How to Not Die Alone - A Dating Expert's Guide

hey friends how's it going welcome back to deep dive what you're about to hear is an interview that i did with logan yuri logan is a behavioral scientist turned relationships therapist who has written a book called how to not die alone this is an absolutely fantastic book that i made a video on a few months ago and that video was called this book changed my love life and it's got over a million views to date logan is also the head of relationship science at the dating app hinge where she leads a team of researchers to help uncover what are the secrets behind finding and maintaining true love in our conversation we discuss all things dating and relationships including the concept of the friend zone does it exist doesn't exist how does one break free of this proverbial friend zone we talk about how to apply insights from behavioral science to the world of dating how to optimize your dating profile and how to think a little bit more like a scientist when it comes to dating we talk about things like what makes the perfect date we talk about the concept of the secretary problem the prom date versus the life partner and a bunch more exciting stuff i had an absolute blast during the conversation initially we had like a two hour slot where we recorded the remote interview but we had so much stuff to talk about that we chatted for another two hours afterwards as well so i think this was probably the longest podcast interview that i ever did anyway links to all of logan's stuff including her book how to not die alone are going to be in the show notes and the video description or if you'd rather not read it although you should you can check out my video summary of the book but anyway i really hope you enjoyed this conversation between me and logan yuri so hey logan welcome to the podcast uh it's it's great to have you hey um thank you for having me i'm so excited yeah thanks for being on here we managed we we connected because initially i mentioned your book how to not dialogue it's very good i mentioned it in my email newsletter and somehow you clocked that i'd mentioned it and then you emailed me which was pretty cool and now here we are having a bit of a chat oh that's great yes it was my friend joe garvey who gets your newsletter who sent it my way so thank you to joe for connecting us and i've been looking forward to this for a few months now amazing um so i'd love to start like i have so many questions about dating and relationships and stuff but i'm very curious about about kind of your background like how did you get to the point where you now work at hinge and you have a book about relationships like what was what was the story yeah so i've always been really interested in dating in relationships as i think many people in general are i definitely think part of it goes back to my parents getting divorced and one of those seminal moments in childhood and adolescence where you think okay happily ever after it's not something i can take for granted and i think it planted this seed in my mind where i thought this is something i really want and i have to work for it so from a young age from my teens i really thought this is something that i want to investigate more it's mysterious to me and it's not a given then i went to harvard and i studied psychology and i had a secondary concentration in women gender and sexuality and so i was able to understand things like gender dynamics i did a large paper on pornography habits i really just use it as an excuse to get into whatever topics were interesting to me and then from there i went on to work for google i had a couple interesting jobs there i ran the pornography team there was called the porn pod this is my first job out of college and it was running the ad campaigns or the online advertising for some porn companies and sex toy companies which honestly was just like a very quirky thing to talk about with my family during my first thanksgiving home but truly my my job at google got very interesting once i started to run this team called the irrational lab and so are you familiar with the book predictably irrational by dan ariely i've heard of it i've heard a lot of people reference it but i've i've never read it what is what what's the deal with the book yeah it's a great book worth having on your radar so behavioral science is this entire field that looks at how people make decisions and why we so often act against our own rational best interests and so it might be something like of course we should all be saving for retirement we agree on that but why is it so hard to take a certain percentage of your income and put it towards savings or we say we want to lose weight but then we don't actually show up and exercise or eat healthier foods and so there's this gap between who we want to be what we want to do and what we actually do and this field investigates that gap it says why are we acting against our own best interests and so i had the opportunity at google to work with dan we ran this team together called the irrational lab where we really thought about the behavior of people who work at google the behavior of google users the behavior the behavior of google advertisers and it was just so interesting to apply this academic field to real world marketing culture other aspects of a company and so that is an important moment in my development because i later did that with dating and relationships and so at that moment that i was running the irrational lab i was single i was using dating apps i was swiping and i thought okay this is something very new no one has done this before nobody has swiped on thousands of people and gone on eight dates a week and it just felt like this new moment and i was surrounded by all these smart people at google but they were as lost as i was on dating and so what i have done in the last majority of the last decade is basically take thoughts about dating in relationships thoughts about behavioral science and how we act against our own best interests and combine them and so what i've been doing through one-on-one coaching through matchmaking through writing the book through working at hinge is this whole field where i'm saying actually relationships are a series of decisions and you can break them down and you can make better decisions and get into a great relationship or you can repeat the same bad decisions and wind up in an unhappy relationship or unhappily single and so i really try to take this academic research-backed approach that will help people get out of their own way overcome their dating blind spots and get into a relationship oh amazing okay so i have so many questions on this but i wonder if can we pretend like we're having a one-on-one coaching session and sure i would love to do that amazing so what's what's the sort of person that comes to you for like is it like relationship therapy or like dating coaching like how how how do i decide that hey let me book a session with with logan yuri yeah it's a great question so i have worked with couples i have one guy i've been working with for years where first he came to me when he was single i was helping setting him up on dates i was helping him after those dates then he got into a relationship and now i coach him individually and her individually and the two of them and they just got married and are having a baby and i'm seeing them next week and so i've really gotten to be there for the entirety of their relationship but most of my clients are people who are single and send me an email that says something like i like my life i like myself i like my job i like how i show up to friends and family i am an engaged person in the world this one part of my life is not working i don't know why and i want to enlist your help to improve it oh interesting okay so that sounds basically 100 like i was before i discovered your book [Music] um interestingly so when the this episode is probably going to come out in a couple of months but um i actually have a girlfriend now and she was the one who recommended the book because we went on our first date like sometime in july and she said that she's been reading this and i thought okay that's an interesting title let me read it as well and now we're like together and we're applying a bunch of the principles that you talk about like um kind of being intentional about like reviewing the relationship and asking that that you've got this questionnaire like later on where you're asking asking questions and stuff it's all really good but uh up until then i was very much of that the exact avatar of that person that you described broadly happy with my life life is good relatively successful by kind of traditional metrics but i can't seem to get into a relationship um and i also i kind of felt that i'd been on a bunch of dates but the thing i'd always be asking my friends afterwards is like how how do you really know if you like someone i don't i don't know i don't know if like i didn't really feel a spark i was like all this kind of stuff so how how how do we go about like solving this problem what sort of questions would you be asking oh i love that well thank you for sharing that the book has been helpful it's very meaningful to me usually when i work with clients the first session is really understanding who they are in context and so sometimes people just want to come in and within the first minute tell me everything about dating but there's this coaching exercise called wheel of life where i understand you know what's going on in your career what's going on in your family friends mental health physical health and that's helpful to me because occasionally i have clients where a lot of stuff is going wrong and i really try to help them figure out those other things or i say i think you should invest in a therapist first and then come to talk to me and so just understanding that dating is part of an integrated system but let's say everything else really is working except for dating then we dig in we try to understand so one thing i would ask you early on is what is your long-term goal for dating right now oh okay so i think um i want to get married and have kids and get a dog and stuff and when you're young it's like easy enough to just not be in a relationship because life is good and et cetera et cetera et cetera but i kind of think that as like middle age approaches um in a way a relationship is a hedge against loneliness to an extent i'm not sure if that's like actually true but i think it would be cool to have a family and have kids and stuff and all of their studies well a lot of the studies show that being in relationship and stuff contributes to meaning and happiness and fulfillment etc so it feels like even though for me it is not like an urgent thing right now that i absolutely am desperate to find someone because i'm really happy with myself and my life i know that i probably should start looking given that this is a thing that i want further down the line yeah that that answer really resonates with me because sometimes people hear the title of my book how to not die alone and they feel like it's a critique on being single and if you are single and it makes you happy and long term you want to be single that's totally fine but i find that many people do want to find someone and the majority of people around the world do end up getting married so this is obviously something that our culture's still investing in and yeah the research shows that our health happiness and overall life satisfaction hinges on the quality of our relationship so it's a great idea to hedge against future loneliness through through dating and finding someone and i think having gone through the pandemic people who were single and spending a lot of solo time i heard from many of them and they said things like i wish i had invested in this before or i thought that love was just something that would happen for me and now i'm going to more proactively go and get it and so i do think we've just gone through this major traumatic moment as a culture and it was the jolt to the system that many people needed to take a step back and say i do care about this and whatever psychologically has been holding me back from saying that out loud i'm going to say it right now and i need help and accountability and advice to make that happen nice so so that's my kind of long-term thing a hedge against feature loneliness i should probably take it seriously in the short term where where do we go next from there we're going to take a little break to introduce our new sponsor for this episode which is fabulous fabulous is the number one self-care app to help you build better habits and achieve your goals and genuinely it is probably the single nicest app that i've ever seen in terms of its design and its aesthetic and the illustrations and the imagery it's just an absolute joy to use i'm using the app personally for two main things that's number one building better routines and number two being a little bit more mindful rather than kind of like frantic all the time and so in terms of building better routines the first thing we're working on is building a better morning routine and so i've got these little like achievements that i have to do like drinking water first thing when i get up figuring out a way to have a great breakfast in the morning dance dance your way which i've not yet unlocked and the idea is that it sort of turns it into a game so i need to take the box that i've drank water three days in a row and then it will unlock okay cool once you've built that habit now let's think about the breakfast thing so it's good in that it's based on behavioral science insights and it's one step at a time but the people that built habits using the app were more likely to stick to those habits than a control group and there's kind of two approaches that you can take if you're using the app number 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deep dive that's t-h-e-f-a-b dot co forward slash deep dive or hit the link in the show notes or the video description wherever you are watching slash listening to this and the first 100 people to use that link will get 25 off the annual premium subscription so thank you very much fabulous for sponsoring this episode so in a coaching session i would try to understand why you think you're single and so before we would have met for the first time i would have sent you some homework to do and one of them is to ask your closest friends and maybe family why they think you're single and so the reason for this part of it is to there's this whole idea in behavioral science that we have these blind spots we have parts of our behavior or our ways of thinking that we don't have access to and so if we only talk about what we know i think we're missing this part and so through my feedback through my pattern matching through asking your friends and family why you're saying all things will come out and so people often say to me i thought everyone was going to say that it's because i don't dedicate enough time into dating but actually consistently everyone said that i have unrealistic expectations or everyone said that i'm too picky and so even in that pre-work i think people get a lot out of it because our friends and family want to help us but there's not really that many moments in our society for people to pull you aside and say hey logan by the way i consistently see you making excuses about exercise or i see you saying you're unhappy with your job but you don't change it but if you invite them into a safe moment and say i will not hold this against you why do you think i'm single i think people will will want to share wow okay so i think if i had done this exercise my friends would have said i have unrealistic expectations and i'm too picky i guess this is a thing that you get quite often yeah and of course there's a bias for what kind of person books time with an expensive dating coach but yes i i do think that that's very common and the too picky thing comes up a lot so we would talk about that and then i would go through your relationship history and i would say you know have you been in a relationship before and i don't know if you want to talk about this like live on the podcast but you know have you been in a relationship before how long have they lasted where have you met the person who tends to end it i would just want to understand kind of up until the moment that we're meeting what your relationships have been like in the past and what i'm doing in the background is pattern matching okay do i hear him saying that he's putting effort in and it isn't working do i hear that the problem is he's not even going on dates at all do i believe his reasons for why things are working out or do i want to dig in more and so i'm basically using like hundreds of people i've spoken to in the past to say like what type of data are you and then figuring out a plan of action to help you based on you know how you're showing up to me that day okay and so within this cohort of people who pay for an expensive dating coach what what are like the common the common problems that you see in like you know in in this world sure so in my book i talk about the three dating tendencies and that was based on the people i had been seeing in dating coaching or kind of friends and other people that i was meeting and so that whole framework which i know you talk about a lot in your video is based on unrealistic expectations and so i saw the most of the maximizer and the maximizer is the person who has unrealistic expectations of their partner and i have a feeling based on you and your background that you're a maximizer yeah very much so when you when i read that bit where it was describing maximizer i was like damn okay i feel really pulled out right now yes totally and so if you're listening right now and you're not familiar with this a maximizer is the person who says you know life is one big research project and i can research my way to the right answer and there is a perfect pen and there is a perfect microphone and there's a perfect zoom setup and if i just research my way to the right answer i will win and sometimes that works there is you know the best microphone but with dating there's no way to date everyone there's no reviews humans are what we call experiential goods you have to live them to know how they impact you and what some person might like in a wine or a movie is different than what you might like and the same thing is true with dating and so you really have to get out there date different people and make a decision for yourself there's no researching your way to the right person eventually you have to choose someone great commit and build a relationship so on that note um there i i was earlier today i was listening to an episode of the hubermann lab podcast where he speaks to dr david bus i think is his name who's a big kind of researcher in this field and talking about yes there is an extent to which uh kind of mate value and dating preferences is subjective but actually there's a lot of stuff that across cultures is kind of true and across the culture that we live in where you can actually sort of rate someone in terms of their mate value and get a somewhat consistent result for an individual person across a bunch of people that you that you look at so they would argue it's not quite as simple as you know there's someone out there for everyone and just as like there are zillions of different combinations of wine there you know some people like different sorts of people like to to what extent does that side of it come into the equation here like in terms of the stuff guys look for in girls and and vice versa yeah so there's a ton of interesting research in the academic field of relationship science that studies things like attraction or do opposites attract or if thousands of people rated the attractiveness of certain people would they all find a consensus and generally the answer is yes so i can make my point a little bit more nuanced which is assuming that you're dating people who are a reasonable match for you people with whom you have interesting conversations people with whom you're attracted people who you could see a long-term relationship a lot of maximizers come to me when they're already dating in a pretty small pool of people all of whom would make great partners but instead of taking a step back and saying of the last 10 people i went out with there's actually a bunch of them in there that probably could work long term and it's about me choosing investing and making a relationship they think the fact that i don't feel a hundred percent sure about anyone means that i need to keep looking and so i think it's really about what's the premise well first of all i don't think there's any a hundred percent sure about anything especially with something as meaningful as getting to choose one person for the rest of your life which is what many of us are going for right even with the job it's like millennials gen z we think i'll stay in this job for 18 months there's with dating it's just this huge decision that we are making with so much cultural baggage and so of course we want to make the right one but also it's it's very hard to be sure so really with maximizers i want to help them switch their mindset from if i keep looking i'll find the perfect person to relationships are things that you build not things that you discover and so life is much more about having high standards finding somebody or something that meets that standard and then feeling good about the decision versus the maximizer mindset of i'm obsessed with making the right decision and i think that that's a recipe for unhappiness i was quite familiar with this line of reasoning because i had i was a big fan of alanda baton stuff around like romanticism and yeah how the soulmate stuff is a bit of a myth and actually um one of his quotes that i really like is that compatibility is an achievement of marriage it should not be its prerequisite and so i i kind of came across this stuff a few years ago and i kind of like maybe i was bullshitting myself but i genuinely thought to myself that hey i i recognize intellectually that a bunch of the um the value of relationship comes from the amount of effort you invest into it rather than pre-existing compatibility and finding someone who ticks all of the proverbial boxes and so i'd be going on these dates and i'd be like ugh i'm not really feeling it but i don't know maybe i'm just being too much of a romantic maybe the whole feeling is a bit of a myth like so and and this was the thing i would i would always ask my friends and never get any useful responses to it's like what is the bar like how do you know you like someone enough to warrant investing into that relationship and like how like what are the questions i should be asking in my head about like you know i'd be thinking do is this the sort of person that i would enjoy spending 16 hours in a row with if we're stuck in an elevator together it's like i mean maybe that's a question is it someone i'd want to go on holiday with for an extended period of time yeah what what are your thoughts on this no this is this is great and i think the more personal we can make it actually the more universal and easy to understand it is and so why don't you tell me what are some of the questions that you were asking that you felt weren't very fruitful and then with the woman that you're dating now what shifted so that you felt that you could see the potential and you could invest in her and so what was that shift like for you i think before the questions i was asking were things like do i feel a spark as it were um which was always a bit like vagues like how do you define the spark and it's like uh you know it's it's kind of like that question of asking like how do i know i'm in love when people are like well you you kind of just do you know when you you know yeah um so that was a question another question was um am i looking forward to seeing this person would and am i looking forward to seeing them again another question was um did i wish this date lasted longer um another question was can i imagine having dinner with this person 10 000 times in my life um another question was how well do i feel this person reflects on me when i introduce them to my friends and family um but a lot of these weren't like conscious initially it was just a with a bunch of other people i'd i dated i just had a general feeling of like uh i'm not really feeling it but maybe maybe i'm just being too picky so for this for this current girl that i'm dating it's really the the thing of i look forward to hanging out with her and i have so rarely had that particular feeling of looking forward to seeing someone in a romantic context that i'm like oh hello this is new is this what people mean when they're like you've gotta find them i love that so it's interesting you know you shared earlier that you were introduced to my book around the time that you started dating her and so your experience of evaluating her has been somewhat in the context of reading my book right and so it's hard to separate what's her from what's your mindset and it's probably a bunch of things and it's her mindset right she's actively choosing you what i could say in terms of people that i work with is that i get a lot of messages that say i used to focus on the spark i used to focus on instant chemistry and a feeling of i've known you for my whole life and if that wasn't present i thought okay next it's on to the date the following day things like that but instead people are shifting away from i need to feel the spark to what can we build together or am i curious about you so one of the things that really resonated with me in the book was the idea of um the secretary problem and the whole explore versus exploit dilemma and i'd i'd come across this before but the way you framed it in terms of age was the thing that i'd like i'd never heard before i was like damn because i'd always sort of thought like how how how do i know what n is how do i know how many people i would actually end up dating my life therefore the whole thing is flawed i wonder can for the people who haven't heard about it i wonder if you could give us an intro to the secretary problem and how how that relates to this issue that some of us have been being a maximizer absolutely i would love to share that and i'm glad to hear that it resonated with you and i also want to give a shout out to the book algorithms should live by which is how i was first exposed to this idea so the secretary problem is a line of mathematical inquiry so it's sort of a math puzzle that asks imagine if you were hiring let's call it an admin and there were 100 possible candidates so you know how many candidates you have and here's what's hard about it you have to interview them one at a time and after each one you have to say yes or no i want to hire you or i don't and so the question becomes how many people should you interview before you choose someone if you choose too early on maybe there's tons of great candidates out there and you haven't been exposed to them but if you choose too late what if all the good candidates have passed you by and so the mathematically correct answer here is that you interview the first third of candidates so the first 33 and from there you say who is the single best candidate that person now becomes your benchmark the next time that you find a candidate who you like as much or more than that person you hire them because the 33 percent gave you a chance of what's a chance to see what's out there now you know and then you snag the next person who's on that level so are you following me with that great all right so how do we apply that to dating well we don't know the total number of people you're going to date and it's really going to vary but let's say that we think about age and let's just choose that let's say you in particular you are going to be dating in earnest from ages 18 to 40. what do you do um with that number well you could say well what's 33 percent of that and so mathematically we know it would be at 26.1 years of age that's when you've dated a third of the people who you could possibly date and so you look at those first years of dating and you say who was that benchmark person who did i date who i liked as much or more than the other people and now in the future when you meet someone who you like similar to your benchmark that's the person you invest in and when i say this to people sometimes they say oh no my ex was so great should i contact her right now and i say no no it's more of a concept it's the idea that you likely have already dated somebody who is be great most of us are past that 26.1 years of age mark and the idea is it's not about keep searching and searching and not knowing it's about understanding that you've probably already dated somebody who would be great and the next time you meet someone where you have similar feelings that's a chance to invest and build a relationship yes i just i just love this so much because like this was the exact answer to the question that i've been having the problem i've been having for the last few years which is that i felt that oh maybe i just haven't dated enough people like i didn't date that much when i was at university but and i you know i had a bunch of female friends all that all that kind of stuff and i always thought that okay maybe when i'm 30 or something that's when i will have dated enough to get that kind of sample size to then kind of know but then when i saw 26 i was like oh my god okay i'm already 27. okay let's you know really start taking this thing seriously um i've done it i've mentioned this to a few friends um a bunch there's um a bunch of my friends are like not into they're very much hesitators and so they haven't really done the whole dating thing um do you think that getting to like is having female friends a sufficient like sample for this sort of thing or do you think that it really does need to be actually going on dates like first dates through an app like hinge or whatever um or even in real life god forbid um to to get to gather the appropriate data points for this for this problem great so for people who aren't familiar with the framework there's this idea of the hesitators is one of my three tendencies and basically these are people who aren't putting themselves out there they're not going on dates and their framework is all date when i'm ready which might mean losing weight getting a more impressive job having better stories to tell maybe a global pandemic is over but there's always the dot dot dot all date when and my whole philosophy is no you need to be dating there's two main reasons why one is you only get better at dating by dating and two is you only figure out who you want to be with by actually being with different people and seeing what side of you they bring out and so i understand the crux of your question which is can't you get some of those dating skills by having female friends or can't you get some of the who do i want to be with by having female friends i would say it will help you it will help you develop empathy it will help you understand what kind of conversations go well or how to be a better listener i think it's part of a well-rounded life i do think that there's something unique about being in the romantic realm i get so many questions from men and women who say i'm always friend-zoned so there might be and these are very gendered terms but you know there might be the woman who says like i'm super sporty i grew up with brothers i always played sports i'm one of the guys but then when i you know go in for the kiss they're like no i see you as a sister or a friend and same thing there's the guy with tons of girlfriends who is the person you call after a breakup but not the person that you sleep with to get over the breakup whatever it is and so often people want to get out of the friend zone and so what i would say is in general having friends is extremely important it helps you be a well-rounded person it makes you happier it's a way to meet new people but there is something different about engaging with people on romantic and sexual terms that you do need to experience specifically through doing that and so what is it like on a date to present yourself as not just one of many people who that person could be friends with but as the one person who they might choose to invest in and what does it mean to experience a hard conversation with the one person who you're in a romantic relationship with and so for those people i would say yes and you should also be dating got it um so okay so at this point in our dating journey we've had had the consultation with you we're like all right cool i'm gonna be dating i should probably and at that point probably can be thinking okay cool i guess you know i guess i should make one of these accounts on one of these dating apps potentially oh i've got to figure out my photos ugh but now i have to choose photos of me that look good oh but you know i lost a few gains during the pandemic maybe i should go to the gym for a few months like what what are the what are the action steps that someone in that position would take oh i love this yes okay so you know you know you and i have met very first session i've heard why people think you're single i've heard about your dating history and now i'm going to give you some experiments to run and so my whole thing is date like a scientist so date like a scientist is have some hypotheses test them bring the data back to me and we will try to understand what that means and so maybe at the end of our first session we said we think you're a maximizer we think that you have unrealistic expectations of partners and we think that the next time that you go in a second date and you don't want to go in a third we're going to push you to go in the third because it's in that third that you will deepen the relationship and get to know this person versus rejecting them for something silly if your issue was that you were a hesitator and you weren't putting yourself out there your next step would be getting a dating app and trying to go on more dates and so what's the point of a dating app profile the point is to create a great first impression and so your dating app profile is almost like you walking into a bar and giving off a particular vibe so if you're wearing a game of thrones t-shirt people are going to engage with you on that if you're wearing a tutu or a basketball jersey people are going to engage with you in different ways and so how do you want people to see you and then respond to you and so i can get into the weeds but really your dating app profile should tell a story it should have variety it should say this is me when i'm with my family and friends and this is what dating me would look like this is a full body shot of me so you can see what i look like in the world here's a clear picture of my face without filters or sunglasses so you know what i look like here's me doing an activity that i love and i want you to ask me questions about it so you're really painting a picture you want to have variety you want to have clear photos that show us who you are we don't want to be playing where's wally and wondering which one you are in a different picture and really you're putting yourself out there so that somebody can see who you are know what you look like and most importantly you're creating a hook that they can grab onto and then engage you in a conversation okay so dating apps um one of my core beliefs is that everyone who is single that i know should be on dating apps and only about half of them are and there's a few common objections that i get when i try and talk people into making accounts on dating apps um can i just throw a few of them a few of them at you and i would love to hear absolutely okay um dating apps are just for hookups what's going on there i work at hinge hinge is really about getting people off of the app and onto relationships i know that's sort of a tagline but in the two years that i've been there i've really found that to be true we're obsessed with helping people go out on great dates there are different dating apps that serve different purposes but if you're someone who's really looking for a relationship a so are a lot of people on certain apps like hinge and b you should feel free to be up front from the beginning about what you're looking for so we just ran this fascinating experimented hinge where we showed 12 000 different users four profiles some of the profiles said they were looking for something generic you know kind compassionate adventurous some of the profiles said i am looking for a long-term relationship what we found is that if the person in the experiment was also looking for a long-term relationship they were much more likely 17 more likely to send the person who was looking for a relationship a message because they were like great you've taken the guesswork out of this i want something you want something i'll message you if the person looking at the profile did not want a relationship they were 10 percent less likely to send that person a message and that actually saves you time on both ends you get more messages from the kind of people you want to hear from and fewer messages from the kind of person you don't and so a lot of this is just being bold being courageous being up front from the beginning whether it's on your profile or the first and second date about what you in particular want to get out of this experience nice love it so objection number two is dating apps focus too much on the superficials and as a sub point to that it's mostly guys that i speak to about this uh guys are systematically um uh shall we say shafted in the dating market because um you know there are so many more guys on this app than there are girls and i've tried it a couple of times and i never get any matches and then i look at one of my female friends and they're getting freaking 100 matches a day like ugh as a guy dating apps are not for me there are issues where dating apps can reduce you to this two-dimensional image that people are evaluating and without a lot of context they might immediately go for looks one thing that hinge just released is these voice prompts and this is a chance for people to be silly they could do an impression of their favorite cartoon character they could play you a silly song that they've been writing they could you know do a celebrity impression whatever that is and it's a chance to bring more authenticity to the profile and so i'd say in general i think the future of what we're going to be seeing with dating apps is wanting more information whether it's more video more voice more interactivity so it's not just like hey here's a piece of paper with bio data on it that your mom showed you and you have to say yes or no i want to go on a date with this person but really it will feel more like oh i've seen you on social media i get a sense for how you move through the world i get a sense for what you look like what your voice sounds like i have an immediate response to who you are and so i would say for those people what can made you on their end to bring their more full self to the profile and then also in their own behavior on the app how can they try to give more people a chance because if we focus too much on height or age we're actually filtering out a lot of people who could make great potential partners on the note of what you put on a dating profile um i so on on my hinge profile about two years ago one of the prompts was um i think you know the i like a perfect date night or something like that and i said something like uh singing a duet uh of uh i see the light from tangled with you um that's so cute and i showed this to a few friends and a few a few guy friends who by their admission had had a lot of success on apps like tinder and hinge and they said bro you can't be saying that that signals that you are not very masculine it signals you are insert homophobic slur here that is not the kind of thing that women want in a man so suppress that aspect of your personality on the dating app and let it maybe come out preferably never but like if you have to do it like further down the line when they've gotten to know you already what's what's your take on the suppressing the less masculine characteristics of myself on my on my dating app profile i totally disagree with your friends first of all one exercise that people can do is think about the three messages that they want to get across on their profile so let's say and i'm you know we're just getting to know each other but let's say i wanted you want people to know that you're curious about the world that you are intellectual and like having deep conversations and that you also have a silly side so i might say to you okay if those are you and actually how how close am i and why don't you tell me what your three things might have been i guess i i never really thought of it as like what are the three things i'm trying to get across um yeah that's just as an exercise maybe you can tell me you know before you met the person that you're seeing now if you were like when somebody looks on my profile and they give it 20 to 30 seconds in an ideal world they'd come away with three these three ideas about me and then we would reverse engineer a profile that shows those things oh that's interesting okay so so immediately the thought in my head is that there is a difference between the way i'd want to come across authentically to people that i'm interested in being friends with and the way i'd want to come across authentic i would want to come across to people that i'm interested in being romantic partners with and maybe and i don't know maybe i've just drunk the kool-aid of this like toxic masculinity stuff for too long but i would be very hesitant about wanting to signal that i really enjoy singing disney songs even though that's true uh i it's it's like stuff like that that i would be i i would hesitate in saying that this is something that i i want to put forward because maybe it doesn't create create the right kind of image does that make sense i understand what you're saying so i think what you're saying is if it was just who am i in the world in a platonic setting you might put the disney thing in in a romantic setting you might not but before we go into the how to get it across just and i know this is not the easiest exercise but just like for the romantic context three things you'd want them to know about and this could be something like family super important to me it could be you know you have a love for a certain football team like just what are three things where you're like i want to give off this message okay so it's a good question let's think about this so one of them would be something like i am quite uh i had a phrase i'm i'm quite keen on my own stuff and i would like the sort of relationship where we're both like we're both doing our own stuff we have our own projects and we come together to like build each other up but where one party is not like reliant on the other party for their happiness uh or what's to that effect and at one point i had in my hinge prompt thing i think the the prompt was uh the ideal relationship looks like dot a dot or something like that and that's a good problem and my answer was where we spend 90 of our time doing our own thing and 10 of our time doing stuff together and that was very very polarizing i showed that to like all my female friends were like whoa you sound like a sociopath what the hell is wrong with you but i was like hey this is you know if someone wants to sign up to be in a relationship with me this is probably something they should probably know where and also 10 that's like 2.4 hours a day that's quite a lot of time do people in relationships spend more time together than that people are like no but it just makes you sound weird if you boil it down to a mathematical ratio so that's one of them um i think another one would be i would probably want to signal some level of social status success prestige whether that's the cambridge university on the thing whether it's the doctor on the thing whether it's at one point i even had me holding up my million subscribers youtube plaque as like one of the images which again was a bit polarized some friends were like oh that's a bit weird why would you signal that and other friends were like oh if i saw that i'd be like oh my god this person's interesting they've got a million subscribers on youtube that's unusual so i think i'd want to signal social status in that kind of sense um and i would want to signal something like yeah sort of a playful a playful side um maybe not disney maybe something else along those lines maybe me having a big smile uh with hanging out with friends or playing board games or like being obsessed with harry potter or you know that that side of things um potentially as a fourth option like the music stuff because i'm big into singing and piano and guitar and stuff and i just love that [ __ ] so i don't know i think i would want to signal some of those some of those things that was great and thank you for being honest i feel like a lot of people wouldn't have said that second one but would feel it people who make a lot of money might want to signal that they make a lot of money and you'd have a nice lifestyle if you were with me but i feel like people aren't always honest about that so i appreciate that you said like social status is something you're proud of and you'd want that person to know so those three things all summarize them as the first one is you're looking for a relationship with a lot of independents where you both bring a lot to the table but you have separate and fulfilling lives and then together you also have a fulfilling life but it's not codependent the second one is you've worked hard you've been successful and you feel like you bring that to the table and then the third one is you also have a playful side which comes out maybe through harry potter or playing games or just spending time with family and friends or music great so we would start with those three things and then we would say how can we use your photos and your prompts and maybe your voice prompts on hinge to get that across and so for the first picture i would probably just say a really high quality headshot of you and maybe it's something that you have from your professional life with that camera that does uh you know the blurry background and even that is kind of it's you know uh subtly suggesting to us like you're sort of an important person then in one of your prompt responses you can talk about you know started as a medical doctor transitioned to being a youtuber and a podcast and your favorite way to spend time is thinking about ideas and talking to interesting people right you could have something like that but then you could have a hook in there like what's the last great book you've read or what's the last skill that you've developed and so you are already signaling what matters to you but creating a conversation opener where the person can say i really want to give you this uh this book recommendation i really want to engage with you about this idea or this podcast or this philosophy then for the status one i think you could have um i think the million subscribers one thing that would worry me is are you going to be attracting the type of person that really focuses on that but i think that you can use um conversations and first dates to filter that out basically you don't want to have people that are just social climbers and then the silliness one i think that's super important because people are going to say well with those first two how do i know that this person doesn't take themselves too seriously which is a common thing that people want and so you could have a video of you juggling poorly and all the balls fall down and it's just like i like to excuse me i like to learn new things but i'm not very good at this or a video of you singing or something like that and so that's a long-winded way of saying i actually think the disney karaoke one is a really good idea because with the balance of the full profile i am professional i am successful i have over a million youtube subscribers it is totally fine to be like and also i have this side of myself that likes the movie tangled and will sing with you and so i think out of context maybe somebody will say oh women like someone who's masculine and decisive and all this stuff but that's not just one part of you you're this whole person and so i love that one i think it's surprising i think it's specific i think it opens a conversation to say i won't sing that with you but i will sing a frozen song with you and so i think it's much more about understanding how you want to be portrayed versus trying to fit into a cultural context in which disney could be seen as being a beta some of these ideas i just don't think are helpful oh oh that's very interesting okay so um what are the the bro okay there are some kind of somewhat universally attractive factors that girls look for in guys and and vice versa and and one thing i've always been always been curious about is to what extent do should me as a guy use the my knowledge of what the generalization and the averages are to shape my own dating profile plus or minus my own personality uh do you get what i mean give me an example of something besides the disney one that you may or may not include based on this so-called strategy um um so the disney one uh so like at one point my hinge thingy well one of the prompts was uh i'm really good at or i'm the best in the world at and i said harry potter trivia so again um at one point i had a photo of me in my bedroom but the feedback that some of my male friends said about that is that those like get pastel colored posters you've got on the wall with the blue and white baby blue bed sheets maybe doesn't quite signal that you're a man who's got their life together and it kind of looks more like a teenager's room rather than a successful man's room um things like that where it's like i could choose to put that in there but it maybe wouldn't signal the i don't know masculine nurse the confidence the successfulness that what i'm a grown up person who's good to go the life together kind of vibes i'll start by saying i do think that it depends on what you're looking for and what the other person is looking for so i have a close guy friend who went on a date with this woman they had known each other for several years they were friends but they were exploring being something more and they went on this great date and she went back to his apartment afterwards and she said your towels have holds in them your bathroom is dirty the sink is dirty there's garbage overflowing from the trash can you're not signaling to me that you're ready for a serious relationship and i can't waste my time helping somebody grow up and i don't want to continue seeing you romantically and that story stuck in my mind because he felt like he was ready for a long-term relationship but some of the actions about his life and how he was how he was you know keeping his space didn't portray that and so yes people are taking in lots of signals i think that if you are unemployed or underemployed people are going to judge you based on that i think that hygiene and the way you keep your space yes people judge you on that and so i'm not saying that that stuff doesn't matter but in reading between the lines and what you're saying i feel like you're investing a little too much time in the how will this be seen and how does this one picture in a vacuum portray me and not enough time saying i can paint a picture of myself on the profile then very quickly i'm going to get into a conversation i'm going to ask good questions i'm going to be interesting i'm going to be attractive i'm going to work hard to make that person feel seen and i believe in my own ability to create a relationship and so i i hope you don't take this the wrong way but i feel like some of what you're saying is a little bit of like what i see on reddit from people who are trying to hyper optimize specific things and i think trying to say like what do women want and how do i become that and you know this isn't masculine because a pale poster would be that it's like actually maybe all the guys who have these so-called masculine photos of holding up a dead fish that's a huge turn off and that's a cliche and people literally will swipe past that and instead if you're just a bold curious person who says this is what i'm about i'm a layered person with complexities i bet you are too that is going to stand out that is going to be more unique that is going to have more hooks and so i think that while i also am an optimizer and i also like to have strategies and do things the right way there's something about love in which it's two deeply complicated people who have to come together choose each other and continue to choose each other and i think for every moment that you're spending thinking about the baby blue sheets and the pastel posters you could be spending that either becoming a more interesting person which i know that you spend a lot of time on or contacting more people or going out on more dates or actually learning by engaging i think that the profiles matter but at a certain point it's less about optimizing the individual pictures and more about learning and updating and that's sort of the scientific method right it's not just ask your million friends what you think the outcome will be but actually test it so if you have that picture on there and nobody comments on it for weeks maybe it's taking the place of something that people could comment on and so make your best case scenario profile see how you do switch out your first photo switch out your prompts and your end goal is to create a dynamic story with variety which with a lot of hooks that people are commenting on or liking or asking you questions about amazing yeah that makes so much sense and after all of this like uh experimentation i i i landed on a profile that had i showed it to my male friends two years ago they would have been like oh it's not very masculine i was like you know what it's fine like that's not the vibe we're trying to go for here we're trying to go for someone who would kind of appreciate what i'm actually like rather than a sort of false persona of what reddit and you know these other books and websites tell me that girls would women women would potentially want um and that ended up working reasonably well so that was good ding ding ding yeah i loved everything you said i would write it down and i would underline it and write you're trying to portray who you are and get one person who's interested in you you are not trying to hack an entire gender and figure out what the most number of people would like it's how do you get the person who you would most like to like you nice okay so we've got the profile where we've matched with a few people we've got hinge premium because why not such a time saver um this is another thing this is another hill that i die on with a bunch of my friends like why would you not like you're making decent money you work at mckinsey why would you not pay 17 quid every six months it just begs but anyway i think about that all the time in terms of like how much would you pay to find the love of your life and for a lot of people you know depending on their pay scale it's a lot of money so why aren't you putting money behind that why aren't you you know investing in some good date outfits whether it's paying for a dating app or even i have a friend who runs an incentive program where if you it's actually through her dad if you set her up on five dates either five dates with one person or five dates with different people some combination he will send you this gift basket from nuts.com which i just think is so funny and random but why it works is psychologically it makes you feel like okay this person's really serious about dating she's willing to go out with whoever you set her up with and there's an incentive and so it makes me put in the extra effort to set her up and so if anyone's listening and feels motivated put your money where your mouth is and offer an incentive to your friends to set you up it might just make the difference between them saying yes and i'm actually doing it yeah so on that note there was a blogger that i that i follow um his name is tynan uh he was he was actually featured in uh the game back in the day uh the book oh wow um he was he was one of the people in the house but he ended up kind of growing out of that becoming like a personal development blogger type guy and building businesses and things and i i interviewed him on this on one of these like streams about two years ago uh he had a thing that when he turned 30 he posted to his mailing list saying look i'm serious about getting to know someone if you introduce me to the person i end up in a long-term relationship i will i will a long-term relationship with i will help you tick off any item on your bucket list and he got a bunch of like inbound that way and when i when i heard about that that really resonated with me because it really was a case of put your money where your mouth is and take this seriously but then i mentioned it to some people and they were like that's a bit weird it's dating shouldn't be so systematic and stuff like what what the hell is wrong with you um i don't know if you could if you got that like the whole like scientific approach to dating and stuff do you get that pushback that like oh it's supposed to be more natural than that first of all i have chills from that story because it's so clever like i love that it was at the milestone of turning 30. i love those to his email list i also think tick something off your bucket list is just such an amazing prompt and probably better than money because it like helps you release it and say like what's my bucket list and what's holding me back and maybe even if you don't win that contest or whatever you still might make progress on it but for the general question yes people ask me all the time why are you trying to apply research to something that's organic and how can you bottle up love so my response to them it's actually the first paragraph of my book is that yes love is natural and we're born knowing how to love but dating isn't dating in the modern sense was invented at the end of around 1890 so this is a relatively new concept in terms of the span of human history and then dating on apps is around a decade old with um swiping and all that being extremely new and so part of it is just having humility around the fact that a lot of us are just making this up as we go along this is not something that we know how to do second of all in history people would help you right there was the matchmaker or maybe your father would have you marry the person next door so that your parcels of land connected or he would trade your hand in marriage for 10 camels there was all these other people involved it's actually a really new concept that you on your own define all of these characteristics of your life including who you marry and so people need help second of all there is academic research on this we talked about this there's research on attraction research on do opposites attract research on what makes for a long-term compatible relationship why wouldn't you look at that if you were going to make a nutrition plan or a financial plan you would look at the research why is love something that has to defy logic and defy science and so i'd say this is something that you care about and you want to find someone great and not get divorced why wouldn't you invest in knowing the information out there it can only empower you and you can take the parts of it that are useful and you can ignore the other parts nice love it um just like while we're on this on on this tangent i wanted to ask like what what is the kind of uh broad brushstrokes of what the research says on what is attractive and what are the qualities that make for a good long-term partner can you you mentioned there's research on on both those so the people who i admire the most in this field are the gottmans so john and julie gottman highly recommend people check out their stuff and they've been doing research into the topic of love for over four decades and they run this institute called the gottman institute and some of their most interesting research happened in this space called the love lab so what they would do is they had this apartment sort of in a bnb that they would invite couples to come to and this apartment was decked out in ways to monitor them and yes people knew that they were being monitored and so it would have cameras and microphones and it even had this thing under the chair called the jigglometer that would see how much your chair moved and maybe how anxious you were it was testing your urine there was tons of data being collected what they would do is they'd have a couple there over the weekend and they would observe them and what they did is they had couples there for a period of time and then six years later they saw who are the couples that stayed together happily what they called the relationship masters and who are the couples who were unhappily together or had broken up they called these the relationship disasters and they did all this research to understand what were the behaviors that we saw in that first setting that might have helped predict who was gonna thrive versus breakup and so the most important thing that they found is this concept called bids and a bid is a verbal or nonverbal chance to connect so a very obvious bid might be me saying to you hey i had a hard day can we talk about it i'm being very explicit that i want to talk to you but it also might be me reading an email and signing loudly and i want you to say to me what's wrong and so it's this chance to connect and then they measure how does your partner respond and there's three ways the partner can respond turn towards you asking a question reaching out trying to engage turning away from you that could be just ignoring you or turning against you just saying why are you making so much noise you know that i'm trying to get work done and so what they found is that for the relationship masters they turn to get they turn towards each other 86 percent of the time so they're making a lot of bids and they are accepting each other's bids and the relationship disasters they only turn towards each other 33 of the time so you and i are talking about these very strategic things about like profile and masculinity and how do you portray yourself but what the godman's would say is that the secret to a successful long-term relationship is small things often having a habit of trying to connect with your partner and noticing when your partner's trying to connect with you and taking that time to really invest in each other turn away from distractions and really say this is what's going on with me what's going on with you and just it's those daily habits and those daily moments it's not the trip to hawaii or the you know exciting new sex toy it's about constantly investing in each other hmm so this segues nicely into something else that i i wanted to talk to you about and that is the extent to which this and bid stuff is different when you're dating versus when you're in a relationship and what i mean by that is that um you know so a few a few a few months ago i was i was i was going on a few dates and we were kind of chatting a bit by whatsapp messages afterwards and uh obviously i turned to some of my female friends to help me respond to some of these messages uh as as one does um and one of the points that i of feedback that i got from some people and this was not everyone but but some people was that i was coming across as too keen and my response rate was too fast and she said that thing and she asked you a question and then you responded to it but then you like overly elaborated on that response which signals to her that you have nothing better to do with your time that you're begging for her attention she you know in the dating stage she wants to feel as if she's doing some of the work therefore you need to tone the hell down your response time and kind of be less like a beggy about like the way you're responding to her uh this was some of my female friends there were other female friends that were like that's completely terrible advice you're just having a normal conversation like screw all of that what's the what's the solution here okay i am giggling and covering my face because this is such a hot topic that i could talk about for hours everything you're saying i could talk about for hours but i feel honored to get the chance to bust some myths yes so remember right i work with people one-on-one i have the anecdotes i have the stories i also work at hinge which means i have access to millions of data points around how this stuff works we did this fascinating research on the topic of responsiveness and what we found is that if somebody messages you and you respond within the hour you have a much greater chance of having a long conversation and even going on a date and so all of this nonsense around play games match how many hours she waited to respond and then you do the same none of that helps you get into a relationship with somebody who's a good communicator who talks authentically who is somebody who you can be yourself with all of that is a way to just maximize a game and you're not trying to play a game or win a game you're trying to find a long-term relationship and so what i would say is remember you are talking to a bunch of people she is talking to a bunch of people right it's a noisy bar with a lot of conversations one of the best ways to stand out is to just engage in a conversation with her and try to make it as synchronous so talking at the same time as possible and so the data on this is very clear responsiveness on a dating app is a useful strategy because it helps you get into the conversation and stand out and one thing that you can do strategically is pretty early on say something like you know i'm more into texting can we transition to text and something about getting from the busy dating app inbox to the more personal um texting or snapchat inbox is that now you're in the place where her friends are and you can help stand out and so generally in that place i would say you want to be playful and you want to play but you don't want to play games i remember a few probably uh probably earlier this year um i was on one of these apps this was on mismatch actually um that i interviewed the founder of on this podcast in episode number two if anyone wants to check it out um there was a girl whose profiler came across who i wasn't like like like i wasn't massively sold on the profile i was just like um kind of lukewarm towards it but one of the prompts that she said she said like you know what's one fact about me that will surprise you or something like that and she said i reply ridiculously fast to messages i was like oh okay and then i commented on that as being like just testing or something something something like that and she replied within like 10 seconds and we ended up going on a date and actually having a great time and like you know the spark wasn't there and and and all this and that but like we actually had a great conversation through the app went on the date and i was like wow this person really stands out by actually being quick at responding to messages because otherwise it's like you send a message you wait 18 hours nothing happens you know etc etc like it was such a breath of fresh air um and i just never i guess i guess in my head because as a as a guy in this scenario i think guys are more sensitive to the a girl will be turned off if you come across as too keen i i i didn't quite sort of put two and two together and think you know maybe if i were quicker at responding people would would vibe with me a bit better i want to make a meta point because i think a lot of what you're bringing to me as questions are things that are like there's an old wives tale or there's general cultural wisdom that you should do x and many of my answers are no i would advise doing y and so i think we could go through all of those different ones but i just want to make this as a general point which is that if you were to start a youtube channel and all you did was study the most popular youtube channels you might just end up creating a copy of the most popular people done with worst lighting worse audio equipment worst guest and you are less good at interviewing right you're just doing a copy of something else and you blend into the background maybe you want to do something different maybe you want to innovate maybe you want to stand out and i think that sometimes when we're looking at so many profiles doing something surprising creating that hook showing your individuality is the best possible thing that you can do because if you see 10 dead fish pictures in a row and then you see a guy who says i spend most of my day on the computer because that is my job but at night i'd love to play a board game with you that is different and so for her you know you're talking about men don't want to seem like they are too available so they shouldn't respond quickly well women also want to don't want to seem like they're too needy so in writing that she's really standing out and i think it's it's not that there are no rules but i think in general these rules make us focus on the wrong thing when the things that we should be focusing on are be the best person you can be invest in your communication skills learn how to talk about hard topics like sex and conflict treat the other person well and when you know that you're not interested in somebody break up with them in a kind respectful and firm way and move on i think if we worked on those foundational skills of human connection and less time on well how long did she spend to respond to this message and do i seem needy i i think that that's investing the wrong energy in the wrong place yeah and this is exactly the side the the the stuff i tell kind of youtubers as well stop focusing on the wrong things focus on the stuff that's going to move the needle i actually making videos and slowly getting better over time one of the things you talk about in the book is the idea of um prom date versus life partner and if i kind of paraphrase uh there are different things that we're looking for in a prom date where maybe we're focused on how attractive are they and how adventurous and risky and interesting do they seem whereas there are different qualities that we look for in a life partner which is more like in growth mindset uh emotional maturity the ability to fight well and communicate clearly etc um how when when it comes to like first and second dates how would you go about sussing out the more deeper qualities where uh in in the context of a date where like everyone is kind of putting on their best behavior you would think great so yes i love this concept and i think that it's really important in people's personal development to make that shift from the prom date to the life partner and unfortunately some people just think oh that happens with time but no i think you really have to make a concerted effort to say like yeah that guy's really hot and it'd be fun to sleep with him but he's actually not that reliable i don't know if he'll show up when he says he will i'm constantly worried about him letting me down and actually what i'm experiencing isn't chemistry it's anxiety and so that's the prom date and now i'm going to reject that person and move towards a life partner and so for anyone listening or watching i would say if you consistently find yourself with prom dates i want you to focus on the life partner in terms of how to find these people early on i think you can do it as early as the profile the messaging and first dates and it's really about coming up with some questions that help you elicit certain responses and so something about the growth mindset is people with a growth mindset feel like they can try new skills safely and even if they're bad at them that's totally fine because life is about getting better as opposed to somebody with a fixed mindset who says you're born with these skills and you can't improve them so a question i've been encouraging people to ask over the last two years while we've been in the pandemic is something like what's something that you were bad at that you've gotten better at or have you invested any time especially during lockdown in working on any skills and you know you can iterate that on that and make it sound more casual but just understanding is this the kind of person who says i have a lot of alone time i'm going to learn to speak spanish or did they just spend more time playing video games right like what is this person's orientation toward growth in terms of loyalty a really important quality you can ask these people you know do you have friends from different stages of your life or what is the best gift you've ever given there's chances where you say this is the quality in the person i'm looking for this is the question that strategically helps me understand if they have that and then i'm actually going to listen to their answer and see how it jives with me and not just say well actually all their answers were terrible but they're so hot i'm going to ignore it no no that's a prom date thing listen to their answers and say is this the kind of person that i want to keep getting to know or do i want to find someone who's more aligned with the qualities i'm looking for yeah one of the one of the things that i i accidentally did this was before i read the book is that um on this uh with with this girl who i'm i'm now like i guess in a relationship with well i feel that still feels weird to say um on our second day we went to play top golf which is like this cross between 10 pin bowling and a golf driving range and neither of us had ever played golf before and so i messaged her being like hey do you want to try the skull thing and she was like i mean i've never played golf before i was like me neither let's just give it a go and she was totally up for it and that was one of the things that really stood out where i was like she was totally cool with actually trying out this new thing being okay with looking like a bit of an idiot playing both of us playing the sport that we never played before um and so i really liked that as um a thing and then i read the growth mindset stuff in the book and i was like oh i kind of accidentally kind of selected for that particular quality which was kind of nice i i love that story so much i think there's so much to that first of all you were brave and suggesting something that you weren't good at there might be somebody out there who says oh i only take people on dates to things i'm really good at so that i look good in a certain light no what you were showing is that you're fun and spontaneous and willing to try new things and be bad at them and she was also willing to do that so i think that's a great idea i talked before about dating like a scientist part of dating like a scientist is having a hypothesis testing it and then looking at the data and so a big thing that people have been asking me in the last year or so is i want to ask people if we can do a phone call or a video date before we meet up but some people will be turned off by that i think using what you said um hey on a scale of uh this is scary too i'm interested how open are you to having a phone call or a video call that could be a cool way of doing it but i also think just asking and seeing how the person responds gives you a lot of data so maybe somebody says a video call what are you screening me for a job that's weird no or they say i haven't done that before but i'm open to it and so it's each moment is a chance to see you're putting out um some sort of stimulus and you're seeing how they're responding to it and that gives you a lot of information and so do the bold thing ask the question and see if they can roll with it or are they so traditional and so tied to certain norms that that freaks them out well if you don't like that then that's maybe not the kind of person you want to be with nice one of the things that you talk about is the sort of actively reflecting on a date when you get back from it um and i wanted to ask like to what extent like what are the sorts of questions that we should be asking when we get back from dates and to what extent is like a sort of checklist approach to this a good idea because we talk about things like growth mindset and emotional maturity and ability to communicate is that the sort of thing like similar to how like if you're hiring someone for a job you want to have like a scorecard and you want to be able to evaluate each candidate against the scorecard is this the sort of person who would be able to do x to what extent is that like a decent approach when it comes to dating and reflecting on dates afterwards in general i think that having a checklist is not helpful because often what's on that checklist is the wrong stuff it's height income perceived success do we have the same hobbies i think a lot of times that checklist is based on what we think matters in long-term relationships which the research shows us doesn't matter in long-term relationships so as a concept i would say throw out your checklist be willing to date someone who's not your type it is very possible that the person you end up with the person who makes it you happiest long term is not the person you thought you would be with that being said in my book i offer this exercise called the post date eight the post date eight is based on research on gratitude journals so there's amazing research from many people including sean acor of harvard that says if at the end of the day you have to write down three things that you're grateful for your brain will actually be looking for them throughout the day so if you're running to make the bus and you make it maybe five minutes later you forget about it but if you know that at that night you have to write it down then you're going to notice it more so what we do at the end impacts what we look for throughout so the post date eight is the same idea i've taken what i believe and what the research shows matters for evaluating a date i've turned it into these list of eight questions things like how did i feel in my body around this person do i feel curious about this person what side of me did this person bring out and then throughout the date you aren't looking at their height and their job you're paying attention to those things and at the end of the date you ask yourself the post date eight to decide do i want to see this person again and so it is a version of a checklist but it's a checklist designed to help you focus on what matters not what doesn't nice and i wonder if you can give some examples of like what are some of the questions in the post sure so from all the research that i've done and even the coaching i've done since my book has come out this one of what side of me did this person bring out is huge because it helps you understand great on paper brings out a bad side of me i don't want to see them again that's a really helpful insight another one is this idea of do they energize me or de-energize me so there's an activity called a penthouse in a basement person you think in your life not even in a romantic setting who is my penthouse person who when i'm with them do they bring my energy up do i feel creative do i feel inspired so for you who's your penthouse person he's my penthouse person uh i can think of a few university friends i think my brother is one of my penthouse people which is why we kind of decided to start a podcast together um my current housemate is a penthouse person definitely i love that yes so you have this penthouse person that's another helpful benchmark and you have a basement person somebody who makes you feel depressed down de-energized and so just asking this question did i feel more energized or less energized after the date helps you understand where that person falls and helps you get closer to finding a penthouse person because of course the person you end up with in a romantic relationship you want them to bring out that inspired capable creative part of you and so it's really helping you understand what stuff matters what stuff to pay attention to and it ignores things like did i think they have an impressive job and do we have enough hobbies and comments stuff that people think matters but really doesn't nice um one of the things that you talk about in the book is to always go on the second date uh what's the what's the deal with that yes so there's a whole idea in behavioral science of defaults and so whatever we create as a default sticks with us so if a hamburger place has fries as the default most people will stick with that and get the fries if a hamburger place has a salad as a default most people will stick with that in general we stick with what the default is in these rules of thumbs the next thing is that in dating i think we put too much pressure on the first date some of the best people i know do not perform well on first dates they are awkward they are not comfortable they are not good at small talk they are more introverted this is harder for them but these are people who would make great long-term partners and so how can we actually take the pressure off the first date and say first dates are almost a warm-up round it's uh do i like the sound of your voice am i attracted to you do we have something to talk about and i'm going to assume that we're going to go on the second date pending that nothing crazy or terrible or unsafe happens on the first date and that way if you go in assuming you'll go on the second date you're giving people more of a shot and it's easier to find those diamond in a rough people who get better over time and one of the things i talk about throughout the book is this idea of [ __ ] the spark go after the slow burn the spark is somebody who gives you instant chemistry they make you feel so attracted to them like you've known them for a million years but honestly a lot of sparky people are charismatic but also narcissistic they're focused on getting you to fall for them but they're not actually asking themselves if they like you the spark is something that you can chase that burns that burns out quickly instead you want to find this slow burn someone who you like more and more over time your appreciation for them grows and those are really the people to go after and so some of my friends who are in the best relationships that i admire they had terrible first dates but either because i told them to go on a second date or their mom told them to go on a second date they gave that person more of a chance and so you will find some great people if you make the second date the default i really like that yeah like uh having having that as a default meaning that if something's disastrous happens on the first date it's not like we're saying that oh my god you have to go on a second date and it's contractually binding but more like hey it's a default and that actually probably would change your behavior on the first day as well because now you know it's not so big a deal being on the first because by default if they're you know if they consent you'd want to go on a second as well totally and there's this concept i talk about about the evaluative versus the experiential mindset so the evaluative mindset is are you good enough for me where did you go to uni what are your table manners i'm constantly judging you against this rubric in my head and saying are you good enough the experiential mindset is i'm going to be in the moment with you i am going to be looking at cues for how i feel and if i'm having fun and am i laughing but i'm not judging you i think we just do so much better when we are in the moment having fun letting time pass versus when we are constantly evaluating someone and even what you said before about having a job description and measuring somebody against this i feel like as a culture one of the biggest mistakes that we're making is we're saying let's take what works at work and let's apply that to dating and that's a mistake this is a date this is not a job interview if you are showing up with a corporate mindset and a spreadsheet and you're giving me 15 minutes to give your investor pitch you're going to go on 100 dates and it's not going to work out because that is not what leads to connection and so yes it's great that you are killing it at your job but if you are applying all of what you do at your job to dating you're probably not having the connection that you're looking for oh this is so interesting experiential versus evaluative um so this really resonates with a bit because um again earlier earlier this day earlier this year when i was like actively dating um one of my female friends would always ask you know how how was it and i'd be like yeah that's pretty good we know we had a good time we vibed i think we get on um and she was like no like i'm i and this was like okay what do you what do you like about her i was like oh i don't know um i mean i guess we vibed and we got on and it was it was a good time and she was like hang on mate you're doing this all wrong you want to be going in with a in a way a checklist of these are the qualities i'm looking for you want to design questions that that sort of suss it out and you want to be in a way treating this like a job interview so that when you when someone asks you what you like in the person you're actually able to talk about it and i was like what this this seems weird like if you ask me what i like about my friends i'd be like i mean i i probably can't list off a checklist of things and this friend was saying oh that's just because you're not like emotionally mature enough yet once you become more emotionally mature then you'll be able to know what it is you like about someone and be able to articulate it rather than saying oh we vibed um what's uh what's what's going on there any thoughts i'm laughing because i almost feel like i'm saying some things that are in conflict but in my mind they're clear but we should probably go through them and clear them up and so for example when i walked you through that exercise about what are the three things you want to communicate to me that's just saying like this is like your one shot to have a billboard about you and i do think you should be strategic but then in other ways i said i don't think you should optimize the color of the posters on your background and so it's like you want to invest you want to put your best foot forward but you don't want to spend too much time right in that last 20 you want to focus on the 80 percent that matters and so for this situation i could see somebody listening or watching and being confused and saying well she's saying you have a checklist but it's a post-state 8 it's not a checklist about that person's qualities what i would say for this topic and for what your friend said is that so often people come to me and they say logan i know exactly what i want i just need your help finding that person then they go through this list of he must be over six feet tall he must make at least six figures he must love travel he must have parents who are not divorced and they go on and on and on with this list and unfortunately the older people get when maybe they should becoming more flexible because the pool is smaller the list gets longer and they say well i've waited this long he better be perfect and that's not a good strategy how i think about it is this so-called type of yours these qualities that you're so sure that you need how has that been working out for you maybe you've dated plenty of people with that and it hasn't worked out because what you think you want is not what's actually going to make you happy long term and so my husband is a five foot eight red-headed vegan engineer do you think that if i made a checklist those would be all the things on my list no that wouldn't have been on my list but he is brilliant he is hilarious he understands me better than i understand myself we have the most fun together we see the world in a similar way i couldn't have made a list to find my husband but when i started hanging out with him and i saw the side of me he brought out and i found myself thinking about him all the time and we had the best jokes and the best conversations i realized this was a good match for me and so take your checklist take your so-called type rip it up be willing to say i'm going to date different types of people and see what side of me they bring out so be strict about how you want your partner to make you feel and the life you want and be flexible about how they show up in the world and what qualities they have is it reasonable to go on a date and not really be able to articulate what you liked about someone and instead just that you vibed or is that just uh yeah i love that i mean i think you really nailed this question when you said i couldn't tell you everything about my friends that i like i think if i'm i mean i have a lot of close friends and i think if i think about them what i might say is something like i don't have to censor myself i can say exactly how i feel i can be petty i can be unkind i can be selfish i can be self-absorbed and i can just say this is what's going on with me give me space to vent and they will hold that space for me and it will be totally fine think about people who i don't vibe with as much and it's because i think that they're judging me or i feel like they want something from me or our relationship isn't balanced and so it's really humans are complicated if humans were less complicated there would have already been an algorithm that perfectly predicts from day one who out of the millions of people in your country or city you should date the reason that doesn't exist is because we have years of habits years of trauma we have different characteristics we have different personality traits and so the only way to know if you're a good match with someone is to spend time with them and see how you feel around them can you imagine bringing them into your home and and building a life with them and so you don't have to be able to articulate she said this thing which implies this thing which goes against my list you could just say i could imagine myself talking to her for hours or i found that my brain was making interesting connections and i felt energized from our conversation um nice i really like that i feel i feel partially vindicated in these in these conversations yeah i mean it's funny i feel like i'm yeah i feel like i'm judging your friends but i kind of am because i feel like your friends are bringing a lot of cultural baggage to you saying here's the rule and you're breaking it and what if i said to you there's no rule the number one thing is be a good person and pay attention speaking of rules uh there is another friend who i've not talked about yet um who so i'd i'd been on a but i'd been on a first date uh with someone and i was very concerned about the whole first kiss situation and like when when do you go for the first kiss and i brought this up on a group holiday with some friends i was just like yeah i don't really know like uh you know i guess when the moment's right but like and and one of my friends said no no in my experience if we haven't kissed by the third date then it's a no-go that's a massive red flag and then suddenly i was like oh [ __ ] like there's a there's a three-date rule and i even went through the motions like uh sort of rehearsing this with some of my friends be like okay if we're sitting by a park bench and we're sitting on the bench then then how do i how do i go for the first case if we're sitting in the car how do we go like all of all all of all of this kind of stuff um and describing it now and for someone listening to this it probably seems really bizarre but there is i feel like there is some element of truth where it's like uh if well you know having having pulled a handful of female friends about this they do say that oh well if he hasn't made a move by at least but you know by the third date it kind of suggests that he's not really either he's not really into me or he's just not that confident and therefore it's it's a no for me how do we approach this uh three date rule situation when it comes to the first kiss and i guess the broader question is a more meta question about rules and regulations when it comes to dating so this is a question i get a lot and i wouldn't say that i necessarily have a rule on it i would just say it's really hard especially it became hard after 2017 with the me too era because there was a lot of feelings of i want to be bold but i don't want to be creepy i want her to know i'm interested i don't want to ask for permission in a way that seems weak and so i just want to acknowledge that for everyone i think this is really hard then you add into it a pandemic where being in someone's face breathing on them sharing a kiss with them is actually potentially putting them in danger this has just become a very difficult conversation and so my advice for my clients is that there is a sexy and confident way to say can i kiss you and so part of it starts with body language what did you say what is that way i think that it's first of all i think that there's body language i think you can see you know if you're close to someone do they seem to be leaning into you if you touch their arm do they seem to like it you know you can whisper in their ear i think that there are some subtle flirtatious things that you can do to say you know i'm going to get closer to your space and seeing if you respond well the pandemic does complicate a lot of this because i think some people would be like i don't want you to be anywhere near me but what i would say is that at the end of the day you could say something like i really want to kiss you how would you feel about that or um you know what are your thoughts on kissing on the first date or just something where it's like oh no wait that second one was exactly what i said i said really how would you feel about kissing on the second date yay i love that yeah maybe i'm inspired by your earlier thing that i really liked about saying you know what are your thoughts on this i think it's a clever way of basically getting at someone's thoughts but you're obviously saying can i kiss you and so i think the number one message i want people to take from this is in general asking for consent is the right thing to do and there's a way to do it that's both confident and sexy and doesn't ruin the moment and it's up to you to experiment with different phrases that feel right for you but you should neither assume that somebody wants to kiss you or assume that somebody doesn't want to kiss you the best approach here is to actively find a way to let them know that you're interested in doing that and seeing what they think one of the things that i wanted to talk about in in in this video that's coming up is what are the things that make for a good or bad date in your experience i have some tips that help people create great dates dates that lead to connections so the first tip is that the date doesn't just start when you show up the date actually starts hours before when you get into the mindset so my version of an old quote is whether you think the date will go poorly or you think the date will go well you're right and so what that means is that your mindset matters so if you're transitioning from a hard day at work where your boss was yelling at you and going straight into a date you're not going to bring an excitable present part of yourself you're gonna bring a stressed part so i want you to proactively take time between work or whatever else you're doing and the date and getting into a mindset that might be to bring yourself with perfume because you're turned on by sense it might be listening to a pump up playlist to get your energy going it might be working out what are the things that you can do to cultivate the right mindset for a date the next thing is what are you actually doing on the date so many dates are these job interviews where i sit across from you and i say what did you study and why and how many siblings do you have and what's your five year plan and you know what who cares that doesn't really affect our ability to be in a relationship together it's dry it's boring coffee dates that feel like job interviews all fade into the same why can't we do an activity together why can't we meet up in a park and run around and try to pet five dogs why can't we go to a street with a lot of dumpling places and create our own dumpling tour and figure out our best one why can't we have an experience together where we're doing something we're having fun even if we don't have a connection at least we had a fun experience together and it takes the pressure off so designing a date with a lot of fun and playfulness another thing is really listening so often we have our cell phones out and there's great research that shows that a conversation is much less deep and much less empathetic when our phone is out because what happens is i think as soon as your phone blinks you're going to check it and i might be in the middle of something deep and personal and i don't want that to happen so i'm just not even going to go there so put your phone away turn it off put it under the table ask questions that help you connect versus just waiting for your turn to talk so there's this concept called a shift versus support response a shift response is when um you say something like i'm going to adopt a golden doodle puppy and i shift the attention back to me and i say oh i've always wanted a puppy but i don't have a puppy because of my job a support response is i say why do you want a dog have you ever had a dog before how did you choose that breed it helps you go deeper into your story support responses are really great for a date because in the end people care about how you make them feel and what people what makes people feel good is when you make them feel interesting versus you being interesting so it's much less about sharing stories that make you seem cool and much more about asking them questions that make them feel important and then my last tip is end on a high note there's amazing research from the behavioral economist daniel kahneman which found that when people are getting colonoscopies they'd actually rather get a colonoscopy that's slightly longer but ends in a less painful way because we disproportionately remember things based on how they end so even if you have a mediocre date you can save it by ending on a high note you can ask someone for a kiss and give them a great kiss you can order dessert you can give them a meaningful compliment you can show them a surprise mural that they've never seen before and so really think about how can i end this date in a meaningful and fun and memorable way nice that's a great stuff um earlier today i posted on instagram and on twitter basically saying i was interviewing you and we we've got a bunch of questions in from uh random people in the audience um so if that's all right can i chuck some of these at you so let's start with the uh the girlfriend ones because obviously you know i need to prioritize her um i love it so she says um oh okay it's got three actually okay the first one what are your top tips for becoming a better life partner to someone else i love this question and it's something that i've been thinking about a lot i don't know exactly if i'll write a second book or what would it be about but this is one of the main things that i'm considering so my first book in many ways is about how to choose the right person and there's almost an implication that okay there's all these people you can get whoever you want and how do you choose among them but the truth is many of us are not necessarily who we want to be or we wouldn't even necessarily be good partners right now and so i think what needs to go along with that is how to be a good partner and so in the book in the chapter called go for the life partner not the prom date i talk about this idea of loyalty and how you want to find somebody who's with you for the ups and the downs and in that chapter i quote my sister's speech or no i quote um yeah in that chapter i quote this article from about a decade ago that my sister loves um which is from this woman who's an oncologist so she's a cancer doctor and she's talking about how her friends say i want to find a guy who loves long walks in the beach and i want to find a guy who loves dogs as much as i do and what she says from being an oncologist is you want to find a guy who will hold your purse and what she means by that is that she sees different husbands in the cancer treatment ward some who kind of hold the metaphysic uh the metaphorical and literal person some who don't that you want to find this guy who's going to be there with you and i i quote that in there so after the book but before it came out my then fiance now husband was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and so what's been happening for me is all of these things in the book that i talk about what you should look for in somebody else i am now having to be that partner so my husband went through three extremely invasive surgeries including uh but then below the knee leg amputation um a knee replacement like really major surgeries and i have literally been the person holding the purse or in his case his backpack or his fanny pack and so what really resonates with me about your girlfriend's question is that we spend so much time thinking how do i choose but we should probably be spending as much or more time saying how can i be the person that gets chosen so anyway just wanted to start with that preamble of why this is so relevant to me it broke yeah it really comes down to kind of being being there for the person yeah so that was just one example but i would say how to be a better life partner so some of it is just knowing yourself and knowing your stuff so what keeps you in the safe zone where you're happy you're confident i like this word that i invented called confident it's when you're calm and confident how do you stay in your confident mode and what are your triggers so for some people let's say they're anxiously attached their trigger is when their partner's traveling and isn't in touch they get upset and they move into the danger zone so what i would recommend to that person is know your triggers know what you need and learn how to ask for it so really part one is going deep inside yourself and knowing yourself and doing the work another thing is learning how to have card conversations so sometimes people say to me oh i met this guy we're getting along so well we never fight that's not something that i think you need to optimize for lots of very happy couples fight fighting is about being passionate my mother-in-law who's a therapist says when couples tell me they don't fight i also say do you not have sex because for her and her mind those things go along it's about having friction and working through stuff so learning how to have hard conversations learning how to say things like i'm sure you're familiar with non-violent communication but when you think of that at the moment i'm like oh really yeah i love nvc i i use it all the time so for people who aren't familiar with it it's a framework for expressing yourself in a way that helps you get heard and helps you kind of speak in a way that really expresses what's going on for you so the format is when you insert a specific thing that happened i felt and you have to use an emotion word so it can't be something that's judging them like i felt left behind it would be something like i felt sad i felt enraged i felt depressed whatever it was because of my need for blank so you explain to them why this matters so recently i had this in a work conversation where i said when i wasn't part of that decision making it made me feel sad because of my need for inclusion and then you say in the future i request that you blank and you say a specific request that they can agree to or talk to you about and so just learning things like that like how to communicate how to stand up for yourself how to have boundaries all of that is super important another one is what we talked about earlier around bids so making bids to connect with your partner and turning towards their bid so if you are working really hard and your partner clearly wants to talk do you make a choice to close down your laptop and talk or do you say not now i'm in the middle of editing and i'm in a flow state or maybe you can just say i'd love to hear that story can we talk in 20 minutes and so these small decisions that you're making and i think another one that we haven't talked about that much is sex dan savage has his concept of ggg this is his secrets to good sex so it's um good which means being skillful how can you develop your sexual skills giving how can you be generous in bed and game how can you be willing to experiment or give your partner what they want within reason and so i would also invest in learning how your body works how somebody else body works asking for what they want giving feedback because while some very happy relationships don't have great sex lives for many people that does matter and how can you take your own sex life into your own hands oh any recommended resources on that front so there's a lot of great books that help women understand their bodies more there's a lot of great women books that focus on pleasure there's a book called she comes first there's a book called come as you are there's a wonderful book that is maybe on people's radars called mating in captivity and that's about the tension that many people feel between wanting to feel comfortable and safe but also wanting to feel adventure and excitement and how you know the mating captivity is such a clever title because it's like how do you keep the sexual spark going in a long-term relationship which is genuinely something for someone because there is part of sex and lust that has to do with novelty when you've been with someone for a while novelty fades and so what can you do to really engage in that oh one other resource is a friend of mine started a company called dipsy which is erotic audio storytelling so it's not like listening to porn it's listening to a sexy story and why i love that is the whole idea is that you're investing in your imagination you're closing your eyes you're seeing this visual you're imagining these two people meet the tension is building up and i do feel like we live in a very visual porn addicted world where people have lost some of that imagination and if you can actually remove some of the visual and focus on your imagination your desire explore your kinks that is only going to help you when it comes to having sex with other people and having good sex amazing um what a great answer uh very blushing [Music] this is great i love this i've got some new books to add to my at my kindle library okay so next question uh it seems that understanding how to find and create great relationships is a key life skill do you think this life skill should be better taught to children teenagers young people and if so how i think all the time about the fact that we should be teaching people more life skills in school so this is everything from how to save money for the future why you should pay off your highest interest loans first to nutrition exercise maintaining good relationships i really feel like if you look at what makes a happy meaningful life it is not algebra and it is not grammar and those things matter and you know i'm a nerd i went to harvard i care about all that stuff but when i actually think about the things that i learned in college that impact me it's things like how to speak in a way that's persuasive how to get your point across how to work with others how to be a leader a lot of these soft skills really impact the bottom line and so i absolutely think that we should be teaching people from middle school high school on about healthy relationships because you can think about your relationship history as a garden and so throughout your life you're planting these seeds and then those seeds develop later and so even if you're 20 years from a traumatic incident there was something that happened that is now part of your garden and so if from a younger age we can help people say this is how to say yes this is how to say no this is how to ask for consent this is how to explore your own body this is what emotional manipulation looks like this is the difference between secure and avoidant and anxious attachment and so i think we would help people save a lot of heartbreak and a lot of pain some of which is necessary but not all of it is by teaching them these skills earlier yeah that's kind of what i'm semi trying to do on this youtube channel uh on my youtube channel which is that less from a perspective of i know what i'm talking about and therefore i'm teaching you these life skills and more from a perspective of i have no idea therefore let me talk to people who are experts on things like relationships and love and health and wealth and things like that and let's kind of learn together and be sort of students together in this on this journey yeah i'm so happy that you're doing that and it also reminds me of a course of the school of life and i had the opportunity to go to a school of life conference i was just so inspired by some of the ideas that were shared there was an exercise that helped people have better conversations where you got to choose the superficial or the deep and it was just so fun to see a concept come to life through videos and exercises and um breakout rooms and i was like yes this is what we need to be learning nice love it um final question from my girlfriend who shall remain unnamed uh in the book you talk about how much we all change over the course of our lifetime what are your top practical tips on being able to grow together in a relationship over time there's wonderful research from dan gilbert of harvard called the end of history illusion this idea that we stopped changing and so how he experimented with this is he asked people of different ages how much did you change in the last 10 years how much do you expect to change in the next 10 years and people inevitably said i changed so much from 20 to 30 i changed so much from 40 to 50. i'm already i've become who i'm going to be i'm not going to change and that is incorrect we are all constantly changing and so if you think about marriage and monogamy and long-term relationships there is something a little bit irrational and ridiculous about it i'm gonna choose a partner at 27 that i expect to find interesting and attractive and warm at age 77. like do you know what i mean there is something sort of irrational about it but there are ways to build relationships that last and so one of them is just understanding that relationships are going to go through ups and downs and so in the book i talk about this idea of a relationship contract or a relationship charter which is something that you put together with your partner and you say here's what matters to me here's what i'm about here's where i want your support here's how i want the relationship to be and you can check in on it from time to time and you should choose this date in advance you could say six months from now let's check in or six years from now let's check in it helps make sure that you're staying on track it also provides this space for you to say what's working and what's not and so i think a lot of the questions that i get from people in relationships are things like my partner's constantly doing x maybe i should just accept it how do i know when something's worth bringing up or not and my feeling is that resentment is so toxic there's this saying resentment is poison that you give yourself and i really agree with that so a bet the best way to avoid resentment is bringing things up as they happen so instead of saying over the last six months every single weekend i've asked you to do the dishes and you haven't done it and i'm going to go crazy it's after this happens a few times say hey i've noticed that i am doing the dishes a lot of the time maybe i'm missing when you do them i know you do a lot of other stuff around the house but next time that you see the dishes need to be done will you just proactively try to do them or you know you can use non-violent communication but really addressing problems as they come up planning for the future knowing that change is inevitable and creating space for you and your partner to talk about what the relationship was what it is now and where it's going nice yeah one thing that we do which we kind of started from uh in inspiration from the book is like a every few weeks uh relationship review type thing a series of 12 questions some of which are from the book some of which which is made up and it's genuinely really helpful to just like specifically ask questions like the first few are kind of what's what's going well i like um what did i do this week that made you feel loved or appreciated and vice versa stuff like that and then later on it gets to you know is there anything that i did that kind of made you feel not great or sad or annoyed in any way what can i do differently and it's actually been really useful and every time i've mentioned this to friends who are in relationships they're like damn i thought that was a little bit weird when i first heard about it but actually i wish i could have these conversations on a somewhat regular basis with my partner because it seems to yeah it's a sort of thing where otherwise it just tends not to come up and stuff can i guess fester for a long time yeah and honestly i feel like that's one of the main things that's emerging from our conversation today is things that seem initially weird or forced or cheesy really work and it's like the same way that if you are going to the gym a lot you might write down what your exercises are and check out your gains and look back from a year ago and say i'm much stronger and i can do this many more reps why can't we apply rigor to our relationships and so why it's great to build a habit around it is that neither you nor your girlfriend needs to say sorry to nag you but i really want to talk about this it's like no no it's built in and so the calendar the date the recurring event holds that space for you and neither of you has to nag the other one it's just like every three weeks we have this check-in yeah um how are things with your husband now yeah my husband thank you for asking my husband's doing really well he wrapped up treatment a few months ago he's rebuilding his strength he just got back into the climbing gym which was a big um emotional milestone for him he has more energy his beautiful red hair is coming back yeah he's doing well and it's been just super interesting we've been together for seven years and just to see a person who you know so well go through something like this and then also to see how he's changed because in general i feel like you shouldn't assume that you know sometimes people say to me like i like this guy but he's he's not really this do you think he'll change and i'm like no i don't think you should bank on that but i actually have felt with my husband like he's in many ways a new person any any any ways in particular that come to mind yeah with his parents he's just much more patient i've noticed that he just has more patience for you know physical disabilities for people who get tired more easily there's just all these ways in which like he's a very smart very athletic talented person so prior to this adversity many things in life had come very easily to him and i think just having to work harder to move around in the world having less energy going through chemotherapy all of this stuff has just given him so much compassion for other people's struggles and so what i find is sometimes people will want to say to him oh this thing happened but it's so small compared to what happened to you i won't burden you with it and he says no no the opposite is true i have so much space and compassion for whatever you're going through more than i did before i had experienced this myself wow that's very interesting and has that kind of manifested in your relationship as well yeah i think our relationship is completely different i really feel like we are i think i'm a different partner i have had to be way more responsible there's a part of me that sort of likes to be well i don't know it depends on the scenario but there's a part of me that likes to be the more fun loving one but like prior to his diagnosis i hadn't really liked driving and i hadn't driven in about 10 years it just wasn't a super comfortable driver and when he was diagnosed he was like we're getting a car and you have to learn how to drive again like you're going to need to drive me to and from chemo there's gonna be emergencies which there were you have to learn how to drive and i just did it i had to figure it out and now i'm an extremely confident driver and it was just one of those things where like i had to step up he also was somebody who wasn't good at asking for help he's talented he's independent there were moments where he really needed help and i had to pay attention to his cues and he had to be willing to ask for help so for example there was a really dark moment where you know everything that could go wrong went wrong and things were really scary and there was just all these signs that things were going poorly and i was supposed to go see my friends and family the next day and this was a trip i had planned for a long time and i kept saying do you want me to cancel do you want me to cancel and he said no no no and then finally i said this is ridiculous i am canceling i can't leave and then he was like oh i'm so relieved you're staying and i was like i wish you could have said to me please stay and then we talked about can we have a code word for that and we just went through so many intense emotions around you know two people are in a dynamic then a drastic train bulldozes and careens into you and now you have to redefine your dynamic but i think that we've done that in a really healthy way and any questions that we might have around are you in it for the long term can i trust you are you gonna hold my purse in the cancer ward i feel like we've definitely answered and so we're we're truly all in and there's just such deeper trust than there ever was before yeah yeah it really sounds like you've kind of both grown through the experience and i guess you wouldn't kind of wish it on anyone else but with all these kind of traumatic experiences that's kind of the seems to be the silver lining yeah there's a wonderful book called stumbling on happiness that by dan gilbert who are you familiar with that book yes yeah i read it a few years ago um yeah yeah what's the key message there's a bunch of things and stumbling on happiness around what we think will make us happy versus what does make us happy one of the key things is is that we all adapt to our surroundings so you think being really rich will make you happy but actually you just get used to having that amount of money and so when you ask people how much will your life change if you um win the lottery versus how much will your life change if you become a quadriplegic in both situations people overestimate the impact because the truth is after about a year or so you sort of adapt to your circumstances and so when all of this happened with my husband i emailed dan gilbert who i know a little bit through harvard and some other research in my book and i said you know this is what's going on everything assembly on happiness has made me feel better and he wrote back and he said i'm paraphrasing but as crazy as this sounds when you're talking about this with your with your grandchildren decades from now you might very well say this is the best thing that ever happened to me because it will just put so many things in perspective it will help you grow and so no i wouldn't wish this rare form of bone cancer on anyone but i do think that my husband is a more patient grounded empathetic loving person and in many ways this experience really helped him rise to the occasion and change for the better well thank you for being so like open and talking about this this it can't be an easy thing to discuss i guess it's not but it's also just happening right now so i'm an external processor so even just being able to share it with you and kind of see how i feel now versus how i felt six months ago it's a helpful it's a helpful exercise and checking in with myself oh excellent um we've got a sort of i guess on a somewhat related note a few questions from from instagram rnc snapshot something uh are humans designed to be monogamous ooh this is a loaded question so they're i am not an expert on this topic but i can lead you towards some interesting resources so there's a book called saxodon that argues that we are not meant to be monogamous there is a biological anthropologist named helen fisher who i really admire and i interviewed for the book and she has some issues with sex at dawn i would encourage people to look into her work to look into his work to really understand kind of the evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology perspective on this and for people to come to their own conclusions that being said i feel like anyone who's trying to disrupt relationships i really admire that i think that we have this one-size-fits-all toaster model of relationships where if you think about a toaster you buy it at the store you plug it in and at best you hope it doesn't break you never expect it will get better yeah why can't we think about relationships more like an iphone where there's software and you can constantly be updating the software and you can be getting more apps you can be deleting apps and it's something that going back to what we said the end of history illusion how can you adapt and grow as the relationship adapts and grows and so i would say i have lots of friends that are in ethical non-monogamy relationships who float in and out of them who have found that this is something that they love to think about and talk about and so i personally believe that there is a lot of space to explore different relationship structures nice um a real underscore fee says do you think that a person who loves you must accept you exactly as you are i think about this question a lot because one thing that people ask me is do you need to be a whole person before you can date or can somebody complete you and i feel like these questions are all kind of circling the same thing which is should you be with someone who loves you for who you are or should you be with somebody who sees the potential in you are you complete without them are you complete with them i think there's a lot of ideas in here and so i would say as a baseline acceptance is a huge part of relationships because if you get into a relationship expecting somebody will change i think you're setting yourself up for disappointment a few examples of this i've seen are relationships where somebody's much older and somebody's much younger and the older person takes on a mentor capacity and is constantly trying to help that person become better i think that creates a power imbalance that can be really hard to maintain over time and what happens when that younger person says i want to be your equal i don't want to be mentored anymore that can change the dynamic another example i've seen is when people are looking for a project and not a partner so they say ah this guy is unemployed and not ambitious but he's so talented i'm gonna help him get his act together it's like don't you wanna be with someone where the two of you can run together not where you're dragging somebody behind you and so in general i would say it's okay if somebody can see the best in you and try to help you self-actualize and become a better person but that should come from a basis of acceptance where even if nothing changes they'll still be very happy to be with you i am ray j rapport says i have a crush on my best friend but i feel if i confessed it to her it will ruin everything do you have any advice on this my husband and i met when we were in college when we were undergrads and we know this because we became facebook friends that day we didn't meet again for seven years until we were both working at google and he came up to me by the shuttle stop and said hey didn't you used to date so and so and didn't you go here for college we then spent a year being friends he was tutoring me in r a certain coding language and after that i developed a crush on him i was working with the dating coach who helped me see his potential and finally i helped shift from friends to more by saying i don't have plans on friday night you should ask me out and so i feel like i am living proof that friends can make the best partners and sometimes the most eligible single person around us is hiding in plain sight we just have to identify it and then take the leap that being said there is a huge risk here you can make someone uncomfortable you can ruin a friendship so a couple ways to do this one is i don't drink i'm not that into drinking but you could get drunk with someone and say crazy idea have you ever thought about us being together or my mom always asks why aren't you dating so and so you'd be such a good match what do you think about that so you can kind of tiptoe into the conversation um and then i think you should also just make it very safe for them to say i don't feel that way about you and so i think it's worth bringing it up but create a space where the person can turn you down without putting the friendship at risk makes a lot of sense um ahmed says how do you detach yourself from a person after a breakup breakups are so hard there's all this research that shows that when we are going through a breakup our bodies are actually experiencing withdrawal the same way that we would be if we had been addicted to drugs so the nucleus accumbens a part of our brain lights up in the same place from love withdrawal as it does from drug with all so if you're feeling an intense amount of attachment and pain and trauma that is completely normal a few things that you can do to get over a breakup one of them is you can focus on the negatives of the relationship so there's an experiment where they had people journal about what are all the reasons why the relationship was bad that can help you really focus on the reasons why you're lucky to be out of it instead of looking back at looking back at it with rose-colored glasses another journaling exercise you can do is write um all the reasons why the breakup is good what are the ways that it will help you what are the ways that you can move forward you can also engage in what's known as rediscover yourself activities so those are things that imagine you were dating someone and they didn't like jazz or they didn't like going to the beach or they didn't like visiting your parents for the holidays what are all the things that you can do now that your partner didn't want you to do and reinvesting in those activities helps you discover yourself your own identity and things like that another thing is there's a concept about making meaning and i imagine you've read viktor frankl's man search for meaning yeah great book yeah so a lot of the concepts in there are about the fact that it's not that time heals all wounds it's that meaning heals all wounds and how can you make meaning of something so how can you sit there with your journal with your therapist with your friend and say this is what i learned this is what happened here's what i'm going to do moving forward and it's in that moment of saying i'm going to do this next time or i'm going to incorporate this into it that you feel that you've grown that you create a narrative that this was an okay thing that happened it wasn't a waste it was a learning opportunity and in that making meaning you feel empowered to move forward and do you know find a better relationship the next time uh so quick question number one what advice would you give to your younger self i would say to my younger self find places where you feel like you belong because you will be at your happiest and most confident when you feel like you have when you feel like you belong who has had the biggest influence on your career the person who's had the biggest influence in my career is dan ariely i talked about his book predictably irrational not only did the opportunity to work with him at google allow me to write my book which is applying behavioral science to dating but he just really changed my entire perspective on how to live so for example dan is extremely into mentorship if he meets a college student who has a question about the way the world works dan will go out of his way to respond to that email send them a voice note engage anytime i've asked dan for help he goes above and beyond he just his true nature is to be extremely generous and think i am lucky i have a lot of opportunities how can i help other people do that another thing that dan does is he lives experimentally so he might say okay i want to eat healthy i'm going to make a rule that i don't eat bread how does that impact my life okay i'm gonna make a rule that i go running every day so he's constantly thinking about how he wants to live how he wants to show up in the world and running experiments and so that's really impacted the way that i live because things like moving into a commune was not on my bucket list it was not on my husband's bucket list but i'm willing to give things a try and see how they sit with me because i understand that we don't necessarily always know what stimuli will make us happy and so it's worthwhile to test that sick yeah he sounds like a great guy i think i read a few kind of blog post summaries of predictably rational but i need to read the book and then email him for an interview that would be fun um what is what is one tip for someone looking for success one tip for somebody looking for success is to lead into your strength i think people spend a long time trying to become well-rounded and i have found that that doesn't necessarily work so for me i'm not particularly quantitative it takes me a longer time to do data analysis to understand a graph something like that right that's just not necessarily like my strength but i have some really spiky things around pattern recognition communication persuasion making people feel comfortable and so i mentioned before that i met my now husband because he was teaching me this coding language r well you know what i didn't learn r but i did get a husband out of it and so i don't spend my days trying to get better at the things i'm bad at i try to get i just spend my days trying to become best in class at the things that i'm really good at and then i supplement the things i'm bad at by paying people or asking friends or crowdsourcing and so lean into your genius zone awesome uh what is the first what does the first and last hour of your day look like i wish i were more disciplined with how i spend my time i'm working extremely hard and i do feel like i am firing in all cylinders but i could be a little bit more disciplined so the first hour of my day unfortunately is probably doing some scrolling checking some messages sort of looking at the inbox i wish that weren't the case then i listen to the new york times podcast the daily i make coffee and then because i live on the west coast but i work for hinge which is east coast i'm basically jumping into work right away i do know that i am an extreme morning person and i'm most creative basically anytime before noon so i try to carve off a few hours in the morning to do what i call creator work so writing brainstorming generating ideas dealing with messages that i've been avoiding but you know sometimes things can get in that way but yeah and then in terms of the last hour of my day probably talking to my husband and then reading nonsense articles on my phone until i fall asleep fantastic um what uh material item under around about a hundred dollars uh could you not live without i have a portable phone charger that i really care about that i've been carrying around for a long time and i know it sounds silly and i should probably be less addicted to my phone but there's just something about having this portable phone charger with five charges on it where i'm like i can leave for the day and go on adventures and do everything i wanna do and know that i can charge my phone and i never want to be that person who's you know going to a starbucks and trying to find a cord and doing this and that so yes i really love my portable phone charger nice um what is a book that you would recommend to anyone other than your own there's a wonderful book called far from the tree by andrew solomon and when my husband and i first started dating i came up with this idea of a syllabus and a syllabus was a syllabus of books that helped somebody understand your soul so we each gave each other a few books to have the other person read and one of mine was far from the tree so far from the tree is about 12 chapters each about an extraordinary childhood have you read it or you've been like no i've just bought it on kindle so i'll start reading it tonight okay great so basically one chapter is you know children who are deaf another one is children who are the result of rape another one is children who are criminals children who are prodigies children who have schizophrenia children who have autism and they're basically exploring what is childhood like for them what is the experience of being a parent and it's really about understanding sort of extraordinary ways of you know having children and i think it just creates so much empathy for the fact that there's a lot of different ways of being and in the book andrew solomon talks about this idea where imagine that you think you're going on holiday to france and you get on the plane and you think you're going to france and it lands and they say welcome to holland holland is a perfectly great country that somebody would be lucky to visit but it's not what you expected but you have to embrace holland and so with everything that happened with my husband sometimes we would turn to each other and say welcome to holland and it means this is where you are this is the reality make the most of it nice that's really cool i will i'll check them back out um if you lost everything so let's say um you get cancelled you lose the job book gets boycotted everywhere what would you do uh career-wise and life-wise this is a fear of mine i mean i think anyone who's existing in the public space who's saying things off the cuff who does a lot of interviews like i worry about this all the time and i i do feel like there's you know probably 20 of my brain that's monitoring what i'm saying and trying to be media savvy so i would say definitely on my mind i think if this were to happen i would just really invest in my friendships and relationships and i would say my life in the public persona my my life in the public sphere is over or it's going to be over for a while but what actually matters is things like mental health physical health spending time in nature helping people and so even if i were canceled that doesn't mean that i can't help people with their love lives it doesn't mean that i can't come up with interesting theories and frameworks and so i would say it's a fear of mine and i hope it doesn't happen but i do think it would be a helpful opportunity to really go deep with myself and the people that matter most to me nice that's really good the this is something that i i think about in the shower as well but like what if i do yeah what do you think what's your answer to that i i kind of think that i would um yeah again not do the public thing but uh and i'd i'd figure out a way you know also the whole friends and family thing they're probably they probably understand and still be friends with me i'd probably figure out a way of building some sort of internet content type business that was anonymous or pseudonymous so there's a bunch of interesting youtube channels that explore really cool topics but you don't know who's behind them because it's just a voiceover um so i'd be able to kind of exercise my love of like reading writing and teaching just not with my name plastered over the internet that's really smart we'll see yes yeah uh what what quote or mantra do you live by so before we talked about victor frankl the holocaust survivor who wrote man search for meaning and he has this quote between stimulus and response there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom so for me this is something i think about all the time is how can i actually take that gap between something happen something happening and respond instead of reacting and so i am a sensitive person certain things that happen to me i can get really upset or frustrated or anxious or enraged or whatever and so i really try to create that gap for myself where i say hmm my mom gave my sister this purse that she's had for years that i really would have wanted and i feel left out and i feel mad at my mom and i want to send my mom an angry text about it you know what my mom didn't mean anything by it my sister probably asked and my mom didn't know and it was no big deal i'm going to sleep on it i'm going to take space and so i really have been trying to become a person who responds rather than react and victor frankel who's a hero of mine and a hero of many people has helped me understand the power of taking that beat taking that space fantastic and final question uh journey or destination journey nice everyone says that i love it okay how about this i used to be really into adventure and i used to spend a lot of time traveling and going to different places and trying to work from different countries and then i realized it's so much more about the people that you're with so my answer which is not your question is community over adventure nice that's really good um there was a there's there's this artist who does these like really famous cartoons where it's like so one of the questions that he he writes is that he you know it's like a child asking a mentor like an elephant or something you know is what what's more important the journey or the destination and the elephant replies the company oh i love that that's exactly how i feel yeah that's good that's exactly how i feel great yeah i'm gonna remember that fantastic place to leave this logan thank you so much um everyone check out the book links in all the things um anything else that you'd like to share with the audience before we before we part ways absolutely yeah so i have this quiz on my website loganuri.com quiz where people can figure out their three dating tendencies i also am starting to teach classes where people can learn alongside me and other people in a similar dating situations all that's on my website and then people can follow me on instagram and twitter at loganuri fantastic logan thank you so much this has been such a joy i've learned so much and the way that you're so open and honest about everything is just really really inspiring um thank you thank you so much thank you for having me i was looking forward to this and it definitely lived up to my expectations fantastic all right so that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the itunes store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full hd or 4k on youtube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 270,875

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast, How Not To Die Alone, Dating Advice, How to Not Die Alone - A Relationship Therapist’s Guide, Valentines day ideas, Valentines Day, How To Find A Significant Other, Modern Dating Tips, Online dating tips and tricks, Best dating advice books

Id: CTLWzzmfOxQ

Length: 135min 2sec (8102 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022