Hinge's Relationship Scientist Gives Dating Advice - Logan Ury

people don't want it choose a restaurant choose a hotel choose a purchase without doing tons of research which is fine if you're going to tulum and choosing among 16 airbnbs but it's not fine when you are choosing among thousands of potential partners and so what does this era of maximizers do they always keep swiping saying who else is out there logan yuri welcome to the show thank you so much for having me i was very excited to receive this invitation what does being the director of relationship science at hinge entail you know it's really a

dream job and if i can just go off topic right from the beginning i recently found an email from march 29th 2012 where i emailed a guy at okcupid who i had met in an event and i was clearly trying to network with him and i was like how's your move to la by the way i'd love to work at okcupid and you know no response totally ghosted and now i'm like wow 10 years later and i have this job that i've essentially been trying to get for over a decade just feels so good and

it's also a really healthy reminder that when you see people's careers you're really seeing their final product the highly edited version you don't see all the emails that not just where they were told no to but all the emails where they just didn't even get a response not even enough respect yeah and so my job at hinge is incredible because i basically get to conduct research into dating and i get to have these amazing moments where i'm like okay what am i hearing from my friends and my dating coaching clients for example i'm hearing a

lot about women dating guys with lower sex drives the guy is depressed what's going on do they want to date the depressed guy can they overcome the low sex drive issue how do they support a depressed partner certainly they want to be dating someone who's in therapy and then i bring that back to hinge and then we conduct research on things like um has talking about mental health gone from a stigmatized topic to actually a must-have and so we did this great research around the end of 2021 where we found that um 86 of people

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

dating right now are you doing the data science for this or have you got a team that works below youtube to pull all of that yeah i have amazing research collaborators um so i am really coming in with a lot of the hypotheses and then working closely with the researchers and we do have some amazing data scientists but i am not doing the data science myself it is funny because when i i had met my husband in college but when i really met him was when we were both working at google he was a data

scientist and i was learning a data science language called r and i was like i'm looking for an r tutor and he's like i just dropped out of a phd program hello girl at the lunch table can i tutor you in r every day and so anyway data science and r have a very close place in my heart but i would say i am i ended up being much better at being with my husband than writing writing his programming language yeah so what else if that's one of them some men with a low libido um

and the challenges that that has in relationships men suffering with mental health and depression what are some of the other trends that you've discovered over the last couple of years sure yeah and i would say that one wasn't that gendered it was like pretty broad it was just like hey the last few years have been so hard i don't know a person who hasn't been dealing with depression anxiety not sleeping like i think everyone's kind of gone through something rough so i would say more broadly just what is happening in the dating world with mental

health and how people are not only talking about it but want to be talking about it um another one that i just conducted and wrapped up last week was about the role of asking for advice in gen z so gen z as you can imagine very anxious generation notoriously very digital obviously so if you think about sex in the city the tv show people would you know the women would go to brunch on sunday and talk to their friends about the last guy they had sex with well now it's like every text message can be

screenshoted every profile can be shared every message that you're about to send you can ask the you know the group chat what should i say and so it's basically turned all these elements of dating into this crowd source thing where you almost have this war room and you're like okay guys what are we writing and yeah maybe you write a more clever text but like the actual relationship is between you and the person that you're dating and when you are lying in bed with them paying attention to how you feel that is not something that

you can outsource or crowdsource and so the message for me behind that research was basically saying to gen z you all are way too reliant on your friends for advice and your friends should be your cheerleaders they should be the people encouraging you um helping you achieve your goals they should not be the coach telling you what those goals are and so really helping gen z in particular learn this is what it's like to tune into how you feel this is how to build up those muscles and actually you need to rely on yourself because

you are the one in the relationship your your posse is not dating that person you are i think one of the most interesting realizations i've had from when i went to uni 15 years ago to now we used to run an event called carnage which is exactly as it sounds it was a big bar crawl and everyone wore a t-shirt and on the back of the t-shirt there were different tasks that you had to do like yeah pull a pig snug three randoms like steal someone else's hat you know like stuff that is so cancelable

like any one of those would be worthy of cancellation right now yeah um and i was having this conversation with a friend a while ago who used to be another franchisee like myself when we were both 1920 and we were talking about how we don't see this same sort of messy sloppy dance floor kissing nights out that we would have facilitated perhaps when we started running events and he said something that was really interesting that was you basically have perpetual state surveillance that's done by gullible volunteers because everybody has a cctv camera in their pocket

and whereas previously you could make whatever catastrophic error you wanted and the most people that could find out about it were the friends of your friends who they maybe were able to tell individually over blackberry pin or something like there was no way to facilitate your failings be brought being broadcast to the world and i think that that does create even in person forget online dating that facilitates an in-person sort of sword of damocles thing where everyone's just feeling like there's something hovering over their heads at that whole time and it's difficult to just let

yourself feel at ease when that's happening oh yeah i absolutely agree with that and i hadn't thought about it in a while but i recently spent a day with someone who's 10 years younger than me who went to the same university and we were just comparing notes and there were so many elements of her experience that i just couldn't i just had never thought about and so for example having a dating app while you're in college and really understanding does that mean that you just are exposed to more people at your university than you would

have been otherwise does it mean that everyone at your school is hooking up with people at other schools like you know i went to harvard and so it was nice for harvard women to be able to date harvard men but if harvard men are on dating apps now you're competing with women at the many many universities in boston and so what does that mean for the harvard social life and like i don't really know and then kind of exactly what you were talking about it's like we had you know when i walked into college we

had flip phones i had a cute pink flip phone and then i got a blackberry but the cameras were so bad and so i would have you know a camera that i might take out but that's really different from obviously like live streaming or instagram stories and yeah dance floor makeouts are really fun part of going to college and so we didn't she and i didn't talk about that but it is fascinating to think about if there's always a part of your brain thinking that you're being recorded what does that do to you and you

know this idea of surveillance or the opticon or something like that it's like i imagine that it does change your psychology because kind of as another example um i spent 24 hours last week with a reporter from the new york times and so it's like there's what i'm saying and then there's the part of my brain that's making sure that what i'm saying is okay right and so that's like doing double duty and i was very tired afterwards because i was cognitively overloaded with like what i'm saying and making sure that it's okay and so

if your whole brain is what i'm doing and then making sure i wouldn't be upset if this were recorded or shared like that just actually seems really inauthentic and exhausting well what you're externalizing or you're playing a persona right every decision that you make and everything that you say gets run through first the filter of did i come up with it and then secondly the filter of is this okay for me to say oh maybe it's not i've got to think about it and that's not a very sort of easy graceful way to be so

what would you say well how would you categorize the sort of messaging that young people are being given around what love and dating and romance is supposed to be in 2022 yeah it's something that i'm actively thinking about i would say 2022 is a year where i have spent way more time thinking about the gen z audience and so i would say as of now i'm probably a millennial dating expert so that means that i've worked with loads of millennial clients a lot of hinge users are millennials so the research and the data i've had

access to for two years is based on that and now it's like of course like what happens with generations like people age into the dating market and so i need to spend way more time understanding that and as silly as it sounds i just binge watched both seasons of euphoria i've watched that what's that okay it's like a really amazing slash raunchy show on hbo it's about a teen dealing with drug addiction there's a lot of sex there's a lot of nudity but it's also just kind of about the like over stimulating anxious gen z

high school experience and like who knows how realistic or not that is i certainly don't think uh the clothes are realistic but um it is interesting to think about like what does gen z know about dating and so um there are some things that are like clear trends so of course the world is moving in a more fluid direction and so that means things like gender identity gender orientation um sexual orientation and so if you think about that applied to dating you're not necessarily looking for the one or you're not necessarily as focused on this

outcome of like i'm gonna get married i'm gonna be married to one person and i hope it lasts as long as possible maybe you're into non-monogamy maybe you're into having a relationship that's really powerful but you're not focused on marriage or maybe you don't even want to have kids maybe climate change has made you so afraid of the future that like having kids sounds preposterous to you and so it's really interesting to think about what are the cultural forces affecting gen z and then how does that show up in their dating that being said i

do think that we all really do have this natural desire to love and be loved and so i don't care what's happening on euphoria i don't care how many tick tocks there are about certain trends at the end of the day love and dating and finding someone or someone's i still think is very relevant to people well yeah human biology is a hell of a drug and you're going to have to work incredibly hard to like front brain out yeah millions of years of evolution that compels you to behave in one way i think i

i've never felt so much like a boomer as i have recently i'm a millennial as well you know like slap bang in the middle of it not even though you're great for a boomerang but i've never felt so out of touch and yeah it's crazy to look at you know remember it wasn't that long ago that millennials were sort of the the media's common calling card they were the ones that everybody was bitching on and and now i'm being looked at and thinking about you know stuff to do with gender fluidity stuff to do with

non-monogamy being not just for certain friends of mine in austin but you know as a general scalable yeah yeah opportunity and i'm like this just it doesn't resonate with me it doesn't resonate with my friends and i now i'm starting to get a sense of what it must have felt like for my parents generation looking down at my generation just getting into facebook and online dating and dick pics and stuff like that to then roll that forward so i guess each new generation can make the older generation feel more boomery than they ever thought they

could totally and i feel the exact same way where i'm like wait it feels like two years ago there was an article about millennials are killing dining room furniture millennials are killing the paper napkin it was all about how millennials were changing things like i have a friend who is known as the millennial workplace expert and then boom now all we're talking about is gen z and i find that so fascinating and are you a fan of bo burnham yes i've only seen a little bit of his work but yes he's good okay so i'm

a massive bo burnham fan and he has that amazing special that came out last year called inside and there's a song on it i play the songs on repeat but there's a song that's basically like he was born in 1990 and he was always known as the young guy and he was always like oh i can't believe you've accomplished this by that age and then the song about turning 30 he's like now the zoomers are telling me that i'm out of touch and so you're really like through these very funny lyrics hearing about his existential

crisis about being like the young hip cool guy pushing the edges where very few people are going to be like i can't believe you accomplished that by 30 because it's like 30 is not considered supposed to have your [ __ ] together yeah i had this conversation not long ago that just getting no longer being young is a strange is a strange thing so i'm 34 and pretty much every single year probably up until 31 or 32 everything biologically was just improving so i was getting better looking i was becoming more confident i was recovering

from workouts in the gym better i had more muscle mass i could get leaner i'd all that stuff right everything and then you just sort of you know when you're at the top of a roller coaster and it's been going on and then you start to feel yourself go weightless and you go oh hold hang in a second hang on this is i know what happens next this is just before it starts to go down and that's something that i'm grappling with at the moment the fact that you know my gym workouts are going to

get progressively more difficult for me to recover from moving forward that looking good is going to become progressively more difficult moving forward now i think there's a good argument to be made here for both guys and girls that if you have made it into your 30s and your primary source of value that you see in yourself to the world is the way that you look there's probably something that goes wrong there because you can have wisdom that's just going to compound over time grace empathy love poise you know confident all that stuff all of that

[ __ ] can continue to grow um but there is something a bit sort of like oh is the ride over like that kind of totally when did that change happen for you probably 31 32 um so probably during the pandemic was or just after that within the last sort of 18 months to two years but again i don't know how much of that's just been due to the fact that i've been locked in the house you know maybe i'm gonna have a fourth puberty or something next year and i'm gonna like shoot up again

but i think for a good few of my friends as well it seems to be the same case we're just finding stuff that used to be easy and not getting over hangovers that's been impossible for 10 years um like some things that used to be easier just aren't the same anymore i think that i mean it all really resonates with me i'm also 34 and i feel like i'm less in touch with my body and my health as compared to my husband but my husband is one of those people where it's like he's he read

that book how how not to die and he is you know he's always intermittent fasting and he's thinking about like how his cells can age backwards and i'm like dude i just want to feel good when i wake up in the morning like i just want to feel physically better and he's like planning for the future so i do think it depends on how tuned in to our own bodies we all are well here's an interesting thing civilization on average has never been this old and on average we've never had so long to live yeah

that's so wild that blows my mind the fact that yeah whether we're the oldest civilization in history that's going to live the longest oh yeah well that also is relevant to relationships because if you're choosing a partner for a decade or a few decades versus many many many decades like half a century and how does that change your expectations i even have friends who are mormon and are like you're choosing that person for forever and i'm like oh my god i can't even fathom that amount of pressure that you're choosing a relationship for all of

eternity bro that literally could be 70 years from the time that you're 20. someone goes away does their mission comes back and you're like okay so my assistant ben he's mormon and uh he's 22 22 23 and him and his misses are married and they're amazing but i'm like [ __ ] man like that that could be you could be talking about 70 years of marriage from this point and this is eternity for that and the rest don't underestimate that that's more than underestimate eternity a good lesson so what is it i've been thinking about

this a lot i've had a lot of conversations on the show to do with dating intersexual dynamics the mating market imbalances stuff like that one of the things that keeps coming up is kind of a bit of an ick factor that some people have around anybody that has an intentional approach toward designing a lifestyle around dating why why do you think that is okay i couldn't think that that was funnier because i'm literally drinking from a mug that says intentionally ever after which is the last line of my book it's about you know forget happily

ever after and go for intentionally ever after and so i'm really like ready to put my boxing gloves on and fight this one because like this is my entire ethos it's my perspective and my viewpoint is that the type of clients that i work with the people who are drawn to my work which is not for everyone as far as type of person it's the person who says um if i want to be healthy then i might listen to tim ferriss or i might be interested in bulletproof coffee i would listen to these podcasts and

take these supplements if i wanted to get better at personal finances then i would listen to ramit sethi like there's just like a self-help world and so like we believe in we these people including myself believe in like lifestyle design and saying like when you have a goal you should go after it you should have people who are experts you should understand the blind spots you should understand what makes it hard and then make a plan and somehow love feels like it's on this other dimension where we're not allowed to do that and people put

love on a special platform and they won't allow it to be researched or analyzed and they think that it makes it unromantic but my entire philosophy is that yes love is natural love is organic you are born knowing how to love but you are not born knowing how to date and dating as we know it is extremely new in the span of human history so even the idea of people on their own choosing each other that happened in around 1890 and there's a great book on this called the labor of love by maura weigel since

then obviously gender dynamics have changed women being out of the house in the workplace like this idea of the shop girl in the 1920s you know meeting a guy but even then it was like oh i'm going to go on a date so i can have a hot meal because i can't afford one otherwise and then you think online dating started around 94 95 with match group and kiss.com then the dating apps only started a decade ago so you were talking about human biology as a hell of a drug well you know evolutionary evolutionarily we

are not designed to choose from thousands of potential options and either even choose for ourselves the historical reference is that marriage was an economic institution institution where maybe my father would give your father 12 camels for my hand in marriage and if my land was next to your land we could combine the two through marriage and so the idea i'd take 12 camels for you logan okay thank you so much that's fine flattered the idea that people would be marrying for love the idea that people would be marrying for 70 years the idea that people

would be marrying for self-actualization that's also new and so i think that ich factor is people responding to this idea that they want love and dating to be a realm that cannot be analyzed when actually i'm like hey this is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life who your partner is that is your number one teammate that is your number one giver of advice this is your counsel and why would you not try to take what this amazing field of relationship science has learned about long-term relationships attraction what the field

of behavioral science has learned about common biases and how we make mistakes in decision making why wouldn't you take all that and then be informed to make the right decision just like you'd think about personal finance accounting nutrition fitness etc this is a science and it can be analyzed and i think the ick factor is misplaced i think a lot of people see romance as a black box that there is something magical about it there's a term called conceptual inertia which i learned about from a history of science research which is that um when new

insights from science arrive a lot of the time it takes time for culture to then catch up so if you went from a earth being the center of the universe to the earth revolving around the sun revolving around the galaxy that switch in terms of models was accepted by signs but only 50 years 75 years later was sort of permeated the culture so that people actually started to think and feel like that so you have this sort of lagging measure of what people think despite the fact that they may have had something proven in front

of them and i think that insights from evolutionary psychology from relationship science all this stuff takes time to trickle down and what you're battling against is still a lot of culture disney vacation of movies you love actually rom-coms that kind of i mean is relationship science romantic it's certainly not romantic in the traditional way so you're not it's very rare that you're going to have here's a movie about a girl who optimized her online dating profile and after she'd done that then she decided to go on 37 dates and then pick the next best person

that was there after that because she'd read algorithms still love them to live by and you go that's just not going to be a movie so a lot of the time with regards to relationships and presented in common media you don't have what's optimal being what's shown you have kind of this idealized much more naturalistic way so i do think there's a tension between those two everything you just said i agree with and i think you really nailed the problem and then i can present my approach which is slightly different and i think the cultural

inertia thing is that what is called cultural inertia yeah that makes total sense to me i mean even if i'm thinking about like climate change and don't look up and like why is it so hard for you know everyone is paying attention to this thing in pop culture versus what's happening with climate change and it's like why are we not paying attention to the science and i don't know but yes in my world i would say first of all what do i think is romantic what i think is romantic is waking up in bed with

my husband after we've been together for seven years and just being excited to talk feeling like your partner is your best friend and it's you against the world like still being excited to have sex and have dinner with someone who you've known for a long time and there is no chase because essentially you are a team and there is such a foundation of trust romance to me is the experience i had over the last two years with my husband which is he was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer he went through 18 rounds

of chemotherapy below the knee ampu leg amputation crazy [ __ ] that you do not expect in year one of marriage and saying i [ __ ] love you i'm here for you i you are much more than your body to me you are much more than your health to me and just being like i'm all in like to me that is the essence of romance i don't think romance is oh um he planned this date where he picked me up in an uber black and took me to a cool expensive sushi restaurant like i

don't care like that is courtship courtship is lovely flirting is lovely feeling a connection with someone is lovely but to me the real romance is the deep connection and trust that you maintain over time so people who are resisting this they're basically saying when you apply science to love you are taking us out of the black box you are taking us away from the mystery and you are really focusing on the practical but life is the practical life is doing your taxes life is wiping your baby's diaper like that's what life is like it's not

the trip to hawaii it's not those moments because yes those are peak moments but most of life is the average moment where you and this person are saying i'm your partner and i'm all in and let's do this together and so yes disney movies are the way they are rom-coms are the way they are i like the show bridgerton but like what i'm really doing what my role in the universe is right now is to help people find a long-term partner that is going to help them create a great life it's not about the reality

tv show sparky in the moment feeling because that fades and i'm really here for the long-term relationships i wonder how much of the black box mentality is also because if people believe that there is a effective strategy to be able to date that makes them more culpable for their dating failures like if it hasn't gone well and it's a black box then there was nothing that i could have done about it but if it hasn't gone well and it's because i wasn't sufficiently well educated or informed or i maybe i messed up then it's not

to do with the magic of cupid it's to do with me not knowing enough that's a very hot take and i i think that's clever and i will think about it more but my gut reaction is that people already feel that way and so i have a chapter in my book called why dating is harder now than ever before one of the elements of that is that in the past if your love was negotiated not your love your marriage was negotiated for you by your father by the matchmaker and camels can't forget the camels then

everything was really written for you right we we inherited these identities so for me if i had been born 200 years before let's say i would have been a jewish woman living in berlin who knew exactly how i spent my time my marriage would have been negotiated for me by the local matchmaker i would have known what i ate what i wore how i spent shabbat how i raised my children everything would have been predetermined for me and part of modern life is freedom but that freedom is scary because when you write your own story

if that story sucks you are the only one to blame and i think that is the ethos of our modern era and so i already think that people think i haven't found love it's on me i don't think that you know as much as people like romance i don't think that they imagine cupid just missed his arrow i really think that if you saw the emails that i get you'd know people are being extremely hard on themselves and they are taking their lack of success and love as a personal failure so we're already there how

can people learn to be happy with their decisions then getting into and getting out of relationships and all of the things they're in without it being about a single incident what is an overarching way to make better decisions or to be happier with your decisions yeah so we talked about how i have this intentionally ever after mug and i really do believe in this intentional approach to love and so what that might look like and there's a whole menu of things and people can pick and choose what works for them but a lot of it

is just owning your past behavior and so in my class date smarter we do this activity called the relationship audit and people have a lot of resistance to it they don't necessarily enjoy it but you basically say who are the people i've dated why did it end what was good about this relationship what was bad what side of me did they bring out you know if they understand attachment theory then was that person person anxious or avoidant or secure so really saying what's gone on in my past and then looking at your patterns and saying

wow i tend to meet more people in person maybe the dating apps aren't a good fit for me that's a takeaway or i tend to like someone until they like me back and then i don't trust them and i run away or my version of love is chasing after someone and so a lot of it is understanding what's your past behavior and how can you make different choices in the future then there's understanding what matters and what doesn't for long-term relationship success and so some of the things that matter less than people think they do

are things like looks and money yes hot people are great rich people are great sure but whatever you have you adapt to it over time and so the feeling of being wealthy is something that you get used to and it doesn't impact your life as much as you think people also overestimate having the same personality or having the same interests those matter but they're not actually huge factors the things that do matter are things like loyalty kindness someone who's emotionally stable a person who you can fight well with yes fight well because fighting is inevitable

somebody who you can make hard decisions with and then what's really become the most important one to me which is what side of you that person brings out because i don't care about their resume i don't care about what's on paper who are you when you are with them because that's who you'll be for a lot of your life one of the conversations we've had a lot on the show recently has been to do with the asymmetries in the dating market that increasingly women are out earning men they're out educating men and you have an

ever increasing group of high performing women competing for an ever decreasing group of ultra high performing turbo chads at the top given the fact that you've identified there that looks money a lot of the status markers that typically are either utilized commercialized weaponized by dating apps and online dating aren't necessarily the things that predict long-term relationship success how would you advise girls to try and overcome their uh innate hypergamy their desire to date up and across to find the dude with the six figure income that's six foot tall with a six inch whatever yeah i

mean there are so many interesting historical things here that i can pull from including just one example i remember i went to a talk a few years ago where the guy was talking about how like historically most doctors have been men and men would marry their nurses and now actually a lot of male doctors marry female doctors and so what does that even mean in terms of like intermingling of classes and things like that but yes the number one piece of advice that i would give women is forget about height i think that setting height

filters just really blocks many people from seeing amazing people and so yes when there's a height filter you might feel tempted to say okay i'd like to date a guy who's at least six feet tall and then you make your height minimum six feet tall and what you may not realize is that only fourteen percent of the american male population is six feet or taller and only three point nine percent of the american male population is six three or taller and so they're just thinking like yes that would be nice but they don't realize these

filters are acting as bouncers where people under that height are not even making it into your club or the people that you can meet and so there is really no evidence that height impacts long-term relationship success and in fact i think that um maybe my hottest take here would be date the least attractive person who you're attracted to because you're still attracted to that person you're caring less about what other people think and you are really maybe finding that hidden gem and that's a lot of the work that i do with people it's not settling

settling is this curse word the s word that people are so afraid of i'm not about settling i'm about saying what are the things that matter and really go after those and what are the things that don't and don't be distracted by them can you explain the difference between maximizing and satisficing when it comes to decision making yeah so there's been amazing research done by barry schwartz and he has a great book called the paradox of choice where he talks about these two different ways of making decisions so maximizing is that you believe that you

want to turn over every stone you want to really do all the research and you want to keep looking and looking and looking until you find the perfect solution satisficing is saying i'm going to set a bar and maybe that bar is really high but once i achieve what i was looking for with that bar i'm going to be excited about it and stop looking and so for example if you are looking for an espresso machine at home the maximizer might read the wire cutter reviews they might read consumer reports they might go to 10

different shops and then they finally decide on getting the revel at-home espresso machine but even when they are drinking it they might think to themselves it is a little bitter i should have gotten this other one i made a mistake and there's this sense of you're never done there could always be something better out there whereas the satisficer might say okay nespresso is a good brand i will go to the downtown nespresso store i will buy the one that is in my price range and that the sales person recommends and then i will go home

and feel good about it and so the maximizers believe that they are getting the objective best result because of their research whereas the satisficer is the one who's actually happy because in the end it's not about making the right decision it's about how you feel about your decision and the maximizers are never satisfied and the satisficer is able to say i got what i wanted and i feel good about it how does this manifest in dating this is a huge problem in modern dating where our culture generally is very focused on maximizers and so people

don't want to choose a restaurant choose a hotel um choose a purchase without doing tons of research right we are the google yelp tripadvisor generation which is fine if you're going to tulum and choosing among 16 airbnbs but it's not fine when you are choosing among thousands of potential partners and so what does this era of maximizers do they always keep swiping thinking their perfect person is one swipe away and what a satisficer does is they say i want someone who i'm attracted to who would fit in well with my family who's kind and loyal

and who i enjoy talking to and when they find that person whatever their requirements are they say i found this person they're great i'm going to invest in the relationship and they don't sit there saying who else is out there and my proverbial coaching couch is full of people who are maximizers saying my girlfriend wants me to propose i really like her but she's just not interested in abstract ideas and couldn't i just be with someone who likes trail running a little bit more and they are imagining that they could come up with this frankenstein

person and then that's their perfect partner instead of saying something like i'm really excited about the person that i found and i am going to build the relationship of my dreams as opposed to finding the perfect partner you have three dating tendencies one of which is the maximizer can you lay out the rest of that framework for everyone yeah absolutely so as i was writing my book i really like frameworks i really like recognizing trends and patterns i feel like that's sort of what my brain does well and i was like all right i've talked

to all these people i you know some of them are older some of them are younger different countries what do they have in common it felt like this theme was unrealistic expectations and so the framework is one the romanticizer the person who has unrealistic expectations of relationships who expects that it's going to be butterflies there's a soulmate for them it'll always be easy that they'll know it when they see it and really it's this concept of once the relationship starts to feel hard they think oh this can't be my soul mate because it would be

effortless with them the second one is the maximizer which we've just talked about unrealistic expectations of their partner they expect that they're going to find this perfect partner and then everything will work out as opposed to investing in the relationship and then the third one which has become a much larger group during the pandemic is the hesitator they have unrealistic expectations of themselves and they think i'm just not lovable yet i'm just not ready i need to be i need to lose weight i need a more impressive job title i need to clean my apartment

then i'll be ready and so they have this imaginary date in their mind or moment in their mind will they'll be ready to date when the truth is no one's ever 100 ready for anything and in fact the only way to get better at dating is by dating the only way to figure out who you want to be with is by trying on different people and relationships and seeing what works and sitting at home reading a dating book or thinking about how you might eventually start working out doesn't get you any closer to finding your

person let's say that someone has identified themselves as one of those three what's your advice for overcoming that tendency for each of those categories yeah so for the romanticizer these are often the people who cry when i talk to them because they're like you want me to give up my love story you're telling me i have to settle and i'm like no i'm trying to reconfigure in your mind what matters and what doesn't so the work i do with those people is around giving up on the soul mate there's so many people out there who

could work for you you can write a life story or a love story with many people also understanding that who cares about the we met people are so few focused on this idea of the meat cute right like we met at the farmer's market or he switched he switched his seat on the plane and we sat next to each other and talked for six hours it's like who cares if you're gonna be married for 50 years then the day you met is point zero zero five five percent of your total relationship and so really taking

away the disney rom-com hugh grant moments and saying like what's romantic is this these are the things that matter let's get you into a relationship and help you really focus on the things that matter and the things that don't for the maximizer some of it is just understanding what satisficing might look like and so you made kind of a cheeky reference to this before but yes there is this idea of the secretary problem which is this idea that the mathematically correct answer to hiring a secretary is that you go through a third of the possible

candidates you say who is the best person from that group that's your benchmark person and the next time that you find someone who you like as much or more than them you hire them so you basically say who's out there i've identified the best of that and then you identify then you um go after the next person who matches your benchmark so that you don't waste too much time looking but you don't stop too early and so for the maximizer it's about understanding yeah of course you want to find someone great but it's also what

you bring to the relationship how you build it together so stop spending so much time researching and find someone great and build with them and then for the hesitator and i think this is a group that i have had a lot of success with during the pandemic it's saying to them stop hesitating and start dating and let's make a deadline for you let's choose a few outfits for your dates let's help you get more comfortable maybe you've gained some weight during the pandemic maybe it's been a while that's fine let's actually help you just get

out there and get your sea legs back because sitting at home thinking about how you should date just feels frustrating and so for the hesitator it's really about how can we create action so that you move towards having the identity of being a dater are any of your tendencies related to attachment styles yeah i've definitely found that there's some overlap i've also found that maximizers can be um avoidant attached so one of the common things with people who have an avoidant attachment style is that they are looking for excuses to push people away i talk

about my book a woman whose boyfriend wanted to break up with her because she pronounced the word picture like a picture on the wall as pitcher like a pitcher of water and so it's like really that's what you're gonna break up with someone for and in his mind he turned it into this big thing about education and class and how articulate she was and how could the mother of my children pronounce it picture and it's like dude there's something else going on that is not about the word picture but you are so focusing on this

and maximizing about it as an avoidant strategy and so i've definitely seen that i think that many people who have the romanticizer tendencies can be anxiously attached because their vision of love might be that um kind of the rom-com 500 days of summer thing where it's love is the chase love is convincing somebody to be with you as opposed to love is two people choosing each other and so i'd say i haven't done a one-to-one analysis and in fact in my class the first session is what's your dating tendency and what's your attachment style and

i do have a lot of anxiously attached maximizers who take my class but in general i think that people come with a whole load of nuanced family background genetics histories etc and that they can be kind of more complicated than just one of these types i feel like i would be doing a disservice to everybody to not ask someone that works behind the wall at hinge about how to design an online dating profile what's the biggest do's and don'ts and wins and losses sure yeah i i love this topic i'm super comfortable speaking to it

so yeah so my perspective on a profile is that it's really storytelling and what is the story that you are trying to communicate and so when i work with clients i start by saying to them what are the top three things that you want to communicate with your profile so for someone it might be i'm from boston i love cooking and family is really important to me and i'm saying great okay let's make sure we get those points across then make sure that you're choosing photos and prompt responses that really support that and so you

don't want to repeat you know i love the red sox over and over again but i want to i want to at least see that represented in one another important thing that we found through hinge research is the importance of variety so sometimes i'll see a profile and it's a guy wearing a pair of sunglasses taking selfies in front of different monuments around the world i'm like dude we get it you travel but i don't see more of you and so i want a first photo that's kind of like a headshot where i see your

face clearly no filters no sunglasses i want at least one photo that's a full body people have that question so you might as well show it some activity photos seeing you do something that you love candids work really well and then also at least one photo with family and friends show us that you have a social life but not one where you and your ten mates are playing rugby and i don't know which one of you are and i have to play where's wally with you and so really that should be clear and then for

the prompt responses sometimes people try to be clever and say you know um certain things like i'm you know what i'm competitive about then they write everything and it's like no we want to see more information about you that's actually a cliche so you want to ignore it and so really using your prompt responses as a way to communicate who are you what are you looking for what makes you different and remember that your profile is like a t-shirt that you wear into a bar whatever you wear people will respond to and so if you

wear a shirt with madonna on it you're going to have a different conversation than if you wear a shirt with a game of thrones character and they're going to lead to different conversations different types of people and so most people would benefit from being more intentional about their profile and even if their profile is great if you're bored of online dating switch it up because it will lead to new conversations did i hear you say that mirror selfies gym selfies and smoking are three big no-nos as well yeah exactly yeah definitely um no smoking nothing

too controversial that'll turn people off the gym selfie it just does not perform well selfies there are some exceptions to that especially i feel like some women know how to take really good selfies and they know their angles but in general those are not the high performers you want to go for high quality photos where it's clear what you look like if you have a friend with a good camera or portrait mode you know go to the beach at golden hour and have your friend make you laugh and take a picture of you laughing like

show me what it looks like to be with you and date you that is so much better than some poorly lit gym selfie where i'm just like oh another another one of those what about good and bad practices for online dating beyond the first front window yeah you know it depends on what the person's needs are so i work with some people who are way too picky and our work together is helping them be less picky or less picky about the things that don't matter sometimes i work with people who need to be more picky

they go on way too many dates with people who are not interesting or are not interested in them and so there's an element of kind of which category do you tend to fall into but let's just say that people are being too picky i would say open it up your filters be willing to date someone who's farther away be open to dating someone who's a little older a little younger than you might have and expand your height filters i would also say that when you are using the app sometimes people swipe as if would i

marry this person or not and it should be something like would i be willing to have a conversation with this person or not and so for those who are too picky it's just being more flexible in the early stages because you don't know who's even going to convert into a match for people who are not picky enough i would say how can you have higher standards around who you go on a date with and so um some people i call zq zero questions this is often men who just ask no questions so it's like they're

willing to be kind of interviewed but they don't say and what about you and what about you and so i have women who say to me after the date i could have written his biography but he didn't ask me a single question about myself and when i asked these zq men what they're doing they're like well she had something to say she could have spoken up or i just thought she thought i was so interesting it's like no dude good conversation is we are taking turns talking and you show interest in me and you ask

follow-up questions and so that's just kind of a general point that um people should certainly be making statements sharing about themselves and then asking questions so that it feels like a conversation not an interview is it true that on average if you have a conversation where somebody asks more questions they tend to come across more likeable than somebody that makes the same number but of statements yeah there's really great research on this it basically shows that the more questions you ask and the less time you spend talking the more that person thinks you're a great

conversationalist because essentially what you're tapping into is people like talking about themselves people like to be made to feel as if they are fascinating and so like right now you've been asking me questions for an hour i feel great i'm like wow you know chris is so curious about me and i must be so interesting even though like of course we're in a dynamic where this is the setup you're asking me questions but it feels really good and so think about that and apply it to dating it's much more important to be interested showing interest

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

you are endlessly fascinating i suppose it's difficult if you and somebody else who's also taken the same red pill about how to have conversations in dates that's just going to end up with you going like what about you no no no no what about you so yeah that could i could imagine that coming to a stalemate yeah yeah in my dating class we do a lot of live demos and i actually did one last week where i made this mistake where i was trying to show how to ask good questions but i wasn't letting the

person ask me questions back so it really just felt like i was interrogating them and then two students did it and i was like thank goodness you went because they actually took turns asking responding going deeper and so it should not have a feeling of like one person is the podcast interviewer and the other one is the guest you also have to share you talk about the spark and you've got a problem with the spark what's up with that yeah the spark is that moment where you feel instant chemistry you feel fireworks you feel like

the whole world has stopped except for you and this person and the spark is definitely real i have certainly felt the spark with people throughout my life the issue with it and why i think it's a really big problem in modern dating is that people are overly optimizing for it and so my clients would say things to me like this one guy jonathan would say i met this guy he was great we had a good conversation he planned a fun date i'm not going to see him again and when i'd say why he'd say i

just didn't feel the spark and so he was going on dates expecting to have this magical moment and so yes the spark is real but we also expect to have it too often and so there's research that only 11 percent of people experience love at first sight i would also say that because of the mere exposure effect we often like things more over time as we're more exposed to them so it's why we might like a person who lives in our apartment building who we see every day or you might even like a song the

more that you hear it and so the spark can grow over time people are sometimes just very sparky some people are really good looking they're really charismatic that can also be tied to narcissism and so certain people give everyone the spark but you think it's something special with you and finally the third issue is that the spark doesn't mean that you have a long-term lasting connection and many divorced couples or unhappily married couples started with the spark and so it's enough to kind of get you off the ground but not to keep going and so

my entire advice my antidote to this is to go after the slow burn which is the person who might not spark with you on the first date but the more you go out with them the more you like them over time the more you peel back the layers and you realize how funny or curious or brilliant they are and a lot of people have passed them by because they're not sparky but you could wind up with this amazing engaging partner because you were willing to give them that second look i think that's one of the

most interesting insights that i've taken from the stuff that you've done which is that the spark can be something systemic about a person and not unique to your interaction with them and this makes sense right i've had tons of conversations about narcissism and dark triad traits and stuff like that and those individuals they are sparking the guy at the grocery store they are sparking the bus driver that you know that's just part of their existence and using that as a proxy for there is something exciting about this meaning there is something that has long-term longevity

it's just a leap that's being made way too much and i think again as well you're seeing one of the problems of culture taking a hold of one very particular element and then just myopically focusing on it and saying well this is something that's really really important and you look at every rom-com movie throughout time well actually no that's a lie that i'm i'm incorrect there there are rom-com movies where the good guy that's kind of the hapless romantic that's chasing the girl she does sometimes end up with with him um but there is also

a lot of push toward the spark given that it happens whatever 11 percent of the time it's definitely not only in 11 of rom-com movies totally yeah absolutely and so this kind of goes back to the point you made earlier chris which is like what is making it into the movies and it's like most movies and there are a few exceptions like the before trilogy most movies are very focused on the meet cute okay she's so clumsy he's too focused on work and then they go through trials and tribulations and then they end up together

but where the movie ends is them coming together as a couple and then it's the famous three words right they lived happily ever after but the movie ends at their coming together it doesn't tell you what's going on you're 12 into the marriage when their kid is having trouble at school and they haven't had sex in a year and all of this stuff and so our movies are selling us on the on the happily ever after early stage not the long-term relationship success and this idea of the spark after having written my book and talked

talking to a lot of people about it like i totally notice it out and about like if i go to a party or a conference everyone will kind of be talking about the same person oh did you meet so and so oh so-and-so's presentation was so great it's like yeah that person's really sparky and everyone here is drawn to them and often they're very conventionally attractive or they make great eye contact with you or they do that thing where they make you feel interesting bill clinton yeah the bill clinton-style thing exactly right you feel like

you're the only person in the room and it's like yes that person is very sparky we are all feeling a spark with that person that doesn't mean anything for like who we should all be with and so just knowing that that spark sensation is real but understanding that it's more representative of that person than your dynamic i think does really help you move past it that's a huge red pill that's really really interesting i think as well one of the things that i find so attractive in a relationship is when i admire my partner like

if i admire the girl that i'm with then it's such a compelling um pull of attraction toward them however anybody that has a spark is admirable because you look at them and you think oh god you know everybody else wants them you've got this sort of crowd-sourced sense of the toys in the playground type thing charisma generally extroversion generally you know likeability humor all that stuff that we've talked about um so yeah decoupling those is is really interesting and i think asking yourself the question of seriously is this person just like this with everybody or

is this person specifically like this because of me is probably a good one to ask i think since this is personal to you we could like even zoom in on it a little bit more which is do you know this concept of the halo effect yes which is people that are good looking tend on average to be treated better by everyone in society right and like i know that i do this all the time i mean people even do this with good looking babies our whole lives if you are good looking people ascribe positive traits

to you oh she's good luck looking she must be generous she must be kind she might must be smart and compassionate so part of what you're describing is the halo effect of when somebody is good looking we ascribe all these other traits to them the other thing that you're talking about the admiring your partner yes that is huge and i think people should be thinking about that more so maybe for you or for anyone else who's experiencing this it's saying when i think about admiring someone i want to admire them because i can learn from

them because they have a passion because they have pursued their dreams and really being concrete around what this admiration is versus this more nebulous halo effect admiration which is everyone else seems to want them so i should want them to it's almost more of the um market dynamics or evolutionary biology piece it's not actually about admiration it's saying well if everyone else values them clearly they are of value what's the difference between sliding and deciding through a relationship yeah so there's great research on how people make decisions in relationships and a lot of couples slide

which is they just slip from one relationship moment to the next so for example you know you and i have been dating for six months my lease is up and i say hey chris should i renew my my lease or not you're like that'd be good to split rent why don't you move in we didn't talk about what does moving in mean to me does it mean we're on our way to get engaged doesn't mean we're going to figure out if we're good partners maybe it means nothing but what other couples do is they decide

they sit down and they actually have a conversation explicitly about what this milestone means and so they might say moving into me means we are engaged to be engaged and the other person might say moving into me just means we're going to spend more time together and then they might say okay we're not on the same page let's actually wait until we are and the research shows that couples who decide have healthier relationships they have more passion they have better sex they're more likely to survive through the long haul and so in this theme of

intentional dating or intentional love deciding is the intentional way to make major relationship milestone decisions that was the sense that i had in my mind this tension between like it being natural and spontaneous and emergent and it being i know i don't know what people i there is almost everybody that's listening to this will be intentional with everything that they do right they'll eat intentionally they'll sleep intentionally they'll know the temperature of the air conditioning that they go to sleep in if they're in a warm country or whatever and so like it's probably not but

that like more artistic view of things that does take things and then separate it out step by step you think well i don't know that that to me seems like the smart thing to do is is there any tension between that and and sort of romance and spontaneity can you see a world in which someone sort of overshoots with regards to their intentionality i can definitely see that and you know we talked a little bit about the secretary problem in the 37 and i really see clients and i see emails that say okay logan so

i'm this old and i've dated this many people and this is my benchmark person but they rejected me does that make them my benchmark person there can definitely be a feeling of i want to have ultimate control over this and if i have enough spreadsheets and enough format conditioning then everything will work out and so i do think that there's pushing this too far so instead how can you think about this as a layer upon which you view the world versus a just like every single decision that you make and so what this might look

like is someone's gonna say being intentional about love to me is going to therapy to own my past trauma and drama having a rough sense of what i'm looking for going on dates where i'm open-minded and i understand oh i don't actually like this person i'm just excited because they don't like me and i want to have the chase having open conversations from the beginning about who i am what i'm looking for and then as you go through the different phases saying what does defining the relationship mean to you should we move in together should

we get engaged so it's some key moments but other than that add in as much spontaneity as you want surprise that person take them on a getaway like there's lots of ways to be romantic in the day-to-day i just don't want you to miss these big moments because that's when people make the big mistakes talking about on the other side of relationships how should people know whether or not they can can or should break up with their partner yeah you know when i set out to do this work i certainly never thought that i would

be talking to people about breakups but it's become a passion of mine in terms of the unique research that i've done and i do have a lot of conversations with people where they say should i stay or should i go and so i have a few practices that i walk them through so one is kind of going off the same theme saying what's your historical tendency do you tend to be a hitcher someone who stays in relationships way too long past the expiration date do you tend to be a ditcher a person who stays in

relationships way too short always hopping from new relationship energy to the next honeymoon phase things like that so we talk about that we talk about what are you bringing to the relationship are you bringing your best self have you told the other person how you feel or do you just expect them to magically know what you want and then are there external factors did one of you lose a job who's a parent is somebody going through mental health stuff like is this a temporary moment in time where things could get better and then i asked

them this final question which is kind of silly but in this fun abstract way where i say it's called the wardrobe test and i say if your partner wear a piece of clothing in your closet something that you own what would they be and sometimes people say my boyfriend is a wool sweater he keeps me warm but it's itchy so i have to take it off or my boyfriend is on ratty t-shirt that i would wear to the gym but i wouldn't want anyone to see me in and these are real answers that people have

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

have to get in touch with how you're actually feeling what the hitcher and ditcher is such a good way to kind of split groups up i think pretty much everybody that i know falls into one of those two categories what is the typical piece of advice or the first few pieces of advice that you give to each person from that group to overcome it yeah and i would say you know i do have a lot of frameworks and terms some will resonate with some people some won't i think there are people that are not historically

ditchers they leave the relationship at the appropriate time but let's say most people are for the hitchers a lot of them is understanding this concept of sunk cost fallacy so i'm sure you know this from economics but if you spent twenty dollars on a concert ticket and then you're deciding if you should go or not you might say oh i should go because i spent the twenty dollars it's like you spent the twenty dollars regardless it doesn't impact the money if you go and so this idea of when you made a decision um you throw

good money after bad and you keep feeling like you have to double down on it when maybe you can just say i'm gonna cut my losses twenty dollars i'm not gonna go to the concert and so they feel like i've been dating this person for so long i have to keep going that's not necessarily true maybe you should have left the relationship years ago and maybe this is a great quality you're very loyal you believe that people can change but you might need a readjustment for ditchers and i do think this is highly tied to

the avoidant attachment style there's a feeling of wait it doesn't feel like it did at the beginning in the beginning i was thinking about that person all the time and it was so exciting and this and that and then they just feel like they want to move on to the next thing and so this is a lot of work where i do with people where i help them understand love is a drug when you do brain scans of people who are falling in love it literally lights up part of their brains that are lit up

when they do you know drugs like cocaine and so you're saying quit the relationship and start a cocaine habit i'm saying you already have a cocaine habit and the the cocaine is the love and so understand that yeah you are in this different place and your brain is being stimulated but that doesn't last forever and it's probably a good thing and so there is going to be this transition from falling in love to being in love and if you just want to spend your whole life falling in love and there are people like that you

can do it but if you want to be in a long-term relationship get married be a dad whatever it is you're gonna have to accept that the falling will feel different from the being and how can we make you excited about the being and i've spoken to a lot of men who really successful i really respect and they talk about how much they love being married and they're like your partner is this closet where you're hanging these different stories and parts of yourself and memories and this person has been with you through all of life

and you get to have that partner and that that is really beautiful and sure like seducing someone or those honeymoon period feelings are really good but if you want to move from the honeymoon stage to the being in love stage you do have to have different expectations for what that feels like i read a while ago that there's two attraction systems is it the passionate and the companionate system have you heard these before vaguely but i'm not super knowledgeable about them there's a lot of frameworks that are like three different types of love and stuff

like that but not i don't have expertise in it it just matches onto what you're saying here that you kind of have the i don't know that first period that pretty much everybody is is familiar with and then when that begins to wane a little bit and it becomes much more of a a friendship a deep friendship with benefits and love as opposed to the sort of head-over-heels obsession that occurs in the first instance that kind of ties into the spark thing as well right that that's how it should feel all the time and i

think yeah that's that's probably pretty erroneous so let's say that someone's got themselves to the stage where they know that the relationship isn't for them what do you advise people to do if they need to actually pull the pin and get themselves out of a relationship you know so interesting someone might ask me like what's what are some of the most meaningful moments in your work and you might think i would say like oh when i introduce this couple or help this person notice red flags but the things that really stick out to me are

helping people get out of relationships that are no longer serving them because sometimes you really need a push or a partner or a plan and so i approach breakups like the way that i would approach goal setting and i use goal setting research and so when i help people plan their breakup we talk about things like okay when are you going to do this let's create a deadline let's talk about what you're going to say what your main messages are let's talk about how you should not have sex afterwards because that will just be confusing

for both of you um there's even conversations around things like when are you going to be in touch with them how long should the conversation be what are you going to do to make yourself feel better afterwards how can you avoid being the nice breakup person who thinks it's nice to check in with them all the time but actually you're confusing them and so we really just take the very messy heartbreaking effort of decoupling and we turn it into a plan that is compassionate to them and compassion to the other person and then i help

them execute it and stick to their goal of being broken up what about overcoming heartbreak yeah you know breakups we just talked about this but if love is a drug then breaking up with someone often feels like withdrawal and there's lots of evidence that it's physically painful that you are you perform worse on cognitive tests people are actually more likely to commit crimes there's some really interesting research on how challenging it is to actually navigate a breakup and so for anyone listening i would just say give yourself a beat this is hard there are activities

that you can do so there's great research from gary lewandowski who talks about rediscover yourself activities so what are the things in your relationship that you didn't really pursue because your partner didn't like them so if you love going to the beach but your partner was pale skinned maybe you haven't been if you love jazz and your partner hated it you weren't going to jazz shows go do more of those rediscover yourself activities and those people seem to move on from breakups and feel happier than people who just go out there and do kind of

like generic activities like going for a walk or spending time with friends you can also do a lot of journaling to sort of help your brain get through the breakup faster so you can make lists of all the bad qualities about the person you can make a list of all the parts of the relationship that were bad and you're basically thinking about your brain as this rationalization monster and how do you feed the monster by saying oh yeah he was rude to my sister oh yeah she never did pick me up from the airport that

time and so you're actually helping yourself remember why it wasn't as great as you might be thinking and then there's also this expression time heals all wounds well i think the updated version is that meaning heals all wounds and you can really apply meaning to it by saying what did i learn how will i be different next time who should i go for in the future and so really not just assuming that time will make things better but by really creating a story of this was an experience i am better for it i am more

informed in the future and i will move on logan yuri ladies and gentlemen if people want to keep up to date with what you're doing where should they go yes people can follow me on instagram and twitter at loganuri people can learn more about my class date smarter at loganuri.com i have a weekly newsletter they can find out there and in general people can listen to my book how to not die alone or pick it up wherever great books are sold i really appreciate you i appreciate your work i think it's very interesting to look

at dating from a much more scientific background and then also to have all the data that you get from hinge so i'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with over the next few years as well thank you so much you were so well researched great questions i loved our conversation see you later what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace you