So I recently read How to Not Die Alone by Logan Urie and this book has genuinely changed how I'm approaching my love life.

And so in this episode of Book Club, the series where as you know, we distill and discuss highlights from some of my favourite books.

We're gonna start by talking about the four reasons why dating is difficult in the modern world.

And then I'll be sharing five top tips that I got from this book.

Really good book, you should read it.

Five top tips about how to date more effectively so that we can find love and all that fun stuff.

Let's get into it.

Part one, why is dating so hard?

So to be honest, every era has had some kind of issues when it comes to dating and finding love.

It's one of the foibles, I think that's the right word, of the human experience.

But what Logan says is that there's like four main reasons why dating in the modern day in 2021, 2022, whenever you're watching this, why dating is particularly hard for us.

Firstly, and this is probably a good thing, we do define our personal identities more so than we did in the past.

In the past, there was a lot less personal agency.

You would kind of have these expectations thrust on you.

You'd become a doctor because your parents told you to become a doctor.

You'd marry this person because your parents told you to marry that person because they happened to own the plot of farmland next to you.

These days, we don't quite do that.

Especially in the West, we are very individualistic.

We want to build our own personal identities.

And so in a way, the person we marry, the person, like the way we find love is a huge part of that personal identity thing, which is kind of hard today.

Secondly, it's hard because we've just got way too many options.

Again, back in the day, you would just marry the person that you met in your neighbourhood.

But now with all of the apps, and trust me, I would know, I have premium accounts on all of the apps.

With all the apps, there's just way too much choice.

There's this concept in social psych behavioural economics called the paradox of choice, which is that you would think that the more options you have, the easier it becomes to find the perfect option.

But actually in studies, if for example, you give people a choice of four bits of jam to choose from or a choice of 24 bits of jam to choose from, the people who are confronted with the 24 bits of jam are unlikely to make a decision about any of them.

Whereas the people who are confronted with four are like, oh, strawberry jam sounds good.

I'm gonna take that.

I'm not comparing dating to choosing a flavour of jam.

But the point is, we just have way too many options at our fingertips and that weirdly makes dating harder than we would think.

Thirdly, we've got the social media thing.

Now this is a problem sometimes when it comes to dating because we see the highlight reels of other kind of couples.

We see these people on Instagram with their really cute photos.

We see these couples on YouTube doing Q and A's.

We see all these couple blogs.

I've been watching a lot of couple blogs recently, don't ask why.

And they really show the highlight reels of their lives.

And so when it comes to dating, it's like, oh my God, I need to be able to find someone for whom I feel that sense of like love that those people, that YouTube couple seems to show with one another.

Oh, Jess and Gabriel, they're so cute together.

Matt and Abby, they're so cute together.

How did they do it?

Monica and Sam, oh my God.

Like we see all these comparative things.

And even if it's not like famous YouTuber, a couple of bloggers, Casey and Candice, it's our friends on social media, engagement photos, all that kind of stuff.

It's so easy to compare our failures in dating with other people's highlight reels, like our behind the scenes with their highlight reels that makes trying to find the right person, this like really high stakes decision that that level of comparison just wasn't really there back in the day.

And fourthly, dating is quite hard because it's actually a pretty big decision.

Like Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook says famously that the person you marry is the single biggest decision you'll make in your career because it just has such a huge impact on your career, your life, all that kind of stuff.

And so finding love and retaining love and getting into a long-term relationship and like figuring out who that person is gonna be is actually genuinely a very kind of high pressure decision that genuinely could change the trajectory of our lives.

So those are four reasons why dating is hard.

I wanna talk now about five top tips that I got from this book.

But before I do that, I wanna talk a little bit about why am I reading a book about relationships?

To be honest, I think every single person in the world should be reading more and learning more and finding out more about relationships because as research has shown and as our own experience shows, relationships are the single most important thing in our life.

Not necessarily just romantic relationships, but also friendships, also relationships with family, relationships with colleagues.

Relationships are the most important thing in life.

Like when you're lying on your deathbed, you're not gonna be worrying about whether you put out an extra video or whether that person who said something mean to you in high school is just a thing.

You're gonna be wanting to spend more time with the people who matter, the people who you love.

And I think relationships are this weird area whereby a lot of people just sort of think, oh, you're meant to just make it up as you go along.

I think people like the school of life, Alain de Botton, like the people who write about this stuff are fantastic and Logan definitely gonna add to my VIP list of relationship advisors.

Because for such an important area of life, it's pretty weird that we don't think about it, that we don't talk about it, that we don't like theorise about it.

You know, if I think about myself, like I enjoy reading books about relationships and yet I listened to of the 100 or so podcasts I'm subscribed to, maybe one or two are themed around relationships and 98 of them are themed around how to be more productive, how to make more money, how to launch a business, that kind of stuff, which is weird, right?

Because if relationships are the thing, the main lever that we can move to contribute to our happiness, why are we not spending more time thinking about them?

And so to be honest, moving forward on this channel, I wanna talk about more about friendships, relationships, love, that side of the human condition, which I haven't really talked about in the past, been reading about it for a long time.

But I just think it's something so hugely important.

And whenever people are like, oh my God, why would you read a book about love?

Love is meant to be experienced, not to be read about.

Yes, okay, fine.

Love is meant to be experienced, but for something so big, the person you marry, why wouldn't you read about it?

That's my whole spiel on this.

This is a fantastic book.

Let's not talk about kind of the five main points that resonated with me.

And tip number one from the book is to know your blind spot.

Now, the person who wrote this book, Logan Urie, is actually a relationships therapist who is now head of relationship science at Hinge, which is one of the famous dating apps that I've used extensively and have premium accounts on.

Hinge, if someone at Hinge is watching this video, please reach out and sponsor my channel because like genuinely, 100%.

Anyway, Logan is a relationship therapist.

And the way she talks about it is that we all have these dating blind spots and she calls it the three dating tendencies.

And the idea is that all of us fit into one of these categories, but we probably have traits from all three of the categories.

The first type of dating tendency is the romanticizer.

This is the sort of person who kind of believes the whole soulmate stuff that, oh, falling in love, it's like this magical thing and I wanna find my soulmate.

And if I don't feel very strongly about someone, if there's no spark, then things aren't gonna work.

You know, I like it when they walk.

Secondly, we have the hesitator.

Now, this is the sort of person that thinks, you know what, I am not ready for dating just yet.

If you're under 18, this doesn't apply for you, but you know, the sort of person over the age of 18 who thinks, you know what, I'm not ready for dating just yet.

I want to establish myself first.

I wanna lose weight.

I wanna get my six pack abs.

I wanna make sure I've got a job.

I wanna make sure I know what I'm doing with my life before I even consider getting into the dating marketplace.

This is the hesitator.

And thirdly, we've got the maximizer.

Now, this is the sort of person who recognises that dating is like a big deal and the person I marry is like a very, very big decision.

And therefore, they want to try and maximise the score on all of the different traits that they're looking out for and find the person who most maximise, sort of hits the highest score point on each of these different traits.

And to be honest, I know quite a few people who are hesitators and romanticisers, but the vast majority of people I know, including me, are very much maximisers.

And in fact, she has a quiz early on in the book.

So you can see, you can answer a few questions and figure out like, are you a hesitator, maximiser or romanticiser?

I am definitely a maximiser.

And this is like a real problem.

And I didn't quite realise it was such a problem until I did the questionnaire.

And I realised, oh my God, this is a thing.

This is why I've been struggling with my love life because I'm too much of a maximiser across all these, supposedly all these different qualities that I'm looking out for.

Which brings us onto tip number two, which is we solve for the maximiser problem with tip number two, don't let perfect be the enemy of great.

And the problem with being a maximiser, which I am and you possibly are as well, if you are watching this sort of video about a book summary, the problem with being a maximiser is that we tend to obsess over making the right decision.

And we think that the more we analyse something, the more carefully we weigh up the options, the more options we give ourselves, the better an outcome we're gonna get.

But this is not necessarily true.

And what Logan says is that what we should be trying to do is become instead of a maximiser, a satisficer.

And the idea here is that instead of trying to maximise, trying to find the absolute perfect person you possibly can, we should try and find someone who is like good enough and then work to make that relationship something that is absolutely fantastic.

Now, that's not to say that you just settle for the next person that you meet, but it is to say that if you find someone who meets your criteria and you get on with them and the vibe is good, and you've kind of assessed them on the long-term traits that matter that we're gonna talk about, once you've done that, you think, you know what?

I'm gonna commit to this person and you stop doing the whole like, ooh, there could be someone better out there.

You know what?

I'm just gonna keep my dating apps active just so I can see what's out there.

Like for example, if you wanted to watch something on Netflix, being a maximiser would be like, okay, I'm gonna look through the entire catalogue of absolutely everything that's available on Netflix.

I'm gonna look at the reviews.

I'm gonna make sure I find the absolute perfect film.

And only once I found the absolute perfect film, oh, wait, two hours have passed.

It's time for bed because I no longer have time to watch the film.

That is like the maximiser approach to it.

Whereas if you're a satisficer, you take a look at the front page, you think, hmm, let's scroll a little bit.

Oh, that one looks good.

Reviews look good.

Let's go for that.

And you don't worry about the fact that maybe if you'd been scrolling for an extra 10 minutes, you might have found a film that's slightly better.

At this point, you might be thinking, okay, well, finding something to watch on Netflix is not such a big deal.

The person you're gonna marry is actually a big deal.

And surely it's better to be a maximiser in that than to be a satisficer.

But interestingly, that is actually not true.

So if we look at the studies, which Logan cites in the book, what she says is that the thing we're optimising for is not can we find the perfect partner because there's no such thing as a perfect partner.

The thing we're trying to optimise for is what is gonna lead to long-term happiness in our relationship.

And it turns out that even if you are a maximiser, if you find the perfect person, the fact that you're a maximiser and you're approaching this with a maximising kind of point of view means you're gonna be less happy in that relationship than someone who is a satisficer.

And so given that there are no real objective criteria about what makes a perfect romantic partner or a perfect spouse or a perfect life partner, whatever, given that we don't have any objective criteria like that, the only thing that matters is how we feel about the decision.

And inevitably, if we are satisficing, we will feel better about it in the long run and therefore do better in the relationship than if we were trying to maximise on that front.

And there's a nice quote from a guy called Barry Schwartz who wrote the book about paradox of choice, where he writes, maximisers make good decisions and end up feeling bad about them.

Satisficers make good decisions and end up feeling good about them.

So being a satisficer rather than a maximiser is one part of the equation, but it's not the only part of the equation.

And the next thing is to actually figure out what sort of person we're looking for, which brings us onto tip number three, but I have a meeting to go to, so I will be right back.

All right, and we're back.

Background's changed a little bit, but let's move on now to tip number three, which I really hope that worked.

Anyway, let's move on to tip number, let's move on to tip number three, which is to stop looking for prom dates.

Let's keep in the mistake there for the thing that's kind of cute.

Lol.

I don't know why I'm weird.

So there's this concept in, again, in psychology and behavioural economics called present bias.

And that is the feeling that causes us to prioritise the short-term over what actually matters in the long-term.

This is the reason why we procrastinate from all sorts of things in life.

And interestingly, what Logan tells us is that we have exactly the same bias when it comes to relationships in that we tend to often prioritise short-term things compared to long-term things.

And she calls this looking for a prom date rather than looking for a life partner.