Hinge's Relationship Scientist Gives Dating Advice - Logan Ury

Logan Ury is the Director of Relationship Science at Hinge, a Harvard-trained behavioural scientist and an author. Modern dating is difficult. Thankfully Logan has access to all the data from Hinge and can conduct as many studies as she wants on trends and preferences from thousands of people in and out of relationships. Expect to learn why an intentional approach to dating seems like a turn-off but is a very smart strategy, why you should start looking to settle down after dating 30% of your partners, what the data tells us are the most important rules for constructing a successful dating profile, why chasing The Spark is a recipe for disaster, how to break up with someone, how to get over heartbreak and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on everything from Lucy at https://uk.lucy.co/ (UK) or https://lucy.co/ (US) (use code: MW20) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy How To Not Die Alone - https://amzn.to/3v0KY1J Check out Logan's website - https://www.loganury.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #dating #relationships #hinge - 00:00 Intro 00:30 Being Hinge’s Relationship Scientist 05:48 Impact of Surveillance on Dating 12:11 Boomers, Millennials & Gen Z 18:15 Intentional Dating 28:47 Making Better Dating Decisions 37:04 Personal Dating Tendencies 43:32 How to Succeed at Online Dating 51:17 Logan’s Issue with ‘The Spark’ 1:02:07 Knowing When to Break Up with Someone 1:11:54 Where to Find Logan - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People don't want to choose a restaurant, choose a hotel, choose a purchase without doing tons of research, which is fine if you're going to Tulum and choosing among 16 Airbnbs, but it's not fine when you are choosing among thousands of potential partners. And so what does this era of maximizers do? They always keep swiping, saying, who else is out there?

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Logan Urie, welcome to the show.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. I was very excited to receive this invitation.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  What does being the Director of Relationship Science at Hinge entail?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  You know, it's really a dream job. And if I can just go off topic right from the beginning, I recently found an email from March 29, 2012, where I emailed a guy at OkCupid who I had met in an event, and I was clearly trying to network with him. And I was like, how's your move to LA? By the way, I'd love to work at OkCupid. And, you know, no response, totally ghosted. And now I'm like, wow, 10 years later, and I have this job that I've essentially been trying to get for over a decade. Just feels so good. And it's also a really healthy reminder that when you see people's careers, you're really seeing their final product, the highly edited version. You don't see all the emails that not just were they were told no to, but all the emails where they just didn't even get a response.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Not even enough respect to get the reply.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Not even a response. Yeah. And so my job at Hinge is incredible because I basically get to conduct research into dating. And I get to have these amazing moments where I'm like, okay, what am I hearing from my friends and my dating coaching clients? For example, I'm hearing a lot about women dating guys with lower sex drives. The guy is depressed. What's going on? Do they want to date the depressed guy? Can they overcome the low sex drive issue? How do they support a depressed partner? Certainly, they want to be dating someone who's in therapy. And then I bring that back to Hinge. And then we conduct research on things like, has talking about mental health gone from a stigmatized topic to actually

• 2:06Speaker 00

  a must have? And so we did this great research around the end of 2021, where we found that

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Eighty-six percent of people say it's really important to them to date someone who is in therapy and who prioritizes their mental health. And in fact, people would be more likely to go on a second date with you if you say on the first date that you go to therapy. And so I basically get to take topics that I'm hearing about through my one-to-one coaching, or my friends, or just being aware of the dating zeitgeist. Bring it to Hinge, conduct research with some amazing researchers, and then share it with the world and say like, hey, this is what's happening in dating right now.

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  Are you doing the data science for this? Or have you got a team that works below you to pull all of that?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have amazing research collaborators. So I am really coming in with a lot of the hypotheses and then working closely with the researchers. And we do have some amazing data scientists, but I am not doing the data science myself. It is funny because when I, I had met my husband in college, but when I really met him was when we were both working at Google. He was a data scientist and I was learning a data science language called R. And I was like, I'm looking for an R tutor. And he's like, I just dropped out of a PhD program. Hello, girl at the lunch table. Can I tutor you in R every day? And so anyway, data science and R have a very close place in my heart. But I would say I am, I ended up being much

• 3:32Speaker 00

  better at being with my husband than writing R.

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  Writing his programming language.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  So what else? If that's one of them, some men with low libido, and the challenges that that has in relationships, men suffering with mental health and depression. What is some of the other trends that you've discovered over the last couple of years?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. And I would say that one wasn't that gendered. It was like, pretty broad. It was just like, hey, the last few years have been so hard. I don't know a person who hasn't been dealing with depression, anxiety, not sleeping. Like, I think everyone's kind of gone through something rough. So it was, I would say more broadly, just what is happening in the dating world with mental health and how people are not only talking about it, but want to be talking about it. Another one that I just conducted and wrapped up last week was about the role of asking for advice in Gen Z. So Gen Z, as you can imagine, very anxious generation notoriously, very digital, obviously. So if you think about Sex and the City, the TV show, people would, you

• 4:31Speaker 00

  know, the women would go to brunch on Sunday and talk to their friends about the last guy they had sex with. Well, now it's like every text message can be screenshotted, every profile can be shared, every message that you're about to send, you can ask the, you know, the group chat, what should I say? And so it's basically turned all these elements of dating into this crowdsourced thing where you almost have this war room and you're like, okay, guys, what are we writing? And yeah, maybe you write a more clever text, but like the actual relationship is between you and the person that you're dating. And when you are lying in bed with them, paying attention to how you feel, that is not something that you can outsource or crowdsource. And so the message for me behind that research

• 5:15Speaker 00

  was basically saying to Gen Z, you all are way too reliant on your friends for advice. And your friends should be your cheerleaders. They should be the people encouraging you, helping you achieve your goals. They should not be the coach telling you what those goals are. And so really helping Gen Z in particular, learn this is what it's like to tune into how you feel. This is how to build up those muscles. And actually, you need to rely on yourself because you are the one in the relationship. Your, your posse is not dating that person, you are.

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the most interesting realizations I've had from when I went to uni 15 years ago to now, we used to run an event called Carnage, which is exactly as it sounds. It was a big bar crawl and everyone wore a T-shirt and on the back of the T-shirt, there were different tasks that you had to do, like pull a pig, snog three randoms, like steal someone else's hat, you know, like stuff that is so cancelable, like any one of those would be worthy of cancellation right now.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  And I was having this conversation with a friend a while ago, who used to be another franchisee like myself when we were both 1920. And we were talking about how we don't see the same sort of messy, sloppy, dance floor kissing nights out that we would have facilitated. Perhaps when we started running events and he said something that was really interesting. That was you basically have perpetual state surveillance that's done by gullible volunteers. Because everybody has a CCTV camera in their pocket. And whereas previously you could make whatever catastrophic error you wanted. And the most people that could find out about it were the friends of your friends who they maybe were able to tell individually over BlackBerry PIN or something.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  Like there was no way to facilitate your failings. He brought being broadcast to the world and I think that that does create even in person. I'll forget online dating that facilitates an in person sort of sword of Damocles thing. Where everyone's just feeling like there's something hovering over their head at that whole time. And it's difficult to just let yourself feel at ease when that's happening.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I absolutely agree with that and I hadn't thought about it in a while, but I recently spent a day with someone who's 10 years younger than me, who went to the same university. And we were just comparing notes and there were so many elements of her experience that I just couldn't. I just had never thought about. And so, for example, having a dating app while you're in college. And really understanding, does that mean that you just are exposed to more people at your university than you would have been otherwise? Does it mean that everyone at your school is hooking up with people at other schools? Like, you know, I went to Harvard and so it was nice for Harvard women to be able to date Harvard men. But if Harvard men are on dating apps, now you're competing with women at the many, many universities in Boston.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  And so what does that mean for the Harvard social life? And like, I don't really know. And then kind of exactly what you were talking about. It's like we had, you know, when I walked into college, we had flip phones. I had a cute pink flip phone and then I got a BlackBerry, but the cameras were so bad. And so I would have, you know, a camera that I might take out. But that's really different from obviously like live streaming or Instagram stories. And yeah, dance floor makeouts are really fun part of going to college. And so we didn't, she and I didn't talk about that, but it is fascinating to think about. If there's always a part of your brain thinking that you're being recorded, what does that do to you? And you know, this idea of surveillance or the opticon or something like that.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  It's like, I imagine that it does change your psychology because kind of as another example, I spent 24 hours last week with a reporter from the New York Times. And so it's like, there's what I'm saying. And then there's the part of my brain that's making sure that what I'm saying is okay. Right? And so that's like doing double duty. And I was very tired afterwards because I was cognitively overloaded with like what I'm saying and making sure that it's okay. And so if your whole brain is what I'm doing and then making sure I wouldn't be upset if this were recorded or shared, like that just actually seems really inauthentic and exhausting.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, what you're externalizing or you're playing a persona, right? Every decision that you make and everything that you say gets run through first the filter of did I come up with it? And then secondly, the filter of is this okay for me to say? Oh, maybe it's not. I've got to think about it. And that's not a very sort of easy graceful way to be. So what would you say? Well, how would you categorize the sort of messaging that young people are being given around what love and dating and romance is supposed to be in 2022?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's something that I'm actively thinking about. I would say 2022 is a year where I have spent way more time thinking about the Gen Z audience. And so I would say as of now, I'm probably a millennial dating expert. So that means that I've worked with loads of millennial clients, a lot of Hinge users on millennials. So the research and the data I've had access to for two years is based on that. And now it's like, of course, like what happens with generations? Like people age into the dating market. And so I need to spend way more time understanding that. And as silly as it sounds, I just binge watched both seasons of Euphoria.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  I watched that. What's that?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Okay. It's like a really. Amazing slash raunchy show on HBO. It's about a teen dealing with drug addiction. There's a lot of sex, there's a lot of nudity, but it's also just kind of about the like overstimulating, anxious Gen Z high school experience. And like, who knows how realistic or not that is? I certainly don't think the clothes are realistic, but it is interesting to think about like, what does Gen Z know about dating? And so there are some things that are like clear trends. So of course the world is moving in a more fluid direction. And so that means things like gender identity, gender orientation, sexual orientation. And so if you think about that applied to dating, you're not necessarily looking for

• 11:17Speaker 00

  the one, or you're not necessarily as focused on this outcome of like, I'm going to get married, I'm going to be married to one person and I hope it lasts as long as possible. Maybe you're into non-monogamy. Maybe you're into having a relationship that's really powerful, but you're not focused on marriage, or maybe you don't even want to have kids. Maybe climate change has made you so afraid of the future that like having kids sounds preposterous to you. And so it's really interesting to think about what are the cultural forces affecting Gen Z? And then how does that show up in their dating? That being said, I do think that we all really do have this natural desire to love and be loved. And so I don't care what's happening on Euphoria.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  I don't care how many TikToks there are about certain trends. At the end of the day, love and dating and finding someone or someones, I still think is very relevant to people.

• 12:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, human biology is a hell of a drug and you're going to have to work incredibly hard to like front brain out

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:16Chris Williamson?

  Millions of years of evolution that compels you to behave in one way. I think I've never felt so much like a boomer as I have recently. I'm a millennial as well, you know, like slap bang in the middle of it, not even an

• 12:28Speaker 00

  I was like, you look great for a boomer.

• 12:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm right, I do. But. I've never felt so out of touch.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy to look at, you know, remember it wasn't that long ago that millennials were sort of the, the media's common calling card. They were the ones that everybody was bitching on. And, and now I'm being looked at and thinking about, you know, stuff to do with gender fluidity, stuff to do with non-monogamy being not just for certain friends of mine in Austin, but, you know, as a general scalable.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  Opportunity. And I'm like, this just, it doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't resonate with my friends. And I now am starting to get a sense of what it must have felt like for my parents' generation, looking down at my generation, just getting into Facebook and online dating and dick pics and stuff like that, to then roll that forward. So I guess each new generation can make the older generation feel more boomer-y than they ever thought they could.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Totally. And I feel the exact same way where I'm like, wait, it feels like two years ago, there was an article about millennials are killing dining room furniture, millennials are killing the paper napkin. It was all about how millennials were changing things. Like, I have a friend who is known as the millennial workplace expert. And then boom, now all we're talking about is Gen Z. And I find that so fascinating. And are you a fan of Bo Burnham?

• 13:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I've only seen a little bit of his work, but yes, he's good.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm a massive Bo Burnham fan and he has that amazing special that came out last year called Inside. And there's a song on it. I play the songs on repeat, but there's a song that's basically like, he was born in 1990 and he was always known as the young guy. And he was always like, oh, I can't believe you've accomplished this by that age. And then the song about turning 30, he's like, now the zoomers are telling me that I'm out of touch. And so you're really like through these very funny lyrics, hearing about his existential crisis, about being like the young, hip, cool guy pushing the edges where very few people are going to be like, I can't believe you accomplished that by 30, because it's like 30 is not considered that young.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  Supposed to have you shit together.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  It's I had this conversation not long ago that just getting no longer being young is a strange is a strange thing. So I'm 34 and pretty much every single year, probably up until 31 or 32, everything biologically was just improving. So I was getting better looking, I was becoming more confident, I was recovering from workouts in the gym better, I had more muscle mass, I could get leaner, I all that stuff, right? Everything. And then you just sort of, you know, when you're at the top of a roller coaster and it's been going up and then you start to feel yourself go weightless and you go, oh, hold, hang on a second, hang on, this is, I know what happens next. This is just before it starts to go down. And that's something that I'm grappling with at the moment, the

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  fact that, you know, my gym workouts are going to get progressively more difficult for me to recover from moving forward, that looking good is going to become progressively more difficult moving forward. Now, I think there's a good argument to be made here for both guys and girls, that if you have made it into your 30s and your primary source of value that you see in yourself to the world is the way that you look, there's probably something that goes wrong there because you can have wisdom that's just going to compound over time, grace, empathy, love, poise, you know, confident, all that stuff, all of that shit can continue to grow. But there is something a bit sort of like, oh, is the ride over? Like, that kind of sucks.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Totally. When did that change happen for you?

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  Probably 31, 32. So probably during the pandemic was or just after that, within the last sort of 18 months to two years. But again, I don't know how much of that's just been due to the fact that I've been locked in the house. You know, maybe I'm going to have a fourth puberty or something next year and I'm going to like shoot up again. But I think for a good few of my friends as well, it seems to be the same case. We're just finding stuff that used to be easy and not getting over hangovers. That's been impossible for 10 years.

• 16:26Chris Williamson?

  Some things that used to be easier

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:29Chris Williamson?

  Just aren't the same anymore.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  I think that, I mean, it all really resonates with me. I'm also thirty four and I feel like I'm less in touch with my body and my health as compared to my husband. But my husband is one of those people where it's like, he's, he read that book, How, How Not to Die. And he is, you know, he's always intermittent fasting and he's thinking about like, how his cells can age backwards. And I'm like, dude, I just want to feel good when I wake up in the morning. Like, I just want to feel physically better. And he's like, planning for the future. So I do think it depends on how tuned in to our own bodies we all are.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, here's an interesting thing. Civilization, on average, has never been this old. And on average, we've never had so long to live.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  That's so wild. That blows my mind. The fact that

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  We're the, we're the oldest civilization in history that's going to live the longest.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Well, that also is relevant to relationships, because if you're choosing a partner for a decade or a few decades versus many, many, many decades, like,

• 17:30Chris Williamson?

  Half a century.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And how does that change your expectations? I even have friends who are Mormon and are like, you're choosing that person for forever. And I'm like, oh, my God, I can't even fathom that amount of pressure that you're choosing a relationship for all of eternity.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Bro, that literally could be seventy years from the time that you're twenty. Someone goes away, does their mission, comes back and you're like, okay. So my assistant, Ben, he's Mormon. And he's twenty two, twenty two, twenty three. And him and his missus are married. And they're amazing. But I'm like, fuck, man, like, that, that could be, you could be talking about seventy years of marriage from this point.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Plus eternity for them.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  And, and the rest.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  For eternity. Don't underestimate that. That's more than seventy years.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Underestimate eternity. Yeah, that's a good lesson. So what is it? I've been thinking about this a lot. I've had a lot of conversations on the show to do with dating, intersexual dynamics, the mating market, imbalances, stuff like that. One of the things that keeps coming up is kind of a bit of an ick factor that some people have around anybody that has an intentional approach toward designing a lifestyle around dating. Why, why do you think that is?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Okay, I couldn't think that that was funnier because I'm literally drinking from a mug that says intentionally ever after.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Which is the last line of my book. It's about, you know, forget happily ever after and go for intentionally ever after. And so I'm really like ready to put my boxing gloves on and fight this one because like this is my entire ethos. It's my perspective and my viewpoint is that the type of clients that I work with, the people who are drawn to my work, which is not for everyone, it's for a type of person. It's the person who says, um, if I want to be healthy, then I might listen to Tim Ferriss, or I might be interested in bulletproof coffee. I would listen to these podcasts and take these supplements. If I wanted to get better at personal finances, then I would listen to Ramit Sethi.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Like there's just like a self-help world. And so like we believe in, we, these people, including myself, believe in like lifestyle design and saying like, when you have a goal, you should go after it. You should have people who are experts. You should understand the blind spots. You should understand what makes it hard and then make a plan. And somehow love feels like it's on this other dimension where we're not allowed to do that. And people put love on a special platform and they won't allow it to be researched or analyzed. And they think that it makes it unromantic. But my entire philosophy is that, yes, love is natural. Love is organic. You are born knowing how to love, but you are not born knowing how to date. And dating as we know it is extremely new in the span of human history.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  So even the idea of people on their own choosing each other, that happened in around 1890. And there's a great book on this called The Labor of Love by Maura Weigl. Since then, obviously gender dynamics have changed, women being out of the house in the workplace, like this idea of the shop girl in the 1920s, you know, meeting a guy. But even then it was like, oh, I'm going to go on a date so I can have a hot meal because I can't afford one otherwise. And then you think online dating started around 94, 95 with Match Group and Kiss.com. Then the dating apps only started a decade ago. So you were talking about human biology is a hell of a drug. Well, you know, evolutionary, evolutionarily, we are not designed to choose from thousands of potential options

• 20:59Speaker 00

  and either even choose for ourselves. The historical reference is that marriage was an economic institution, institution where maybe

• 21:10Speaker 00

  My father would give your father 12 camels for my hand in marriage. And if my land was next to your land, we could combine the two through marriage.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  I'd take 12 camels for you, Logan.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you so much.

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  That's fine.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Flattered. The idea that people would be marrying for love, the idea that people would be marrying for 70 years, the idea that people would be marrying for self-actualization, that's all so new. And so I think that ick factor is people responding to this idea that they want love and dating to be a realm that cannot be analyzed, when actually I'm like, hey, this is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life. Who your partner is, that is your number one teammate. That is your number one giver of advice. This is your counsel. And why would you not try to take what this amazing field of relationship science has learned about long-term relationships, attraction, what the field of behavioral science has learned about common biases and how we make mistakes in decision-making?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Why wouldn't you take all that and then be informed to make the right decision? Just like you'd think about personal finance, accounting, nutrition, fitness, et cetera. This is a science and it can be analyzed. And I think the ick factor is misplaced.

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of people see romance as a black box, that there is something magical about it. And there's a term called conceptual inertia, which I learned about from a history of science researcher, which is that when new insights from science arrive, a lot of the time it takes time for culture to then catch up. So if you went from Earth being the center of the universe to the Earth revolving around the sun, revolving around the galaxy, that switch in terms of models was accepted by science, but only 50 years, 75 years later was sort of permeated to culture so that people actually started to think and feel like that. So you have this sort of lagging measure of what people think, despite the fact that they may have had something proven in front of them.

• 23:03Chris Williamson?

  And I think that insights from evolutionary psychology, from relationship science, all this stuff, takes time to trickle down. And what you're battling against is still a lot of culture, Disneyfication of movies, your love-actuaries, your rom-coms, that kind of, I mean...

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  Is relationship science romantic? It's certainly not romantic in the traditional way. So you're not, it's very rare that you're going to have, here's a movie about a girl who optimized her online dating profile. And after she'd done that, then she decided to go on 37 dates and then pick the next best person that was there after that, because she'd read Algorithms to Live Back. And you go, that's just not going to be a movie. So a lot of the time,

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  with regards to relationships and presented in common media, you don't have what's optimal being what's shown. You have kind of this idealized, much more naturalistic way. So I do think there's a tension between those two.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Everything you just said, I agree with. And I think you really nailed the problem. And then I can present my approach, which is slightly different. And I think the cultural inertia thing, is that what is called cultural inertia? Yeah, that makes total sense to me. I mean, even if I'm thinking about like climate change and don't look up and like, why is it so hard for, you know, everyone is paying attention to this thing in pop culture versus what's happening with climate change. And it's like, why are we not paying attention to the science? And I don't know. But yes, in my world, I would say, first of all, what do I think is romantic? What I think is romantic is waking up in bed with my husband after we've been together for seven years

• 24:42Speaker 00

  and just being excited to talk, feeling like your partner is your best friend and it's you against the world. Like still being excited to have sex and have dinner with someone who you've known for a long time and there is no chase, because essentially you are a team and there is such a foundation of trust. Romance to me is the experience I had over the last two years with my husband, which is he was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. He went through 18 rounds of chemotherapy, below the knee, leg amputation, crazy shit that you do not expect in year one of marriage and saying, I fucking love you. I'm here for you. I, you are much more than your body to me. You are much more than your health to me. And just being like, I'm all in.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Like to me, that is the essence of romance. I don't think romance is, oh, he planned this date where he picked me up in an Uber black and took me to a cool, expensive sushi restaurant. Like, I don't care. Like, that is courtship. Courtship is lovely. Flirting is lovely. Feeling a connection with someone is lovely. But to me, the real romance is the deep connection and trust that you maintain over time. So people who are resisting this, they're basically saying, when you apply science to love, you are taking us out of the black box, you are taking us away from the mystery, and you are really focusing on the practical. But life is the practical. Life is doing your

• 26:09Speaker 00

  taxes. Life is wiping your baby's diaper. Like, that's what life is. Like, it's not the trip to Hawaii. It's not those moments, because yes, those are peak moments, but most of life is the average moment where you and this person are saying, I'm your partner, and I'm all in, and let's do this together. And so, yes, Disney movies are the way they are. Rom-coms are the way they are. I like the show Bridgerton. But like, what I'm really doing, what my role in the universe is right now, is to help people find a long-term partner that is going to help them create a great life. It's not about the reality TV show, sparky, in-the-moment feeling, because that fades. And I'm really here for the long-term relationships.

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of the black box mentality is also because if people believe that there is a effective strategy to be able to date, that makes them more culpable for their dating failures. Like, if it hasn't gone well, and it's a black box, then there was nothing that I could have done about it. But if it hasn't gone well, and it's because I wasn't sufficiently well-educated or informed, or I, maybe I messed up, then it's not to do with the magic of keep it, it's to do with me not knowing enough.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  That's a very hot take, and I think that's clever, and I will think about it more. But my gut reaction is that people already feel that way. And so I have a chapter in my book called, Why Dating Is Harder Now Than Ever Before. One of the elements of that is that in the past, if your love was negotiated, not your love, your marriage, was negotiated for you by your father, by the matchmaker. And camels, can't forget the camels, then everything was really written for you, right? We inherited these identities. So for me, if I had been born 200 years before, let's say I would have been a Jewish woman living in Berlin, who knew exactly how I spent my time, my marriage would have been negotiated for me by the local matchmaker, I would have

• 28:05Speaker 00

  known what I ate, what I wore, how I spent Shabbat, how I raised my children, everything would have been predetermined for me. And part of modern life is freedom, but that freedom is scary, because when you write your own story, if that story sucks, you are the only one to blame. And I think that is the ethos of our modern era. And so, I already think that people think, I haven't found love, it's on me. I don't think that, you know, as much as people like romance, I don't think that they imagine, Cupid just missed his arrow. I really think that if you saw the emails that I get, you'd know, people are being extremely hard on themselves, and they are taking their lack of success in love as a personal failure. So we're already there.

• 28:47Chris Williamson?

  How can people learn to be happy with their decisions, then? Getting into and getting out of relationships and all of the things therein, without it being about a single incident, what is an overarching way to make better decisions or to be happier with your decisions?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, we talked about how I have this intentionally ever after mug, and I really do believe in this intentional approach to love. And so what that might look like, and there's a whole menu of things, and people can pick and choose what works for them, but a lot of it is just owning your past behavior. And so in my class Date Smarter, we do this activity called the Relationship Audit. And people have a lot of resistance to it, they don't necessarily enjoy it. But you basically say, who are the people I've dated? Why did it end? What was good about this relationship? What was bad? What side of me did they bring out? You know, if they understand attachment theory, then was that person anxious, or avoidant, or secure? So really saying, what's gone on in my past? And then, looking at your

• 29:46Speaker 00

  patterns, and saying, wow, I tend to meet more people in person, maybe the dating apps aren't a good fit for me, that's a takeaway. Or, I tend to like someone until they like me back, and then I don't trust them, and I run away. Or, my version of love is chasing after someone. And so a lot of it is understanding, what's your past behavior, and how can you make different choices in the future? Then there's understanding what matters and what doesn't for long-term relationship success. And so some of the things that matter less than people think they do are things like looks and money. Yes, hot people are great. Rich people are great, sure, but

• 30:26Speaker 00

  whatever you have, you adapt to it over time. And so the feeling of being wealthy is something that you get used to and it doesn't impact your life as much as you'd think. People also overestimate having the same personality or having the same interests. Those matter, but they're not actually huge factors. The things that do matter are things like loyalty, kindness, someone who's emotionally stable, a person who you can fight well with. Yes, fight well because fighting is inevitable. Somebody who you can make hard decisions with. And then what's really become the most important one to me, which is what side of you that person brings out, because I don't care about their resume. I don't care about

• 31:09Speaker 00

  what's on paper. Who are you when you are with them? Because that's who you'll be for a lot of your life.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  One of the conversations we've had a lot on the show recently has been to do with the asymmetries in the dating market, that increasingly women are out earning men, they're out educating men, and you have an ever increasing group of high performing women competing for an ever decreasing group of ultra high performing turbo chads at the top. Given the fact that you've identified there that looks, money, a lot of the status markers that typically are either utilized, commercialized, weaponized by dating apps and online dating, aren't necessarily the things that predict long-term relationship success. How would you advise girls to try and overcome their innate hypergamy, their desire to date up and across to find the dude with the six-figure income, that's six foot tall with a six inch, whatever?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there are so many interesting historical things here that I can pull from, including just one example. I remember I went to a talk a few years ago where the guy was talking about how like historically, most doctors have been men and men would marry their nurses. And now actually, a lot of male doctors marry female doctors. And so what does that even mean in terms of like intermingling of classes and things like that? But yes, the number one piece of advice that I would give women is forget about height. I think that setting height filters just really blocks many people from seeing amazing people. And so yes, when there's a height filter, you might feel tempted to say, okay, I'd like to date a guy who's at least

• 32:45Speaker 00

  six feet tall, and then you make your height minimum six feet tall. And what you may not realize is that only 14% of the American male population is six feet or taller, and only 3.9% of the American male population is 6'3" or taller. And so they're just thinking like, yes, that would be nice, but they don't realize these filters are acting as bouncers, where people under that height are not even making it into your club or the people that you can meet. And so there is really no evidence that height impacts long-term relationship success. And in fact, I think that maybe my hottest take here would be date the least attractive person who you're attracted to, because you're still attracted to that person,

• 33:27Speaker 00

  you're caring less about what other people think, and you are really maybe finding that hidden gem. And that's a lot of the work that I do with people. It's not settling. Settling is this curse word, the S-word that people are so afraid of. I'm not about settling. I'm about saying, what are the things that matter and really go after those? And what are the things that don't? And don't be distracted by that.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain the difference between maximizing and satisficing when it comes to decision making?

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's been amazing research done by Barry Schwartz, and he has a great book called The Paradox of Choice, where he talks about these two different ways of making decisions. So maximizing is that you believe that you want to turn over every stone, you want to really do all the research, and you want to keep looking and looking and looking until you find the perfect solution. Satisfying is saying, "I'm gonna set a bar," and maybe that bar is really high, but once I achieve what I was looking for with that bar, I'm gonna be excited about it and stop looking. And so, for example, if you are looking for an espresso machine at home, the maximizer might read the Wirecutter reviews, they might read Consumer Reports, they might go to 10 different shops,

• 34:38Speaker 00

  and then they finally decide on getting the Breville at-home espresso machine. But even when they are drinking it, they might think to themselves, "Mmm, it is a little bitter. I should have gotten this other one. I made a mistake." And there's this sense of, "You're never done. There could always be something better out there." Whereas the satisficer might say, "Okay, Nespresso is a good brand. I will go to the downtown Nespresso store. I will buy the one that is in my price range and that the salesperson recommends, and then I will go home and feel good about it." And so, the maximizers believe that they are getting the objective best result because of their research, whereas the satisficer is the one who's actually happy. Because in the end, it's not about making the right decision.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  It's about how you feel about your decision. And the maximizers are never satisfied, and the satisficer is able to say, "I got what I wanted, and I feel good about it."

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  How does this manifest in dating?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  This is a huge problem in modern dating, where our culture generally is very focused on maximizers. And so, people don't wanna choose a restaurant, choose a hotel, um, choose a purchase without doing tons of research, right? We are the Google-Yelp-TripAdvisor generation, which is fine if you're going to Tulum and choosing among 16 Airbnbs, but it's not fine when you are choosing among thousands of potential partners. And so, what does this era of maximizers do? They always keep swiping, thinking their perfect person is one swipe away. And what a satisficer does is they say, "I want someone who I'm attracted to, who would fit in well with my family, who's kind and loyal, and who I enjoy talking to."

• 36:20Speaker 00

  And when they find that person, whatever their requirements are, they say, "I found this person. They're great. I'm going to invest in the relationship." And they don't sit there saying, "Who else is out there?" And my proverbial coaching couch is full of people who are maximizers saying,

• 36:37Speaker 00

  My girlfriend wants me to propose. I really like her, but she's just not interested in abstract ideas. And couldn't I just be with someone who likes trail running a little bit more? And they are imagining that they could come up with this Frankenstein person, and then that's their perfect partner, instead of saying something like, I'm really excited about the person that I found, and I am going to build the relationship of my dreams, as opposed to finding the perfect partner.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  You have three dating tendencies, one of which is the maximizer. Can you lay out the rest of that framework for everyone?

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So as I was writing my book, I really like frameworks. I really like recognizing trends and patterns. I feel like that's sort of what my brain does well. And I was like, all right, I've talked to all these people. I, you know, some of them are older, some of them are younger, different countries. What do they have in common? It felt like this theme was unrealistic expectations. And so the framework is, one, the romanticizer, the person who has unrealistic expectations of relationships, who expects that it's going to be butterflies, there's a soulmate for them, it'll always be easy, that they'll know it when they see it. And really, it's this concept of, once the relationship starts to feel hard, they think, oh, this can't be my soulmate, because it would be effortless

• 37:55Speaker 00

  with them. The second one is the maximizer, which we've just talked about, unrealistic expectations of their partner. They expect that they're going to find this perfect partner, and then everything will work out, as opposed to investing in the relationship. And then the third one, which has become a much larger group during the pandemic, is the hesitator. They have unrealistic expectations of themselves, and they think, I'm just not lovable yet. I'm just not ready. I need to be, I need to lose weight. I need a more impressive job title. I need to clean my apartment. Then I'll be ready. And so they have this imaginary date in their mind, or Moment in their mind where they'll be ready to date, when the truth is, no one's ever 100%

• 38:37Speaker 00

  ready for anything. And in fact, the only way to get better at dating is by dating. The only way to figure out who you want to be with is by trying on different people in relationships and seeing what works. And sitting at home, reading a dating book, or thinking about how you might eventually start working out, doesn't get you any closer to finding your person.

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  Let's say that someone has identified themselves as one of those three. What's your advice for overcoming that tendency for each of those categories?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for the romanticizer, these are often the people who cry when I talk to them, because they're like, "You want me to give up my love story? You're telling me I have to settle." And I'm like, "No, I'm trying to reconfigure in your mind what matters and what doesn't." So the work I do with those people is around giving up on the soulmate. There's so many people out there who could work for you. You can write a life story or a love story with many people. Also, understanding that who cares about the "we met"? People are so focused on this idea of the meet cute, right? Like, "We met at the farmer's market," or "He switched, he switched his seat on the plane, and we sat next to each other and talked for six hours." It's like, who cares? If you're going to be married

• 39:48Speaker 00

  for 50 years, then the day you met is .0055% of your total relationship. And so really, taking away the Disney rom-com Hugh Grant moments, and saying, like, "What's romantic is this? These are the things that matter. Let's get you into a relationship and help you really focus on the things that matter and the things that don't." For the maximizer, some of it is just understanding what satisfying might look like. And so, you made kind of a cheeky reference to this before, but yes, there is this idea of the secretary problem, which is this idea that the mathematically correct answer to hiring

• 40:29Speaker 00

  a secretary is that you go through a third of the possible candidates. You say, "Who was the best person from that group? That's your benchmark person." And the next time that you find someone who you like as much or more than them, you hire them. So you basically say, "Who's out there? I've identified the best of that." And then you identif- then

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Go after the next person who matches your benchmarks so that you don't waste too much time looking, but you don't stop too early. And so for the maximizers about understanding, yeah, of course you want to find someone great, but it's also what you bring to the relationship, how you build it together. So stop spending so much time researching and find someone great and build with them. And then for the hesitator, and I think this is a group that I have had a lot of success with during the pandemic, it's saying to them, stop hesitating and start dating and let's make a deadline for you. Let's choose a few outfits for your dates. Let's help you get more comfortable. Maybe you've gained some weight during the pandemic. Maybe it's been a while. That's fine. Let's actually help you just get out there and get your sea legs back because

• 41:34Speaker 00

  sitting at home thinking about how you should date just feels frustrating. And so for the hesitator, it's really about how can we create action so that you move towards having the identity of being a dater.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Are any of your tendencies related to attachment styles?

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've definitely found that there's some overlap. I've also found that maximizers can be avoidant attached. So one of the common things with people who have an avoidant attachment style is that they are looking for excuses to push people away. I talk about in my book, a woman whose boyfriend wanted to break up with her because she pronounced the word picture, like a picture on the wall as pitcher, like a pitcher of water. And so it's like, really? That's what you're going to break up with someone for? And in his mind, he turned it into this big thing about education and class and how articulate she was and how could the mother of my children pronounce it pitcher? And it's like, dude,

• 42:34Speaker 00

  there's something else going on that is not about the word picture, but you are so focusing on this and maximizing about it as an avoidance strategy. And so I've definitely seen that. I think that many people who have the romanticizer tendencies can be anxiously attached because their vision of love might be that Um, kind of the rom com 500 days of summer thing where it's love is the chase. Love is convincing somebody to be with you as opposed to love is two people choosing each other. And so I'd say I haven't done a one to one analysis. And in fact, in my class, the first session is what's your dating tendency and what's your attachment style? And I do have a lot of anxiously attached maximizers who take my class.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  But in general, I think that people come with a whole load of nuanced family background, genetics, histories, et cetera. And that they can be kind of more complicated than just one of these types.

• 43:32Chris Williamson?

  I feel like I would be doing a disservice to everybody to not ask someone that works behind the wall at Hinge about how to design an online dating profile. What's the biggest do's and don'ts and wins and losses?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah, I, I love this topic. I'm super comfortable speaking to it. So yeah. So my perspective on a profile is that it's really storytelling. And what is the story that you are trying to communicate? And so when I work with clients, I start by saying to them, what are the top three things that you want to communicate with your profile? So for someone, it might be, I'm from Boston. I love cooking and family is really important to me. And I'm saying, great, okay, let's make sure we get those points across. Then make sure that you're choosing photos and prompt responses that really support that. And so you don't want to repeat, you know, I love the Red Sox over and over again, but I want to, I want to at least see that represented in one.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Another important thing that we found through Hinge research is the importance of variety. So sometimes I'll see a profile and it's a guy wearing a pair of sunglasses, taking selfies in front of different monuments around the world. Like dude, we get it. You travel, but I don't see more of you. And so I want a first photo that's kind of like headshot where I see your face clearly. No filters, no sunglasses. I want at least one photo that's a full body. People have that question. So you might as well show it. Some activity photos, seeing you do something that you love. Candids work really well. And then also at least one photo with family and friends. Show us that you have a social life, but not one where you and your 10 mates are playing rugby.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  And I don't know which one of you are, and I have to play where's Wally with you? And so really that should be clear. And then for the prompt responses. Sometimes people try to be clever and say, you know,

• 45:27Speaker 00

  certain things like I'm, you know, what I'm competitive about, and then they write everything. And it's like, no, we want to see more information about you. That's actually a cliche, so you want to ignore it. And so really using your prompt responses as a way to communicate, who are you, what are you looking for, what makes you different? And remember that your profile is like a T-shirt that you wear into a bar. Whatever you wear, people will respond to. And so if you wear a shirt with Madonna on it, you're going to have a different conversation than if you wear a shirt with a Game of Thrones character. And they're going to lead to different conversations, different types of people. And so most people would benefit from being more intentional about their profile. And even if their profile is great, if you're bored of online dating,

• 46:11Speaker 00

  switch it up because it will lead to new conversations.

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  Did I hear you say that mirror selfies, gym selfies and smoking are three big no-nos as well?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, definitely. No smoking, nothing too controversial that'll turn people off. The gym selfie, it just does not perform well. Selfies, there are some exceptions to that, especially I feel like some women know how to take really good selfies and they know their angles, but in general, those are not the high performers. You want to go for high-quality photos where it's clear what you look like. If you have a friend with a good camera or portrait mode, you know, go to the beach at golden hour and have your friend make you laugh and take a picture of you laughing, like, show me what it looks like to be with you and date you.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  That is so much better than some poorly-lit gym selfie where I'm just like, oh, another, another one of those.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  What about good and bad practices for online dating beyond the first front window?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it depends on what the person's needs are. So I work with some people who are way too picky and our work together is helping them be less picky or less picky about the things that don't matter. Sometimes I work with people who need to be more picky. They go on way too many dates with people who are not interesting or are not interested in them. And so there's an element of kind of which category do you tend to fall into? But let's just say that people Or being too picky, I would say, open it up your filters, be willing to date someone who's farther away. Be open to dating someone who's a little older, a little younger than you might have, and expand your height filters.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  I would also say that when you are using the app, sometimes people swipe as if would I marry this person or not? And it should be something like, would I be willing to have a conversation with this person or not? And so for those who are too picky, it's just being more flexible in the early stages. Because you don't know who's even going to convert into a match. For people who are not picky enough, I would say, how can you have higher standards around who you go on a date with? And so, um, some people I call ZQ, zero questions. This is often men who just ask no questions. So it's like, they're willing to be kind of interviewed, but they don't say, and what about you? And what about you? And so I have women who say to me, after the date, I could have written his biography, but

• 48:42Speaker 00

  he didn't ask me a single question about myself. And when I ask these ZQ men what they're doing, they're like, well, she had something to say, she could have spoken up. Or I just thought she thought I was so interesting. It's like, no dude, good conversation is, we are taking turns talking and you show interest in me and you ask follow up questions. And so that's just kind of a general point that, um, people should certainly be making statements, sharing about themselves, and then asking questions so that it feels like a conversation, not an interview.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  Is it true that on average, if you have a conversation where somebody asks more questions, they tend to come across more likeable than somebody that makes the same number but of statements?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's really great research on this. It basically shows that the more questions you ask and the less time you spend talking, the more that person thinks you're a great conversationalist. Because essentially what you're tapping into is people like talking about themselves. People like to be made to feel as if they are fascinating. And so like right now, you've been asking me questions for an hour. I feel great. I'm like, wow, you know, Chris is so curious about me and I must be so interesting. Even though like, of course, we're in a dynamic where this is the setup, you're asking me questions, but it feels really good. And so think about that and apply it to dating. It's much more important to be interested, showing interest in the person than to be interesting.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  And so when I have people who say to me, I haven't been on a trip in two years and nothing's going on in my life. I'm not interesting. How could I date? I'm like, you are at an advantage. It doesn't matter. Just go out there and ask deep questions, flirt with people, be vulnerable, be curious, use a support response where you ask deeper questions about what's going on for them, as opposed to a shift response where you bring the conversation back to you. And this person will think that you are endlessly fascinating.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  I suppose it's difficult if you and somebody else who's also taken the same red pill about how to have conversations in dates, that's just going to end up with you going like, what about you? No, no, no, no, no. What about you?

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, that could, I could imagine that coming to a stalemate.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. In my dating class, we do a lot of live demos. And I actually did one last week where I made this mistake where I was trying to show how to ask good questions, but I wasn't letting the person ask me questions back. So it really just felt like I was interrogating them. And then two students did it. And I was like, thank goodness you went because they actually took turns asking, responding, going deeper. And so it should not have a feeling of like, one person is the podcast interviewer and the other one is the guest. You also have to share.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  You talk about the spark and you've got a problem with the spark. What's up with that?

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, the spark is that moment where you feel instant chemistry, you feel fireworks, you feel like the whole world has stopped except for you and this person. And the spark is definitely real. I have certainly felt the spark with people throughout my life. The issue with it and why I think it's a really big problem in modern dating is that people are overly optimizing for it. And so my clients would say things to me like, this one guy Jonathan would say, I met this guy. He was great. We had a good conversation. He planned a fun date. I'm not going to see him again. And when I'd say why, he'd say, I just didn't feel the spark. And so he was going on dates expecting to have this magical

• 52:04Speaker 00

  moment. And so yes, the spark is real, but we also expect to have it too often. And so there's research that only 11% of people experience love at first sight. I would also say that because of the mirror exposure effect, we often like things more over time as we're more exposed to them. So it's why we might like a person who lives in our apartment building who we see every day, or you might even like a song the more that you hear it. And so the spark can grow over time. People are sometimes just very sparky. Some people are really good looking. They're really charismatic. That can also be tied to narcissism. And so certain people give everyone the spark, but you think it's something special with you.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  And finally, the third issue is that the spark doesn't mean that you have a long-term lasting connection. And many divorced couples or unhappily married couples started with the spark. And so it's enough to kind of get you off the ground, but not to keep going. And so my entire advice, my antidote to this is to go after the slow burn, which is the person who might not spark with you on the first date, but the more you go out with them, the more you like them over time, the more you peel back the layers and you realize how funny or curious or brilliant they are. And a lot of people have passed them by because they're not sparky, but you could wind up with this amazing engaging partner because you are willing to give them that second look.

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  I think that's one of the most interesting insights I've taken from the stuff that you've done, which is that the spark can be something systemic about a person and not unique to your interaction with them. And this makes sense, right? I've had tons of conversations about narcissism and dark triad traits and stuff like that. And those individuals, they are sparking the guy at the grocery store. They are sparking the bus driver that, you know, that's just part of their existence. And using that as a proxy for there is something exciting about this, meaning there is something that has long-term longevity. It's just a leap that's being made way too much. And I think again, as well, you're seeing one of

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  the problems of culture taking a hold of one very particular element and then just myopically focusing on it and saying, well, this is something that's really, really important. And you look at every rom-com movie throughout time. Well, actually, no, that's a lie. That I'm, I'm, I'm incorrect there. There are rom-com movies where the good guy that's kind of the hapless romantic that's chasing the girl, she does sometimes end up with, with him. But There is also a lot of push toward the spark, given that it happens whatever 11% of the time, it's definitely not only an 11% of rom com movies.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And so this kind of goes back to the point you made earlier, Chris, which is like, what is making it into the movies? And it's like, most movies, and there are a few exceptions, like the Before trilogy, most movies are very focused on the meet cute, okay, she's so clumsy, he's too focused on work. And then they go through trials and tribulations, and then they end up together. But where the movie ends is them coming together as a couple. And then it's the famous three words, right? They lived happily ever after. But the movie ends that they're coming together, it doesn't tell you what's going on. You're 12 into the marriage, when their kid is having trouble at school, and they haven't had sex in a year, and all of this stuff. And so our movies are selling

• 55:30Speaker 00

  us on the happily ever after early stage, not the long term relationship success. And this idea of the spark, after having written my book and talking to a lot of people about it, like, I totally notice it out and about. Like, if I go to a party or a conference, everyone will kind of be talking about the same person. Oh, did you meet so and so? Oh, so and so's presentation was so great. It's like, yeah, that person's really sparky, and everyone here is drawn to them. And often, they're very conventionally attractive, or they make great eye contact with you, or they do that thing where they make you feel interesting.

• 56:05Chris Williamson?

  That Bill Clinton style.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Bill Clinton style thing, exactly, right? You feel like you're the only person in the room. And it's like, yes, that person is very sparky. We are all feeling a spark with that person. That doesn't mean anything for like, who we should all be with. And so just knowing that that spark sensation is real, but understanding that it's more representative of that person than your dynamic, I think does really help you move past it.

• 56:29Chris Williamson?

  That's a huge red pill. That's really, really interesting. I think as well. One of the things that I find so attractive in a relationship is when I admire my partner. Like if I admire the girl that I'm with, then it's such a compelling

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  pull of attraction toward them. However, anybody that has a spark is admirable because you look at them and you think, oh, God, you know, everybody else wants them. You've got this sort of crowdsourced sense of the toys in the playground type thing. Charisma generally, extroversion generally, you know, likability, humor, all that stuff that we've talked about. So yeah, decoupling those is is really interesting. And I think asking yourself the question of seriously, is this person just like this with everybody? Or is this person specifically like this because of me is probably a good one to ask.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  I think since this is personally you, we could like even zoom in on it a little bit more, which is, do you know this concept of the halo effect?

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, which is people that are good looking tend on average to be treated better by everyone in society.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Right. And like, I know that I do this all the time. I mean, people even do this with good looking babies, our whole lives. If you are good looking, people ascribe positive traits to you. Oh, she's good luck looking. She must be generous. She must be kind. She must be smart and compassionate. So part of what you're describing is the halo effect of when somebody is good looking, we ascribe all these other traits to them. The other thing that you're talking about, the admiring your partner, yes, that is huge. And I think people should be thinking about that more. So maybe for you or for anyone else who's experiencing this, it's saying, when I think about admiring someone, I want to admire them because I can learn from them, because they have a passion,

• 58:10Speaker 00

  because they have pursued their dreams and really being concrete around what this admiration is versus this more nebulous halo effect admiration, which is everyone else seems to want them. So I should want them too. It's almost more of the market dynamics or evolutionary biology piece. It's not actually about admiration. It's saying, well, if everyone else values them, clearly they are of value.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between sliding and deciding through a relationship?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's great research on how people make decisions in relationships. And a lot of couples slide, which is they just slip from one relationship moment to the next. So for example, you know, you and I have been dating for six months. My lease is up and I say, hey, Chris, should I renew my lease or not? And you're like, hmm, that'd be good to split rent. Why don't you move in? We didn't talk about what does moving in mean to me? Does it mean we're on our way to get engaged? Does it mean we're going to figure out if we're good partners? Maybe it means nothing. But what other couples do is they decide. They sit down and they actually have a conversation explicitly about what this milestone means. And so they might say, moving into me means we are engaged to be engaged.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  And the other person might say, moving into me just means we're going to spend more time together. And then they might say, okay, we're not on the same page. Let's actually wait until we are. And the research shows that couples who decide have healthier relationships. They have more passion. They have better sex. They're more likely to survive through the long haul. And so in this theme of intentional dating or intentional love, deciding is the intentional way to make major relationship milestone decisions.

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  That was the sense that I had in my mind, this tension between like it being natural and spontaneous and emergent. And it being, I know, I don't know what people, I, there is, almost everybody that's listening to this will be intentional with everything that they do, right? They'll eat intentionally, they'll sleep intentionally. They'll know the temperature of the air conditioning that they go to sleep in if they're in a warm country or whatever. And so like, it's probably not, but that like more autistic view of things that does take things and then separate it out step by step. You think, well, I don't know that, that to me seems like the smart thing to do. Is, is there any tension between that and, and sort of romance and spontaneity? Can you see a world in which someone sort of overshoots with regards to their intentionality?

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  I can definitely see that. And, you know, we talked a little bit about the secretary problem and the 37%. And I really see clients and I see emails that say, okay, Logan, so I'm this old and I've dated this many people and this is my benchmark person, but they rejected me. Does that make them my benchmark person? There can definitely be a feeling of, I want to have ultimate control over this. And if I have enough spreadsheets and enough format conditioning, then everything will work out. And so I do think that there's pushing this too far. So instead, how can you think about this as a layer upon which you view the world versus a, like, every single decision that you make? And so what this might look like is someone's gonna say, being intentional about love to me is going to therapy to own my past

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  trauma and drama, having a rough sense of what I'm looking for, going on dates where I'm open-minded and I understand, oh, I don't actually like this person. I'm just excited because they don't like me and I want to have the chase. Having open conversations from the beginning about who I am, what I'm looking for. And then as you go through the different phases, saying, what does defining the relationship mean to you? Should we move in together? Should we get engaged? So it's some key moments. But other than that, add in as much spontaneity as you want. Surprise that person. Take them on a getaway. Like, there's lots of ways to be romantic in the day to day. I just don't want you to miss these big moments because that's when people make the big mistakes.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Talking about, on the other side of relationships, how should people know whether or not they can, can or should break up with their partner?

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, when I set out to do this work, I certainly ever thought that I would be talking to people about breakups, but it's become a passion of mine in terms of the unique research that I've done. And I do have a lot of conversations with people where they say, should I stay or should I go? And so I have a few practices that I walk them through. So one is kind of going off the same themes, saying, what's your historical tendency? Do you tend to be a hitcher? Someone who stays in relationships way too long, past the expiration date? Do you tend to be a ditcher? A person who stays in relationships way too short, always hopping from new relationship energy to the next honeymoon phase, things like that? So we talk about that. We talk about, what are you bringing to the relationship? Are you bringing your best self? Have you told the other person how you feel? Or do you just

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  expect them to magically know what you want? And then are there external factors? If one of you lose a job, lose a parent, is somebody going through mental health stuff, like, is this a temporary moment in time where things could get better? And then I ask them this final question, which is kind of silly, but in this fun, abstract way, where I say, it's called the wardrobe test. And I say, if your partner were a piece of clothing in your closet, something that you own, what would they be? And sometimes people say, my boyfriend is a wool sweater, he keeps me warm, but it's itchy, so I have to take it off. Or, my boyfriend is a ratty t-shirt that I would wear to the gym, but I wouldn't want anyone to see me in. And these are real

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  answers that people have given me. I'm like, okay, listen to yourself. That's how you actually feel. Taking yourself out of your super rational brain into your emotions, how you feel is that you've outgrown this relationship, or that something feels off. And then we work on helping them make a plan to leave. Some people say lovely things, like, my girlfriend is my favorite pair of pants that I would never have bought for myself, but make me feel attractive and fun. And so I like the wardrobe test question, because you can make a million pro con lists, but sometimes you just have to get in touch with how you're actually feeling.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  What the hitcher and ditcher is such a good way to kind of split groups up. I think pretty much everybody that I know falls into one of those two categories. What is the typical piece of advice, or the first few pieces of advice that you would give to each person from that group to overcome it?

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would say, you know, I do have a lot of frameworks and terms, that some will resonate with some people, some won't. I think there are people that are not hitchers or ditchers, they leave the relationship at the appropriate time. But let's say most people are. For the hitchers, a lot of them is understanding this concept of sunk cost fallacy. So I'm sure you know this from economics, but if you spent $20 on a concert ticket, and then you're deciding if you should go or not, you might say, oh, I should go because I spent the $20. It's like, you spent the $20 regardless, it doesn't impact the money if you go. And so this idea of when you made a decision, you throw good money after bad, and you keep feeling like you have to double down on it, when maybe you can just say, I'm gonna cut my losses, $20, I'm not gonna go to the concert. And

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  so they feel like, I've been dating this person for so long, I have to keep going. That's not necessarily true. Maybe you should have left the relationship years ago. And maybe this is a great quality. You're very loyal. You believe that people can change, but you might need a readjustment. For ditchers, and I do think this is highly tied to the avoidant attachment style, there's a feeling of, wait, it doesn't feel like it did at the beginning. In the beginning, I was thinking about that person all the time and it was so exciting and this and that. And then they just feel like they want to move on to the next thing. And so this is a lot of work where I do with people where I help them understand,

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  love is a drug. When you do brain scans of people who are falling in love, it literally lights up part of their direct brains that are lit up when they do, you know, drugs like cocaine.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying quit the relationship and start a cocaine habit?

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  I'm saying you already have a cocaine habit and the cocaine is the love. And so understand that, yeah, you are in this different place and your brain is being stimulated, but that doesn't last forever and it's probably a good thing. And so there is going to be this transition from falling in love to being in love. And if you just want to spend your whole life falling in love, and there are people like that, you can do it. But if you want to be in a long-term relationship, get married, be a dad, whatever it is, you're going to have to accept that the falling will feel different from the being. And how can we make you excited about the being? And I've spoken to a lot of men who really successful, I really respect, and they talk about how much they love being married. And they're like, your partner is this closet

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  where you're hanging these different stories and parts of yourself and memories and this person has been with you through all of life and you get to have that partner and that that is really beautiful. And sure, like seducing someone or those honeymoon period feelings are really good. But if you want to move from the honeymoon stage to the being in love stage, you do have to have different expectations for what that feels like.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  I read a while ago that there's two attraction systems. Is it the passionate and the companionate system? Have you heard these before?

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Vaguely, but I'm not super knowledgeable about them. There's a lot of frameworks that are like three different types of love and stuff like that, but not, I don't have expertise in it.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  It just matches on to what you're saying here, that you kind of have the, I don't know, that first period that pretty much everybody is is familiar with. And then when that begins to wane a little bit and it becomes much more of a friendship, a deep friendship with benefits and love, as opposed to this sort of head over heels obsession that occurs in the first instance, that kind of ties into the spark thing as well, right? That that's how it should feel all the time. And I think, yeah, that's, that's probably pretty erroneous. So let's say that someone's got themselves to the stage where they know that the relationship isn't for them. What do you advise people to do if they need to actually pull the pin and get themselves out of a relationship?

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  You know, so interesting. Someone might ask me like, what's, what are some of the most meaningful moments in your work? And you might think I would say like, oh, when I introduce this couple or help this person notice red flags, but the things that really stick out to me are helping people get out of relationships that are no longer serving them, because sometimes you really need a push or a partner or a plan. And so I approach breakups like the way that I would approach goal setting and I use goal setting research. And so when I help people plan their breakup, we talk about things like, okay, when are you going to do this? Let's create a deadline. Let's talk about what you're going to say, what your main messages are. Let's talk about how you should not have sex afterwards, because that will just be confusing for both of you.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  There's even conversations around things like, when are you going to be in touch with them? How long should the conversation be? What are you going to do to make yourself feel better afterwards? How can you avoid being the nice breakup person who thinks it's nice to check in with them all the time? But actually you're confusing them. And so we really just take the very messy, heartbreaking effort of decoupling and we turn it into a plan that is compassionate to them and compassionate to the other person. And then I help them execute it and stick to their goal of being broken up.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  What about overcoming heartbreak?

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, breakups, we just talked about this, but if love is a drug, then breaking up with someone often feels like withdrawal. And there's lots of evidence that it's physically painful, that you are, you perform worse on cognitive tests. People are actually more likely to commit crimes. There's some really interesting research on how challenging it is to actually navigate a breakup. And so for anyone listening, I would just say, give yourself a beat. This is hard. There are activities that you can do. So there's great research from Gary Lewandowski, who talks about rediscover yourself activities. So what are the things in your relationship that you didn't really pursue?

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Because your partner didn't like them. So if you love going to the beach, but your partner was pale skinned, maybe you haven't been. If you love jazz and your partner hated it, you weren't going to jazz shows. Go do more of those rediscover yourself activities. And those people seem to move on from breakups and feel happier than people who just go out there and do kind of like generic activities, like going for a walk or spending time with friends. You can also do a lot of journaling to sort of help your brain get through the breakup faster. So you can make lists of all the bad qualities about the person. You can make a list of all the parts of the relationship that were bad. And you're basically thinking about your brain as this rationalization monster. And how do you feed the monster by saying, oh yeah, he was rude to my sister.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, she never did pick me up from the airport that time. And so you're actually helping yourself remember why it wasn't as great as you might be thinking. And then there's also this expression, time heals all wounds. Well, I think the updated version is that meaning heals all wounds. And you can really apply meaning to it by saying, what did I learn? How will I be different next time? Who should I go for in the future? And so really not just assuming that time will make things better, but by really creating a story of this was an experience. I am better for it. I am more informed in the future and I will move on.

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  Logan Urie, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you're doing, where should they go?

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yes, people can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Logan Urie. People can learn more about my class Date Smarter at loganury.com. I have a weekly newsletter they can find out there. And in general, people can listen to my book, How to Not Die Alone, or pick it up wherever great books are sold.

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  I really appreciate you. I appreciate your work. I think it's very interesting to look at dating from a much more scientific background and then also to have all the data that you get from Hinge. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with over the next few years as well.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. You were so well researched, great questions. I loved our conversation.

• 1:12:33Chris Williamson?

  See you later.