert of Harvard called, changeability.

So we often crave the ability to change our minds because it makes us feel more free.

So in this experiment that he ran on the Harvard campus, he had a bunch of students take a photography workshop and one of the weekends, that students took the workshop, they would get a call at the end of the weekend and say, hey, we're actually gonna have an art show in London in a few weeks.

Pick one of your pictures from this weekend of taking pictures and that's gonna be sent to London.

And they didn't have the opportunity to change their mind.

In a different scenario, they would call the students and say, pick one of the pieces to be sent to this Archo in London.

I'm going to call you in a few days and see if you want to change your mind.

Most of the time, people didn't change their mind about the photos, but when you asked people in which situation they were more satisfied, the people who didn't have the chance to change their mind were actually more satisfied because they made a commitment and they immediately rationalized it and they felt good about it.

When you can change your mind, you start wondering, well, that picture is a little sharper, super, but this one's a little more original, and maybe people in London would like this one more.

And so you sort of start making this pro -con list in your head that actually works against you, because you start doubting your original answer.

But this comes back to almost what we were talking about earlier, in dating multiple people and having all these options available.

And you're sort of like, oh, making these choices all over again every day.

Absolutely. And that's something that Hinge is thinking about.

So my favorite feature that's come out in a long time is this thing that came out last year called your turn limits, and basically the idea is that people were thinking I want to get as many matches as possible I really want to get this ego boost from attention and see how many people will like me.

And instead it's about connection over attention.

So now if you have eight conversations where you owe somebody a response you cannot match with anyone else until you respond to one of those people.

So either you close out the conversation and show that you're not interested or you keep the conversation going with them.

I was with my cousin over Christmas and he was like, Oh, Logan, like, this feature is so challenging.

Like I'm just trying to meet some new people.

And I'm like, dude, look at your matches.

Who are these women?

Do you like them? Then ask them out on a date.

And I think that in general the brain just has such a natural tendency to want actions and choices when in reality limiting those options or going through things one at a time makes it much easier to make a choice.

And so I think in the age of dating apps, having this your turn limits feature is actually a really smart way to kind of nudge people towards making decisions instead of endlessly trying to match. And then once you've had a date with somebody, what does the science say about whether you should, should I be dating three people at once for a first date?

Or should I date one person and then be like, oh, I kind of like this person, I'm going to like pause the app or like hide my profile or whatever it is.

I found that it does differ by person.

So there are people out there that are really anxiously attached and when they meet someone their brain goes into, I need to lock it down, I don't want to date anymore, so I just want to date them.

So how can I become exclusive with them?

And for those people, sometimes having multiple people that they're seeing in the beginning is actually a way to sort of ease some of that and just makes it a little bit easier for them to be a bit more relaxed and have a bit more of an abundance mindset.

There are other people for whom seeing multiple people at the same time in the beginning either feels immoral, or uncomfortable, or just too exhausting.

And so I would say for the person really explore, what are the patterns that have held you back in the past. What feels hard for you?

What makes you feel like you're dating successfully and then do what's right for you.

While of course keeping in mind things like making it clear to someone if you're not exclusive or if you're not sexually exclusive.

How do you have that conversation on maybe your first date or your second date?

Do you just ask every, right?

Like, Hey, are you dating other people?

Like, how do you bring that up?

I would say that in modern dating, it's sort of assumed that you're not exclusive until you have the conversation.

And that pain can come from somebody making an assumption, well, oh, we've been dating for six months, we must be exclusive.

Oh, we've had sex, we must be exclusive.

And there is a lot of heartbreak that happens when people don't have that explicit conversation.

So in life, in relationships, in dating, I am such a big fan of just checking in with the person because there's really this natural tendency, kind of going back to mind reading of, well, if I really like you, then we must think the same way and be on the same page.

And when you bring it up, you're afraid, well, what if I find out information that makes me sad, then I'll be sad?

It's like, no, that information is power.

And you need the data to make an informed decision for yourself.

And if you find out information that's disappointing, yes, it hurts, but now you can decide if that's the right person for you or not.

What are women not getting from men and men not getting from women.

That's a question that I'm going to be researching more this year, so stay tuned, but it's really on my mind.

What's your intuition?

I don't know if it's gender specific things where there's a lack of connection or just maybe cultural things going on where you know there's big differences in religious institution attendance or political divergence, but when I think about the issues in dating, I tend to focus less on what is this gender or that gender think?

And I tend to focus more on patterns of behavior or blond spots that people have. And so, of course there's gonna be different advice that I give to a woman in her late thirties who wants to have biological children versus a guy in his twenties.

Like those conversations sound different and they have different timelines.

I think so much of the work that I do is really about helping people understand who they are, understanding these patterns, holding them back.

And those are sort of universal things, but I am interested in what's happening in dating right now and I am sort of at the beginning of a research project that will dig more into sort of what are certain groups not understanding about other groups.

What makes somebody good at dating and maybe bad at being a partner, and then the opposite.

What makes somebody bad at dating, but good at being a partner?

What do you think you are?

I think I'm terrible at dating, but good at being a partner.

What do you think makes you bad at dating?

I get bored. I... The opportunity cost of being on a first date is incredibly high.

So going back to priorities, if you think about my priorities and sort of like the kids and then work.

And those two things matter a lot to me, and between those two things it doesn't leave a lot of time for anything else.

The difference between running a business and working for somebody else often is I could be working in earning money like you at 6 PM, right?

So if I'm on a date or something with somebody, then there's all these things and you start thinking about that.

And then you just get caught up in your days sometimes and you extremely focused, which is part of what makes people successful, is extreme focus.

And then I think, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong, correct me on this, if you come home to a person, I value connection.

I value that time. But it's really hard to make that time in your day versus it exists naturally because you're coming home, you're going to bed.

Okay. You're cleaning the kitchen together or you're making dinner together, you're doing these things together, which becomes a natural part of your day versus I'm not going to text you.

And I'm like with the kids and I'm making dinner and I'm not gonna.

Yeah. And so by that time it's 9 p .m. And I don't know, but everybody else, but 9 p .m. I'm pretty much ready for bed.

that you know, maybe 10 I can go up till, but how does that work?

And maybe this is the wrong way to think about it.

I don't know. It's very interesting that you said you're good at being in a relationship, but sort of not as good as getting into one.

Yeah. And it sounds like once somebody has jumped through the hoops necessary to kind of make it into the top priorities in your life, you will give them the time and attention, but you find that hard to do in the early stages where maybe they haven't earned that spot yet.

Totally. So... I mean that's a bit more extreme than I have heard it, but I think you're generally on the right track.

Right. And so what are your long -term goals in dating and relationships?

I want to be in a relationship.

Yeah. You know, I want to be happy, and I want a life post. Like, right now, one of the things that's top of mind for me, or has been for a while is sort of, the kid, They're 14 and 15.

The path to them going to university is very clear.

And then what? I have a great, amazing group of friends.

I'm very close with my family.

I have a very full life.

But then what? They move out and now I'm alone.

The reason why I asked you what your long -term goals are are that if you're really clear on your goal, I think it helps you prioritize your life differently.

So it's like, for the next five years as you have kids at home, it's very clear what your evenings look like.

But what happens when you don't have any kids at home?

Do you then suddenly start dating?

And then do you feel behind?

Do you feel like, I'm a little rusty on my dating skills.

I don't know what kind of person I want.

I actually wanted to have more kids, but now I feel like I've aged out of that.

And so, by getting super clear on your long -term goals, for you, for anyone else, I feel like it helps you make those adjustments in your life.

And so if you told me I want to run a marathon, but I don't have time to train, then I would say I don't really think you wanna run a marathon. Totally, yeah.

Or you're not gonna run a marathon this year.

But if you said I really wanna run a marathon and I'm willing to lose an hour of sleep every night or be slightly worse at my job or even have a few fewer hours a week with my kids, and I would say it sounds like this is something that you're willing to do, and so instead of thinking this is something that'll happen in the future, I think it does look like making, a sacrifice is too strong a word, but making adjustments now to how you spend your time so that you are getting close enough to somebody to even decide if you want to be in a relationship with them.

Dating's a bit of a show though.

Like, you put on your best face, right?

You might have had a bad day at work.

You sit down and all of a sudden you just want to be in your sweatpants at home like watching trashy TV, but you're doing something that you don't want to do.

And so like not not want to do but you're putting on a bit of a mask right, you're hiding part of yourself through dating.

And I feel like it might be better if people just saw all the different sides of you rather than this pretend little dance.

So what would that look like?

I don't know like you're you're the expert.

No but why I'm pushing you on that point is like your job right now is flying to different locations to have deep one -on -one conversations with somebody.

Isn't that a little bit of a show?

Isn't it a little bit like a first date?

It's like, I'm meeting a stranger, I want to have a connection with them, I want to have an experience.

There's cameras here, but I don't think we're thinking about the cameras.

I think we're thinking about the fact that we are getting to know each other, changing information.

And that's why I prefer to do them in person.

Right. Me too. So my assumption is that like you must enjoy this if you've built a life around it.

how can you reframe dating to be something where it's like I get to meet somebody, have an experience with them, go deep, have thoughts I've never had before because we're playing a conversational game of ping pong and I'm having a good time.

Whereas right now it sounds like the frame is dating is draining, dating is time away from my kids.

Dating is I can't be in my sweat pants as opposed to reframing it to, this is aligned with my goals and I can actually make it fun.

Maybe the way to think about this is I feel broken in a lot of ways, right?

And this is part of the reason I went to therapy last summer and spent a lot of time I did immersive therapy which is kind of crazy Tell me about it 10 hours a day with this woman who like flew to Ottawa cool, we walked we walked like 20 miles.

This is like my dream.

Hey five days. Oh my god That's healthy.

And by the end of the day, she's like totally energized and I'm like, oh my god.

I'm ready for sleep This is a new modality that I need to pursue.

It was amazing. It was the best thing ever.

I didn't want to do this like every two weeks thing.

I definitely didn't want to do therapy over Zoom.

I love this. I hired this world -class therapist and spent four or five days with her.

Incredible. Totally immersed.

I figured, from my point of view the worst thing is she knocks on the door.

We don't get along.

I've already paid for the week.

It's like just go home and I'll do work or whatever.

but we really hit it off.

And part of what came out of this is, I don't know, maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like when I get broken up with where a relationship doesn't work out, I feel like I'm constantly telling my friends, oh, it didn't work out.

And then there's a part of me on the inside that just feels like I'm broken.

What's your reaction to that?

That you are so not alone.

Rejection sucks. Having somebody spend time with you, evaluate you and tell you that you're not what they want is so painful.

And I think that if you apply for a job and you don't get it, it's, oh, I wasn't right for the position and they had an internal candidate and it's just one slice of your life.

There's something uniquely painful about rejection in dating because it's like, I've met you and I don't want you.

And so I'm just validating that I think many, many, many people find this whole process very painful.

Especially people who have been dating 10, 15 years and are just like, my body, my soul, I can't go through this anymore.

So I just have a lot of empathy for that.

But what is so interesting about the conversation that we're having is you sort of started with it's hard for me to make time for dating, when I think what's actually going on is it's very painful for me to feel rejected.

So I don't want to subject myself to that.

And so the time is an excuse for a much deeper thing that you're experiencing.

There's definitely an element of that.

i feel broken even when i break up with somebody do you know what i mean like i feel like maybe i pushed them away or did something to like cause the fracture and then you know eventually manned up and uh called off the relationship or something but then i walk away from that feeling like i'm like why did i do that why so what's the story in your head i mean it comes back to vulnerability Right.

Like I think you get to a point in any relationship where you have to make a decision.

And for me, it's more binary maybe then other people.

And that decision is, do I trust this person to not hurt me?

And for whatever reason, post divorce that's been really hard for me to get to that point and then trust somebody.

So when I have got to that point and I do overcome it, it hasn't worked out.

And so it's like, oh, gosh.

So you did these five days of Immersive Therapy.

Oh, yeah. What are you currently doing to kind of heal that inner wound, which is I am broken?

Because if your analysis is that until you feel less broken, both when you break up with someone and when they break up with you, I think you're not going to be able to connect with someone.

Walk me through how you made your decision to pay your husband, because that was not a love at first sight.

Yeah. That was a slow burn.

How do you decide between falling into a relationship with inertia and choosing to be in a relationship?

Thank you for indulging me and letting me talk about my husband, who I love so much and it's so cliche.

But like I just, I feel like I love him way more now than I did in our first year, our second year, like our lives are just so much more unmatched.

And so my husband and I met in college and we only know this because we became Facebook friends at the time.

So I have this vague memory of like sitting next to him in the dining hall and we had a mutual friend and he wrote on my Facebook wall, which back in the day, you know, maybe he was flirting or maybe he wasn't.

And then we met again at Google and I saw him on a dating app.

And I looked at his photos, I can just remember exactly where I was, exactly what the photos look like.

And I swiped left I said no, because from his pictures, he just looked like this unsmiling bro.

They were sort of all from this one hiking trip and maybe one wedding he went to.

It wasn't smiling in any of them.

And I was just like, oh, this guy's wearing tank tops and a backwards hat, not for me.

And I like that part of the story because I think it shows how quickly we make judgments and how incorrect a lot of those judgments are.

So, then some period of time later, I held this lunch at Google, which was people who had gone to our college who worked at Google.

And in retrospect I think I was expanding my network, I was doing it for the interns from our school but it was also a way of just like meeting more people and maybe meeting more potential partners.

And so I sat next to my then husband, at this lunch, and I was talking about how I was trying to learn the statistical programming language of R and how it was very hard. And he said, oh, I just dropped out of a math PhD program where I wrote R every day.

I will tutor you in it.

And now that I know this person extremely well, I feel like that was out of character for him.

He was totally like hitting on you.

I think he must have been, but that's not what either of our versions of it are.

He didn't like - It's not how it felt.

That's not how it felt, but it's so interesting.

It's like, even using my language of what side of you does the person bring out.

I feel like in that moment, I brought out a generous side of him that he maybe doesn't always access.

My husband is not the person going through the world asking people if he can do them favors.

And I don't know if it even was romantic for him or a feeling of I wanna be around this person more, or I'm lonely, I just dropped out of a PhD program, I wanna make new friends.

And so over the next year, we did have these R tutoring sessions and I remember them so well and I remember these celebratory moments where I figured things out and he was a good tutor and it really put him in a good light.

right? Like, he's just so smart.

It was a chance for him to chime.

At the same time, there was this guy that I had met at Burning Man who I was obsessed with and definitely pursuing and every textbook example of anxious attachment was coming true for me.

So it was like, he would pull away.

So I would chase him more.

He rejected me. So I thought, how can I prove to him that I'm worthy of his love?

This guy who I was obsessed with, I had a mutual friend with him.

We were sort of in the same extended group of friends and somebody who knew the guy that I was chasing, you know, was just witnessing how in pain I was and was like, hey, like, this isn't working out.

I think you should see a dating coach or this isn't working.

And so I started seeing this dating coach and it was so helpful because a lot of what we did was kind of pull back the curtain.

And so I started to understand when she asked me the person who you're going to end up with, how do you want them to make you feel?

And so a lot of that stuff was, I wanna feel desired, I wanna feel smart, I wanna feel cared for.

And how does this guy from Burning Man make you feel?

Well, he makes me feel anxious, he makes me feel not good enough, he makes me feel not attractive enough.

And it's like continuing to pursue him, I was continuing to pursue those feelings that felt really bad.

She said, well, do you know any guys have ever dated anyone who makes you feel this way that you want to feel.

And this guy from work popped up in my head.

I was like, wow, those tutoring sessions are really fun.

And we've gotten closer.

And now we have lunch at work.

And sometimes I call him after my dates with other people.

But why am I not dating him?

And so pretty quickly, being a goal -oriented person, I was kind of like, hey, I don't have plans this Friday night, dot, dot, dot, you should ask me out.

And we quickly went on a first date and, you know, a number of dates.

And now we've been together for almost 10 years and I just feel like on paper, there were some reasons why we wouldn't have worked.

So for example, like at the time, I was very into Burning Man.

And he not only didn't go, but he would say, I don't really trust anyone that goes to Burning Man.

Well, guess what, we went to Burning Man together multiple times.

It's like I felt like the deepest parts of us that were connected so sort of same sense of humor Which is a huge part of relationship mutual intellectual respect really trusting each other deeply like those things were there from the beginning and I've continued to grow and We still have parts of our lives where we're not the same.

He's vegan and I'm not I like traveling a lot more than he does but we've built a life where the Venn diagram of the middle is super strong and we We each also have the parts of our lives that are separate and we're not trying to be 100 % merged.

What was the transition from friendship to dating?

Was it seamless or was it awkward?

I think in my head, it's so mythologized that I don't know if I can give you a truly honest answer but I think it was kind of pouring gasoline onto the chemistry that we already had.

There was tension already.

Yeah so it was like, it was really exciting.

I mean, it felt so exciting, especially, we've worked both to Google, it's his big company with thousands of people.

So I would go to his cafe instead of my cafe and hope that I would see him.

Or I would, what do we call it back in the day?

Gee chat him on the shuttle.

There was just so much excitement in the beginning around, wow, I have a lot of chemistry with this person and we're going to take that friend to chemistry and see if there's something romantic there.

And it was not smooth sailing all the way.

Like there was definitely a moment a few years later where I kind of blew up my life, where I left the study job that I had at Airbnb and I moved to New York for a few months to do this TED program and just a lot of changes were happening.

And we definitely hit a moment of like, we're either gonna break up or get engaged.

And we navigated that moment and you know, clearly.

How did you navigate that moment?

That is like such a decision where there's a fork in the road.

Absolutely. Your interrelationship, you have a lot of sunk cost in that relationship.

How did you make that decision?

I think people often assume that relationships are smooth sailing and that you just keep dating until you're married.

But as somebody who does these like breakup consultations and has really talked to a lot of people over the years, that idea of breakup or getting engaged is pretty common because it's like, we either keep going and it escalates to marriage soon or there's no marriage at the end of this, in which case we should break up because we both want to find other people to marry.

And so I think just like normalizing that that happens or that people put ultimatums or deadlines on things.

I actually think that's happening all the time.

For us, it was a lot of conversations about things that we wanted longterm.

So for example, one of the conversations that we had was, I said, like, here are three values of mine.

I really like travel and I want to travel more with you.

I want you to get to know my friends better because my friends are so important to me And I want those people to really know you and vice versa.

And I probably wanna live in community at some point.

And I wanna know if you would be open to that.

And now six or seven years after that conversation, it's like, we've done a ton of international travel together.

Most of my closest friends are his closest friends.

And we lived in this amazing communal environment for two and a half years during the pandemic.

And so my husband is super stubborn.

He's super independent.

It's not that he changed himself.

it's that he understood things that were important to me and he was able to give them to me in a way that felt genuine.

And there's plenty of things that I've done over the years, such as, you know, I'm not vegan, but like there's not a lot of meat in our home and I'm closer to that or we're currently raising our daughter to be vegan.

And so I just feel like we just kept finding that our values were aligned and that we loved hanging out together.

And I can't even emphasize enough this idea of mutual trust, like it's almost annoying to think about it.

But it's like, I think my husband's right most of the time.

I think he's right about really big issues.

And so I feel so lucky that I have this person as my decision maker partner, where I can really say like, I have this opportunity.

This is how far away it is.

Do you think I should do it?

And when we talk through it at the end of the conversation, like I either agree with him or he's helped me come to the right decision for myself.

And when people have partners where they don't really trust or admire or respect them, like, I couldn't be in that relationship.

And so I think that as parents, you're just constantly making decisions.

And that's why I feel even closer to him than ever before, because I'm like, we're really basically partners in this big class project, and it's been really fun.

That's awesome. Do you agree with the timeboxing?

The ultimatum, I guess, as you called it, or sort of, like, these points where you artificially create this one point for people who are not younger and maybe dating again is do you meet the kids yeah so I think that the ultimatum I mean that term is even loaded this point because there's like this Netflix show about the ultimatum and I think when people hear that they probably have a negative assumption of somebody being like if you don't propose by the end of the year we're breaking up like it doesn't sound collaborative to me but I actually do think that decision points are very important in life

and in relationship so there's this That's great research about, you know, people eating cookies.

So like in one part of the experiment, people just eat cookies in a sleeve and they just eat the whole sleeve of cookies until it's over.

And then they're like, damn, I just ate a lot of cookies.

In another part of the experiment, in between every few cookies are these colored pieces of wax paper.

And when you get to the piece of colored wax paper, you think like, do I wanna keep going or not?

And it creates a decision point that makes you consciously decide do I go forward or not?

that. And so I think that relationships do offer these decision points.

Do we want to be exclusive?

Do we want to move in together?

Do we want to get married?

Do we want to have kids?

And each of those is an opportunity to check in with the other person.

And so sometimes creating that by saying, Hey, let's go away for a weekend and talk about our future.

You're really shining a light on an important topic that impacts both of you.

And so maybe I'll take back the word ultimatum and instead say I want people to make conscious choices I want them to be deciding not sliding through relationship transitions.

How do you have those hard conversations in a secure way where a Lot of people might interpret them as like, oh no the relationships over they close up to get defensive How do you structure them in a way where both people stay open and they're trying to solve the problem together?

It's like we have a problem or we have a decision point, but we're both on the same side of the table.

How do we deal with this versus the perception that one person might have, that, oh God, it's over.

I'm gonna start protecting myself.

And the minute they do that, it becomes almost a self -fulfilling prophecy.

So there's definitely people who are more experts on this than I am.

Like a lot of people love Marshall Rosenberg who wrote nonviolent communication.

Or even I think some of the work by different negotiation experts is really helpful because you say, how can we solve this together?

So I really encourage people to seek out those resources.

But some of the things that I can say are really approaching things from being a team.

So we as a team are thinking about our financial future.

And this is, I don't know if you know Ramit Sethi, but sort of some of Ramit's work where it's like, what is our rich life?

Let's sit down together and have a fun, generative conversation around our rich life.

and isn't that fun to think about what we could achieve together, versus, hey, I save a lot more money than you do, I don't want your debts to be mine.

It's like, we're adversaries.

And so how can you come at it from a place of we get to do this really exciting thing of design our lives together, let's have a conversation about it, versus this is a negotiation where one of us wins and the other loses.

There's no one -size -fits -all, but how do you, the money is a great point, right?

Like how do you have those conversations when maybe there's a huge income gap, or do you have a joint account, or do you have separate accounts?

And how does that work?

Does having a large income gap correlate to problems in a relationship?

I truly do pull on Ramit's work for a lot of this stuff.

You know, he has this great podcast where he interviews couples and money, and he has a new book, Money for Couples.

And I just did a newsletter with him where it was about how to have the first money conversation.

and some of the key tips are things like, it's the first conversation, it's not the only conversation.

So maybe it's just where you open up and you talk about what does money mean to you?

What was your family's relationship with money?

When you think about money, what feelings does it evoke?

And so just having a conversation where more people are sharing versus having a conversation that needs to come to a specific outcome like, well, I make two times what you make so I should pay two times the rent, it's like you don't have to get into all the tactical stuff right away.

I think approaching it as the first of one of many conversations is a really healthy idea because I just went to this event that Ramit had and he said, a lot of times people don't even know what somebody else makes or how much money they have until something like having a kid or buying a house and it's like we should be having conversations about sex, money, spirituality, children a lot earlier.

I like that politics has become very divisive in the last, I don't know, ten years, let's say.

What's the difference between having different political views and a deal breaker?

It's been so interesting in the ten years of doing this to see how this has changed.

So ten years ago, I did an event with Christian Rutter, one of the founders of OkCupid and And we talked about this question that they have on an OkCupid survey of, you know, do you care about politics?

And what he told me at the time was it was way less important if the person had the same political views as you as if they cared about politics or not.

And now fast forward to this year, I would say that's no longer the case, that people really do care about political views because it's moved into the category of values.

And so people are really thinking about if we share political views, that's a proxy for do we share values?

And so for a lot of people, it's as important or more important to them than something like religion.

And so at the end of the day, it's about understanding what really matters to you in your life, what really matters to you in a partner.

And if politics are something that's at the top of that list, I think that that's a legitimate deal breaker.

Interesting, I remember being on a date right before COVID and politics came up and I was like, oh, I'm moderate.

And she instantly replied, oh, so you can't make up your mind.

Oh, that's interesting.

And I was like, whoa, that's not what I said.

I was like, I'm just sort of like center, you know?

I'm not extreme, I'm not extreme left, I'm not extreme right, I'm policy based, I'm not party based.

And it turned into this really interesting discussion about politics, but it was clear from her point of view that that was never gonna work.

Did that change how you presented your political views on future dates?

Yeah, I was more hesitant to sort of bring them up because it could be such a contentious point.

But maybe you should bring them up earlier if you know it's gonna be a source of contention.

But I always think, like, let's avoid some of the more nasty stuff, at least in the first, like, few dates, and then get into more understanding the person and how they approach life, versus what do you think of abortion?

What do you think of politics?

What do you think of XYZ?

And, because then you're just, you're almost looking for an argument, right?

Yeah, you know I think it depends on how important those things are to you So if somebody said I'm Muslim I really want to raise my kids to be Muslim talking about that on a first date feels completely fair Totally so if you feel the same way about your political views, then I'm totally fine with somebody talking about that on our first date I don't think it's let's debate the role taxes play in America and it sounds like to you Having political views in common isn't as important so I could see you talking about it later But...

But it's also shocking.

Like, I had a Jewish woman, once on a date, ask me if I would confer.

Yeah. And I'm like, it's a first date.

Like, wow, I don't know.

I've never thought about this, you know?

Like... Yeah, but then, when you...

But that's important to you.

But then, what did you think?

What did you say? Exactly what I just said.

Like, I don't know, I've never thought about that.

I understand from you bringing it up so early that it's clearly important to you.

No, that's a really interesting one, because I could see it going a few ways.

So I could see it being where the guy, not just you, but in general, it's like, that's way too forward. That's way too intense.

The truth is that if I was in love with somebody, I might consider it, but being asked on the first date, it makes me so turned off that I'm not interested.

That is a much better response than mine.

But I could see, no, no, no. But I could see another argument in which the person says like, oh, you know what, actually being Catholic is just such a big part of my family that like, I just cannot ever see that.

and then the woman gets the information that she needs.

And so, I think a lot of times it's about how you bring things up.

You don't wanna paint somebody in a corner where they feel like there's a wrong answer.

You wanna sort of share and model and make them feel safe saying whatever's true to them.

And so, for example, she could have said something like, you know, I've been dating for a while and the older I get the more I realize my Jewish identity is really important to me and I grew up celebrating the holidays.

I really wanna celebrate the holidays with my kids, how important is your religion to you?" Then you get a chance to talk about your experience versus feeling like there's a right answer.

Like, what would you say to that question on a date?

I like your response which is, you know, if I was in love with somebody, I don't think it would really matter.

I haven't thought about it at this point because I haven't reached that point with somebody, but it wouldn't be a...

I don't think it would be a deal breaker for me but I don't know.

Like, I haven't got to that point, right?

I think that's a great answer because she can either say, that's wishy washy, I think that's probably a no, that's not good enough.

Or, okay, he's open to it, religion's not something where he has his own conflicting thing that he's attached to.

And so, in most of these situations, I feel like we think so much about the strategy and the response and the right thing, it's like, what if we just prioritize communication skills that allow people to ask questions that are true for them and listen to someone's answer and have a conversation around it instead of some AI resume reviewer that's basically saying, well, they didn't have the right keywords.

I'm not gonna pass them on to the recruiter.

I like that approach. Is it a red flag if a guy's best friend is a girl or a girl's best friend is a guy?

I don't care about any of that stuff.

No, I knew you were gonna say that, but statistically has that.

No, but I'm just wondering, what does the science say behind that?

I haven't seen science behind that, but just in my own relationship, I feel like a lot of my closest friends are men.

And the fact that, just two days ago, I spent like a lot of the day with one of my close male friends.

And my husband was like, oh, I'm so glad that you're getting to see David.

Like make sure you ask him about this and that.

Like I want the update.

And it's like, it's so attractive to me that he's so confident.

You hang out together, right?

Sometimes, this is a person, but like I have plenty of male friends that he's not particularly close to.

And from the beginning, I think he's just understood like Logan is a social creature with a lot of deep friendships and Some of them are men and There's this concept called other significant others Which is this idea that it came from research from Eli Finkel and Elaine Chung at Northwestern and you basically say to a couple You know Who are the different people that you go to in your lives for different things?

whether it's like talking about TV shows talking about baseball career advice and And couples that have longer lists of the individual people they go to tend to have these happier, more successful relationships.

Because instead of putting all the pressure on getting their needs met from one person, they actually have this network that they lean on.

And so my husband and I really invest in this idea of other, significant others to the point where our WhatsApp channel with 30 of our friends is called OSOs.

And this is truly something that we in our community embody.

And so I think that when my husband knows I'm having brunch with Mike, he's thinking, Oh, Mike and Logan are just like these creative animals that literally have brunch with post -it notes and a notebook, and they're just gonna jam out in a way that Logan and I don't.

And he feels like that makes Logan happy and it makes our relationship stronger.

He doesn't feel threatened.

And I think that that's hard. A lot of people do feel threatened or they do feel jealous.

But the more you can do in your own life to feel confident in yourself and your relationship, people just are drawn to that sort of confidence and it's better for both partners.

Tell me more about this OSO WhatsApp group and how it's used and how it started.

Sure, so I mentioned Communal Living.

So I have these friends named Kristen and Phil who are very visionary people.

And they are people that are truly living their values and thinking like many steps ahead of most people.

So in their 20s or maybe it was the early 30s when they were dating they lived in this communal house that they ran in San Francisco or it was about like nine people in a house.

They would have dinner together and there was a lot of shared activities and close relationships.

And none of this is sexual.

This is not like, I don't know, if sometimes people's heads jump to like orgies.

That's really not the vibe.

My mind did not agree.

Okay, good. The vibe is really like people who come home from work and like want to have an interesting dinner conversation with somebody else and like eat the like rice pilaf that they made.

So then they said, well, you know, we're getting to be in our mid thirties and people are gonna to start having kids soon." Well, this house is not gonna work for kids.

So, they bought a piece of property.

And they said, we're gonna turn this into the next phase where if people want to have kids, they can have kids.

And in the beginning, everyone's like, this piece of land sucks.

This is like close to the highway and close to BART.

But like over the years, everyone flocked there, including my husband and me.

So during the pandemic, when my husband was going through cancer treatment, that's where we wanted to live.

We wanted to live with people, with a community of support, with these other significant others.

And so we really had just this group of people who were either old friends or new friends to rely on.

And this place now has five kids, it's soon gonna have eight kids.

And people are just truly living in a pretty radical way, which is why do you have to have a concrete house with just you and your partner and your kid?

Why do all your resources have to go towards making one dinner and doing all the dishes?

What if you only had to cook every 14 days?

What if you could pull your resources and have a hot tub, a cold plunge, a sauna, like that stuff is doable when people live in this alternative environment?

It's incredible, because we tend to do that in Western world is older.

Once we retire, we go to truly yeah.

And, you know, there's plenty of jokes there about like, you know, a millennial retirement community, or I think the company's called like a rave for introverts, they have a lot of funny names for it.

but the point is that this is a group of people who have decided life is better when you're living with your friends.

They're not optimizing for the maximum square footage.

They're not maximizing for the Tonious neighborhood.

They're really saying, I feel happy when I see a friend in the middle of the day without social coordination.

I feel happy when I have an interesting dinner conversation.

I love being able to host friends here and now having children there.

people just feel like, oh, well, I never had to hire a babysitter because like I'll watch this parent's kid or they'll watch my kids and like, I no longer live there.

I live like in a house, like 10 -minute walk away, but I truly feel like the people who are there are way less stressed than the average parent that I know.

I think that that's true.

Even if you're not living in that community.

I mean, as a single parent, it takes a village to raise your children and having that help and social support network, easily accessible.

and I like how you mentioned, uncoordinated, kind of social event.

I remember I used to live in the neighborhood of a lot of my close friends, and then I moved.

And I missed those impromptu sort of wines, or walk -bys, and now it requires more coordination.

So there's a lot of research that shows that people are happier if they live within a five minute walk of their friends.

So Phil, one of the guys who started this community, he's now built an entire company around this premise, and the company's called Live Near Friends, and it's basically either how can you buy a property with a friend or near a friend or even rent something nearby, it's basically like instead of making your housing based on your commute or your favorite coffee shop why are we not centering our relationships?

Yeah I like that, I think often it comes down to commute or cost, right?

Right. We often trade off money to live farther away from the city, increasing our commute so that we can get a bigger house or I don't know what the variables are because I don't resonate with that.

So we're in a relationship.

What are the questions that we should be asking ourself as we decide whether we want to commit to this person for the rest of our lives?

Yeah, this is really hard. I mean, the reason why I love that I have a background in behavioral science is that it's really about the science of decision -making and so much of a relationship is, am I ready to date?

Who should I date? Should I keep dating this person, should we move in together, should we get married?

And so each of these is a pivotal point in your life.

And so the first thing I would say is just having a lot of honest conversations.

So before my husband and I got married, we did, there's a great book called Eight Dates by the Gottmans, who are sort of the kings and queens of relationship science and really research backed.

And in the book, there's a series of dates that you should go on to get to know your partner.

And so there's conversations about money.

There's conversations around family.

There's conversations about hopes and dreams in the future.

And I did all the dates with my husband sort of as this like project where I was blogging about it, but I'm really glad I had that container that forced me to do the dates because we got so much out of them that I think really did lead us to get engaged and kind of build a life together.

And so I think that the questions differ per person, but a lot of it just sitting down and think about like, what does our life look in the future?

Look like in the future, like, do you plan on working?

What are your values?

Do you wanna have kids?

What are things from your childhood that you really wanna repeat?

What are things about your childhood that you wanna do the opposite of?

And I think sometimes when we're so in love with someone, we just assume we're on the same page.

And so, just kind of echoing our earlier sentiment that I think it's about having these intentional conversations to decide, is this somebody who I could really build a life with?

The other key thing is to understand that people often think, am I making the right choice?

There's not really such thing as the right choice, I don't believe in soulmates.

I think that you could have many great relationships with many great people and you get to decide, is this the person that I wanna do it with?

And so of course, you can think about the lives that you didn't live and all the other stories that you could have written.

But instead, I think think about the fact that this is a story that I am excited to write.

Your husband sounds like an awesome man.

He's great. How do we end that relationship?

We decide it's not for us but we've been in the relationship.

So it's not after our first date but maybe we've been dating three months or six months and we've reached one of these points we've had these conversations now.

How do we respectfully break up?

Okay. We talked today about how painful rejection is and so I think the first guiding principle for breaking up with someone really should be empathy and just understanding and really imagining how painful it is to be broken up with in most situations.

And so a few things to keep in mind.

So one of them is, there's this rule kind of in corporate America that if you're going to lay somebody off or give them a bad performance review, it shouldn't be the first time that they've gotten that feedback.

So I think it's much more fair to let somebody know throughout the relationship if something isn't working.

I think it's so painful for people when somebody breaks up with them and says, you know, you You love going to restaurants and city culture and I love camping and skiing, but since we've been dating, I haven't gotten to do any of those things.

And then the person's like, what?

You never brought that up once.

Like, of course we could have made time for that.

Why were you keeping that from me?

And so I think just understanding that as things are happening and coming up, share them with your partners so that you can tackle them together.

Maybe it comes to the same outcome of breaking up, but don't kind of hide all of that until the moment that you break up with them.

Another thing to keep in mind is, I don't think it's the opportunity to give somebody feedback.

I think that can be very painful for somebody.

So sometimes, in a breakup scenario, the person will be like, tell me what I did wrong.

Tell me when you fell out of love with me.

I don't find that that's helpful unless there's something really specific like, I constantly felt like you were breaking plans with me or you know something that they can change, but you were unreliable but a lot of times it's like, you just weren't a match and whatever you say to them is really gonna stick in their mind and they're going to go over it a million times.

So, I just sort of find that that's unhelpful.

There's also this idea, do you know Ilan deat batein?

His work, so he has this concept of like the nice breakup person, where it's like, I'll keep being in touch with you after the breakup, because it makes me feel like I'm a nice person, which makes me feel better, but it's actually really about respecting your boundaries, which is like, it's probably better for you if we're not as in touch. And so, really letting you define that, or not trying to sort of assuage my own guilt being in touch with you all the time, which actually makes things harder for you.

So I have a conversation guide in my book for how to have a breakup conversation, which has a lot of things about like, preparing for it in advance.

So when are you going to have this conversation?

You know, if somebody has a big presentation on Monday, like, don't do it Sunday night, is this person able to get in touch with some friends or family to support them afterwards?

So just really trying to soften the difficulty of the situation by setting them up to get support from other people, sharing with them kind of how you're feeling but not giving feedback.

And then I think honestly not having sex with them and giving them space to honor the fact that this is challenging and they need to move on.

I like that. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about dating profiles.

What are the tips that people, the most common things that people get wrong?

Yeah, I've done a ton of research on this And I can tell you some of the main tips.

So your dating app profile is sort of like your billboard. And if you were buying a billboard, let's say on the one -on -one in San Francisco, like you would, of course, think a lot about what you're gonna put on it.

I think people should give the same amount of attention to their hinge profile.

So for example, you are telling a story about who you are.

So let's say that you have a side of yourself that loves anime, and there's a side of yourself that's passionate about baseball.

If all of your pictures are from Comic -Con, I'm not gonna see that.

So really I like to teach people this concept of your three big things.

What are three big things about yourself that you wanna express on your profile, and then make sure that through your prompts and through your photos, you're getting those things across.

Another thing is having a mixture of humor and vulnerability.

You don't wanna be all jokes and you don't wanna be all super serious.

You wanna show people different sides of yourself.

You also don't wanna fall into these dating app cliches.

So there's this one on Hinge, I'm overly competitive about everything.

And people have seen that all the time.

At best they sort of just ignore it.

And at worst they're like, cliche, I'm not interested in that person.

There's actually a new feature that just came out on Hinge called prompt feedback, which uses AI to kind of give you personalized, private feedback on your prompt responses.

So if you give a one word answer or it's cliche, It will say like dig a little bit deeper.

You know what are you overly competitive about?

So hopefully that's gonna kind of raise all profiles.

Other Jews and Don'ts, you know, don't have one of those wears Waldo photos where we can't tell which one you are, people don't like that.

In general, selfies perform worse.

If you have sunglasses or filters or wearing ski goggles, it's really hard to tell what you look like.

So just like make it easy for the person to tell what you look like.

have a photo of, a clear headshot, photo of your full body, photo of you doing something that you love and then a photo with friends and family but not so many that we can't tell which one is you.

But in general, it's really about using it as an opportunity to share who you are, what you're looking for and what kind of person you wanna meet.

Should you smile? Smiles, good.

Should you have a pet?

If you have a pet, sure, But I think that when people - You know what came to mind there is, like Tim Ferriss did this thing.

I think I remember this correctly where he tested like 8 ,000 photos or something crazy.

And the one that was most successful was him carrying a cat on the cover.

I have seen over the years, different research about people with cats, people with dogs.

When I hear those things, I'm just like, do you have a fucking cat or dog?

Like if it's really important to you, put it in there, but don't dogbait somebody.

If you don't, I just made that up.

But if you have a friend with a cute dog, like putting the dog in your picture, it's like that's not representative of your life.

It's like, show us authentically what spending time with you would be like.

So, if you once went on a hike, but you actually spend every Saturday night playing board games, take a picture of board game night, don't show that one hiking photo.

And so, I think the dog or cat thing kind of fits into that overall advice of authentically show us who you are and if that involves your dog, great.

but if not, like don't take 8000 pictures, some of which have a stranger's dog in them.

I always end on the same question, which is what is success for you?

Success for me is balance.

Feeling like I'm not forsaking my health for the sake of career, not feeling like I'm forsaking my husband for the sake of our daughter, not feeling like I'm forsaking my family for the sake of my friends, and really just knowing my priorities and having that reflected in how I spend my time.

Thank you so much, this was an awesome conversation.

Thanks for having me, I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening and learning with me.

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[Rethinking Modern Relationships: From First Dates to Lasting Bonds]-[#219 Logan Ury: The Dating Myths You Need to Stop Believing]

📋 Summary

Rethinking Modern Relationships: Insights from Logan Urie

The Myth of the "Spark" and the Power of the "Slow Burn"

Reframing the First Date: The "Post-Date Eight"

Dating Like a Scientist

Attachment Theory and Digital Communication

Vulnerability and Long-Term Success

Conclusion: Prioritizing Connection

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript