The Exchanges

Q Walk me through a little bit more about good conversations on our first date. I mean, I think a lot of people tend to just have this list of questions almost, that they're like, it doesn't quite feel like an interview, uh, but it kind of feels like an interview on the same token. How do you get out of that?

A Okay, let's think of examples. So I think a bad question would be, what did you study in college? I think then you're just finding out about a fact about somebody about their major. I think a good question would be something like, oh, you just told me that your job was a marketing manager for this tech company. Like, how is that different from what you thought it would be? Or can you see yourself doing that for a long time? Or like, what changes would you want to make to it? And that one might be a little interviewee, but I think the point is that if you go on a first date and you're information-seeking, Then what you will get is facts. If you go on a date and you're connection seeking, then what you will get are stories.

AI assessment note: “if you go on a date and you're connection seeking, then what you will get are stories”

Q So I've been guilty of this in terms of the spark. You know, you walk away from a first date, and you're like, yeah, they're a nice person, but maybe they're boring, or you didn't feel that instant romantic connection, and what do you think about the spark? I mean, we all look for the spark.

A Yeah, so the spark is very exciting. Who doesn't want to have that feeling of fireworks and instant chemistry with someone, but through the work I've done, I've actually come to see the spark as a bit of my nemesis, because I have coaching clients who say to me, Logan, I went out with this guy. He was great. We had a good time. Oh, I'm not going to see him again. Like, what are you talking about? And they say, I just didn't feel the spark. And so, In our culture, people have come to expect that if you don't have that instant feeling, then it must not be your person, and instead, I teach my coaching clients about the three myths of the spark. So the first myth is that if you don't have the spark, then it can't grow, and that's absolutely not true. So we know from research that only 11% of people feel love at first sight, and that means many people are getting to know someone over time. Maybe they live in the same apartment building. They Work in the same place, and that attraction and appreciation grows over time, so the spark can definitely grow. The second myth is that if you feel the spark, it's definitely a good thing, and actually, sometimes certain people give us the spark because we actually don't know how they feel about us, so sort of that hot, cold feeling makes us wonder, does he like me? Does he not like me? And through that, we end up feeling what we think of as but…

AI assessment note: “I've actually come to see the spark as a bit of my nemesis”

Q Uh, that reinforces the best in us and gives us patience and tolerance for the worst in us. Uh, what are the things that people can do individually to put themselves in a better place? And, you know, you don't have to make that leap overnight, but what are the steps that we can take to get to a better place?

A Right. So people do tend to have one attachment style, and it's a mixture of genetics and how they were raised, but around 25% of people are able to shift their attachment over time. So if you are insecurely attached, there is hope. It's not just, oh, I need to find one of those securely attached people that's already in a relationship. So for people who are anxiously attached, It's really important to understand triggers for you. So a trigger for somebody who's anxiously attached might be, I text the person I'm seeing all day, but I just sent them a meme. They usually respond to that right away. They haven't responded in four hours. Okay, so a trigger was not hearing back from somebody. What usually happens in that moment is you sort of go down into the danger zone, and you start, you know, texting them a bunch of times, hey, what happened? Or you spiral in your head, They don't like me anymore. They met somebody else. When I said this thing two days ago, they thought it was super weird, and they're pulling back, and then they sort of do these behaviors to try to reconnect with the person, which can really turn the other person off, and so instead, Set yourself up for success by not getting to the danger zone in the first place. So when you feel like, oh, no, they didn't respond to my text, what are other things you could do? So you could text a friend and distract yourself wi…

AI assessment note: “text a friend and distract yourself with the conversation with them.”

Q That's awesome. Do you agree with the time boxing, uh, the ultimatum, I guess, as you called it, or sort of like these, these points where you, you artificially create this? One point for people who are not younger and maybe dating again is, do you meet the kids?

A Yeah, so, um, I think that the ultimatum, I mean, that term is even loaded at this point, because there's like this Netflix show about the ultimatum, and I think when people hear that, they probably have a negative assumption of somebody being like, if you don't propose by the end of the year, we're breaking up. Like, that doesn't sound collaborative to me, but I actually do think that decision points are very important in life and in relationships. So there's this great research about, you know, people eating cookies. So like, in one part of the experiment, people just eat cookies in a sleeve, and And they just eat the whole sleeve of cookies until it's over, and then they're like, damn, I just ate a lot of cookies. In another part of the experiment, in between every few cookies are these colored pieces of wax paper. And when you get to the piece of colored wax paper, you think like, do I want to keep going or not? And it creates a decision point that makes you consciously decide, do I go forward or not? And so I think that relationships do offer these decision points. Do we want to be exclusive? Do we want to move in together? Do we want to get married? Do we want to have kids? And each of those is an opportunity to check in with the other person. And so sometimes creating that by saying, hey, let's go away for a weekend and talk about our future, you're really shining a ligh…

AI assessment note: “I actually do think that decision points are very important in life and in relationships.”

Q I like that. That's a, that's a good way to do it. One of the things you brought up, uh, was having a phone call first. Is that like the recommended protocol?

A Yeah, so before the pandemic, I did not like the idea of video dates or phone calls before a first date. To me, it triggered this idea of like a tech job and a phone screen, like that 15 minute call with the Google recruiter to see if you're crazy or not, and I felt like it was going to create too much of a feeling of, okay, I saw who you were, I'm not interested in you, I'm out. But during the pandemic, that was the only way that people could really date for a while, and so there was this proliferation of video chats or phone dates, and I actually felt like they were a great technique for people to just see, can we hold a conversation? Are they who they say they are? It makes people feel more safe before meeting up for the first time. It helps people who are really busy, like, executives or single parents feel like, is this somebody who I'd Want to get a babysitter for in order to meet up with them, and so now I actually think that it's a really helpful technique for a lot of people.

AI assessment note: “now I actually think that it's a really helpful technique for a lot of people.”

Q I like that. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about dating profiles. What are the tips that people, uh, the most common things that people get wrong?

A Yeah, so I've done a ton of research on this, and I can tell you some of the main tips. So, Your dating app profile is sort of like your billboard, and if you were buying a billboard, let's say, on the one-on-one in San Francisco, like, you would, of course, think a lot about what you're going to put on it, and I think people should give the same amount of attention to their Hinge profile. So, for example, you are telling a story about who you are. So let's say that you have a side of yourself that loves anime, and there's a side of yourself that's passionate about baseball. If all of your pictures are from Comic-Con, I'm not going to see that. So really, I like to teach people this concept of your three big things. What are three big things about yourself that you want to express in your profile? And then make sure that through your prompts and through your photos, you're getting those things across. Another thing is having a mixture of humor and vulnerability. You don't want to be all jokes, and you don't want to be all super serious. You want to show people different sides of yourself. You also don't want to fall into these dating app cliches. So There's this one on Hinge, like, I'm overly competitive about everything, and people have seen that all the time, so like, at best, they sort of just ignore it, and at worst, they're like, ah, cliche, like, I'm not interested in tha…

AI assessment note: “You also don't want to fall into these dating app cliches.”

Q sort of broken dating in a way where, I mean, I've been on dates with people, we all know people who are, I wish people would come up to me and ask me out. I wish I didn't have to use a dating app. And my defense of, you know, thinking immediately in this is like, society has taught guys not to approach women anymore. What's your reaction to that?

A This is something that I'm thinking about a lot, specifically with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. So I was recently speaking to somebody, she's a sixteen-year-old entrepreneur, and she's trying to deliver help for teen daters. And she said by far the number one thing that she gets questions about is how to deal with rejection. And so I am genuinely concerned that because of different societal factors, because of people who maybe lost out on some social skills during the pandemic, because of people who live a lot of their lives online, there is not that rejection resilience that many of us need in life. So if you want your dream job, you need to go out there, get a lot of no's, and go after it. You don't just sit at home waiting for a LinkedIn recruiter to message you about your dream job. That, that doesn't happen. You have to make it happen, and the same thing is true with dating, is that you have to shoot your shot. You have to approach people in public. You have to take a risk, and so I'm encountering a lot of people who are very afraid of rejection and are not taking those risks, and I think that it's leading to fewer relationships.

AI assessment note: “I'm encountering a lot of people who are very afraid of rejection”

Q I have a theory that the people who expect unconsciously other people to be able to read their mind They do that because they're very good at reading other people's minds, but not actually reading their mind. They're just, they tend to be maybe more thoughtful, or they pay attention to a lot more nuance or details. Do you think that's true?

A I haven't thought about that before, but it resonates with me. Something that I'm working on with my business coach is I make a lot of assumptions about what people want, and then I get really nervous about saying something that I think will disappoint them. And then I just avoid the conversation, but the feedback that I'm getting from my coach and from these people that I'm dealing with is you're actually getting wrong what I want, and so by not having the conversation with me, you're making decisions on my behalf, and if you actually just told me what was going on, we could come to a happy medium about it, but because you think you know what I want, and then you want to avoid discomfort for me, you're not even bringing it up, and so I think for me, the work that I'm doing There is to have uncomfortable conversations sooner instead of saying, well, I'm so good at knowing what everyone wants, I must be right, and instead being more curious and asking them what's going on.

AI assessment note: “I haven't thought about that before, but it resonates with me.”

Q I like that politics has become very divisive in the last, I don't know, 10 years, let's say. What's the difference between having different political views and a deal breaker?

A It's been so interesting in the 10 years of doing this to see how this has changed. So 10 years ago, I did an event with Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OkCupid, and we talked about this question that they have on an OkCupid survey of, you know, do you care about politics? And what he told me at the time was it was way less important if the person had the same political views as you as if they cared about politics or not. And now, Fast forward to this year, I would say that's no longer the case, that people really do care about political views, because it's moved into the category of values, and so people are really thinking about if we share political views, that's a proxy for do we share values, and so for a lot of people, it's as important or more important to them than something like religion, and so at the end of the day, it's about understanding what really matters to you in your life, what really matters to you in a partner, And if politics are something that's at the top of that list, I think that that's a legitimate deal breaker.

AI assessment note: “if we share political views, that's a proxy for do we share values”

Q There's so many parallels between that and business, right? Where, you know, a lot of people just tend to dabble in all of these different projects, and they don't actually get things done, versus people who commit to a project, focus on it, and make it a priority.

A There's a great concept from Dan Gilbert of Harvard called changeability. So we often crave the ability to change our minds because it makes us feel more free. So in this experiment that he ran on the Harvard campus, he had a bunch of students take a photography workshop, and one of the weekends that students took the workshop, they would get a call at the end of the weekend and say, hey, we're actually gonna have an art show in London in a few weeks. Pick one of your pictures, From this weekend of taking pictures, and that's going to be sent to London, and they didn't have the opportunity to change their mind. In a different scenario, they would call the students and say, pick one of the pieces to be sent to this art show in London, and I'm going to call you in a few days and see if you want to change your mind. Most of the time, people didn't change their mind about the photos, but when you asked people in which situation they were more satisfied, the people who didn't have the chance to change their A commitment, and they immediately rationalized it, and they felt good about it. When you can change your mind, you start wondering, well, that picture's a little sharper, but this one's original, a little more original, and maybe people in London will like this one more, and so sort of start making this pro-con list in your head that actually works against you because you start …

AI assessment note: “There's a great concept from Dan Gilbert of Harvard called changeability.”

Q Walk me through how you made your decision about your husband, because that was not a love at first sight. Yeah. That was a slow burn. How do you decide between falling into a relationship with inertia and choosing to be in a relationship?

A Thank you for indulging me and letting me talk about my husband, who I love so much, and I, it's so cliche, but, like, I just, I feel like I love him way more now than I did, you know, in our first year, our second year, like, our lives are just so much more enmeshed, and so My husband and I met in college, and we only know this because we became Facebook friends at the time, so I have this vague memory of, like, sitting next to him in the dining hall, and we had a mutual friend, and he wrote on my Facebook wall, which back in the day, you know, maybe he was flirting, or maybe he wasn't. And then we met again at Google, and I saw him on a dating app, and I looked at his photos. I can just remember exactly where I was, exactly what the photos looked like, and I swiped left. I said no, because from his pictures, he just looked like this unsmiling bro. They were sort of all from this, like, one hiking trip and maybe one wedding he went to. It wasn't smiling in any of them, And I was just like, oh, this guy's like wearing tank tops and a backwards hat, like not for me. And I like that part of the story because I think it shows like how quickly we make judgments and how incorrect a lot of those judgments are. So then some period of time later, I held this lunch at Google, which was people who had gone to our college who worked at Google, and you know, in retrospect, I think I was ex…

AI assessment note: “My husband and I met in college, and we only know this because”

Q But then when I... That covers up to maybe 50, right? Like, I mean, they're younger, but their partner, the person that they're looking for might be older.

A Potentially, but what I was going to say is, you know, I did this Netflix show, The Later Daters, and that was where I worked with people 55 plus, and so that was sort of my first exposure to that age group, and it was really interesting to see the different age differences and if people were dating somebody at the same life stage as them, and so I think what came up a lot on the show and in the kind of coaching conversations that maybe didn't make it onto the show was that Sometimes if you look younger, you might go on a date with somebody younger, and that feels really good from an ego perspective, but then you're just in a different life stage, and so I think what really matters is, do you have the same values? Do you like spending time the same way? You know, if you're retired, and you can travel, and the other person is hustling and building their business, then maybe you just aren't a good match because you're not going to be spending the majority of your time together, and so I think instead of, like, you know, one of those funny calculations, like, I don't even remember it, but it's something like half of your age minus seven. Like, I don't believe in any rules like that. I think people mature at different rates. People have different life experiences, but instead really tuning into, am I dating this person because they're younger and hotter and an ego boost, or do I ac…

AI assessment note: “I did this Netflix show, The Later Daters, and that was where I worked with people 55 plus”

Q Well, let's double click on that again. So if your needs are getting met outside of a relationship, then there's no incentive to be in a relationship? Is that what I?

A You know, living in the Bay Area, there is such a big community of people who are polyamorous or in open relationships, and I'm personally not in one of those, but I see a lot of value in it. I think that with the divorce rate being at 40 to 50% over the last 40 years, we've really seen that this one-size-fits-all version of marriage Doesn't work for most people. So if you have a product and 50% of people are returning it, then maybe you need to rework that product. So anyone who's rethinking the structure of marriage, I am a fan of. So relationship fluidity, all those things I think are great. And so in a polyamorous relationship, you might have somebody where you have more of a sexual relationship with them, somebody where you have more of an intellectual connection with them. There's so many different ways of doing it. And so I wouldn't say That you need to get all of your needs met by one person, and you should not get those needs met by other people, because I believe in these open relationship structures. But what I'm saying here is, when you're single, and you have limited time, and you really want to find someone, ask yourself, is this ongoing relationship with my ex something that's pushing me forward or pulling me backwards? And if the answer is that it's pulling you backwards, then I would cut ties for the time being and really focus on the next person that you could…

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't say That you need to get all of your needs met”

Q don't know much about him, and then you spend time with him. So your first impressions But now we're filtering before you even get to that point. We're filtering based on a dating profile. We're filtering based on pictures. We're filtering based on politics. We're filtering based on all of these things. I want to come back to the spark thing. Is there a difference between the spark and lust?

A I've thought about this a lot because, you know, when you write a book, you're writing it alone, maybe a few people read it, and your editor reads it, and then when it's out into the world, you really get to see what takes off with people, and so I would say a few things have taken off, and one of them is this concept of fuck the spark, and so people have really strong reactions when I say that because they feel like, oh, Logan's telling me I shouldn't be attracted to the person, or it doesn't matter. Logan's telling me to settle. Wait, I said fuck the spark, and then I met someone I wasn't interested in, and I dated them for six months, and it didn't work out, and so I really want to talk about what the spark is. The spark is a huge emphasis on instant chemistry and instant connection versus allowing it to grow over time. I would say that lust is about attraction, and a lot of times, you know, I want to have sex with this person. I hope this person wants to have sex with me, And I think being sexually attracted to someone is, of course, something that you should look for in a relationship, but it's slightly different from the spark, which is this overall feeling of, like, when I meet someone, I want to be around them more and more, and the big message I'm trying to get across here is that that feeling of chemistry can grow over time.

AI assessment note: “lust is about attraction... slightly different from the spark, which is this overall feeling”

Q That six feet thing is like such a killer. I'm like five 11 and three quarters. It's like, what do you do? Do you say six feet or do you do five 11? In which case, every woman has this like six feet.

A The height thing is really interesting. So I would say over the last few years, the posts of mine that have gone the most viral are reels where I've posted about this stat. Because in the comments, you have a lot of women saying, well, guys lie about their height anyway. And then guys say things like, Yeah, you should change the hype filter, and then women say, well, you filter based on weight, and so, anyway, it's just really interesting to see how much this bothers people, and I wish that I could kind of shout from the rooftops to everyone and say, imagine that you were in a bar, and you were sitting next to somebody, and you're both sitting on stools, and you have a 45 minute conversation that is incredible, it's deep, it's soulful, it's mind-blowing, and at the end of the day, the guy stands up, And he's five, seven. Are you telling me that you're not giving him your number now? No, of course you're gonna give him your number, because you just saw who this person was, and what an incredible connection you had. And in that moment, you're not thinking height first, you're thinking connection first. And I really want people to change their framework, and to understand, yes, the filters exist, but you are filtering out so many great potential connections. Why not date like a scientist? See if these things that you think are deal breakers are really deal breakers, when most of t…

AI assessment note: “I really want people to change their framework, and to understand, yes, the filters exist”

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

A So, one thing that I've looked at a lot is this idea of what matters more and less than we think for long-term relationship success. So, a lot of the things that people think matter more than they do include things like looks and money. So, of course, looks matters. We just talked about lust. You want to feel attracted to the person, but I wouldn't give anyone the advice of try to date or marry the hottest person that you've ever met, or the person maybe who you've had the hottest sex with in your life, because Like many things in life, our brains adapt to them over time, and so if you think about some of the most beautiful celebrities in the world, there are often people kind of known to humanity who have cheated on them, and so it's like if even these people that are considered the most attractive by cultural standards are being cheated on, there's this idea that people adapt over time to somebody's looks, and even if someone's really attractive, we'll get used to that over time. The same thing is true with money. I know this amount of money has changed over the last few years, but, you know, they used to say happiness doesn't change over 75,000 dollars. Now I think they've raised it, but it's this idea that whatever amount of money you have, you get used to. A few more things that matter less than people think they do. So people think, we need to have all the same hobbies. I…

AI assessment note: “one thing that I've looked at a lot is this idea of what matters”