Modern dating is miserable. Can it be fixed?

[Music] There was a time when dating meant you actually had to leave the house. Your eyes would meet over the top of a work cubicle or across a crowded room at a party or I don't know, maybe over the unripe lava cattos in the produce section. You'd make some remark and did smile and you get that little jolt of magic. It was the best of times and the worst of times as Dickens said, you got to flirt without a paper trail to remind you of how humiliating those remarks would look when the romance didn't work out. You agonized with your friends afterwards of course, but only over what you could remember. Not a timestamped archive, you could pour over in a desperate attempt to figure out where exactly things had gone wrong. Now look, dating was never easy. It's always been awkward and vulnerable and full of humiliation, false starts, bad timing and lots of little misunderstandings. But it did at least take place in the real world where people had context. Now for a lot of young people, romance has moved into this strange digital holding pen called dating apps. Those apps were supposed to make dating more efficient, but they also made it lonelier, more suspicious, less fun and I don't know. Kind of disperting and even worse, when every uncomfortable feeling becomes a diagnosis and every romantic risk starts to look like a red flag, it becomes harder to do the one thing relationships actually require, which is to be vulnerable with another person. So how did we get here? My guest today is Cat Rosenfield, a novelist and cultural critic. Her new book had a survive in the woods, because the story about revenge relationships, sex murder and the many ways men and women can make each other crazy. But she's also a former teen advice columnist and she dispensed a whole lot of advice to people who were looking for love and maybe not finding it. So that makes her the perfect person to talk to about the current state of dating. But they do want to give a quick warning before we begin this episode contains discussion of sex dating, desire, consent, Playboy magazine, erotic thrillers and one of the last truly intimate acts left in modern life, calling a stranger out loud to order dinner instead of using an app. So consider this your content warning. And with that, here's my conversation with cat. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And thank you for bringing your new book. How to Survive in the Woods, a tale of revenge and relationships. I don't want to give too many spoilers away, but can you tell us a little bit about it? Yeah, so you have two women. One of them is married to a man. The other is his mistress. And despite this obvious conflict of interest, the two women are friends and I have bonded to a certain extent over what an absolute just son of a f*** this guy is. And his wife, who's been under his thumb for about five years, decides with the help of her friend, who's also involved with this guy, to plan a camping trip. The three of them will go. They'll hike the 100 mile wilderness, which is the last stretch of the Appalachian Trail. And maybe this guy will have some kind of accident in the woods. Bad things happen on the trail all the time. I mean, there's all sorts of things that go wrong. Yeah, the next thing you know. Trajic. Yeah. So why write about topics like that? Well, you know, the thing is I think about murder all the time and that's just that's not weird at all. It's totally normal and healthy. I've been impressed every time I see you. You are full of information about how one could kill other people, how that would look, what might happen. It's really it's life affirming. Yeah, I mean, it's all completely theoretical. I, you know, have never been accused or charged with murder. But why write about this? I mean, all of the questions like, what do we owe to each other? How should we treat each other? What are we doing to each other? Who are we to each other? How do we conceive of loyalty and love and marriage and dating and relationships? You know, how do we think these things should be? And these cultural questions are at the center of basically any novel, including this one, just happens to come in a kind of a murderous package. Well, this is a good lead in to the opening question. I don't know how real it is, but when I talk to the kids these days, they seem to be having even more difficulty finding partners than we were. And it was to be clear, dating was never fun. It was always kind of a difficult journey of rejection and things not working out. But it seems way less fun now and way more toxic. How would you summarize what's going on there? I think a few things have happened, but the one that I am very focused on is how moving everything online and kind of siloing dating into this like one part of life that it's not supposed to touch other things has really made the entire experience more difficult and more miserable. So basically, we both came of age in an era where you didn't have apps for anything. And so you would spark a connection with another person in person. And you could do that in any number of places. And there were forums in which it was more appropriate to be overtly flirtatious, even maybe like a little bit sexual, like, you know, lascivious, whatever. And there were forums in which it was more like, I'm respectfully approaching you to tell you I would like to take you out for a coffee, but it was kind of in the air. You could meet somebody at work and spark a romance and end up marrying that person. You could meet somebody on the street who you liked the look of and you could approach them and say, could I get your phone number? Could I take you out for a coffee? And what's happened now is that we have decided the only way to meet somebody is through an online forum where they've explicitly consented to be approached. And it's turned into this idea then that to approach somebody in any other forum, whether it's, you know, you get to know them at the office, you see somebody on the street who you like, you meet somebody at bar. This is a violation and you've done something weird and untoward and like, you know, aggressive that's wrong. And the burden of this obviously falls mostly on men who are, you know, they are still the approaches, but now approaching somebody in any forum except for online has been kind of stigmatized as predatory. So they're very scared and women are very miserable because actually they still want to be approached, but nobody is coming up and talking to them anymore because they're afraid of being called a creep. Yes, exactly. So it does strike me that when I talk to young women, they're sad, not just that like no one ever approaches them, right? But they're sad, they look at movies and they're like, oh, I want the meat cute. I want all of that stuff. I mean, did you have a meat cute with your husband? I did. Yeah, we were on the company softball team together. We both worked in publishing and I was catcher and he was third base and it was not quite love at first sight, but he was awfully handsome. I met my husband and the backyard of front of the pod, Matt and glacius highly recommended way to meet a husband if you're looking for one. So we're hearing a lot of really scary diagnoses like the loneliness epidemic and the mating crisis are these things real problems or are we just following our tendency to get historical about things on one. I mean, you say epidemic, you say crisis, obviously, you can make an argument that these are the wrong words to use, but are young people dating less than they ever have been? Are they having significantly less sex in previous generations? Yeah. And is that a problem? I think honestly, yeah, I think it is. Especially because they themselves are not happy. This was sort of thrown into overdrive during the pandemic, but it was already in the pipeline before that. We started stigmatizing in real life interaction. We started thinking that we could replace it and make it better by moving things onto the internet. And then I think that the upshot of that is it's actually not true. I think about how there was a point at which everybody suddenly developed anxiety around making and receiving phone calls. And my theory is that this happened in tandem and in concert with the rise of the online pizza ordering apparatus. Suddenly, you didn't need to call the pizza place to order your pizza anymore. You didn't have to call it. I mean, yes, you know, it's true. I have to call a stranger and tell them what I want to eat and I have to tell them I only want to have pizza to have the pepperoni and then the other thing on the other half. Yeah, no, it's, you know, it's scary. But once we made it so that you could do that by like clicking a bunch of boxes and submitting a form, everybody was like, this is so great. It's so convenient. And at the same time, everybody developed crippling anxiety about making phone calls that were there had been none before. And I do think that these two things are at least somewhat related to each other and that it's made life worse. And similarly, you know, encouraging young people to think that they can't spark connections in person that they can only only ever meet online. That it's predatory to approach somebody in real life, that it's traumatic to be approached. We're encouraging people to view each other with so much suspicion, and then we're like, why aren't you guys dating? It's very obvious why they're not dating. - I think about this when I work a lot for a week straight and I don't really get off my computer ever, and then I will go do something in real life, and I'll screw something up, and I will have an urge for just a minute to hit the undo button. It's like, no, you can't undo the glass you just dropped. That's just broken. And I think that it gives you the solution of control and then leaves you sort of unable to function in the real world spaces. What do we do about that? - I think that we have to just encourage people to put their phones down. I know this makes me sound like a million years old, but this is kind of the way, the way forward, I think. And in doing so, we get people back into real life spaces where they have to interact with each other. They're not interacting through the intermediary of a screen, which strips out a lot of context, including important things. If you're flirting with somebody on an app, that can be fun, but it doesn't hold a candle to making eye contact with somebody at a crowded bar, and maybe you are standing close enough together that your forearm's touch and you feel something, and you can smell their shampoo or their body odor, and maybe that's enticing to you in some way, because we are actually creatures that are designed for a lot of sensory inputs that allow us to become attracted to one another, to spark connections, and eliminating all of those and then saying, "But isn't this more convenient?" I mean, in some ways, yes, I guess maybe if your idea of convenience is to have no friction in your life at all, but it doesn't equal happiness. I also think it gives you the illusion that you can set the criteria, and you're gonna get the exact match of your criteria. I did not know until I met my husband that I wanted to marry someone like that. And I think that that's broadly true for a lot of people. They think that they want someone who's six foot two and X, Y, and Z, or if you're a guy, I don't know what you guys think you want, but I'm sure you do. And in fact, what you discover from being in real life is that the thing you didn't order is often the thing that it turned out you wanted the most. So let's turn to dating, C.A. I've been married for several years, you have been married for even longer than me, but I do know single women and hear the peril of dating apps. And there's a whole language now about boundaries and gas-lating and love-bombing and emotional availability. And what do you think that that kind of pathologizing has done to dating culture? - The intrusion of therapy speak into the way that we talk about matters of the heart has not really been great for anybody. It does mean pathologizing a lot of what is actually, like the not just ordinary, but exciting and beneficial elements of your first kind of, like few interactions with somebody where you realize that you're attracted. Now we have both the kind of therapist view of things and also this idea that male desires inherently predatory. So if a guy starts flirting with you because he would like to get to know you because maybe he's interested in potentially having a relationship with you, well, that's grooming. If a guy complements you or seems really affectionate towards you, you know it's love-bombing. And if you respond to these things, if these things seem nice to you, if you're enjoying them and you feel that flutter, that's your like, fawning reaction from some past trauma where you've never gotten over your parents' divorce or whatever it is. People are encouraged to kind of dive into their own navels and to just, you know, unpack their feelings as though there's something to be kind of untangled and understood and dissected, you know, in the hopes of understanding them better, but what actually happens when you dissect your feelings is what happens when you dissect anything, which is like maybe you understand it better, but it also dies. I also think that there's the element of, it's easier to share the stuff with your friends. It's all in text, right? And we used to come back and agonize over dates, did it go well, whatever, but you know, the play by play was limited by the amount of dialogue that you could remember in your head, whereas now you can see the whole back and forth and you can torture your friends and yourself, forever with the complete record of all of your back and forth. And this just seems unhealthy. - You get the existence of the equivalent of the national archives for every relationship no matter how fleeting has been a bad development when it comes to, I mean, some of the stuff it's supposed to be a femoral, and you're supposed to inhabit the ambiguity of it. And feel the excitement that goes with that. You're not supposed to necessarily be sure and then you see the person again and it's exciting and you know something you didn't know before, but if you've been like looking back at everything you've ever said to each other and revisiting it and rehashing it in your head without that other person there, then you've basically formed a relationship with a person who doesn't exist except in your head. - Yeah, and I think it saves you from a certain amount of rejection, right? You never have to see that horrible moment when someone like tells you to your face, I don't wanna be with you, but instead I think you just trade it for a bunch of ephemeral relationships that never really go anywhere. And overall that feels worse, but it's lower variance, right? It's just like a long, sad, slow decline rather than a lot of fun and then some really bad moments. - Yeah, and the inability to be vulnerable I think is a huge part of this, you know, the fear of rejection, but also the fear of having to reject somebody, the idea that you have to find a way to be gracious about that. People kind of balk at that now because they don't like the idea of being approached. It's like well, you know, you shouldn't have been uncomfortable by approaching me. And I for about 10 years of my life early in my career, I was a teen advice columnist at a site called Sparklife. And I used to get these letters from teenage girls who were very anxious to date. They were like, I'm really, I'm interested in this guy, but like how do I pursue a relationship and maybe fall in love without getting hurt? And I would say nope, nope, nope. That's the, getting hurt is table stakes for falling in love. - Hold that thought. We just gotta go to a break, we'll be right back. (upbeat music) Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnik and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katangi Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters? From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust, get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI, trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI, find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. Welcome back. I'm here with Kat Rosenfield talking about men, women, the internet, and her new book, How to Survive in the Woods. So are we confusing this relationship is hard with this relationship is wrong? Because that's something I feel like I see a lot. Yeah, I think that to a certain extent we are and it goes back to the idea of friction or discomfort being inherently bad. But these are the things that make life exciting and make it worth living. I mean, I think a lot, I don't know if we're like, how much we want to talk about sex in this. Oh no, let's go there. But, you know, we are very focused on the idea right now of consent as kind of the only framework for understanding if sexual encounters and sexual relationships are good. And as though anytime anything goes wrong between a man and a woman, especially, it must be because he didn't get enough consent. And I think that this has a whole lot of downstream effects. One is that it's eliminated this entire category of sex that we no longer know how to talk about, which is totally consensual. It's just also bad because it leaves you feeling lousy about yourself. It hurts your feelings. It's disappointing in some way. But also we have basically inculcated in the generation that grew up with this framework for understanding sex. The idea that it's like the stakes are so high and you focus in this game for one second and either you're gonna end up getting raped or you're gonna rape someone. And either way, it's really bad. Like you cannot let your guard down. You have to always be checking in either like if you're a man, you have to make sure you're always a, you know, one mis-signal away from accidentally committing sexual assault. And if you're a woman, you are like one misstep away from being violated in a way that's gonna ruin you for the rest of your life. And then we're like, why aren't you guys having any fun? So talk about the evolution of sex in our popular culture. Just high level, how would you say what has changed over time since we were in our solid days? - Well, I'm gonna go back even further to like my grandfather's solid days, I guess. I recently wrote something about the history of Playboy magazine. And I got interested in the course of researching this article in what was the first issue of Playboy like? And. And I had an idea about Playboy Magazine, but when I went back into the archives and read the very first issue, it is archived online, somebody uploaded a PDF, and it was really fascinating to me to, like, this was a window into another era when you would just sit down with a magazine for an afternoon and read it. I remember that era. I also do, very fondly, honestly. And obviously, Playboy has this reputation for being like a new-demagazine, and there are pictures of naked women in the first issue from 1953. You have a topless Marilyn Monroe from before she was famous, and another pictorial where a woman is invited. It's sort of nominally a little photo essay about a man's pool at his Los Angeles bungalow, but it's really about the woman he invited over his women. But apart from that, the magazine is words. It's journalism, it's short fiction, reported pieces, there's a recipe for Cuban chicken, there's cartoons, there's jokes. And the thing that I really appreciated about it is, you know, number one, obviously, people were reading this. You know, if you just sat down to look at pictures of naked women, you would not be able to spend very long with the magazine, and also you wouldn't want Playboy, you would subscribe to something that was smudder and more explicit. This was really about entertainment for men, and that was the tagline. And there was this, I mean, at this point, it seemed kind of quaint understanding that what men found entertaining, what men found interesting was women. You know, they were interested in women. They liked looking at women, they liked thinking about women. They liked sex, but in the sense that it was sort of like, you don't want to in your face, it was just the undercurrent to life. You know, sex was part of life. And the magazine, you know, a lot of the writing in it was very much founded on this notion that sex is something that, you know, it is like how the species gets propagated, it's part of everyone's life. And it's in everything, and sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's a punch line, sometimes it's sort of like the, you know, the pratfall. But there were these, you know, there were jokes that were sort of sexually tinged, there were articles about alimony and marriage and dating. Although as I recall, the jokes would not even register today. Right. They're, well, I mean, they're the kind of jokes that, they might register as a me too problem, but they wouldn't register if you told one it would work. It would be like, what kind of environment are you creating in this office? But they're the kind of jokes that my grandfather would have gotten a kick out of, you know, they're like a little bit, a little bit racy, but not like disgusting. And I just, I was so kind of taken by the way that sexuality was understood to be like this thing that was sort of in the air and a part of life. And it could be interwoven in the fabric of, you know, of your reading material, of your magazine. And it wasn't that you were like sitting down to be sexually aroused. It was that you were sitting down to be entertained and entertainment often involved something that was a little bit sexy. So yeah, it was a whole lifestyle, right? So my ex boyfriend and I came across at a flea market, some playboys and he was like, we should buy them. And I was like, okay, let's buy them. And it was actually a really good magazine. There were article, there were interviews with like Gore Vidal and Bill Cosby. And I think William F Buckley, if I'm correct, I remember him correctly. And it was actually very enjoyable to read them. And I will say that same boyfriend when I took when to meet my grandparents, apparently my grandmother immediately told him, I don't think he brought it up. The day had been at the Playboy Club in Las Vegas. And I looked at him and he said, I had that same expression. And your grandmother said, no, it's not what you think. Those girls were very nice. But it was a whole, it was, it was ladish, right? But it was actually much friendlier to women than the modern male influencers seem to be, right? The idea is that you are supposed to become the sort of elevated person who was recently read an article. An interview with Bill Cosby about civil rights in order to be up on the latest hip things so that when you're out with your girls, you'll have something, you'll have some good conversation together. And that seems very different from like the Andrew Tate menace fear of today. Yeah, I mean, Playboy was among other things about men who didn't just like looking at women, but wanted to be attractive to women. Yes. And you know, that kind of, I don't know, like as you were saying, lifestyle or ethos is very much present, like in the air, it's in between the lines of everything in the magazine from that era. What's going on in the manace fear seems really more to me to be about men peacocking for other men about how much they're uninterested in women. And I guess it is kind of the flip side of what I see happening in feminist spaces where, you know, we're teaching young women that half the population, which is unfortunately the half of the population that most women desire, you know, sexually, that, you know, they have crushes on that they want to eventually date and marry and build a life with that this half of the population hates them and wants to do them harm and they shouldn't trust this half of the population. And that same fundamental idea, like they're bad, don't trust them. That seems to me to be very present in the way that people in the manace fear talk about women. Yeah. Now, you could argue, I think that these things are actually the same thing that you start with Playboy, but then you just extrapolated out 50 years and what you end up with is and you're taking one corner, the angry feminists in another corner, who are justifiably angry about and you take is that fair? I don't think that they're on the same spectrum. I mean, I don't see. Playboy was, and this is interesting. It was a stable brand, a stable editorial vision and a sort of a stable media product for decades. Basically until the internet. Yes, the internet then came along and changed things. One of the things that Playboy was trying to reckon with was, well, now people can see way more naked, graphic, hardcore stuff than we're offering in this magazine anytime they want for free. So who are we really? What are we doing? What is our product? But I think that that fundamentally misunderstands what the product was. It really was not about sex as in pornography. It was about sex as in part of the good life. And there was this inherent fondness for women and a certain respect that went with that, even in Playboy. It was like, you were looking at this woman because you think she's beautiful because she's somebody that you would or could want to fall in love with. Obviously, internet pornography is such a different entity. It's a different creature in all of these ways. And I think that Playboy unfortunately kind of aired when it imagined that that was its competition as opposed to seeing itself as a journalistic enterprise. Playboy felt to me like it thought of men as engaged in the battle of the sexes, but it also felt like they were engaged with a worthy adversary. You really had to be slian strategic to get one up on. And that is not how the menace for you guys talk about women at all. Right. And I mean, the battle of the sexes, it was just a battle, like, you know, and one in which at the end of the day you went home and went to bed with your opponent. Yes, and more wearing. And the best kind of battle to fight. Hold that thought. We just got to take another quick break, but we will be right back. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnik and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katangi Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI, trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. Come back. I'm here with Kat Rosenfield talking about men, women, the internet, and of course her new book, How to Survive Noids. So let's talk some solutions. How much of modern dating do you think is shaped by ideology versus just basic human insecurity? They kind of collide. Don't they? I mean, we have right now a set of ideologies that kind of feed insecurities and exacerbate them. I think they're not really possible to disentangle from each other. And now I think that's often correct. There's a form called waiting to wed, which is all about women who would like to get married and men who are stringing them along. And 95% of the time the correct answer is like, leave, he's not gonna marry you. But it also does seem like, you know, people forget that people in the internet don't have your best interests at heart, right? They have their own agendas, and they are gonna encourage you to do things that aren't necessarily good for your relationship, but they allow them to like be supporting you. No, you're right girl, you go, do you? No one's ever like, no, actually, you know what? You're being kind of childish, and you should go back and apologize. - Right, and I mean, whoever is giving that advice is bringing their own perspective and experiences to it. So, you know, they may want to see other people break up because they are either pattern matching to something that happened to them, and they're like, I wish that I'd done this, so I'm gonna tell you to do this. Or they're just miserable and they want company. I think that a certain amount of the advice you see on Reddit dating forums is basically the equivalent of like when your beautiful friend is considering getting a really bad haircut, and you're like, yeah, you should definitely do that. - Yeah, that's right. (laughing) - Because then you'll look just as bad as I do. - And Sally that's not even true, she's just gonna make that haircut look hot. - It's the most interesting. - So, it feels like a lot of the old dating scripts are gone, but nothing's really replaced them. But what would you tell the kids other than get off their phones? What should they actually be doing? 'Cause the hard part is, right, you had, we had our mothers and our older friends and so forth, giving us advice. - I mean, there's nothing wrong with the old scripts. They worked really well for all of us. I mean, obviously, yes, there was also heartbreak involved, but you're never going to eliminate that. And having accepted that, I think we could just say, okay, like this is how people were getting together before the internet came along. So maybe let's just go back to doing what we were doing, which worked very well, even if it had, heart feelings involved. I don't think that we need to be trying to reinvent the wheel. And I know that there's an argument to be made that you can never go backward. But apart from that, like this doesn't change unless we convince people to en masse, move away from this sort of frictionless, gamified, app-driven experience of seeking connection with each other and just like, and get them to be in rooms together, making eye contact with each other, like brushing up against each other, smelling each other, not in a creepy way, but just, you know, experiencing the embodied reality of other people and understanding that that is fine and that is as it should be. I think that we, especially in terms of, for young women, well, actually, not for young men, we need to say, you need to approach women. You need to, you know, and you need to be okay with the fact that maybe 90% of the time, this is gonna end with you getting shot down, but they're gonna be nice about it because the thing that we have to impart to young women is it is not an insult to be approached. It's not an insult for somebody to think that you're attractive, to like you, to want to go out with you. So if you're approached by somebody who doesn't interest you, then you say, I'm flattered, but no thank you, you know, I have a boyfriend or I'm just not interested or what. - The imaginary boyfriend was always such a good, such an easy way to do the let down. No, sorry, also I'm moving to Slovakia next week. - Yes, yes. The problem is then, like, you know, in the internet age, you actually kind of have to move to Slovakia because otherwise they'll see you on Instagram. But, you know, apart from that, yeah, you know, being gracious, letting people down easy, we got into this mode of thinking like, well, I shouldn't have to do that, I shouldn't have to manage other people's feelings in that way because that's hard for me. But like, it's a good kind of hard, it's a thing that you should do. - Yeah, I think this goes beyond relationships. Right, I see women online increasingly posting about how they've had to tell their friends, like, no, I'm sorry, I can't hold space for you right now. I've got my own stuff. It's like, no, that's what friendship is. It's sometimes your friends in crisis and you're also in crisis and you just got to be like, okay, I'm mortgaging the cat, getting on a plane and I'll be there with a bottle of tequila in four hours. Like, yep. And that's also true with dating, although, I mean, don't necessarily start with the bottle of tequila, save that for later. So if someone's stuck in a cycle of bad dates or short relationships, what's one piece of advice you'd give them? - Oh, man. - I mean, I don't feel like I've got the best track record of-- - You've been married since 2008, I believe. - I've been married since 2008. - That's a pretty good track record. - I mean, it is, but I met my husband. We met on the company's off-balting but I was dating somebody else at the time. And so we got to be friends in this kind of, you know, there was chemistry there but we were not acting on it over the course of a few months and then at the end of it, I was like, well, I've fallen in love with someone else so I guess I'm gonna be leaving this current boyfriend and getting together with this other guy. And the fact that I got married to him, I feel really justifies this. It was all like 20 years ago at this point. So it's fine. But that is a hard thing to replicate organically, to be like, yeah, do what I did. People are gonna struggle to do that. But the thing where you are just out amongst other people and you're open to making a connection and you're open to seeing where it goes and you're not trying to necessarily slot it into anything but you're also not treating the idea of developing feelings for somebody like it's akin to catching a disease. You know, the openness, the willingness, I think is maybe the thing that we could instruct people to try to inculcate and cultivate themselves. - Yeah, but the other thing was I really endorsed being friends first 'cause I met my husband. We did not date for a year after we met and part, he was younger than me and I was like, this is probably not something with a future very cute. We can just be friends and then we were friends and then we were friends and then we sort of stopped being friends. So, be open, just saying, go to the party, make friends. You never know, he might have nice friends. He also might be a nice friend. So. - Yes, and eventually more. And I mean, it's funny is the thing that we're kind of circling but not saying is that delaying sex is not necessarily the worst thing that you can do. I do think that we talk about the old model. We've gotten away from a lot of the things that dominated the dating scene before the sexual revolution that were all rooted in the idea that you didn't want to be alone with a man in a way that might lead people to think that you were having sex because that would be bad for your reputation and also you couldn't really have sex without the risk of pregnancy. So, you didn't want to be doing that anyway or have people think you were doing it. And then this movement came along that changed all of that. And we discarded a lot of the courtship norms that existed prior to that. But a lot of those norms were useful. They had this extended getting to know you period in which it wasn't that you were actually just friends. You perceived the person-- A spark as it were. Yes, there was something there that maybe there was something worth pursuing. Maybe you had an understanding with each other. But you would spend time together. It would allow you to see if you were compatible in ways that went beyond your physical chemistry without having to introduce the physical chemistry into the mix in such a way that it makes everything complicated. Yeah, one of the things that I think you see over and over again is that the way that online dating accelerates the sex part. And then women who wanted more than that and don't get it feel hurt and used, which is an entirely fair way to feel. To be clear, I would feel exactly the same way. And if you slow it down, you were just less likely to get into the spot where this was a one-night thing. I mean, sometimes it's going to be one-night thing because you tried it and then you realized that that was just-- you guys don't belong together. But often, it's just that it went too fast. You didn't have anything before it happened. So last question for all of the money. What is one thing you're reasonably optimistic about with men and women? So I've noticed that the young people-- they want to meet cute, right? And they are like, how do I get that? And I think the next step is they're going to realize that they need to return to doing things maybe in the way that we did in previous eras before phones made everything complicated and the internet made everything complicated. So I'm reasonably optimistic that they're going to basically from first principles stumble back into a way of meeting, dating, courting, whatever it is that allows them to spark really genuine connections with each other. From your lips to God's ears. That's excellent. Kat, thanks so much for being on the show. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnik, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening. Alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. 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