The Love Expert: Why Women Are Addicted To Toxic Men,"Have A Boring Relationship Instead!" Logan Ury

most people want to find love but the truth is you think you know what you want but you're wrong but there's a lot of great relationship science out there and this might be the number one thing that I want people to take away so if you're Logan you're King is dating scientist from Harvard she's renowned for her datadriven approach to help millions of people find love big things in my work are the spark the post8 8 and the three dating Tendencies so let's go through that the spark is this idea that we go after initial chemistry the fireworks the spark often leads to relationships that burn out the spark the postdate eight there eight questions to ask yourself after a date training your brain to a new way of dating and finally most people suffer from one of these three dating Tendencies and that's what's holding them back from Finding Love and can you change it yeah so the first type is people in great relationships have made a bunch of good choices and the truth is the person that ends up making them happy in the long term is very rarely who they thought they should be with if you are single and you don't want to be at some point you have to realize you are choosing a set of problems why do I keep falling for boys or people often confuse pet peeves the ick for deal breakers like he has a velcro wallet I can buy you a new wallet and they say to me like I don't want to meet on an app it's not romantic but the number one way that couples are meeting is online and so because I want to help so many people find love these are the top tricks for a great hinge profile first of all you're I think this is fascinating I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this Channel and enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I ask a small favor please hit the Subscribe button helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that to return the favor we will make the show better and better and better and better and better that's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the Subscribe button do we have a [Music] deal Logan why does your work matter my work matters because most people almost everyone wants to find love and it's really hard and I meet people and I see how badly they want it I see how long they've been trying to get it and they're getting in their own way and so I do the work that I do because I want to help people understand the blind spots that are holding them back from Finding Love and I want to help them get out of their own way develop new patterns new habits and find love where are we in times of love as a society love dating sex all these kinds of things where are we what's our direction of travel are we getting better worse people are really struggling if you think about the history of dating it's actually pretty new right so for most of human history you were had an arranged marriage from let's say your piece of land was next to somebody else's piece of land so your dads wanted to combine the land so you were married to the person next door or there was a Matchmaker who made the arrangement so modern dating as we know it only started around 1890 this is very new in the span of human history and then you have dating apps which only started in Earnest around 10 years ago and so the way that we're dating now is actually really new and so when people are struggling with it I understand we were not designed to date this way or we don't have tons of experience and so we were born knowing how to love but we're not born knowing how to date and so I'm out there trying to teach people how to date and who are you so I am a behavioral scientist turn dating coach I work with people one-on-one to help them find love I also work as hing's director of relationship science so I conduct research and really try to understand what's happening with dating people who are finding success on hinge what are they doing differently I also teach dating classes and I wrote this book how to not die alone so for anybody that doesn't know what hinge is because I'm sure there'll be some people listening that don't know what hinge is what is hinge hinge is a dating app and I think it's the best one what hinge does differently is it truly is about getting you off the app and on to great relationships and so before I started at hinge I actually interviewed the CEO Justin McLoud for my book and I was kind of the skeptical person and I was like all right let's be real of course you don't want your users to actually find love because then they would churn and then you'd have to find new users and that'd be really expensive so get real with me of course you want to keep people on the app and he was like no the best referral system that we have is Word of Mouth from people finding somebody on the app and telling other people if you go to a wedding where the people Found Love on hinge that's going to get you to use it and since I've been there for almost 4 years not to sound like a a sponsored ad but I've never been in a conversation that was about how do we keep people on the app we're really it's almost a religion how do we get people off the app and onto these states and you hired a dating coach for yourself right yeah that's exactly right yeah so I have compassion for my younger self but at the time it was just so hard it was like the classic story of you fall for someone we're having this amazing time and emotions are running so high and you fall for someone and you think oh well if my feelings about them are so strong their feelings about me must be so strong and we had this amazing week at berning man and then when we came back I was like oh well of course we'll date now and this person was just not interested in dating and when I look back at my younger self I can see that we were in this anxious avoidant Loop are you familiar with that no I'm not okay so you know about attachment Theory loosely okay so I'll give you the scoop because I feel like it's really interesting so attachment theory is a really great part of relationship research because it's something that has a deep background in research so John bulby was a psychologist and he did the most interesting research on this and this was in the 60s so he basically would have moms bring their babies into a laboratory and the moms would place the baby down and leave the room and see how the baby reacted and so some babies would start crying the mom would come back in the room and pick it up and the baby would keep crying so the mom was there again but the baby still felt upset and that baby is anxiously attached there was another type of baby where the mom would leave the baby would come back and as soon as the mom picked up the baby the baby was soothed so the baby was saying I want to be with you but when you're here I know you're here for good the Third Kind the mom would leave the room the baby wouldn't cry but they knew from other signals that the baby was upset and when the mom came back in the room the baby would ignore it and that baby is called avoidant attached and so basically the point is that what we have in childhood often shows up in adult romantic relationships and this is attachment Theory and so anxiously attached people they feel like they're always going to lose you you're going to abandon them you're going to leave them and so they always try to regain closeness and so that's why when the mom came back they're still like are you going to leave me again I'm so nervous the avoidant attached babies they feel like well you'll probably abandon me anyway so I'm not going to get too close and those are the people who are always pushing somebody away here's the reason why we shouldn't be together they're always creating reasons to delay intimacy and they're afraid of being smothered and then the securely attached babies who become securely attached adults they say I want some intimacy but I also want independence and we sort of think about them as the heroes of the relationship world because they can manage both of those feelings of closeness and Independence and so what happens is 50% of the population is securely attached which would be great because many of us could date them but they actually get into relationships and they stay there so the pool is a lot of anxious attached people and avoidant attached people dating each other and they do the thing called the anxious avoidant Loop and what that means is my version of Love is that you're going to leave me you're going to abandon me and that I have to chase you your version of Love is you're going to smother me so I go after you you pull back and we both think oh this is what love is we're just doing love and it's not until one of us becomes more secure or that we date a secure partner that we actually realize that there's another way so so much of the work I do with people is actually busting the anxious avoidant Loop and helping them understand hey you are anxiously attached when you keep dating these guys who are running away and you have to chase them it's hurting you and you're not in a great relationship look for someone secure and so that was a very long-winded way of what happened to me with this Burning Man guy I was definitely an anxious attached dator he was avoidant and instead of us just saying we're not a match we were in this Loop and it was so painful I remember crying on my friend's couch not understanding why doesn't this person want to be with me and I I tried my heart artist I put that Harvard degree to work right you try to convince somebody to be with you but they're not interested and so somebody recommended this daating coach and I went to meet with her and it was so helpful because first of all I acknowledged how painful it was and then we did an exercise where she says how do you want somebody to make you feel and I wrote down all these characteristics desired respected admired I want to feel like they think I'm really funny and when I look looked at that list I was like this guy doesn't make me feel like any of those things he makes me feel like but there's this other guy at work who actually does make me feel those things and so there was this guy at work who I had met originally in college and then I met him again at work like in a casual lunch and I had told him I'm trying to learn this Statistics language called R and he said oh I just dropped out of a PhD program where I write R every day and he was like I'll tutor you so for a few months he was tutoring me but I didn't think that we were a good match he said a couple things like oh I don't like travel I don't like people that go to berning man he seemed close-minded but then when I worked with this dating coach and I thought about how I wanted someone to make me feel I was like that guy makes me feel that way so I put more effort into seeing him and we went from having lunch maybe once a month to once a week till we suddenly were having lunch every day and I didn't explicitly ask him out but I certainly said oh I don't have plans on Friday what are you doing kind of inviting him to ask me out and yeah we've now been together for almost nine years and we're married I've got so much to dig into that okay great I was smirking at you because I just so much of what you were saying rang true with me you were perfectly describing me when you started describing the avoidant attached can you just characterize that again because I want to zoom in on that right yeah let me go more into avoid an attach M and I would say for anyone listening who's feeling really stuck going deep on attachment theory is one of the number one things that you can do to really understand yourself understand your past patterns understand who you've been attracted to and why it isn't working and so there's a lot of great relationship science out there but this might be the number one thing that I want people to take away let me describe what happens when you're avoiding attach so first there's a trigger so the trigger might be that you go out with somebody on Saturday night you have a great night they sleep over and Sunday morning morning you wake up and you're just ready to do your thing but they're still there so you feel triggered by the fact that they're still at your house then you do something called deactivating strategies so these are thoughts or feelings that push them away so it might be like oh my God it's 10 o'clock and she hasn't brushed her teeth yet when is she going to leave oh uh you know is she going to be here forever and then you start thinking about flaws in that person well this is wrong with her or that is wrong with her and there's all these things that are subtly pushing her away from you and then you do a protest Behavior which is sort of snapping or just saying something like okay I called your Uber and I feel like many of us have had that situation where you think you're going you think things are going well with somebody and then all of a sudden they're like the ubber here and you're like oh so you're kicking me out and it's so interesting because it's like the other person has no idea what's going on for you they feel like you just had a great date and they're like great let's go out to the diner for breakfast and instead that person is like I will never have my life back you are taking over my world you're really blessing and so what an avoidant attached person can do let me give a few tips for them so one of them is being really clear about what you want and so it's absolutely fine if you want the person to leave but saying something like hey I had such a great date with you I have a big week of work ahead of me and so I want to get started but I will call you again soon and so just asking for what you need another thing is overriding the flaws that are become so obvious to you so there's a really interesting thing called the negativity bias and even though we're living in this age of chat GPT and all of modern technology our brains are running on Ancient software and so our brains have the negativity bias which is that we're much more likely to ruminate on what's wrong with someone the reason for this is that if you had five ex-girlfriends and one of them wanted to kill you it was really important to know which one that was and so your brain would remember that and so to overcome the negativity bias to overcome this feeling where avoid and attach people focus on flaws you actually can work on focusing on the positives so even just saying to yourself five things that you like about somebody so you could think in your head last night was so fun she looked so cute wearing my t-shirt I'm really excited to hear her talk more about her work whatever that is and so actively overriding this feeling of pushing people away because that's one of the really hard Parts about being avoidant is that you feel like those criticisms that you have in your head are so valid well I need to pay attention to this but what you don't understand is that that's actually a subconscious way to you to not for you to not get close to someone and so I'm coaching someone right now where she told me oh I went on a date with a guy everything was great but he wore a white T-shirt under his shirt which reminded me of my uncle so I can't be with him I was like do you understand how ridiculous that sounds obviously that's not a reason to not be with someone that's an excuse for you to not get close to someone and as we talked about it more it became obvious that she's really afraid of being hurt she's been abandoned by many people she was in a bad marriage and for her if I don't get close to you then you can't hurt me and that's part of the avoidant attachment if I never rely on you then you can never let me down and so part of it is actually getting more com fortable relying on somebody else and you kind of alluded to it there but the obvious question here is where does it come from you know I think from your answer with your client with the white T-shirt ick I think it's quite clear but in my case I think I I think I know where it comes from but generally where does this avoidant attachment style come from yeah so if you think about the history of attachment Theory and the fact that it started doing research with children and their primary caregiver there is this idea that it goes back to your childhood but I feel like it's unfair to really say all of us have these attachment Styles because of our parents or specifically because of our mothers and hey Mom if I'm single it's your fault that's actually not true I think that's part of it but there's other societal things that can lead to it and there's some evidence of different biological reasons why each of us would do this so the main message that I want to give away is do not blame everything on your mother I think attachment Style is a really good framework but it's not just an excuse to say oh well my parents are the reason why I can't find love and can you change it the research shows that when people work on it about 25% of people are able to change their attachment style and so what that might look like is somebody understanding this is my trigger and when a trigger happens I'm going to do something else and so we talked about for the avoidant person asking for what you need being really clear and not assuming that somebody is going to read your mind and looking for the positives and you can work on self-regulation so for example when an when an avoidant or anxious person is triggered they go into this thing called The Danger Zone which is basically like I need to get away from you as soon as possible or I need to reconnect with you as soon as possible and if you don't want to get into the danger zone and you want to stay in the comfort zone then you can learn how to self-regulate so that's one thing the other thing which I personally feel like is easier and with my strategy is finding a secure partner and so that's a great way to get out of the anxious avoidant Loop so with me right I was this anxiously attached dator chasing after this Burning Man guy had all these bad habits and then when I started dating my husband I distinctly remember this moment where I was walking down the street of San Francisco and I was flooded I was so angry I would just get so upset and I was typing away at my phone I couldn't see anything else I truly was in this flooded cortisol Rush moment and I was telling him all the things he had done wrong and I knew the pattern which was then he would fight with me we'd get into this fight it would blow up and then eventually we'd make up but he didn't do that pattern he wrote back and said it sounds like you're upset we should talk about this in person and it was this crazy moment where I was like wait we're not going to do the thing that I always do with everyone we're going to do this different thing and it just dissipated all of the anger because he was acknowledging that I was upset but he was suggesting a healthier plan and I don't think that it's unrelated to the fact that his mom is a therapist so dating this secure person made me so much more secure where I broke out of the anxious avoidant loop I got over the silly Burning Man guy and I understood what a secure relationship was like and I feel so lucky to be in this secure marriage and sometimes when I think about My Career Success I'm like I couldn't have done it without my husband not because he's involved with my career but I really feel like 20 to 50% of my brain was in these spirals worrying about people being anxiously attached ruminating on them and just being in a secure relationship actually gives you a lot of peace and you can use that brain power for something else but any 50% of people you said are the secure ones that everybody wants yeah yeah so I think it's a combination of you can become more secure yourself or you can find a secure partner what's hard is that we often confuse secure people for boring that's what I was going to say I was I wasn't sure whether to say it but secure sounds a bit you know wallpaper yes and that's what people don't understand so people think oh like I had a client who said to me I went on a date with this guy we went out a few times I told him I was going to Seattle and then he sent me all these recommendations for Seattle so I'm never going to see him again I was like what are you talking about she's like that's so desperate I was like this is just a nice guy who's trying to tell you about a cool bookstore in Seattle like why can't you see that as somebody that's interested in you and putting in effort but to her in the anxious avoidant Loop what she wanted was someone who was unavailable and that's what's so hard I feel like there's all these lovely securely attached people out there that are probably like Oh I'm a dud nobody wants me it's like baby somebody wants you they just haven't figured it out yet and so some of the work that I do is train people to look for secure partners and so things like are they consistent do they not play games are they clear about their interest in you and so we actually have to understand that securely attached partners are the heroes of the relationship world and they're great to be in relationships with they have healthier relationships and you have to train yourself to go for that and to break out of this anxious avoidant loop I could probably hasit a guess as to which attachment style ends up in marriage the mo the most and stays in marriage marriage but I'm also quite curious about which attachment style is most likely to get the most attention mhm you know because from what we've just talked about there there is a hint of vanilla to the person that there is a hint of vanilla to the secure attachment style and there's a hint of excitement associated with the avoidant attached style you know CU one of the principles I learned about attraction is this idea of um social proofing and that and one element element of social proofing is not appearing to be so interested because that raises your the perception of your value so if we're having a conversation if I'm kind of Blas about you and a little bit uninterested it raises my social value therefore you'll think I may be more valuable yeah um so I was thinking maybe these avoidant attached people getting the most sort of short-term interest I don't know is that I think that's exactly right and even when you said that it reminded me of how I felt with the berning man Guy where the story in my head was if you don't want me you must be better than me I think so many many of us feel that way it's like well as soon as you reject me you have more power than me and for me to regain power I want to get you interested in me instead of a much healthier mindset which is I want the person I choose to choose me back that's how un low that we're a match so I want to tell you about this interesting application of research so the term boy has been around for a little while and I people kept asking me what's going on with boys why do I keep falling for boys there's boy Island there's all this stuff and I was like why are people so addicted to boys and so there's this really interesting research from the psychologist BF Skinner and it's a study with pigeons so for the first pigeon the pigeon is in a little cage with a lever every time that the pigeon presses the lever food comes out and so that's pigeon number one then there's pigeon number two they're also in a cage with a lever in the beginning every time that they press the lever food comes out okay so now they're the same but then the first pigeon it stays the same they press the lever food comes out and this is called The Continuous reward schedule the second pigeon over time the schedule changes sometimes when they press the lever food comes out sometimes when they press it it doesn't come out maybe it might take them five or 20 times of pressing it for the food to come out and that's called the partial reward schedule so with the first pigeon once they turn off the food the pige will press it a few more time see there's no more food and stop pressing it the second pigeon once they turn off the food it will literally keep pressing the lever until it collapses from fatigue and that's because the partial reward schedule is so addictive that's also how slot machines work that's how gambling works sometimes I get what I want and sometimes I don't so I want to keep trying and I want to keep trying and that's what's happening with boys so boys give you a attention in the beginning right you get what you want they seem interested in you you go out then they start pulling back they're hot and cold sometimes they're interested sometimes they're not and you become addicted to that partial reward schedule will this time when I press the lever will you text me back or not and it feels really exciting and so securely attached partners are the levers in the first one where they interest in you and they loving you is continuous and that's what we should go after because that's what a healthy relationship is but people get so addicted to the boys and to the partial reward schedule that they're trapped in this cycle and so our brains are really they really develop in this way where when we don't know if we'll get what we want or not it's really exciting but that's not what's aligned with long-term relationship success oh that makes perfect sense tell me about you I want I I feel like from listening to your episodes I was like this is an avoidant attached maximizer this is a reformed Buck boy but what was the dynamic like with you and your girlfriend so for the first 25 years of my life I was the avoidant again grew up in said this a million times but grew up in a household where I think I thought relationships were prison I I ran from everybody that was interested in me and then I met a person who was H I would say she sits somewhere between being secure but also anxiously attached she has hints of both I get that where she's a really calm communicator and and she can just like like your husband if there's a problem like we should talk about it we should sit down and have a conversation about it not scream at each other not get um agitated um and being with her slowly eased me out of my cycle it's still there and it's still can be triggered and when it gets triggered this is how it looks and and this is how I know she's a bit of an anxious attached she'll we'll be on a date on Saturday I will stop paying attention to her in some way she will then increase the amount of need she has of my attention she'll start kind of like pecking because she's seen that she's no longer getting my attention then she goes really really quiet mhm because she's now really annoyed yeah because she lost my attention I then see she's annoyed yeah I don't want to argue but I want I want to know why she's annoyed I ask her why she's annoyed she basically explains that did something seven minutes ago that made her feel whatever I then we kind of get into it a little bit and I want to leave I want to like get my stuff and go to a hotel and I have to say in my head don't leave the house don't leave the house don't leave the house and at that point what she wants to do is she wants to Chase and this is kind of like a toxic combination cuz I'm trying to get out the front door and she wants to solve it and wants me to be even closer so it's almost like when we when we both get triggered together she gets gets increasingly needy and I want to run yeah you really just describe the anxious avoidant Loop and it's exactly that it's like I feel she feels disconnected from you so she wants to reattach and you feel smothered or trapped and so you need space exactly and then it's not that you're relationship is doomed in any way it's that you just have to learn how to both regulate your emotions and so for you it might be saying I see that you're really upset obviously something happened that went wrong I need a few minutes to regulate and so in that moment you're experiencing flooding where your cortisol is riding rising and you actually are in fight ORF flight mode and this is a really common thing in fights is that people don't take enough breaks so if you at all feel like you're flooding you can ask for a break but it's not saying this isn't important to me it's not saying we're never going to talk about this it's just saying I actually can't have this conversation in this moment with where my head is at and for her it's also understanding what did you do that triggered her and what could she do in that moment differently and so we talked about the strategies for avoidant attached but I can also talk about the strategies for anxious attached so for example distracting yourself going for a walk going to the movies doing something else um texting a friend and saying I really want to text the guy I'm interested in but he hasn't texted me back so I'm texting you instead or something called disconfirming evidence which is a fancy way of saying basically what's the alternative here so the story in your head is I texted him a meme this morning he hasn't texted me back he usually text me back right away clearly he's not interested and he's met someone else disconfirming evidence would be maybe he has a really busy week at work he mentioned that he has a big project or perhaps he's not feeling well what are the other reasons that he could not be getting in touch with you and it's about not creating a problem before you know there's a real problem and so both of you could work on those different strategies so that you can have this healthy relationship and that you're not constantly in what you call that toxic cycle of she's chasing and you're running yeah it's and I I agree we she's by far I'm not just saying this because she probably's going to listen I'll probably send her the episode because I always do by far the best relationship I've ever had in my entire life and I will 100% marry her as soon as she says yes yay but we do have that Loop but one thing that's interesting so I know about this from reading about it online it sounds like you were dating and then you broke up and then you went to Bali to chase her yes this is true you still and so right so when I hear that I'm like oh there's something in the dynamic where you as an avoidant attached person you doing the chasing that was breaking a pattern for you and so what was going on with that interesting yeah so we we were together for about two years and it wasn't it wasn't a great relationship in hindsight at that point cuz we were clearly quite immature and then we're lying in bed in Paris and she turns to me and says I no longer she says something along the lines of I don't like having sex with you and I didn't really know what that meant like I'm a I'm a young guy I'm like 25 26 years old no one's ever said that to me before I think I'm you know like I'm a stud I'm like yeah what what do you mean I've like I've I've always got compliments does that mean that I'm bad in bed what does that mean really a mascula thing to hear and so very quickly after that we broke up and then we were separated in that time Co rolls around she's not feeling great and locked down she knows that because of that incident but also just how she's feeling in her life anyway the depression all those kinds of things something's not right she needs to go she spends the next two years living in barley but so a year after the date when we we broke up I had you know looked at what else was out there and I think part of me had realized that that's probably that is the best person I'm ever going to meet I say it to my friends all the time I say I will I cannot find a better person and I think I'd had that realization that this was maybe the best person I'll ever meet um and so I made a plan I got on a plane I flew to Barley and went there really with the the aim of apologizing but Loki the aim was to get her back in some way went and apologized she just wasn't interested in me she wasn't rude she was really sweet and nice there was no romantic interest in me whatsoever and then on like I'm there for four weeks in total staying at the other side of the island with a friend of mine and then in the last week of my trip to Barley my sort of apology tour things slowly start to change and it actually happened when I said to where I'm going to go going back to the UK um and it's been lovely being here with you I sent her a nice text message and said you're doing really well I'm so proud of like the progress you're making on yourself and stuff and then the next day she text me saying can I see you before I go part of me is thinking I've been here for three and a half weeks you've shown no interest to me whatsoever maybe this is my last chance at Victory I'll just tell her to f off and again my mature brain for whatever reason showed up instead of course you can see me before you go and it was in those last 48 hours that everything changed that's when it was like we fell back in love with each other in those last 48 hours before I flew and we've been together ever since wow yeah thank you for sharing that with me I feel like there's so many good moments in there I got the chills when you were talking about how you could have chosen one path which was to say off but you chose to say of course you can see me because that's the moment of growth that's why I do the work that I do that's why I coach because we can just keep repeating the same patterns over and over again I work with 70-year-olds who have been doing the same thing over and over again and it's not until we understand this is a choice and I can make a different one that we get different results and so for you let's just break down that story and think about all the different moments so when she left and she was doing her own thing she probably became more attractive to you because she wasn't chasing you anymore and she was independent and then when you showed up you were doing what she probably wanted for a lot of the time which which is getting attention from you but still she wasn't needy in that moment as soon as you got there she wasn't like finally we can be together you had to choose each other and so both of you overrode your natural tendencies to really be in that moment and be your highest selves and there's just so many universes in which that didn't happen but because you flew there you overrode this avoidant attachment and you made mature choices you get this incredible prize of being with your girlfriend it's so C it's so crazy when you say there's so many universes where that wouldn't have happened yeah so the way that I see it is a great relationship is the culmination of a series of decisions am I ready to date who should I date who should I keep dating who should I get serious with who should I marry who should I have kids with and at each moment you get to choose and so the people in great relationships have made a bunch of good choices and so if you are single and you don't want to be you need to take a step back and so in my coach coing a lot of the work I do with people is looking at what's your relationship history we start with Middle School people tell me you know I was the only South Asian kid in a class full of white people and I never felt attractive until I went to Stanford and was around other South Asian people or people tell me I got a lot of attention and so I got a big head and I didn't develop a personality and people have all these stories about who they are and then they tell me about the relationships they've been in and sometimes they've been in abusive relationships sometimes they've been in just one long relationship and so they have these patterns and so we say what are those patterns resulting in and how can you make different choices to get different results and so really where the Behavioral Science part of my work comes in is understanding that we have these default behaviors we have these patterns and it's not until we illuminate those blind spots and then actively make different choices that we'll get the different results and for you that worked but there's definitely a world in which you and I are meeting here and you're still single you're avoiding attached and I'm trying to give you this advice but nothing really changes until you make the different Choice there was a couple other things I wanted to follow up on from the story so have you heard of the secretary problem only in your book okay so let me tell you about it and I I should give credit to where I heard about it so there's a great book called algorithms to live by and that's how I came across this so this is the mathematically correct way to know when to stop looking and when to choose someone so the idea is Imagine that you're hiring a secretary and you have a hundred people to choose from and you have to go through each one one at a time and say yes or no so after the first person yes or no after the second person yes or no and if you say no you can't go back so the question which is part of this way of mathematical thinking called optimal stop theory is how many people should you go through because if you choose too early you don't know what's out there but if you choose too late maybe all the good people have passed you by and so the mathematically correct answer is that you go through the first 37 people 37% and you say who is the single best person of that 37% that's now your benchmark person the next time that you find someone who's better than that Benchmark person you hire them okay so I go I I'm interviewing someone to be my assistant let's say I go through 37 people and this can be used in the context of dating as well yeah and I find someone called Jenny who was the best of the 37 but I've said no to so I can't go back and get Jenny so I've been on a date with Jenny or whatever I've interviewed Jenny so I'm now at interview number 38 what do I do the next you you keep going until you find someone who you like more than Jenny and then you say I found her and you stop and the reason why this is so important is because if you're a maximizer and we should get into what that means you want to keep looking and there are so many people who just have found someone who's better than their Benchmark person but they keep looking and they keep looking and then they keep looking and the pool is getting smaller and smaller and they don't realize it and so here's how that applies to dating we don't know how many people you'll date but one way we can think about it is let's just approximate how long somebody might date so let's say somebody dates from ages 18 to 40 what is 37% of the way through so it's when you're 26.1 years old so at that point you should look back and say who is my Jenny who was my Benchmark person the next time you find someone who you like more than that Benchmark person choose them and try to build a relationship with them and why this is so important is so many people keep looking so many people keep searching they're waiting for the perfect person and they don't understand that relationships are about finding somebody great and building a great relationship not the continuous search to find the perfect person who doesn't exist and that's a statistical mathematical equation that says on average if we do date from 18 to 40 then by 26 if you've already met someone who could be your benchmark person and that you should keep that as the framework and so the reason it's relevant to your story is you had a feeling that your girlfriend was your benchmark person or was your person and so you broke you guys broke up for a year you looked around and you were like there's nobody better and so obviously things are not exactly the same as a secretary problem and you could go back and you were lucky enough to be able to go back and find her but it was that feeling of I've seen what's out there she's the best that's who I want and I feel like so often people don't recognize how good the person they're with is or they get way past 37% and they're still looking and so a lot of the work I try to do with people is to help them understand I know you're a maximizer I know you're trying to find the perfect person but instead I want you to find somebody amazing and build a relationship with them and not be in this Perpetual cycle of trying to trade up so interesting you talked about this concept called maximizer which I want to double down on but um I feel like there will be a bunch of people out there who CL ask themselves as the first first attachment style anxiously attached that needs some help and advice so my girlfriend I think she's a little bit anxious attached what do anxious attached people need to know um to increase their probability of finding love so you Illustrated this really well in your story so you talked about how your girlfriend will want attention from you you don't give it to her she tries and then she shuts down so that's exactly what we see with anxious attached people so let me give you the equivalent of what I gave you for the avoid and attached so an anxious attached person will have a trigger so for example the trigger would be I ask somebody if we're hanging out tomorrow and they didn't get back to me so after the trigger happens they go into activating strategy so those are thoughts or feelings where you start spiraling and you're thinking they're not interested in me they met somebody else there's something else going on they don't like me anymore and you really are getting into that danger zone of coming up with all these reasons why that person is going to abandon you which is your biggest fear so then you do protest Behavior so the protest behavior and trust me I've been there is sending 10 texts in a row maybe it's sending 20 texts in a row leaving an angry voicemail so really acting out and then afterwards you decide to punish the person and you shut down so you send all those texts you send threats and then you turn off your phone and so you're really in this tough place where you've tried to reconnect with somebody and then you've gotten so upset that they're abandoning you that you actually pull back and so that sort of describes what might be happening with your girlfriend sometimes where she doesn't get what she wants it's very frustrating for her and then she shuts down so the strategies for the anxious attached I talked about them before but I'll say them again so some of the strategies for anxious attached are distracting yourself so going for a walk doing something else where you're not on your phone where you're basically not in a mode where you're waiting for somebody to text back I feel like those are the longest minutes of my life are waiting for that text back from that person the second thing is to text somebody else you know I wish I could say this to him and the third thing is this disconfirming evidence it's almost like inside your head is a judge and a jury and you're presenting to the judge here's all the reasons why it could not be true so then you're presenting to the judge and the jury here's all the reasons why that person might not be texting me back and so you're really doing everything that you can to not get into that protest Behavior moment because once you're flooded once you're in that protest Behavior moment it's really hard to recover and so it's both people are working on having different reactions to triggers and honestly if you look at all of the mindfulness stuff if you look at the work of Victor Frankle and man Man's Search for meaning so much of it is this idea of creating more space between an action and a reaction and if you can extend that space and choose a different reaction that's where the growth comes from and that's how we can overcome these negative behavioral Trends something you said that made me think about advice I once gave to a friend that I'm not sure is good or bad advice she was being ghosted and she came to me telling me she'd been ghosted and she showed me her phone and was like look and I looked at her phone conversation with this person and she was basically peppering him she was dragging the conversation you know what I mean where she's like asking the questions and he's giving um closed responses then she's asking another question then he's giving a closed response it was that cycle over and over again then the next day she text him and he didn't reply and I said to her she's a good friend of mine she works in one of my companies I said I think it's important to realize that people do what they want to do and the reason I said that to her is because she had started justifying I think in her her own mind what I saw as a clear rejection as something else I said I think it's important to let you know that just remember people do what they want to do he would have woke up this morning I'm sure he brushed his teeth because he wanted to do that he then would have eaten breakfast because I'm sure he wanted to do that so if he's not texting you back over and over again and you feel like you're constantly dragging the conversation I think it's important to know that he's doing what he wants to do and it's maybe a bit of harsh advice but I don't know I think that's great advice and I'm I'm smiling and I have sympathy for your friend because I feel like I've really been there obviously I don't know anything about her but let's say she's wired like me it's like well when I want something I go after it and it works in every other area of my life I set goals I go after them I achieve them and people respect the hustle it doesn't work in dating you can't hustle your way into a relationship and I think that's why so many of the women I work with are really smart and ambitious and they're like I've run a marathon I have amazing personal finances I've achieved all these goals why isn't dating working out for me and it does feel like this one aspect of your life where you can't muscle your way through it you actually have to learn this pretty Nuance stance and so for her she wasn't getting the cues and she wasn't getting the clues and so I just finished a bunch of research at hinge on this idea that we're calling DBL digital body language and so we talk about body language in normal conversation which is what are the non-verbal things that you're communicating are you crossing your arms you're not interested in me are you opening up are you interested in having this conversation even The Way We Stand well most of early dating is now happening over text what is your digital body language saying and so through this research I have this whole list of good DBL and bad DBL or signs that somebody's interested you and signs that they're not and this guy is doing all the signs that you're not he's answering the questions with one-word answers he's not asking a follow-up question he's not matching her style and so for her I think it should be a sign that he's not interested but she wants him to be interested so she's going to keep trying and in her in her head which I have been there it's like oh I just haven't found the perfect question yet for him to open up to it's like no he's not interested in you and I can hear my college roommate saying to me Logan don't make somebody a priority when they're making you an option and that's what's happening with her she's prioritizing him but he's not prioritizing her I think your advice is exactly right people do what they want to do and he's choosing not to invest in that relationship but at the end of the day that was not your guy he had already indicated in multiple ways that he wasn't interested you were still grasping on to the crumbs but you don't want the crumbs you deserve the whole cookie it's not like you ruin things with your person he wasn't your person and she always dates people that are either in marriages already or unavailable yeah well I mean going back to our theme of the anxious avoidant Loop and she's drawn to this avoidant person and when they're unavailable she loves the Chase and how can I convince them I don't know if she's Found Love since but I feel like growth for her will look like choosing somebody who's available and retraining her brain to see their availability as sexy and and interesting and correlated with relationship success which is going to feel different than how dating has been which is she's been going after people who are not available something she said to me kind of correlates to this because she was um on a dating app she hates dating apps but she was on a dating app B mind she's a mid-30s woman um and there was this wonderful like this really like wonderful guy he's nicely mannered guy and she said I'm not interested in him I said why she goes look at the background of his or whatever it was photo there's boxes on top of his cupboard uh and that was her reason for this like I thought I was like that's a really good guy he's got a great job seems really nice he's been really polite to her and the reason why she didn't want to be with him was because there was a box on the Wardrobe behind him in the Tinder picture this is what frustrates me about modern dating and you used the word ick before so I know you're familiar with it but the ick has become this trend where only because of her oh you know better from her okay she she says to me so PE for people listening who haven't heard of it the ick is this new trendy word that basically means the reason why all of a sudden you're not interested in someone and so my friend is the comedian Jared freed and he does hilarious bits about this and so he travels around the country asking women for their EXs and one of them is you're having an amazing date you want to go home with the guy it's time to pay the bill you open you you pull out your wallet and you hear he has a velcro wallet the ick you're not sleeping with him and he has these hilarious bits one woman told him my ick was that I was on a date with a guy and I imagined him being late for his bus and running for the bus and I could never be with him and Jared's like to be clear there was no bus and there was no running and she's like I just imagined it and that's what's you know the ick is hilarious when Jared does it it's hilarious you're laughing at it but I'm also like you know what I think we should get over the ick because the ick is just an excuse to not not get close to someone and I found in my work that people often confuse pet peeves for deal breakers so a pet peeve is something that annoys you maybe it's the velcro wallet but you could get over it a deal breaker is a fundamental incompatibility right I have asthma and you're a smoker this isn't going to work and so when all these people are confusing catp for deal breakers sorry it's the velcro wallet I it's so funny because you feel it you're like yes that's not sexy get a new wallet but it doesn't mean you couldn't be with that person now you've said it though there's going to be a lot of people that go on dates and that it's going to be the deal breaker yes or maybe we're saving relationships maybe people are going to get rid of those velcro wallets and actually get laid more what is it about a velc crew wallet though that I think it feels very high school what do you think like that's exactly I had one when I was 12 right like when you think of the CEOs that you admire you're not like Jeff bezos's pulling out his velcro wallet like this guy maybe he doesn't even have a wallet but you know what I mean and it's just this thing where it's like because you have this one thing wrong with you I can't be with you instead of being reasonable which is I can buy you a new wallet if we date this is a fixable problem but because people get this people get positive feedback for these stories right like you have the date with velker wallet guy you don't sleep with him Sunday morning you go to brunch with your friends you get all the social capital for telling the story and now we're having that on a massive scale with Tik Tok how many people are getting a lot of positive feedback and shares for these Horror Story these dating horror stories and so what ends up happening is it's dat entertainment you're dating for entertainment which I love dating stories this is probably one of the reasons I do the work I do is because I love Sunday brunches about dating that's the Sex in the City Empire but if you're dating for the funny story and you're not dating for connection you're not going to hit goals and so yes the velcro wallet isn't sexy I'm not saying it is but get over it X do you think that X are as you said kind of more of an excuse It's funny because I know I know someone who runs a dating podcast and she goes on honestly three or four dat dates a week she is a little bit of a hopeless romantic yeah um and I wondered to myself I said she goes she must have been on like a hundred dates a year and yet she still can't find someone like statistically I'm like you it's it can't be a supply problem that's exactly how I feel I meet with people and they say Logan I've been on a 100 dates in the last two years and I haven't met someone should I move what's wrong with the people out there it's always about how their city is wrong for dating it's what's wrong with everybody else and what I say in my head and what I say out loud to them is there was very likely somebody within that 100 person dating pool who you could have made it work with and we need to figure out why it didn't click because you will now go on 100 more dates and the same thing will happen unless you make a different choice and so this is how I developed this framework that I want to tell you about called the three dating Tendencies and so really this is the culmination of a lot of my research the idea that I've worked with hundreds of people now thousands of people in my classes and most people suffer from one of these dating Tendencies or most people can be categorized into one of these three dating Tendencies what they each have in common is unrealistic expectations so the first type is the romanz and they have unrealistic expectations of relationships so they are the person who really wants that meat cute they cousin met their boyfriend in high school and now they're married and they want to have a romantic we met story they don't want to meet on an app they believe that there's a soulmate one person for Life you'll know it when you see it as soon as a relationship hits a rough spot they think must not be my soulmate because if it was my soulmate it would be easy and effortless the second type is the maximizer the maximizer has unrealistic expectations of their partner so this is the person and I bet a lot of your listeners are maximizers where they feel like the perfect person is only one search away I need to keep searching for that person I want the ambition of my ex-girlfriend plus the hotness of this other ex-girlfriend plus the really great family of this other person and I can just wait until I find this Frankenstein version of the perfect person and so they're always waiting and theyve unrealistic expectations and they're waiting for the perfect person the third type is the hesitat and they have unrealistic expectations of themselves so they're not dating at all so in their head they fill in the blank I'll be ready to date when when I lose 10 pounds when I get a more impressive job when I clean up my apartment when I go to therapy I need to do these things to be lovable and then I can date I can't date now because nobody would be interested in me and so they sit at home maybe trying to get better maybe just thinking about trying to get better but they're not actually dating and they don't understand that the only way to get better at dating is by dating and the only way to figure out who you want to be with is by actually going on dates with people and if I'm if I'm a romanticizing so in the example I gave there with my friend's going on a 100 dates and she's finding no apparent suitable match it could be any of the first two I guess she could be a bit too romantic about how love should look or she could be a little bit too romantic about how a perfect partner should look exactly and I would want to understand more about her but yes definitely one of the first two if she's going 100 date she's not a hesitat so I'd want to understand why aren't things working out so it could be that she's finding that they don't match her image of the soulmate they don't come in the package that she's expecting my guess is the kind of person that goes on that many dates for that long is a maximizer that's just to me more associated with it because to go on that many dates you probably are meeting on the apps and so she's not obsessed with the we met story and so I think she keeps going on these dates waiting for something different to happen instead of understanding what's in her control and so if I was working with her what I would say is first of all tell me about these dates and she'd probably say I go on so many dates I mostly go on coffee and walking dates and then I would say well do you feel sexy on these dates or does it feel like a job interview are you saying the same thing things over and over again are you pressing play in your mind how long have you lived in London how long have you done your job how long have you had a dating podcast you're not even in the moment you've said these things to so many people you're not present you're not connecting you're not flirting you're just having a transaction and you expect that all of a sudden you're going to feel the spark but of course you're not your your environment isn't creating a spark and so I often tell people the dating environment is so important I had this one client and he kept going on dates with men at 7: a.m. he would say I'm really busy and I need to meet with them in the morning and so I meet them at the Starbucks below my office I was like who feels sexy or flirty at 700 a.m. before they've had caffeine this is a terrible way to date but in his head it was like I'll know it when I see it when I meet the right person I'll have that experience that's absolutely wrong the environment plays a huge role in how we feel connected to people it's why sometimes somebody might meet somebody in one setting and not be interested and meet them years later and be interested I met my husband many years before we started dating I met him in college it wasn't the right time for us and then when we met again it still took a year the environment matters so much and so really can you create a flirtatious romantic environment for a date and can you really think about what does that look like and so if you're going on daytime walking dates to save money and that's not working out for you try a wine bar try going out and sitting side by side there's really interesting research that shows when we make eye contact with somebody it can actually be harder to listen to them and to speak because we're so focused on the eye contact when we sit by side side by side actually takes the pressure off us and can make it easier to communicate and connect that's why people open up to each other on long car rides where you're both looking forward that's why I recommend that people sit side by side in a bar instead of across from each other and so for her she's going on one type of date and getting the same result and she's thinking it's the guy it's not the guy it's also you and it's also the environment so what is then the perfect environment and I want you to give me as much detail as possible including you use the word bar which is associated with alcohol yeah I want to know if alcohol is a good or bad idea for a date so I don't drink and I'm a fan of sober dating and in my work with Jen Z that has come up a lot so sober dating has become a much bigger thing with jenzie leading the charge and there's a few reasons why so one is they feel like I want to meet you not you under the influence of two cocktails another thing is we know that they struggle with mental health they feel this anxiety and they don't want to have that the next day and so way more people are going on sober dates and even especially in New York I've seen bars that have zero proof menus and so this is definitely getting normalized and so anyone who's interested in sober dating or just taking a month off drinking should try so absolutely don't feel like you need the liquid courage what makes a great date so I want people to think about what is the part of you that often doesn't come out on dates so let's say somebody is really serious but they have a funny side think about the last few dates you've gone on what side of you is coming out maybe you're going these interview style dates where you sit across from each other and you have a latte and you talk about your work the silly side of you isn't coming out and you're just being very serious can you design a date that emphasizes the part of you that you want to come out so can you go and play pingpong which you're really bad at can you go ice skating and make a fool of yourself can you be in an environment where you're less in control and you can show the silly side of yourself or even for me I love stand-up comedy could you go see standup with someone and then afterwards debrief all the jokes and and express your love of humor how can you have your dates show these different sides of yourself another thing is understanding that at the end of the day people really want somebody to play with in so much of my coaching I talk to people after the and we debrief the thing that makes me understand when they like someone is when they say it was so fun we just kept laughing everybody wants to laugh people want to align themselves with and have a long-term relationship with somebody who's fun but it's really hard because if you're in your mid-30s and you've been dating for a while and you have this feeling of I'm running out of time everyone else is married am I going to have kids it's really hard to relax and be fun you have a goal and trust me I'm the most goal oriented in person I get it but you have to do this dance of flirtation seduction playfulness because people don't want to be with someone who says I have the role of husband open will you please fill the role of husband I'm I'm searching to fill the spouse position on my team no nobody wants that they want a partner they want a person to play with they want to have that fun romantic playful energy and so you have to figure out are you able to show up that way and if not you need to take a break from dating or you need to date differently so that might look like instead of going from work to a date where you're in this boss mode maybe you take a break in between maybe you listen to a podcast maybe you take a bath maybe you what kind of put cost Diary of a CEO pump yourself up with stepen Bartlett you know basically you're shifting your mindset because if you you know this old expression that's like whether you think things will go poorly or you think things will go well you're right the same thing is true with dating your mindset has a huge impact so if you've gone on a 100 dates and it hasn't worked out you're going to say 101 is going to go the same way it will then go the same way so what are all the different things that you can change you can change what you wear you can change what you do you can change what you do prior you can change how long the date is one of my biggest things is date like a scientist what does a scientist do they have a hypothesis they test it and they're open to being proven wrong and so maybe your hypothesis is that the coffee dates aren't working for you great try some dinner dates try some morning dates try different things and see if something opens something new for you maybe it wasn't the coffee dates but at least you tested it so one thing that frustrates me so much about modern dating is when women set their height filters for six feet or higher I know in the US 86% of men are under 6t so when you set your height filter at 6 ft or taller you are excluding 86% of men you are only now seeing 14% of men and then among that group the pool is much smaller maybe you've dated many of them in your city and now you don't have anyone else to date well you should expand your filters because the height of the guy isn't going to predict your relationship success but you've just decided that you want someone six feet or taller and so you've set your preferences that way so dating like a scientist you might say I'm going to expand my filters I'm going to date men of any height or set whatever minimum height you want and then see can I be attracted to someone shorter I do this with my clients all the time and they find that it is actually much more about the person's personality or face but your dating app filters are like a bouncer in your club they're deciding who gets in and who doesn't and when you when you set your filter at something really restrictive like under the age of 30 over 6 feet tall your bouncers is preventing all these people from getting in and you're not even getting the chance to connect with people who could be a great partner there's also like dating hygiene that goes into that I guess you me and my girlfriend when we go to restaurants and stuff when we're waiting for the food or I don't know we sometimes look over at different people and we're like oh who do you think they are like what do you think their story is and we try and guess their story you know they're married they've been married for 20 years they're whatever and then you get The Odd Couple who they're super young and they're both glued to their phone and it looks like it's either a really really bad day or they just generally have like a not not such a great relationship what is the kind of good relationship hygiene or good dating hygiene that you think is conducive with finding somebody I'm so glad you asked me this because we actually just produced this thing at hinge called the distraction free dating guide and it's basically based on this it's like what are all the things that are getting in people's way and one of them is technology so I've absolutely seen those dates and it's really people of any age I don't think it's just genen Z I feel like that's unfair when people are like genen Z is so addicted to technology it's like who's all over Facebook it's Boomers who's the couple with their phones at it's often older people and so the distraction free dating guide is about understanding the research behind this so there's research from MIT Professor Sher turl that talks about the influence of a phone on the depth of the conversation so if a phone is on the table even if it's face down even if it's off you're much less likely to have a deep conversation because the reason is right now you and I are going deep your phone is not out I don't feel like at any moment you're about to be interrupted but if I felt like at any moment I could share something really deep and then your phone could go off and you could grab it that makes me not feel safe sharing so the conversation is more shallow because at any moment you could be pulled away so the first big tip is to put your phone away out of site the second tip is to know that there's other screens involved your watch is a screen you could also be pulled away by that I also recommend that people finish up any big work conversations or even life conversations before they go in so they're not feeling like oh I have to get back to that person sometimes people pull out their phones to show somebody a meme during the date do that later let that be your call back where you can get in touch with somebody and finally if you have plans for after the date make sure that they're really solid so that you're not during the date checking hey hey let me just see when my friends want to meet up and so all of these things all of these things seem fairly obvious right good phone hygiene but people don't understand how much their phones are getting in the way of connection that if you act just commit to having a phone free date hey let's both let's both just put our phones away first person to check their phone buys drinks it's actually a much better way to create deeper connection so on that point of shallow conversation a lot of dates and a lot of sort of Serial datas will engage in a lot of small talk what's your view on Small Talk skip the small talk so much of the research that we've done at Hing talks about how people are drawn to emotional vulnerability interesting they really want you to go deep and and they want to know what you're about and through my coaching I've been surprised at how hard this is for people so I have one client where I said you're going on all these dates they're not clicking I wonder what's going on what do you talk about on these dates when she told me the topics I was getting bored just listening to them and I said you're sharing facts not stories we need you to share stories and she said what do you mean what's a story what how would I how would I tell that so I said okay off the top of my head here are some conversations you talk about I said you know tell me about your family do you have any siblings and she said yes I have a brother and he lives across the country from me so I said okay the fact is that you have a brother who lives far away what is the feeling behind it and she said well he actually just had a kid and I haven't even met the kid yet and I feel disconnected from him and I'm like great that's the story that's the vulnerability the fact sets us up but then go deeper and then we talked about all these deeper things how she feels when her friends have kids and she doesn't and it's harder to have a relationship how she feels about her aging parents how she feels about her industry and it it was so interesting to me because I love conversation this is my art form this is what I love doing but just breaking it down into pieces for her was something that she needed and so I want people to take away this idea of share stories not facts and that means going deeper and so you don't want to be TMI and tell everybody about the crazy trauma in your family but you might let somebody in and say oh I'm struggling with this thing at work I have a new manager and I feel like we haven't clicked yet and there's been layoffs at my company so it's kind of been a stressful time or saying hey I'm about to take this pill because I actually was in an accident a few years ago and now I need to take this pill to regulate my system something like that where it's just saying like I'm a person with baggage I bet you're a person with baggage too our baggage can match and instead we're so focused on these dates on coming across as perfect but the truth is when you have a shiny perfect exterior there's no cracks for me to grab on to you actually need to show me the cracks so that there's something to grip and I can actually feel connected to you and I feel like a lot of my work with people especially older people is telling them that it's safe to let someone in and they've worked their whole life 50 or 60 years to say look at me look what I've accomplished I'm puffing up my chest look at how perfect I am but people aren't drawn to perfection because then they feel afraid of their own imperfections people are drawn to somebody who's real because then that creates a safe space for them to be real too vulnerability is the bridge I guess you could say vulnerability creates a bridge to connection um with that in mind is it conceivable then that people that have the lowest self-esteem feel the need to create the perception of perfection the most and therefore struggle because thinking about one of my friends that has low self-esteem ahead of a date this person will it has like a three-day routine where they go and get their hair they everything done fake tan bloody probably get their toenails done wax this whack wax my butt whatever and it's this huge thing they have a really low self-esteem they go on and they go on the date and I can only just imagine as you were speaking that they go on the date and try and like hit this person with perfection like everything about me is perfect I know underneath that they're struggling with their self-esteem and their self-image but I it made me think that there might be correlation between low self-esteem and our willingness to be vulnerable which will also mean our will our ability to form connection I think it's an interesting Theory I haven't studied it I bet it happens both ways so I think somebody with low self-esteem could feel like I'm going to be rejected anyway so I'm not even going to date so those might be the hesitates that I talked about they also might be the people that you talked about where they're like I have so many flaws I can't let you in because if you know the real me you'll reject me so I have to keep you at arms length mhm however I also think there's this other person who actually has pretty high self-confidence but they go through the world bragging or they say the way that I got investors in my company is by showing what a big man on campus I am and how I'm going to scale my company and that what Society has prized in them is how together they are so they've never been in a situation before where their vulnerability has been appreciated so it's actually pretty hard for that person and I think that just to generalize it this happens with a lot of men where Society wants people to be strong and wants people to feel like they have all their together and so then to suddenly say hey be vulnerable on the date that doesn't feel safe to them they don't have that and so I don't think it's necessarily just low self-esteem I also think it's they feel like it's really risky to show that they're not perfect that's the journey I've been on is when I was younger and most insecure I was never vulnerable that felt like a huge risk that I was not willing to take and as I got more secure with myself I've been able to be much more more vulnerable and that means like having conversations where I admit my and that's also why I think this podcast has worked for me because I I say on stage a lot I ran the experiment of being honest I being vulnerable about my about my imperfection about my doubt about my mental health all of these things and that experiment resulted in connection that I was not expecting I thought vulnerability was a repellent turns out it's a magnet and that was like a revelation in my life so I've doubled down on that that concept of just like share it and instead of repelling people it actually ends up drawing them closer which I think is great I absolutely love what you said and I hope people rewind and listen to that part again because that's honestly a lot of what I'm trying to get across so a few months ago I sent out this email to my newsletter and I said do you worry you're undatable is there something about you where you feel like people will reject you because of that what is that and hundreds of people wrote in and they said I'm undatable because I have a chronic illness that makes me have chronic fatigue I'm undatable because I don't have a close relationship with my parents I'm undatable because I've slept with too many people I'm undatable because I haven't slept with enough people every side of every coin people felt like they were undatable and then I turned that around and the next email I sent out I shared all these things and I said this is what you're all feeling you all feel like you're undatable because of these things none of these things make you undatable they actually are your vulnerability that if you share somebody will feel connected to you but you're not putting it out there and you're not sharing and you're not connecting and I think people who have been on the journey you're on have proven that when you are vulnerable people feel connected to you because they say Steven struggling with something that I'm struggling with I want to be a part of what he's doing because I can learn from him when you come across as perfect people don't feel connected to you because they can't relate my friends that don't share their vulnerabilities I feel less close to them because I'm like well you must have it all figured out and you must think I'm a mess but when they text me what they're struggling with and I text them with what I'm struggling with that's the depth of our friendship and I can judge my friendships based on how real we we are with each other and so I think that younger people but really A lot of people have this idea that if you really knew me you would reject me and the truth is if you really knew me you would feel closer to me and we would have a deeper connection so true even you know I I talk about this experiment it's an ongoing experiment I'm getting better at being more and more vulnerable I think it's only in the last like even I'd say six months that I've open opened up to my girlfriend about things I would normally just keep from her as well like how I'm really feeling when I have my like really bad days share like run I call it experiment because it feels like one it is it is that's your life experiment yeah yeah like letting her know in those really tough moments how I'm feeling and because I'm a man I sometimes feel like I'm supposed to be strong and perfect all the time but and that like there's this part of my brain that thinks okay if I share this with her maybe she's going to like not think I'm a man anymore because I'm like CU I'm experiencing like a weak like an emotion that Society might associate with weakness but it's always been the opposite and it's such a an illusion that feeling that like opening up about my emotions to her even when they emotions of I don't know it could be self-doubt or it could be like um struggles with mental health that she might run off and be like G yuck but it's always the opposite right your your relationship's getting deeper and deeper and it's probably completely different than the first era of your relationship those first few years you weren't sharing those things you were actually having you were perfect perfectly shallow perfectly inauthentic and now that you're in this inauthentic relationship that's why she feels like the love of your life that's one of the reasons is because she's the person who has made you feel safe and then you can be your real self and I feel like that's so much of the work that we're all doing is when you see me in my darkest moments in my hardest times do you run towards me or do you run away and so many of us don't even get to that point of revealing ourselves because we think the other person will run away but you have revealed yourself and she's gotten closer to you and that's allowed you to feel safe doing that even more and so it's this perpetuating cycle of I share we connect and then I can do it again but if you don't share it all then you never get to have that positive reinforcement that comes from the connection but also in there is I share we connect she feels more safe to yeah yes connect that's a huge part of it is when people say to me Logan I know that I'm looking for a long-term relationship when should I bring that up we do this modeling exercise where you say to somebody hey I've been dating for a while I have had some fun but I know that I'm looking for a long-term relationship and I'm ready to build a family what about you I didn't come at you saying Stephen what are you looking for because then you feel like there's a right a wrong answer I better tell her that I want a long-term Rel relationship no you're just going to say what you think I want to hear by sharing the background and letting you know what I'm looking for I'm giving you space to be able to do that and so a lot of it is I share first and then you share I create the space to share and so this is going to sound not humble but my friend said to me she's like Logan you're a great conversationalist I've been trying to analyze why what do you think it is and I was like I don't censor myself I really say what's going on so if you ask me how I'm feeling I might say I feel like I'm so stressed out I'm experiencing burnout I'm forsaking my relationship with my husband here's all the things that are wrong and it's like I don't even know how to just say I'm fine but I think that when I do that people are like I can take a breath I can sigh I can feel relieved because I can tell you all the things that are wrong in my life and not that every conversation should be a venting session but I think that people want to feel like they're getting to know the real you and if they're only getting the perfect you then they don't feel like they know you at all and there's something in that that the 99% of our Lives is imperfect it is messy it is like eating the pot noodle on my stomach at 2 a.m. watching junk television that is the 99% of my lives but and we when we look out onto the world on social media we see this we obviously see this like highlight reil which represents maybe the 1% of Our Lives someone's in the Maldives we maybe go there once in a while the thing that we can connect with and relate to the most is the mess of life so that's maybe another reason why we find people sharing their MTH so resonant because it's the thing we can relate to the most it's the thing we experience the most I agree and I would I would mostly say social media is bad for that because you get more likes for the shiny picture on your scuba vacas versus this is me with my mascara running because I had a bad day but I do think gen Z is doing a good job at being more real I think their interest in Tik Tok over Instagram sort of their unfiltered view is kind of like let's let it all hang out and I think that people are actually responding to authenticity even in my own social media I'm trying to make that switch from like the millennial have my together to being more real and so I would say overall I think social media is bad because it perpetuates the idea that you're the only one with the mess but I do think things are potentially trending in the right direction with Jen Z and Tik Tok embracing some of the more real unfiltered authenticity as you guys may know this podcast is sponsored by one of my favorite bands in all the world which is whoop AI is a topic I've spoken about various times on this podcast and it's a topic that I'm pretty obsessed with but we don't often talk about how it could be used as a force to make our lives even better whoop is using the power of AI to drive meaningful positive change my whoop doesn't leave my wrist and their new feature which is called whoop coach uses the power of advanced AI to synthesize all of your health and fitness data and to provide you with personalized recommendations to support you on your health and fitness journey you can literally ask it questions like why am I so tired or can you help me build a strength training program and its Advanced AI system will provide you with answers that are unique to you so if you would like to check it out and level up your health and fitness journey in the process go to join. whoop.com CEO to get a free months whoop membership some of the things that I used to go for when I was younger when I was looking for a perfect partner I would be able to reel off things like I want this color hair and I want them to look like this and I want this this this this it was like a shopping list like apples plums it was like everything was on there um as I got a little bit older and I did a little bit of hindsight research on what I was actually looking for it the the list reduced and it became more about fundamental things and I got down to these three things I thought you need in a partner to be happy I'm going to run these things past you and get your thoughts I believe you need a sexual connection so I'll say sexual attraction I I believe you need an intellectual connection and the last one is I felt that you need to mutually bake you need to mutually make each other better at what you do and for me that's like my mission doing this or running businesses and for her it could be she's a breath work practitioner and um whatever else we make each other better we're sexually attracted and we're intellectually um stimulating of each other I think those things are great I don't think everyone should write them down as their three things but I think it works for you and I can tell you why they are more about who the two of you are together than her quality so maybe your early list had this body type this hair color this eye color this ethnicity whatever it was it was about The Superficial qualities and so there's actually a term for this from relationship science and we call it relation shopping shopping for a partner like you'd shop for a pair of bluetooth headphones you log on to Amazon and you say Okay I want ones that are this color this weight this battery life and then you start to think oh I can shop for a partner the same way and it just doesn't work what works is relation shipping which is looking for a long-term partner and putting in the work to make that happen so you want to move from relation shopping to relation shipping but this is very common people come to me often these maximizers and they say I know exactly what I want Logan I just need your help finding that person so rarely does that ever work out the person that ends up making them happy in the long term is very rarely who they thought they should be with and so the truth is you think you know what you want but you're wrong and the older you get and the more you think you figured it out the more you're actually excluding really great partners because you think oh I want to find someone like myself or you think well if her parents are divorced and she probably doesn't know how to be in a great relationship so I only will date people whose parents are together you're making all of these assumptions that are wrong the better attitude is to date like a scientist I think I need to be with somebody who's this tall I think I need to be with somebody whose parents aren't together well date date someone who's different from that and see if you could fall for them and so when I'm working with someone in a coaching capacity and they say to me Logan I met this guy but he's not my type in my head I hear ding ding ding because that's often them making a different Choice that's going to lead to a different result and those are way more often the relationships that work out and so when people come to me with that checklist I'm not saying great let's run a LinkedIn search to find that person I'm like let's do the work to help you actually figure out who will bring out the best side of you and I can tell you all the research about what's correlated with long-term relationship success and what's not but my favorite way of viewing it is who are you around that person what side of you do they bring out and so I have this list of questions called the post- date 8 and there are eight questions to ask yourself after a date the point of the post-date 8 is that when you go on a date with a check check list in your head you're evaluating the person as if you're on a job interview are they good-looking enough for me are they ambitious enough for me are they funny enough for me you're evaluating instead with the post8 8 it's actually training you to tune into your experience the experiential mindset are we laughing together do I feel desired in their presence do they make me feel more energized or less energized and finally what side of me do they bring out because whoever that person brings out in you is who you will be for the rest of your life in that Rel relationship and don't you want to be the happy secure desired hilarious version of yourself where do I find uh this post date 8 picture in your book I had this is something from my book that I liked it but it's really blown up because I feel like people really use it they take a picture of it on their phone they take a screenshot from my Instagram and they ask themselves after the date and it really changes the way they show up on the date and it's also a great way to say should I date this person again because my slogan my motto has become the spark and the spark is this idea that we go after the all-encompassing initial chemistry the fireworks but the spark often leads to relationships that burn out and instead you should go after the Slow Burn the person who's not initially as exciting the secure person who' make a great long-term partner but to train yourself from looking for the spark to looking for the Slow Burn how do you do that you need a new barometer so with the postdate 8 you ask yourself these questions after a date and then you see am I interested in um is my interest trending upwards after each date and it's a way of training your brain away from the initial chemistry maybe the anxious avoidant Loop to a new way of dating so the post dat eight questions are all kind of um they're all kind of sensible yeah I'm pretty sensible and I guess this is ranking them more on whether they are a secure person than whether they are that kind of super spicy K and pepper maybe be little bit abandoning anxious type yeah I think it's I think it's doing a few things so one is do you know the research on gratitude journals and why they work no so if you throughout the day have to look for three things to write in your Journal that you're grateful for at the end of the day you're training your brain to look for those things like I almost missed my flight but I made it maybe normally you wouldn't even think about that but because you have to look for things to be grateful for you make a little mental note and then you feel more gratitude the same thing works with the post8 a because I have to answer at the end of the date what side of me did they bring out how did I feel in my body I'm paying attention to that during the date so it's overriding the checklist mindset it's overriding the evaluative mindset I'm not thinking are you good enough for me I'm thinking what are we creating together so it's really training me to be more Mindful and really tuning tune in to what it feels like to be around you because so often what happens with daters is they think he's from a good family he has a great resume he makes a bunch of money we should work out this should be a great relationship he's good on paper well when you're in person he makes you feel like he's rude to you and he's inconsiderate but you're so focused on his resume qualities that you don't think about it with the post8 8 you'll be like I felt very bad on that date I shouldn't see him again so it's taking what people are doing wrong and it's training them to focus on what really matters what are some of the things that people think matter less than they actually do as it relates to finding someone falling in love and having a great relationship so some things that people you know they think are really important are actually not important in reality yeah so let's go through that so here are some things that matter less than people think they do for long-term relationship success so the first one is looks of course you should be attracted to the person but the truth is that we have adaptation we adapt to whatever is around us so I like to joke that even the hottest person you know there's somebody who's sick of sleeping with them that's just the truth of the human brain is that we adapt to what's around us and so obviously you should be attracted Ed to the person but I wouldn't optimize for the hottest person the next one is similar which is money obviously money makes things easier there's tons of research that when couples have enough money to Outsource things like cooking and cleaning and child care they have more time to connect but the same thing is true with money and there's this idea called the transition rule so when you think about winning the lottery what you imagine is going from your current salary to what you would have with the lottery and what that change would feel like but over time and we know this from the research about a year after you win the lottery you are about as happy as you were before because you've adapted to your new circumstances and the same thing is true with people who become quadriplegics if I say to you how bad would it feel to become a quadriplegic you think about the change and you think it would be extremely terrible but what actually we find is that about a year after becoming a quadriplegic somebody is the same happiness as they were before and so the same thing is true with looks and money is that we adapt to our circumstances so don't over optimize for for it the next thing is having a similar personality or similar Hobbies it's fine if we have different Hobbies as long as you make me feel like I can explore mine without judging me for it so interesting because me and my girlfriend are completely different she is super spiritual she believes things that are metaphysical and can't be proven and I'm like science science science evidence right and maybe at some point in your life you thought oh we have to have the same interest no you probably both want to be curious and be respectful and you want understand her breath work stuff it doesn't mean you need to share it and with similar personalities it's the same idea I remember I was coaching this guy who had a huge Larger than Life personality crazy nicknames life of the party and he wanted to find someone like that cuz he's like well she needs to party with me I was like dude you are so much two of you in a relationship would be exhausting two of you at the same dinner party would be exhausting I want you to find somebody who compliments you and so the woman he ended up with is very different from him she's not at the party she's at home but she's the home base for him and he is the energizing wild part of their relationship and so it's not that people have to find their opposites it's that you shouldn't focus on just finding your identical twin your personality twin what are the things on the flip side of it then that we should be looking for that people don't typically think are that important right so relationship science research shows that some of these things are really important and that people underestimate they're important for relationship success so kind and loyalty they sound really simple but you want to align yourself with somebody who will treat you with kindness who's compassion who shown kindness to other people in their lives loyalty if you're in this for the long term don't you want a teammate who will be there through thick and thin another one is emotional stability that's what the relationship research finds somebody who's emotionally stable is just great to be in a long-term relationship with some of the ones that all add to it are the ability to make hard decisions together so life is hard what happen happens when there's an issue with your child or when you have an aging parent you have to decide where to live don't you want this to be a teammate who you respect and admire and you can make hard decisions together another one is the ability to fight well and so feeling like when we fight we can fight in a respectful way we can take a time out when we're flooded and we can say hey what you just said really hurt me I need to take a break or can we fight in a way where we're teammates and it's us against the world versus we're in battle and it's you versus me and finally the one that has become the most important to me is this idea of what side of me you bring out because you could be perfect on paper but something about you reminds me of my dad something about you reminds me of my middle school Billy and I don't feel good around you and so that's honestly why finding love is so hard because it's not an algorithm it's really complicated in some Universe we make perfect sense but in this universe you annoy the out of me and so we're not supposed to be together and so there's a a sense of find the person who feels like home find the person that brings out your favorite side of yourself because that's who you'll be in the relationship longterm one of the most interesting ones for me is having the skill to fight well you didn't say having the skill not to fight at all but it's really about your conflict resolution strategy together you mentioned earlier was it Julie and John gotman yeah they've done some work on this absolutely yeah that's really where I learned about all this so basically doctors Julie and John gotman talk about how most fights are Perpetual 69% of fights are Perpetual what that means is we will never come to a conclusion so let's say I like to get to the airport early you like to get to the airport late the conclusion isn't you start to get to the airport early it might be we accept the other person's View and we go to the airport separately so you're not looking for a person with whom you don't fight you're looking for a person with whom you fight well and whose set of problems you can deal with and this is part of maturing is there's stories about people who say you know I dated this person but I broke up with them for this problem then I dated the next person who had the opposite situation and they they were fine in that area but then they had this problem it's like at some point you have to realize you are choosing a set of problems there's no one with whom you don't have problems and so my mother-in-law who's a therapist she says to me when couples tell me they don't fight I say do you also not have sex because it means you're not being real and you're not getting to the edges you're not getting to the conflict you're not getting to the root of a relationship so interesting that idea that it's just about the problems you're accepting and that because there is you people watch Disney right so Disney tells us that this is going to be this perfect person he comes down she comes down wearing a wonderful dress perfect we we get Happ happily ever after we don't think as of relationships as you choosing the problems you want to accept and then working on those going forward you know absolutely yeah I call this the happily ever after fallacy you think there's this idea of the hard work of dating is finding somebody and then everything will be easy honestly finding somebody is hard but the rest of it is really hard too so for those romanticizes that are obsessed with the we met and they're like I don't want to meet on an app it's not romantic I say to them if you're going to be in a 50y yearlong relationship the day you meet is 0.55% of the total relationship who cares how you meet the Romantic part is that you met and you built a life together it doesn't matter that you didn't have a romcom moment where you were at the farmers market reaching for the same tomato at the same time so get over the we met story and start meeting people and what about when we should get married cuz I'm in the point now I've been in a relationship for what four years so is that a good time to pop the question should I wait longer there's got to be some data and research on people that end up having successful man marriages versus unsuccessful ones I've also got a friend actually that he's getting to like 37 years old now and he's always telling me about this like Rush he's going like Steve you don't understand I'm 37 so he's trying to rush people down the and it's resulting in continual breakdown in relationships he's now been in I'm going to say four relationships in the last four years in one of them he moved the girl in in 20 days after knowing her that didn't go well in the second one he flew her from another country on the second date to move in with him and that also didn't end well and before he flew her from far away land to Europe to that hotel room on the second day I said to him I was like bro listen take it slow because in dating and in relationships and in life the slow way is the only way um and he that's when we were sat on my couch at home and he told me listen Steve I'm 37 you don't understand I haven't got that much time and I think by rushing it he's actually ruining the chances of even if that person was right he's they're going to skip past a bunch of necessary work I agree with you I think he's focusing on the clock and not focusing enough on the connection and so there's no perfect time to get married there is some research that suggests that if You' you've been dating for more than two years before you get engaged that the relationship has a greater chance of success or if you're older than a certain age you have a greater chance of success all of those things are true but what I would really focus on is this idea of decide don't slide so there's research that shows that there's two ways to move through relationship Milestones deciding is having an intentional conversation so you might say to your girlfriend I assume you live together but you might have said to her in the past let's move in together what does moving in together mean to you and this happened with a couple that I know where one person said moving in means we're testing the relationship and the other person said moving in means we're engaged to be engaged well they weren't on the same page so they didn't move in together and they waited until they were on the same page that's deciding sliding is just slipping through the next stage of the relationship well my lease is up so let's move in together and couples that slide their way through the next stage of the relationship end up being in relationships that are less intentional less happy and even have less less sex and so I really would encourage people to decide their way through these relationships and through these milestones and so for you it's about having a conversation with your girlfriend which I'm sure you have all the time what do you want out of life where do you see us living how do you want to spend your time together Do you want to build a family what would that look like and having these relationship conversations that people often don't have because there's this thing that happens where when you're in love with someone you assume that you're the same and so you think oh well I've never talked to her about whether we're going to live in London long term but we love each other so much I bet she feels the same way I do it's like no you have to make the unconscious conscious and you have to actually see if you're on the same page so my advice is less focus on how long you should date before you get engaged or how long you should be engaged before you get married and more like are you having the explicit conversations about what you want because that's the most important part of moving to the next stage and do you think I know you have a role at a dating app but do you think dating apps have been a net positive to society I do because it's helped so many people find love there's this idea of a thin dating market so if you're over 50 if you're in the lgbtq plus Community it was really hard to find love how did you know who in your neighborhood was around who was single who was interested in you and so it's just making all these matches that wouldn't happen otherwise and we know from the research from Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford that since 2017 the number one way that couples are meeting is onine I say this in part because I had Whitney wolf her on the podcast who's the founder of Bumble and I was really surprised actually that when I looked at some of the feedback on the episode specifically from men there was it open my eyes to the way that certain men feel about dating apps they feel and then I spoke to Scott Galloway who told me that it's really difficult if you're in like the bottom percentage of men because the top like 10% of men are having all the sex and all the dates and there's has kind of lost 50% of men at the bottom that like aren't getting swiped on they don't have all the money they're kind of you know I totally hear that and I absolutely work with clients who have the same thing but when I meet with them I feel like there's so many other things going on that's holding them back from Finding Love and it's not just the technology so first of all somebody can be on a dating app but also meeting people in real life there's nothing holding you back from hitting on somebody in person joining a pickle ball league and talking to someone and so I feel like we make a mistake when we think everything related to love happens on my phone the phone is just the modern-day Matchmaker but there's so many other parts to it there's other ways to meet and there's other ways to mess it up and so a lot of the work that I do with people you know I know all the tips and tricks for the best hinge profile I know what a good opening line is I am familiar with all of the stuff that makes people successful but that only gets you to the first date the rest is on you I'm curious you're curious about what the tips and tricks for a great hinge profile oh sure yeah I'll go through all of them I mean we have done tons of research on this at hinge and our basically our philosophy is the people who are finding success what are they doing differently and how can we teach other people to do that so these are the top tricks for a great hinge profile so first of all your profile is telling a story who are you show us different sides of yourself and you want to start with a clear head shot this is what you look like no filters no sunglasses I should be able to see from that first photo what you look like you also want to have the following photos a photo of you doing an activity that you love a photo with you and with friends and family show us you have a social life and a full body picture then for the prompts you want to have a mixture of humor and vulnerability okay let's just pause on this because I want to double down on some of these so the first photo should be a head shot and this is and I don't mean literally a professional headshot I mean just your face clearly not far away no filters no sunglasses just this is what I look like and not like a jail head shot or anything like that but not a mug shot not a mug shot a head shot and the data suggest that those people who have a clear head shot no filters no glasses no nothing have the most success yes all of this is based on the hinge research for what we find what we have found makes a successful profile and what people are looking for on your profile and then you want to show that you have a diverse sort of social life including family and friends so at least one picture with family and friends that shows us that you have a social life it shows us that there's people who you love who love you it also kind of gives you this image of this is what dating me would be like if you date me like here's the kind of people that we're going to hang out with there's a couple ways this can go wrong and the number one is what we call the where's Waldo photo which is the photo where I can't tell which one you are so it's you know 10 white women in bridesmaid's dress which one of these white women are you don't make me do work to zoom in and see who you are just don't include that photo so it should be very clear in the photo who you are you also shouldn't have any photos where it's ambiguous is this the person that you are dating is this the person that you wish you were dating so make sure it's clear that there's no romantic interest in the photo and I can tell at a glance which one is you on that point I've got a friend I always say I've got a friend on this podcast people think I'm just making these friends up I actually am just talking about guys St no friends he's never he's trying to do this podcast to make friends nobody is friends with him you know what's funny is when I say I've got a friend I'm literally talking about five people and I probably said I've got a friend like 200 wait I kind of was thinking about this because you spoke on a podcast about you were like I have six friends that I text with three of them are in sexless relationships I was like anyone in your extended network is going to know you're basically talking about your friends sex relationships they know when they're cool with it and also when when I think it's a bit too revealing in terms of identity I send them the episode ahead of time and say hey I told a story that from from us beforehand is it okay for me to run it and every time I talk about my girlfriend I send her the episode and go babe okayy this is what I said about our situation is it okay and even like the thing I said about that actually makes me feel better as a listener cuz I'm like he's blowing up all people it's funny cuz I was about to say to you I've got a friend and I was and I've actually spoken about them a second ago but um one thing that I noticed on their profile was every single picture that they had on their profile had them holding a glass of alcohol and I remember thinking it was cuz I I I I was so bad on dating apps for the I don't know the one month that I tried but when I looked at this person's dating profile when they showed me I remember they they were telling me about the guy that had the Box on top of his wardrob I was like oh this is the same this is the same I was like every single um picture on your dating profile you're holding alcohol and you're in a party is that are those subtle do those subtle cues matter yes so if I looked at her profile I would say hey do you notice anything in common about these and she would say oh I guess I'm holding alcohol in all them and I'd say exactly so it's not that I think people are going to think you're a lush it's that you're only showing me one side of you right and so I see this all the time where I was evaluating a woman's profile in my course and we do um live profile feedback and she had four pictures from a photo shoot she had done with her dog I was like look your dog is plenty cute but all I know about you is that on one day you wore this dress and this is what your dog looks like I was like you're telling me a story but you're only telling me one chapter and so you really want to have variety and so your friend can have one photo with alcohol or it's not about the alcohol it's about show me different sides of yourself I imagine most of those photos were taken at night or most of those taken photos were taken inside at a restaurant or brunch or a club show me different sides of yourself and really it's a storytelling exercise and so going back to prompt so hinge has these prompts which are ice breakers that you respond to like my love language is or my therapist would tell you or my typical Sunday and that's a chance to tell me about who you are and so the biggest mistakes that people make with their hinge prompts are onew answers which show no effort if you're not willing to put effort into your profile why would I think you'll put effort into the relationship ship they also um if there's grammatical errors or typos unfortunately people are looking for reasons to say no so they won't be into that or being all one flavor so all dad jokes are all super Earnest you want to have a mixture of all of that and so it's like your dating app is your billboard you have limited room what is the story that you're trying to tell I recommend that people be really specific this is a rule in humor and it's also a rule in dating apps so this girl that I worked with she had on her profile I don't know how to ride a bike and she said that that was one of the things that she got the most comments on cuz it was just super specific or I want to debate with you how bad it is to parallel park in Boston there's a rule in comedy that the specific is universal the more specific you go the more people relate to it and the same thing is true and so the things that I look at on people's profiles are do you have any cliches get rid of those make it specific do I feel like you've mentioned anime in two of your answers I already get that you like anime try something else and so so really understand that you have this limited space to tell your story and the best way to do that is to have different pictures and different prompts show different sides of who you are what about a smile does that make a difference Smiles are good yeah I so basically in my book I have some research on things like looking away from the camera looking towards the camera and that was before I worked at hinge and that was based on some research that I had found that was publicly available now that I work at hinge that's not something that's come up in the research I think those things differ but people don't like selfies they don't like gym selfies they don't like smoking selfies so those are all photos that you should avoid interesting Logan we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest in the Diary of a CEO and the question that has been left for you is kind of fitting because it somewhat links to the work that you do the question is what is great sex oh my gosh I always feel like I'm not the sex pert let me think about my real answer I think great sex is losing yourself in the moment and being transported to a different place we play so many different roles in our lives we're pretending to be this person or that person but I feel like when you feel safe enough when you feel turned on enough when you have the right erotic connection with somebody you can actually just lose all the artifice and be fully present and fully express yourself and connect in this deep way and I think many people have never had great sex but once you've had it you want to keep having it and so great sex is the Deep connection that comes from being fully present taking risks attuning yourself to the other person and really allowing yourself to experience pleasure Logan thank you thank you because this is the the best book ever written on this subject it quite clearly is and I say that because a lot of these books in this category that talk about relationships and love and dating they are built on Vibes it's like gossip Vibes and like you know kind of like I don't know I how to explain it there's just no sort of basis underneath the advice that they give your book is based on science and it even says that on the front the surprising science that will help you find love because you think through psychology and the lens of science and that is why this book is so important and if I read this book and I was an author thinking about writing a book about dating I would not write a book about dating because I think that within it you encapsulate so many of the fundamental um nuggets of wisdom that anybody struggling in dating or relationships or is looking for dates or looking for a great relationship or love um needs to find so I highly recommend that everybody goes and gets this book how to not die alone what an amazing title and thank you so much for your generosity generosity today um you've helped me answer so many of my questions that I've had and I feel like I'm going to be quoting You Forever After reading this book so thank you thank you for all the compliments it means so much to me I'm I'm honored that I get to do the work that I do and thank you for letting me share it with more people as you all know this podcast is sponsored by hure and one of my favorite products that they've ever created is their hu Daily Greens it actually performed so well when we released it that it's sold out completely and the only thing I'm back here to say to you guys is that it's now back in stock it tastes amazing and it's actually got 91 vitamins and minerals and whole food ingredients in one scoop it's nice not to have to think about taking lots of different pills and vitamins in the morning I can just take this and I know that I'm giving my body a good dose of all the vitamins and minerals that it needs every morning it's a lot better tasting than having to force down some of the other green powders I've tried and it's really reassuring to know that I'm looking after my body properly unfortunately and currently this product is only available in the US so anyone in the USA head to hu.com to get it before it runs out again but anyone that's not in the US and wants it to to come to their country please send me a DM a direct message and I'll speak to the team at hu in our board meetings and I'll let them know that you want it in your [Music] country [Music] oh