One Year of Office Hours: Lessons on Love and Friendship

The most popular topic that I teach is about relationships. It's about love, falling in love, staying in love, making friends. That's what people most care about. A lot of young people in their 20s today, they, they say, yeah, I, I have goals and direction, but I don't feel like there's significance. I don't feel like I am loved or I don't know who it is. 62% of relationships now start on the apps. It's overtaken every other way to do it, and it should be easier and it should be more fun and it should be more interesting, and it's harder. I wanted to fall in love and stay in love when I was in my 20s. And I remember when I was 23 years old thinking to myself, I'm ready to get married. We're going to do something slightly different for this one-year commemorative episode of Office Hours. We're going to have actual office hours. So that's where we start. This is your time. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur C. Brooks. I'm the host of this program that is now one year old. I'm delighted to be with you for the 53rd episode of this show that we conceived of as a way to bring the ideas of behavioral science to you in ways that you can use. The mission of the show, the mission of my work, my life is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I want to bring you into that as well, which is why I'm doing this podcast. And I'm so grateful to you for following the show and sharing it with a couple million of your close personal friends. I've been doing this this whole year. What a delight it's been. We're going to do something slightly different for this one-year commemorative episode of Office Hours. We're going to have actual office hours. Now, these— the people I'm with right now are not my students at Vanderbilt University, but they are the age of my graduate students, as a matter of fact, people who are really dedicated to The mission of their lives, real strivers in real life in their 20s, dealing with all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Just like all of you who are watching this show, whether you're in your mid-20s or like me in your mid-something that's not 20s. I want you to use the material that you see in every episode, but especially today, I'm delighted. As always, please do feedback on what you see. officehours@arthurbrooks.com. That's the, that's the email address for the show. Also. Leave comments. We read all the comments, even if they're mean. We read those comments too. And I don't feel bitterness toward you. Really, I don't. I want to talk to you today about, well, the subject that most people ask me about almost all the time, practically every day, as a matter of fact, since I've been teaching in the Science of Human Happiness at Harvard and now at Vanderbilt, the most popular topic that I teach is about relationships. It's about love, falling in love, staying in love, making friends, That's what people most care about. And if you go back through history, you will find that the greatest philosophers, everybody from Plato and Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas into the 20th century, what they usually come to is the conclusion that if you were to try to find the motive behind human life, the, the reason that we exist, it's real, is to love and be loved. And that's what I want to talk about. How do we do that better? So funny that the basic motive of human life needs a manual, but Everybody watching us knows that that's the case. We're going to start by getting to know a little bit our, our friends here, and then I'm going to talk a little bit more about the importance of love from a, from a scientific perspective, just for 10 minutes. Then we're going to look in two different areas of love that are most salient for people in their 20s: friendship and romantic love. What are the biggest problems, the biggest challenges? No, the biggest opportunities, because love is the ultimate entrepreneurial act. Can you be a billionaire in that? That's what really matters. Forget the money. Let's take the value that it actually brings. And we're going to talk to our young friends today about where they are in their journey. Maybe we'll talk about where I am in mine and we'll find some of the secrets as well.

Hi everybody.

Hi.

Welcome to Office Hours and thank you for joining all of us in this community. I'm looking forward to hearing what's on your minds and talking about these big ideas. And let's start by getting to know each of you. Where are you coming from? What are you doing? Let's start with your names, your rank and serial number. That's not it. That's a different thing. That's if I were taking you captive in a time of war. Right. Let's start right here.

Uh, hi, I'm Jake. Uh, I live in DC. I work in higher education. Uh, so excited to be here.

That's great. Thank you, Jake.

I'm Daniela. I live in Virginia and I have the privilege of actually working with you, Arthur.

Yeah.

And so I'm really excited to be a part of this conversation with, you know, actually seeing how we— this content interacts with, with us. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. I'm Carolyn.

Um, I'm located in Pennsylvania and I just love any conversation about meaning in life. So I'm excited.

And full disclosure, you're a PhD student, soon to be a PhD in developmental psychology. So you and I share the same passions and toolkit.

That's true.

Exactly right. Congratulations in advance on finishing your PhD.

Thank you.

Big accomplishment. Love to see it.

I'm Michael. I'm 27 years old. Uh, I live local here in, in Virginia, I live in Fairfax. Um, I'm in business development for a government contractor and yeah, excited to be here. Excited to talk about all this stuff I'm really interested in. I've been following your work for a while, Dr. Brooks. So excited to get into it.

Thank you, Michael. And you're a little bit different than the rest insofar as that you're married.

Yes.

And I think you're the only one among us, you and I are the only married men here, right?

Is that true?

Yep.

For about 3 years.

Uh-huh.

Married in 2023.

That's great.

So, hi, I'm Laura. I'm also 27 and live in the DC area. I do grant and education work for the last few years, and I'm excited for our conversation.

What's grant and education work?

I worked in grant writing.

Mm-hmm.

For a while for a public school district, and now I do grant consultant work.

Oh, for nonprofits mostly, right?

Um, nonprofits, a lot of, um, institutes of higher ed. Some nonprofits. Yeah.

That's great.

Mm-hmm.

Good. Welcome. Last but not least, Griffin.

Yeah. My name's Griffin. I've been living in DC for about 4 years. I work for a nonprofit in the early child education space. I also teach meditation and yoga. I do a lot of community building and love to touch grass, get my hands in some soil.

Yeah. And full disclosure from Griffin, the only one of, I think, all of you who has no social media presence. Is that correct?

I also don't.

You don't use social media either. Oh, okay. So there's two of you who don't, you're both countercultural. And you, Jake?

I'm pretty on there.

You're pretty on.

Yeah. I am the opposite end of the spectrum.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, which, which actually puts you firmly in the mainstream of, of, uh, so, okay. Well, good. We're going to get into all of that because all of that plays into the willingness and ability to have the kind of relationships that we actually need. Obviously that's an important thing. Let's start by talking a little bit about The science of, well, the science of, of love, how we understand it, why it actually matters and how it relates to happiness, which is the central topic in this show. As some of you know, my latest book is on the meaning of life and meaning is one of the macronutrients of happiness. I use that as a metaphor. The macronutrients of food are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are the building blocks of anything that you eat actually. And you got to get that right if you want to have good health, if you want to have good nutrition. Well, the same thing is true with happiness. It has 3 macronutrients, the things that you need in balance and abundance. And those 3 things, as everybody watching the show, but you'd probably know this as well, are enjoyment. Gotta enjoy your life from day to day and moment to moment. Satisfaction, which is the joy from accomplishments with struggle, finding satisfaction in your achievements and activities. But most importantly is meaning. For a long time, psychologists kind of split meaning off from happiness. And they said, how do we balance happiness and meaning? You can't be happy if you don't have meaning, if you don't understand the why of your life. But that's the hardest question of all. And that's the biggest crisis that I find in people, particularly under 35 today, weirdly started saying after about 2008, my life feels meaningless. There's lots of data that go back decades. Do you find your life meaningless? And you know, you usually between 10 and 15% of the young adult population would say that? Not very much. These are people that were suffering from, you know, mood disorders, from generalized anxiety or clinical depression. But that started to tick up after 2008. It's almost as if some diabolical force had entered our lives around 2008, 2009. I can't think what it is. Can you? Yeah, that's right. Whatever it is, it doesn't happen to be sitting on this table, but this is the only table in America that doesn't have an iPhone on it. Or a device, a smartphone on it. When the devices started to enter the picture, people started, especially young adults who didn't remember the before times, started more and more and more to say, my life feels meaningless. I mean, it, you can find some meaning, but it, for some reason, got harder. Now, this is something that I started to see as a behavioral scientist in my research, but also in my teaching, because I teach graduate students. My students are your age. They're not undergraduates. They're not 18, 19. They're the average age for one of my students at the Harvard Business School for the past 7 years is 28, as a matter of fact. And they were more and more likely to suffer from this like lack of ability to answer questions like, why am I alive? And for what would I give my life? That's kind of a meaning quiz that I give my students. And they're like, I don't know. Or Those questions don't have any answers. And that gave a rootlessness to it. So I started studying this topic. That was the macronutrient in trouble. You know, just as if you go back 10 years, nutritionists started to study protein because they realized that's what was missing from people's diets. Well, I started looking at meaning because that was the macronutrient of happiness that was really missing from people's lives. The first thing I needed to do in that research is define meaning. I just defined happiness. Now I got to define meaning. Meaning is made up of 3 basic parts as well. I mean, to say go get the meaning of life is kind of broad. It'd be like, go sit in the mouth of a cave and find a guru.

Okay.

You know, I've done it, but you know, not everybody's going to hit the Himalayas in the same way. And so it's much easier if you actually can come up with a better definition of what, what are we looking for? What are we looking for? What's meaning? The three parts of meaning are coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence means an answer to the why question. Why do things happen the way they do? You gotta have an answer to that. I mean, things are happening around us all the time. Your life will feel meaningless if your life feels random. This is one of the things that we know really well from decades of research in psychology. But if you have a theory about why things happen, then you have a theory of coherence. Of life, and that gives your life a sense of meaning. It might be that it's the, it's the laws of science. And so some people are radically physicalist scientists in particular, right? Carolyn, this is one of the things that we see, right? Especially social scientists like you and me. Some people will say it's the hand of God. It's the will of God. That's why things happen the way that they do. Now, personally, I'm a scientist who believes in God. So I get both of those things. Some people who don't really are not very scientifically oriented, and if they're pretty secular, as a matter of fact, they'll, they'll, they'll fall into theories about conspiracies, like doing your own research on the internet. And they'll say, why do things happen the way that they do? Shadowy figures with power. Conspiracy theories are a way to find coherence. And that's a way to look for meaning, which is a search for happiness. So it's important to recognize this, that if you have a family member who's going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories on the internet, don't yell at them and say, you moron. Recognize that this is fulfilling a human need for these people. That's coherence. The second is purpose. Purpose is not the same thing as meaning. It's a subcategory of meaning. And that's the answer to the why question. Why am I doing what I'm doing in my life? Many people don't know. I mean, I'm just getting up in the morning and scrolling my phone and going to work on Zoom and dating on the apps. And then looking at YouTube Shorts. I don't know. Why am I doing it? I don't know. And if you can't answer why you're doing what you're doing, you don't have purpose. Purpose is goals and direction, which you need so that you can make progress. Human beings, Homo sapiens, are intensely progress-oriented. We're making progress toward a goal. We're happy. By the way, that's one of the reasons that people feel so happy when they're on a successful diet. Is because they see the scale fall a little bit every day. It's like so awesome, making progress, making progress. When people are training for a marathon, they're happier than when they're not because they've got goals, they've got direction, and they're making progress toward those. They're not so happy when they hit those goals because then you think that you're going to be cosmically happy forever, and that's not the way your emotions work. That's called the arrival fallacy. Anyway, be that as it may, purpose is really important. To actually— and so when I set my students up to have even kind of arbitrary goals, they feel better about their life. The last one is significance, and it's arguably the most important. Significance is the answer to the why question. Why does my life matter? Why does my life matter? And that leads to the question, to whom does my life matter? Because to say my life matters, but— and you can't say to whom, it's meaningless. Your life needs to matter. You need to matter to someone, to some entity, to something. It's gotta matter in a particular way. This is one of the reasons that people have more meaning in their life when they have children for the first time, because that baby who's completely helpless, you matter to that baby. And you're showing yourself every single day, even at 2 o'clock in the morning when you're waking up and the baby's screaming, you're like, I can't stand it anymore, but I matter. I matter. And that's a huge and fundamental sense of meaning, which is why people's lives get so much more depth when they have children for the first time, because of these channels that we're talking about. The psychology is pretty simple, but that really is the question of love. That is the question of the, the motive of living, which is to love and be loved, has to do with significance, which has to do with meaning, which has to do with happiness. This is how it all hangs together. This is the most important one. And that's what I want to talk about here today, because that's the one that's most in crisis when I'm looking at the data on why people say my life feels meaningless. A lot of young people in their 20s today, they say, yeah, I have a theory about why things happen the way they do, and I have goals and direction, but I don't feel like there's significance. I don't feel like I am loved, or I don't know who it is. And that gets down fundamentally to a bunch of different silos. One of them is love of the divine, sort of a religious idea. One of them is love with family, especially with parents, right? When you're in your early 20s, it's, it's more salient with your parents than with your kids, because most people don't have kids yet. But the two biggies are friends and partners, romantic partners. Those are the two biggies. And those are the two that are most in crisis. Really depressing statistics. When you ask, for example, how many people know you well, the number's been going down now for 20 years. Not coincidentally, since we've seen the influx of technology that mediate our relationships, more and more and more young people, up to half of people under 30, say no one knows me well. That was an answer you never saw 30 and 40 years ago for people your age. That was an answer you'd only see from men my age, you know, men over 60. It'd be like, yeah, nobody knows me well. Are you kidding me? What about your wife?

Especially her.

Right. I mean, that was kind of the lonely old guy thing. And now we're seeing it increasingly for people under 30 because of the mediation of the screens that are actually in people's lives. And the second, perhaps even more alarming, is the fact that romantic love is harder and harder to come by. That couplehood is harder to get. It should be easier. We have more access to the world. The world is flat. I mean, on the screens, you're supposed to be able to meet so many people in the proliferation of dating apps. 62% of relationships now start on the apps. It's overtaken every other way to do it, and it should be easier and it should be more fun and it should be more interesting. And it's harder for some particular reason. And the result of it is that people in their 20s are about half as likely to be married as they were 30 years ago. They're about a third less likely to be in love. They're a third less likely to live together outside marriage. Every way that you want to measure it, romantic couplehood has declined. That's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about those two big problems and how we can turn them into opportunities. I want to hear about your experience with these things, your suggestions on these ideas, and ways that we can actually bring better ideas on friendship and love to more people around the world who are in their, in their 20s today, or maybe not in their 20s, but are grappling with these ideas. So that's where we start. This is your time. So I'm looking forward to any way that you want to, um, any direction that you want to take it. Um, what is it about, starting with friendship, and then we'll get into romance a little bit later. What is it about friendship that feels like it's getting harder today than it might have in the past? And I realized that you don't have the same amount of perspective that I do. Huh. But then again, I'm not in the friend market in the same way that you are. Who wants to talk about why it gets, it's actually harder today than it's been in the past in your experience?

I can talk about it.

Please do, Laura.

I recently moved to DC.

Yeah.

From Chicago.

And it's the first time in my adult life that I'm like moving to a new city. Obviously you do for college, but in college it feels different just because you're all in the same boat, right? You're 18 years old, everyone's looking to make friends. This time I'm in a new city and it's hard to figure out where to start with meeting people. I am lucky that I have like a couple mutual friends in the city that have been able to introduce me to them. But other than that, it's, you know, do I join a club? You know, do I try and join a sports team? I haven't played sports in a long time. That's a little daunting. Yeah, it's daunting, right? Like I'm gonna go play volleyball. I'm not ready to play volleyball. Um, but you just, you're not sure where I think to start with the making new friends at this age. And I'm not sure if that's like new because of screens, but It's just, you're in your late 20s. It's different than making friends at 18, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of the friend architecture is built in when you go to college.

Exactly.

And then you, and you have to go build it for yourself once you're out of college and in a new place, right? Have you felt lonely since you've come to DC?

You know what, I have like a couple really good friends in the city, so I haven't, but I could, I do want to branch out and try and meet people in this new phase of life as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Making adult friendships is a uniquely difficult experience. I think DC, I'm curious other people's opinions, it's particularly difficult given how transient this place is.

Yeah.

I feel very blessed to have a very abundant friend community through the different community groups that I'm a part of. And I've also had to like grieve a lot of relationships that have moved on to their next chapter, whether that be through going to graduate school or going back home or getting a new job. Um, it's, and it's interesting. And I also work largely remotely, which I think, you know, at a different time, that wasn't something that we did. So you don't get that typical like water cooler chat that, that used to happen.

But let me ask you a question. Are the friends that you actually have and the, and the the blessed abundance that you have of friends, are they coming through your work or coming through the fact that number one, you're not on screens and number two, you teach meditation and yoga?

Yeah.

Where are your friendships coming from?

Yeah.

I think, you know, I think part of the gift that I've been able to receive through engaging more deeply in those spaces is I've gotten really clear on what my values are and who I want to surround myself with. So through climbing, through spending time outdoors, through yoga and meditation, I've been able to find folks that, that I do feel really know me and hold space for me the same way that I can for them. And in a lot of ways, you know, like our attention is our spiritual currency. Like that's like why we pay it. And because we're spending more and more time on screens, I think that takes away from some of like the interpersonal connection that we get to have just by sitting in the room together.

So you're validating Laura's question about whether or not she should go to volleyball.

The answer is yes.

1000%. You can come climbing with me too if you want.

Yeah.

Let's go over here, Jake. What's your idea? What you're thinking on this?

I think Griffin, I think you make a really cool point about like kind of starting inward and then moving outwards and finding the people who kind of share that. I think I've kind of been in a similar place as you, uh, Laura. I've been living in the city since 2017 when I went to school here.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then worked for, um, my school for 3 years after that. And then until I finally moved to like a hybrid remote position, and I think I was still in the city. I felt so lonely in your first couple of months after that. I think I wanted to do the same thing that you did. I think finding what I valued, finding what my passions were. You talk about values. I think, think about, think about like things I'm strong in, the things, things that give me joy individually helped me find a group of like-minded people, whether that be volleyball, whether that—

What did you do?

Improv.

Oh, cool.

Right on.

Um, did you have an interest in that before?

I've been, I've been doing theater, um, since I was a kid.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. And then once I, once I kind of graduated college, I, I, I stopped doing that. I was always surrounded by people who, who, who graduated from my school and, and I was in an office. So I, I felt, I felt like I didn't have to kind of pursue that cuz it was kind of built in there once, once that kind of. Structure was pulled out, I wanted to find that again. So I think through improv is where I found a group of like-minded people who just want to make people laugh. We just want to play on stage.

Yeah. This is a theme that's really emerging here that this is where we do these things. Daniela, come in on this. Tell me about your experience. Your family is all here, right?

Yeah. My nuclear family is here.

Your family of origin, as they say, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

How does that actually impact your ability to create a friend group?

Yeah, actually I was noticing something kind of bleeding into this conversation that I feel with social media, we've kind of become this hyper-optimization culture where it feels like it's harder to make friends because even when you hang out with friends, you're hearing, oh, let's do the same activity together, or, oh, I'm gonna get better at rock climbing so that we can, I can go rock climbing with those people. Where when I'm with my family and I notice the way my parents hang out with their friends, they hang out like they invite them to lunch and they just like sit. And, you know, and there's like an old man that's falling asleep on the couch and they still just enjoy spending time together, you know, with his open mouth nap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like my dad's best friend.

I think I'm ready for one, you know?

Yeah. And so I want to have more of that. I think we've lost a bit of that of just asking your friends to hang out and do, you know, just do nothing, you know, go in the supermarket, whatever.

Does that sound like fun?

It actually does.

Is that crazy?

Yeah, it does. I think parallel play is like a parallel play.

Nice.

Nice. Yeah. Which is what toddler boys are really good at is parallel play. And so little toddler girls will look at each other and play with toddler boys. They'll play side to side. Yeah. So no kidding. So just doing nothing.

Yeah.

Doing nothing.

So even for example, Partyful, you guys know that app?

We know Partyful. Yeah.

Yeah.

What is it?

It's an app that, um, it allows you to create an event and then you just send that same event to everybody and just invite through mutual friends. It's become a thing where it's, you even, you make dinners with your dinner plans and then like 15 people show up to your dinner with your friends. You're like, well, I didn't know it was a numbers thing. You know, you just wanna, just wanna have dinner with your friends. So I think that's interesting. Like the way the—

I'm not as bullish on Partyful actually.

Yeah.

I think, I think it's, it's become so big and popular that it's, it's taken away from the intentionality of like me sending you an individual text or an invitation to come have dinner with me.

That's what you're saying, right? Dingyong.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's get to you, Michael. So, um, your situation is also quite different. So Daniela's family of origin is here. Your family of election is here. You're a married man.

Yes. Yeah. My fam— my family of origin and family of election. Yeah. Both in, in the Virginia area.

And how does actually being married make it harder or easier for you to have the people who know you well, who are not, you know, sharing your bed?

Right. Yeah.

I mean, I'm assuming you live with your best friend. Yes.

Yeah, for sure. Live with my best friend for sure. I think it's a little bit of both. I think in some ways it's easier to make friends just through association almost. So, you know, my wife's friends and then you meet their spouse or meet their partner and then it's kind of a vetting concept in a way with that too, you know, 'cause it's like, okay, well I like, I like you, you know, so I'm most likely gonna like your partner.

And so is that true? I mean, I hear a lot, people will say the problem with being married is that, you know, you, you, you get friends for free that are married to your spouse's friends and they might be Okay, they might not be right.

I think it's a different level for sure. I mean, I think I don't know many of those friends-in-law almost that I'd say know me really well, but I would say my, my tight friend group, I think I'm blessed in that way too, just with living in this area and growing up in this area and still living here and having so many friends geographically close to me that also I'd say know me really well. I think the challenge in this phase of my life is kind of just becoming maintaining those friendships. At the level that they always have been, just with my time getting pulled into so many different directions between my spouse and then each of us have really big families too. We're both one of six and they all live in this area. So, um, just constantly, you know, having a family event on the weekends and stuff like that and still, uh, making time for all of those individual friendships I have to keep them at the same, uh, intentional level that they, that they have been. Is kind of where my struggle. Okay.

So it can, it can make, you know, being, being married and having your families here can make it easier or harder to find people you're not related to who, and, and, you know, friendships with people you're not related to. These have a specific magic to them because you choose these people. These are the people that actually know secrets that your mom never will.

Right.

So if you don't have anybody besides your mom or your siblings and all that, it can actually be quite isolating. And I've heard people say that before.

Right.

Yeah.

From a big family, everybody's from the same compound. You don't have people from the outside who know you deeply in the same way that your friends actually do. So it can be easier or harder. You gotta do the work, right?

Right. Yeah. And, and I think I have family members that struggle with that too, especially those that have a lot of kids now too. And, you know, getting pulled into it's, it can be an excuse almost of, okay, well we got this family event, we got this thing, and you can quickly lose time to have with those friends that you are really close with and you can really share. Right, deeply with in a way different than your family, right?

And you belong to a religious community as well, right? And is that important for building friendship for you?

Yeah, I'd say so. Um, I'd say through that, that's more, I think, the maintaining a lot of the friendships, like having a Bible study with all my really close guy friends, you know, that's a really good way. And it's like built into my routine where I can maintain a lot of those relationships. And I hope that that kind of grows and becomes a way to meet new people, but I would say just kind of being involved in like the young adult ministry at my church, you know, that's a good way and another way of kind of, okay, we already have this built-in thing in common that's very important to us. It means a lot to us. And so we know off the bat, okay, we at least have that thing in common. You know, we have all the same values.

Mm-hmm.

So.

Mm-hmm.

Carolyn, your situation is a little different too because you're out of state getting your PhD. And it's funny because people remember Laura talked about these the architecture of friendship in college, which is so unbelievably tight. And you get there when you're 18 years old and you're all super lonely and freaked out. And there's a funny thing in psychology that you and I both studied called a fading affect bias, which is that you remember the past better than it was, even though you see the present as worse than it is. So that's a negativity bias versus fading affect bias. And so almost everybody remembers their first semester at college as better than it was. You were calling home and crying to your mom and the whole thing, but now you see your friends at your 5-year reunion going, it's so great. We have so Fun when we first met. And that's because you retain the stuff that was really good for you and you get rid of the stuff that no longer serves you, which is the loneliness at the time. The reason I bring this up is because people have their, you know, their deepest friendships when they're thrown together, but graduate school is different, isn't it? Tell me about the difference of graduate school and the deep friendships you make or don't.

Yeah.

I think what's interesting about grad school is that you get very tunnel visioned into what you do. And so you're trying to keep up with your old friendships of your friends who aren't in grad school. And now it feels like you can't relate to them as much because you're so tunnel visioned in studying one thing and it's boring to talk about grad school all the time. Um, but it's all you want to talk about.

Right.

I know.

And I think like the twenties are so chaotic. Like what you were touching on earlier of like when you're in college, you are all in the same space and then you all go different directions and life goes really, really quick. And it's crazy. Like the twenties are crazy and chaotic. And I think there's like this temptation of If I'm not in the same circumstances as everyone else, then like, I can't be friends with you. Like, I have a lot of friends who are getting married or having their first kid, and I'm like, oh my gosh, like, did our friendship just end when you walk down the aisle? And like, I mean, that's like maybe a harsh way to put it, but it feels like there's this temptation that like we have to be in the same phase of life to be friends. Like we can't relate to each other anymore. And actually, like what's been really beautiful about graduate school is that I'm in a community where a lot of people are having kids and that adds so much to my life and it's not the friendship I may have selected for myself. So like, I think similarity is a really, really big piece of friendship, but I also think difference is huge. And like, that's what pushes me to grow is like the people who are given to me in the place I'm living in, not just the people I would seek out for myself and the experiences I want to have.

Or like, so what are you doing? Give me an example of what you're doing to specifically to keep real friendships in your life? Tell me about any, you know, your activities that do that.

Yeah, I like, so when I got to grad school, there wasn't like a very big community around me. So I started hosting Sunday dinners. I'm like, come over and I'm going to make chicken every single Sunday because it's all I know how to make. But yeah, just having people over for dinner and kind of like what you were talking about earlier, like we just desire to talk with people and be with people like more than like doing something, just like being. So I've started to tell people to bring people that I don't know to these dinners too, and like kind of fostering a sense of community of a bunch of random people who all happen to be in Pennsylvania together.

Um, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

I'm an introvert.

You are?

Yeah.

So this is really, this is hard for you.

Yeah.

How long did it take you to figure this one out? You're in your 5th year of graduate school. Were you doing this in your 1st and 2nd year?

This was my 1st year. Yeah. So I am super introverted, but I love people and this is why I study people. But as soon as I got to grad school, I was like, all right, we need people here. Like grad school's hard. It's not gonna be fun if I'm doing this alone. So I was like, all right, we need to get the people together and just kind of started inviting whoever I would meet randomly.

Really?

That's interesting. You know, that's a technique of people who do really well is that they move to a place and they pretend they've been there for 20 years. Mm-hmm. We started doing that. My wife and I have moved 20 times since we've been married. Um, I'm not in the Witness Protection Program in case you're wondering. And, and, and we've done this because, you know, we've been active and changed locations and professions so many times, but we noticed that we were lonely the first year or two. And so we started acting as if it were year 3, 4, 5, or 6 when we're actually in year 1. And so within the first couple of months, we'll start holding dinner parties and we'll start inviting people over to our house. And what we'll find is that we'll meet people who are coming over to our house that we meet and say, come on over. And they'll say, I've lived here for 20 years and I've never actually done that. And they're so grateful as if you, you know, you relieved their own, their own sense of loneliness. Do you find anything like that?

Yeah, I think I have a lot of friends who want there to be plans and they don't like making the plans. So like to be the person who's making the plan sometimes takes a burden off of them and they're like, this is exactly what I was looking for, but I would have never done for myself because I didn't want to take the risk. So if I can like bear the risk of rejection for them, it like gives them the space to show up and have fun. So, yeah.

And so these are people that you kind of know and these are friends. They're not close friends.

They became close friends over time. So like the more they would come to dinner, then we would like go get coffee on Tuesday morning before class. And so it started out as just like a once a week thing and then it turned into much more of a friendship, like the more time we spent together.

Mm-hmm.

Which is the way friendships are supposed to develop. So none of you will say you're living in the place where you grew up, right? And you're living in the place where you kind of, not really. I mean, you grew up every place in the world, didn't you?

Yeah.

Yeah. We just moved here 4 years ago.

Yeah. 4 years ago. That's right. So you're the only, is any, did anybody else grow up in this, in this area? So the rest of you kind of are transplants to this particular area. Um, so let's start with you, Laura. Do you have a best friend?

I do.

Who's your best friend?

I have 2, I would say.

Uh-huh.

I have one from childhood and one from college. Cameron is my best friend.

Cameron is your best friend.

She's from childhood or college? Childhood. Really? And, uh, and do you maintain that best friendship still?

Yes.

What does that mean? How do you do that?

We are on FaceTime most days.

Really?

Yes.

You talk almost every day?

We've always done that. We went to college in two different places, so we got really good at keeping in touch long distance.

Right.

And we even FaceTime when we're living in the same city together.

You do?

Yeah.

So this is something that really comes naturally to you.

It does.

And you didn't drift apart at any point?

No, we're of course closer when we're living in the same city, but I would still say we're very close now.

That's great.

Yeah.

And she would say the same thing?

She would.

How has her life changed?

Did she get—

has she got married or No, she recently got out of a very serious relationship, so she's single again for the first time in a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now she's FaceTiming twice a day. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

Hey, you gotta find your best friend. That's great. So, and, and for some people that's really, really hard. What about your girlfriend? Do you have a best friend?

Well, I feel like I, you know, my mom would be mad if I didn't say my siblings were my best friends, but you know, yes, I do.

Is your mom watching us, us do the show?

She told me to send it to her later.

Yeah.

So she'll, she'll watch it at some point.

Okay.

And you do love your siblings, I'm sure.

Very dearly.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, I, I've, I've had best friends at different points. I feel like I've been, been fortunate to have done a lot of different growth throughout my life, which has also resulted in me having different phases. And I've had to actually go through the, the challenge of grieving friendships that, you know, at one point were my best friends and those relationships no longer serve me. I feel grateful to be very present where I am in my community here. So there are people now that are in like my DC ecosystem that I consider best friends. And there's people that, you know, you ask that question, I thought of kid, you know, friends that I grew up with in Chicago and people I went to high school with and the relationships have changed over the years, but certainly people that I feel the ability to be vulnerable around and share experience with.

Yeah. So these are two different models. We saw two great examples of the two classical models. And what you find is that women typically are able to name a person more and men are like, hey, it changes. Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is great, but it could also be a problem as the years go by, because as those networks, those kind of orbiting networks, they start to move there, the entropy actually gets more pronounced, which you find that the danger is that you might find that those best friendships are less, are less close than they've been in the past. Whereas I bet you that when you're my age, Laura, that you and Cameron are still going to be buddies. I bet you are. Which is really, really good.

We've met in first grade, so we're a long time.

That's great. You met in first grade. That's really, really something.

Yeah.

But that's something to work on. That's something to actually keep your eye on and to make sure that the entropy actually isn't working, you know, because you're obviously a highly social person and very, very, I mean, I just met you and I feel very comfortable right here right now. You make people feel comfortable, which is good for a meditation and yoga instructor, but to make sure that you can continue to have a particular intimacy with other people as well.

Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, we would, mentioning, I don't have so social media. One of the benefits of that is being able to keep in touch with people. I, I've, it's a, it's an ongoing resolution and goal that I have to be better at keeping in touch with friends via, via, you know, picking up the phone. Right. Um, I'm not very good at it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I get it. Um, uh, Carolyn, you're an introvert. Do you have a best friend?

I, okay. I don't know how to answer that question. Like I have very close friends, but I don't like ranking them. Yeah. So like, yes. Yes and no.

Do you have an orbit of best friends?

Yeah. I have like a really good group of friends that I love.

A tight group of friends that you wouldn't, who are watching the show and you wouldn't wanna rank them.

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't wanna be like, oh, this person. And then like, what the heck?

Like, yeah, no, I got it. I got it.

Yeah.

And that's so, but these are people you've known a really long time.

I would say most of my close friends are either from college or grad school. So I moved elementary schools and so I don't have like the kindergarten best friend or first grade best friend. Um, but I think a lot of my close friendships started really in college.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I see you've done that. Who else wants to weigh in on this one? This is, this is a question that I'm always very interested in. Do you have, um, Michael, do you have a best friend at work?

Best friend at work.

That's the number one predictor of not wanting to quit your job, by the way, is being able to name a best friend at work. Number one predictor.

Yeah.

I'd say I have a best friend at work. I guess, I guess I'm, I'm just kind of trying to weigh like, uh, what that means compared to like my actual best friends. And that's, there's like nothing close. I, I just started a new job in January too, so it's like not, it's, it's a little bit fresh, but yeah, compared to like my best, best friends, like it's, it's not even close in terms of personally. I mean, he knows my wife's name. He knows I have a big family. He knows a lot of that stuff.

Yeah. He knows you have a big family and he knows your wife's name. That's not particularly intimate at all. And you can actually get that off the internet.

Yeah.

Right.

That's true. Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

I think.

Okay. But it is interesting. And, and that's a piece of your book too, is like the amount of time you spend with those coworkers and compared to how often you see your friends or your family or whatever. And it's, it has really got me thinking, you know, how much time I, I am in a room with these coworkers all the time.

Yeah.

And how close we really are.

Yeah.

Is really interesting. Thought-provoking.

Yeah. What, what I'd like to, you know, open this one up to anybody who wants to answer. What's the What's the hardest thing that you're finding right now? What's the thing that troubles you the most about friendship? What is the thing that is the biggest challenge? What would you like to change the most when it comes to the friends that you actually have and the friend group that you, you're trying to maintain?

I feel like I have a pretty close-knit group of friends right now, but I feel like I've had like a circle every 2 or 3 years. And, and I feel a lot of guilt about the kind of circles in the past that I haven't been like keeping in touch or being as good of a friend of too.

What would it mean for you to be a better friend?

Talk to them. Mm-hmm. Go, go to their things. I, I feel like there's just a lot of, I, I, I think I kind of grieve the, the friends that I've lost. I think there's also part of it that It seems like I shouldn't have lost them that easily.

And what do you think is responsible for that?

I'm scatterbrained.

Well, you just let it, you just, it was torpor. It was just, you know, is that right? And look, I understand how you feel.

Yeah.

People I've really, really, really loved and just lost touch with. And you realize I just lost touch with, how did I lose touch with that person?

Yeah.

And then you feel like, as you, I feel like I didn't do the work because I was too, I was paying attention to things that were less important.

Not even less important. I just feel like I have also another group of friends and I feel something sometimes, like I am not super intentional. I feel like I'm pretty surface level with a lot of my friends.

Why do you think that is?

I don't know.

Just the feeling I have.

Yeah. Yeah. You'd like to go deeper, but you don't know how.

Yeah.

Uh, no. Yeah. How, how does one go deeper in a friendship? How do you do it? What's the take? What's the trick?

You drink.

I'm just kidding.

Shared interests.

Yeah, I think, I think you have to be able to ultimately be vulnerable, right? And I think that's a lot easier said than done. Like a lot of us, including myself in a lot of respects, like we wear this mask of vulnerability. It's as like a mirage for what real vulnerability entails. If somebody once called me out or something and it still affects me to this day, they were like, Griffin, you're very vulnerable about the things you've done the work to process. And not about the things that you haven't. And I think that, you know, with friends, when inviting people into your lives and you like kind of have to lift the veil of delusion, like that can be scary and challenging for sure.

So tell me more. Go deeper into that.

About what's scary and challenging?

Yeah.

You know, I, I mean, I, I guess I'll speak for my, myself in this. Uh, I'm, I'm conscious of the view of how other people view me in the respect of like how I'm seen in the community, how I am extroverted, how I can hold space.

And I think, what does holding space mean?

For me, it, it means being, being able to create a container for somebody else to feel vulnerable or to share, to express, you know, in a, in an open-hearted way. Right. And I think I can often feel like a hypocrite sometimes because I am in spaces where I get to offer that, that service or that gift. And then I don't always afford myself the same kindness behind doors. And so it's actually proved to be a challenge in my own work with romantic relationships is there's a certain level of depth I can get before I perhaps like self-sabotage because I'm scared of like fully being seen by somebody.

So are you better at going deep in your platonic friendships than you're in your romantic relationships?

For sure.

How interesting. Interesting. But one key point on that, however, is that I think what Jake is expressing is that he wishes that he had gone deeper with other people to anchor a relationship that would actually last. Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

Are you skating along the surface a little bit more? You like skating along the surface?

I also really like resonate with like just being vulnerable myself. Like, I think especially with improv and performance and like theater and comedy, there's like, there's a vulnerability that I can afford for, for certain parts.

But yeah, I was at a dinner party in Madrid last year and, um, the woman who was holding it, I didn't know, I didn't know her. I'd met her once. My wife and I had met her once. It was 4 couples. Plus my wife Esther and me. And the woman is holding the party. We're just eating around the table. And 20 minutes in, she said, have any of you come really close to divorce? And the whole place is like, whoa. And my wife's like, awesome, game on. And the whole point was, are we doing this or not? Are we doing this or not? Are we going to be friends or not? And if it's, you don't want to, cool.

Right.

But, but go deeper, go home. Right. Right. Isn't, is this the solution? This is what you're more comfortable with than in the depths of your heart, which is romantic, but we'll get to that in due course. Is this what we're talking about? Would you, if you went to a dinner party and somebody said, Jake, what are you most afraid of? Lay it out. And there were a bunch of people that you barely knew. How would you feel?

I think if it's somebody I didn't know, like I'd probably give them some answer.

Would it be BS?

I think it would be less BS than telling it to somebody who probably knows me a little bit more, like somebody I'm in a community with.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I'm not going to see them ever again.

Yeah. It's interesting because some people would say if it's a stranger, I'm not going to tell them the truth. Some people would say if it's a stranger, it's the only people who get the truth. Yeah. Let's sum up here a little bit and then let's go on to the thing that Griffin just introduced. Which is the fundamental difference between the romantic friendship and the platonic friendship. You've raised 7 points. Let's see if you agree with the 7 points that you've raised here.

Okay.

The 7 lessons. Number 1, the architecture of friendship has to be built once you're past college. It's just not going to happen spontaneously unless it's built in, in a community that you grew up in. Right. If you're new to a particular place, you got to do it. As Carolyn talks about, you got to make the chicken. That's the architecture of friendship. Okay. So the lesson number 1 is make the chicken. Lesson number 2 is that screens don't do this very well. I, you wouldn't know, but trust everybody else that screens don't do this very well. What does this well is lesson 3, which is interest and activity does this. Common interests and activity are actually how you build the architecture. The architecture is around, you know, people that are studying together, for example, who are going to get together for dinner. This is one way to do it. And another way is through religious community. And that's a particularly good way to do this because it's not just another, it's, it's not a hobby. Like Catholicism is not known for being much of a hobby. Right. I'm not sure that's a great hobby. It's a way of life is what it comes down to. Lesson number 4 is that friendship can be easier or harder if it's around family, if family actually is involved. One way or the other, you've got to do the work. It's what it comes down to. So being married or having family of origin there can make it easier or harder. It's not— your results may differ. One way or the other, you have to do the work. Number 5 that I'm hearing from you is an intense focus on what you're doing in your career can be incredibly isolating. And so strivers are gonna suffer. If you're a striver, you're going to suffer is what it comes down to, which means you got to do the work even more., right? Then, and, and, and by the way, you're striving is no substitute for love, right? On the contrary, I can tell you from a million different case studies that the most successful people who strive all the time wind up incredibly lonely because that will not bring you love. The sixth idea is that maintaining close relationships, close relationships, if not best friendship, is really important. You have to do the work. And part of doing the work with best friendship is actually going deep. You can't do it by talking about, you know, golf, unless golf is your big interest and your passion. If it's your religion, the whole point is do indeed go deeper, go home. There's a good set of lessons I'm gaining from, from, from, from the group. All right. This in the show notes, folks.

All right.

Let's move on to a harder, harder subject. One that's scarier for a lot of people. I know I just heard people go, which is romantic relationships. It's, it's a funny thing among my students that they find it more baffling than almost anything else. It was a source of fear and tension for me when I was in my twenties, but it was all I wanted to do. It was all I really cared about. It's what I most cared about. I realized that my core competency in life was that I wanted to fall in love and stay in love when I was in my twenties. And I remember when I was 23 years old thinking to myself, I'm ready to get married. Not right now. I'm ready to meet the person that I'm going to marry. And right after my 24th birthday, I did. And it took me 2 years to close that deal. She wasn't ready yet, or she wasn't ready with me yet. And, and, and we did, but that was a pretty common thing. And it was somebody who didn't speak my language. It was somebody who wasn't even in this country. It was, I packed up and moved to Spain and learned the language because I said, I think I can I think this is it. Right. And that's not all that weird for people my generation, but that's a really, really unusual type of thing for people in your generation. Now that doesn't seem intuitive. And the reason is because you're way more international than people my age. You have way more resources. You think more in a flat world. You're more cosmopolitan than people my age ever were. And yet it's sort of harder to do that romantic entrepreneurship. What changed? What made it that you kind of shut down this market in a particular way besides just the apps? Can you, can you talk to me a little bit about why falling and staying in love seems to be harder now than it did 35 years ago? I want us to start with that. Did we wreck the world? We boomers? I mean, what do we do? You know what I mean? By making houses expensive. I don't know the whole mechanism here. It's all economics probably, right? Why does it seem harder?

Obviously we can have a whole discussion about the disconnectedness that we're seeing as a result of online dating and apps and all that stuff. I also think to some extent we're living in a less compassionate society. And I think they're like, this is a bubble that we're in, right? Like these are people who are like doing the work and like similarly I surround myself with people who are very compassionate and do the work. But I know you like to go back to the root of words a lot. Like I think that can get, bring us closer to truth. And even the word compassion, It means to suffer with. And I think reintroducing the humanity back into love, into society, and creating a more compassionate world, like it allows you to tap into a piece of yourself that realizes a collective human experience, that realizes that we are all wanting to love and to be loved. Um, and I've noticed that in this very tribalist politicized world that we're currently in, it's, it's harder to to love thy neighbor or to introduce compassion to somebody that you maybe disagree with.

Practically speaking, is it harder to date somebody of the other party? Is that what you're saying?

For me? Yeah, it would be. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think I knew my future wife's politics. I don't think we discussed it at all. Well, part of it is because we didn't speak the same language, so, but, but truly, I mean, that would've been a lot less germane to the experience. What, what about you, Danielle, or your parents? Did they know each other's, do they care about each other's politics when they were dating? Lo these many years ago?

No, not, not at all.

I don't think so.

Yeah. It's a lot more poignant now.

Yeah.

People's, yeah.

Yeah. And so that, and that's kind of part and parcel of what you're talking about here, right?

And every dating profile, you can see their political party. Really? Oh yeah.

And people care.

Yeah. Super.

And do you care? Do you care?

I would say so. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you care, Laura?

I care.

You care?

I care for sure. Yeah.

It's an ideology thing rather than a party thing.

Yeah, for sure. But do you care? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

You wouldn't date somebody who disagrees with you ideologically?

I don't think they did me.

Well, that's very different. No, this is a very, this is a really important point, right? Because what you just suggested is that you would, but she probably wouldn't.

No, I probably wouldn't either.

What about you, Carolyn?

I, I'm not super political, so I don't know. Like it doesn't matter as much to me. Like I do think values in general matter. But I don't know if I like align values with like a particular party or not. So, but I will say like I've seen people on the apps like immediately swipe no. And it's like, oh, this person's this. And I'm like, whoa, wait, you don't even know anything about them. Like moderate doesn't mean moderate on the apps anymore. It means conservative. So I don't know. It's, it's really interesting to watch people when they're deciding on the apps.

So it's really interesting. I want to dig in on this, Griffin, because you said two things that are slightly in conflict. Number one is that you said that the polarization of our society in general is making us less tolerant toward each other and that's extinguishing potential love. Right. And number two is that you said that you wouldn't date somebody outside your own ideological.

Well, that doesn't mean I wouldn't love, like love. I mean, I think that that goes back to Platonic versus romantic.

No, no, but, but I'm talking to romantic.

Oh, sure.

So, so the whole point is that you, you sort of regret the fact that we're in a polarized where a difference of worldview would extinguish the potential for deep passion and love, but at the same time you fall prey to it as well.

Oh yeah.

And you have this presence of mind to recognize that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you regret that? Do you wish that that weren't the case for you?

Absolutely. I mean, like Ram Dass has this beautiful notion of like, we're all just walking each other home. Like I would, like, I would love to live in a society and in a world where like there was this just deep abundance of love that we all extended to each other. It's hard to hold both. Like it is. They do operate in conflict of each other. But I think that is ultimately a reality that a lot of kids are growing up with and myself included.

So you're not saying you wish you lived in a world where your potential partner agreed with you. You wish you lived in a world where notwithstanding disagreement, love were abundant enough that it didn't matter. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

Because that's what Ram Dass was saying.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

That's what it means to walk somebody else home is you're walking somebody who's not you. Home and potentially somebody who completes you precisely by not agreeing with you. Right. And yet it's so hard.

Yeah.

And yet it's so hard.

Yeah.

I mean, I do think, you know, when, when two souls come together, right, like it is not out of, uh, fulfilling something that each other is lacking. It is like a mutual abundance. Like, like when two perfect souls meet, it is not because one is lacking in something. It doesn't sound like a completion. Like both souls are already complete in their own right. And it's a magnification of each other's light and each other's love.

But they do fit together.

Yes.

Where what one person has, the other doesn't. And that's the point, which is one of the reasons why the literature is so clear in relationships that people who are different are more attracted to each other than people who are the same. The initial match comes from sameness, but that doesn't lead to a long-term attraction. You're, you know, looking in the mirror is not hot, right? And so, and, but, but this is there's an antagonism that we, you feel, and that you regret that we built into our society. Is that number one?

I would, yeah, I would agree with that.

Hmm.

I'm not sure we're gonna be able to sort that one out. Um, but I share the regret that you have for that, for sure. What else? What's out? What else is making it harder today? What else is going on here?

I feel like it's a lot of the anxiety that people have for sure. Like the skyrocketing anxiety I feel like is I can't really speak for, I've been off the market for a little bit, but like, and how did you meet your wife, by the way? We met through mutual friends freshman year of college.

So you didn't meet on Tech?

We re-met at Tech. So it's kind of a long story, but she was at my 16th birthday party. So I met her first there. She crashed my 16th birthday party.

Did she like you?

She, yeah, she liked me. We were both dating, we were both dating different people at the same time, at different times. But yeah, I liked her enough. I was like, she's fun. She's cool., and then we re-met like first week of freshman year.

And you married by the second week of freshman year?

Pretty much. No, we held off for 5 years.

Yeah.

Okay.

But you fundamentally didn't meet on the apps. You met, you met through, once again, you talked earlier in the conversation about the importance of religious community and, and, and communities of interest in friendship, but it's also true for romance as far as you're concerned, right? Right. Okay. Yeah. So that's the key anyway.

Continue.

No. And I think, um, So I, I, anxiety, I imagine it's the same with, with romantic relationships, but I see it with friendships too, with like trying to get to know new people. And my wife and I talk about this a lot. She's a school counselor, so she's very, I wanna know you deeply from the second I, I meet you and everything. And she's, uh, helped me get to more of that level when it comes to meeting people. But we really try to get to know, you know, ask where are you from? You know, tell me about your family. Tell me about your friends. Where you, you know, what do you do for work? All these different things. And. It's frustrating when that's not reciprocated, where it's like, well, don't you want to get to know me? Are you going to ask me some questions about, you know, me? And, and our theory, our working theory is kind of, um, a lot of that anxiety kind of makes you, not in a prideful way, but kind of makes you self-absorbed where you're focused on coming off, you know, in a good way and not embarrassing yourself, I guess. And, uh, it kind of makes you so focused on, okay, what's my answer going to be to this person that's really trying to get to know me deep.

What's the, what's the root of that? Why is that? I mean, if romance is harder now because of anxiety, we would conclude that anxiety and self-absorption are higher now than they've been in the past. And this is completely consistent with the work of Jean Twenge, who teaches at San Diego State, and she does work on narcissism. She says that narcissism is much, much, much higher in people in their 20s than it was 35 years ago. And is that, is that a controversial assertion? Do you think that's true? That there's more narcissism?

I believe it.

Why?

I think maybe people are self-conscious because they're like recorded every second of every day.

Ah, okay. So tech, tech is the reason for the increases in self-absorption and anxiety.

Goes to the club and dances anymore because they're afraid they're going to get recorded.

Huh. That's a thing. It's really a thing.

Yes.

You're recorded every second of every day. And all of us, we grew up in a time where like, We probably had smartphones that were recording videos of ourselves at 12.

Right. We're being recorded right now, by the way. That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh-huh.

What, how else is tech creating the problem of self-absorption and anxiety? How else is the proliferation of tech and personal devices and social media doing this? Because it has to be playing into it as well. Besides just this, the self-consciousness of thinking that something that you say or do right now might be played back to the whole world in 10 minutes. Right. Bad enough.

Well, yeah, tech starts becoming tailored to yourself, like the For You page.

Uh-huh.

And so then you not only are spending time doom scrolling, but you want it to serve you. So then you kind of walk around the world with that notion a little bit, like, how will this person serve me instead of how can I love this person?

So do you see, do people and people your age generally recognize how difficult and dangerous it is? To, I mean, how, how, how troublesome the tech actually is in creating more anxiety and self-absorption. Do people recognize this?

Yeah, that's the, that's the irony of the experience.

Everybody knows this. Is this something everybody knows that, that, that the, the smartphone is making love harder? I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know.

They not know that. They do know that.

I don't know if they know that.

I've seen data that suggests that they do know that.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people, whether with love or not, but I think, I think most people know their phone usage is a net negative experience.

That's true.

And they still, I mean, they like, I'll go as far to say like big tech has like colonized our minds, right? Like we're addicted to it. Like we know it's bad for us, but we still engage in it.

How do you meet people, potential partners? Because you're not on tech, on using tech, you're not using social media. How do you do it?

Honestly, it, it's hard, but it's just like people that are in my like friend group or through other people. Yeah. So I'll be transparent. I've never been on the dating apps. Um, but it's hard. That sometimes means you're just not going on dates.

Is it harder but better?

I don't know. I, I, it's hard to like make a comparison because I don't have a reference point. Like I only have my experience to speak from. I've found that the people I go on dates with, like it ends up being very like present because a lot of those people are also probably not on the apps. Um, and it doesn't feel like there's this competition to be against like everybody else who's on the app. Because I think one of the things with the apps is that like you get on them and you see one person, you go on a date with them, you're disappointed by that date maybe. And then you're like, oh, but I can go back to the apps and find somebody else. And like, so you just keep going and like looking for more and more of what you want.

Paradox of choice.

Yes.

Right.

Yes.

Um, and then you don't find what you want. And so you're constantly disappointed. Um, and it becomes like this cycle versus like when I go on a date with someone, sometimes I'm like, wow, this date is so much better than I thought it was gonna be because I didn't have this notion of like, oh, there's all these other options for me. Like, let me invest in this experience. And make the best of this because it might be my only date this summer or something.

So I don't know. But what about you, Griffin? 'Cause you're also not on the apps and you're also not using social media.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I think it's a lot of—

How do you meet people?

A lot of my, my, like the communities and worlds in which I operate in, in, in the wild, I guess, you know, you could say like, I mean, through, through the different hobbies that I have, I've met a lot of different people through going to, I go to a lot of, you know, friends' house parties and whatnot. And so I met people through that. I agree. I, you know, I agree. I think that it's interesting. Like, I know a lot of my female friends and even male friends who do have like social media, they'll be able to create a whole profile of who this person is before the first date just by like having, you know, what college they went to and like what their job and like, and so I go in pretty blind to a lot of these dates to the extent that like, I know what they look like, but I don't really know anything about them. And I think that does create a, a space of like, I can show up maybe more authentically, but I've also, struggle in a lot of ways. Like I, so I can't even, you know, dating is a challenging experience, but it's not because of that.

What is the challenge?

Um, I think, I mean, there's, I think there's, you referred to it before.

Yeah.

It's hard for you to go deep.

For sure.

Why?

I think it's, you know, it's, I can go deep in certain respects and not in others. I think one of my challenges that I'm exploring in therapy now is, um, how I learned what romantic love was.. And for me, that ultimately was through a lot of like film and media.

Did your parents have a good marriage?

It, it was a complicated marriage. My dad had multiple sclerosis before I was born. He was in a wheelchair my whole life. And it placed a great challenge on my mom to be a caretaker for her children and for my father. So I, I received an abundance of love from my parents. I did not observe a romantic loving relationship between my parents.

So that's how you had to learn from other ways, et cetera, et cetera.

And it created this very fantastical idea of what love should be. Be in my mind, which doesn't always match up with that relationships are hard. Right. And it requires you to—

Yeah. You saw the Disney version, which is they lived happily ever after. And it turns out in real life you have arguments and it's really not that great all the time. You're married.

Yeah. Love is a choice.

Love.

Well, and also there's an argument every day over something. It depends. I mean, your results might differ. I'm married to a Spaniard. There's a fight every hour. We disagree. You know, this is what it comes down to. Tell me more about what's on your mind. What's the biggest problem? I mean, as, as you know, from, from dating right now, I mean, we talked about anxiety, self-absorption and tech, et cetera. What's the biggest barrier as far as you're concerned?

I've been dating my partner for, um, about 8 months now. And we met through improv, through my, through like my community. I was on the apps before that. Um, and I think I do, I do share this with a lot of my friends. We were all like, we're on the apps. We're all like tired of it. We're like, ugh, I got to get off the apps. Is everybody is—

this is interesting. Is this everybody say the same thing? Are you on the apps?

I'm in a relationship.

You're in a relationship. Were you on the apps?

No.

I met my partner in person.

Nice. So almost everybody I talked to, are you on the apps, Daniela?

I've been here and there.

You've been. So yeah. So I don't talk to any young people today who say, I love the apps. Nobody says that, that I talk to. And which is one of the reasons that app developers are getting much better about trying to inject more human friction into the algorithm. And they're getting much better. I'm very bullish on some of them, as a matter of fact, but, but that's a very common experience that people have. And that was yours.

Yeah. Um, I think when I was on the apps, I, I very much told myself like, I'm not gonna find the person I'm gonna marry on these apps. I'm just gonna find somebody who like, what were you looking for?

Is that entertainment?

Yeah.

Fun times?

Yeah, kind of. Um, and then I think I found the person who I, I, I love through community first and through shared interest and a close friendship first. I think that really made me like being friends with her and then kind of evaluating like, oh, what am I, what am I doing?

What?

Am I doing on these apps? Um, I think finding somebody like who I, she, I think she forced me to like really care.

Right.

Um, and yeah.

So if you're dating for entertainment, that's probably suboptimal, right? Is it better? Did you believe it's better to date with a purpose of wanting a long-term relationship? Or is, is that a completely valid motive for dating with respect to happiness? I'm not talking about morality at all. With respect to happiness is let's have a good time. I date to have a good time.

I think I was, I was dating just to, yeah, just like see, just to have somebody to like do things with.

Um, just companionship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but then I think I would get just bored easily. And I think that's just something that I have been really reflecting on lately, uh, with myself, especially because somebody has come into my life who I really do care about and she cares about me.

And I think.

Um, that's made me more vulnerable if anything. I think that vulnerability piece with the apps, I think the apps allowed me to kind of reinforce that part of me that was like, I don't need to be vulnerable.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. Nice. She's watching. This is very promising.

Okay.

She hates how I talk on podcasts.

This is just, uh, you wanna add anything to this? I haven't, I haven't actually. Asked you any really uncomfortable questions about this yet, except for whether or not you're on the apps, but what, what is it that makes it hard?

Well, I think what you're saying about, uh, it's difficult to be vulnerable. Yeah. It goes into our friendships and dating.

And this has gotta get back to what Laura was talking about. Why is it hard to be more vulnerable now than it was in the past? Because everything that you do, it becomes public immediately, right? There's, I mean, maybe not showing up on a video, But the whole point is everybody knows everything about everybody.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah. What I said before, kind of an obsession with, not an obsession, but you are looking more inward than outward. You're spending less time in nature or kind of looking at, you know, making yourself smaller. You're just, you're stuck in your own bubble a lot.

Mm-hmm.

I think it could also be comparison. I think with like social media, say like it's so hard not to compare to the relationships around you or like friendships around you or what everyone's doing. Friend groups are doing around you. And I think that's an added challenge. Like, never before were you seeing what everyone you've ever met one time was doing on the weekend, you know? And the stress of that added on to it.

Yeah, that's some talk. That sounds really, truly terrible. That sounds like a nightmare. Um, what, what do you want? What do you want in a relationship? I mean, what, what, where do you want it to go? What do you want the end state to be? I mean, look, I could go back in human history and say what human biology and evolution suggests is that you're going to get a permanent pair bond and have a family that's relatively happy. And you're going to have a pair bond that lasts until one of you dies. I mean, that's what, and that's been sort of the least, the ideal. Nobody goes to their wedding day and says till death or, you know, discontent, you know, hits us too hard and we, and we decide to break up. Say till death do us part, you know, that's the whole idea. But what, Today in dating, in your cases, those of you who are single, what do you want? What do you want, Griffin?

Um, I've quoted Ram Dass already once before. I'll say it again. He's good.

He's worth quoting twice.

Yeah, I'll give him another one.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, he says—

Timothy Leary, I'm not so— his best friend, I'm not so sure, but Ram Dass.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Ram Dass says, uh, to say, if you were to, if I say I love you, Um, what that means is that you are the stimulus that allows me to tap into a piece of myself that realizes that I am love. Um, and I think some of us are spiritual in this space. For me, that is deeply profound in this recognition of non-duality, right? In that, uh, we are all love and we are all divine. And I think, I pray that at some point in my life I will come into contact with a partner that, you know, magnifies that light. And that is that mutual recognition.

And that's permanent. That's what you want. You want to find the person who plays that role in your life permanently.

Sure.

Yeah.

One and done.

I think there is a difference between lust and love, and I've had my experiences with lust for sure.

That's, that's part of the biological human experience as well.

Yeah.

But you do— in other words, to— it's very beautiful what you said.

That was Ram Dass.

No, no, I got it. But, but, but let me just translate it. You want to find your permanent pair bond.

Yeah.

That's what you want.

That'd be nice.

Jake.

I want to make someone laugh for the rest of my life.

Yeah. Sounds like a permanent pair bond to me.

Yeah.

And make somebody a mother and make somebody, right?

I'd love to.

Yeah.

I just, I'd love a house full of laughter.

Yeah. And not just yours.

Not just mine.

Yeah.

I've heard enough of that.

Yeah.

Okay. It's, it's, it's very similar. It's a similar answer. Is anybody going to give me a different answer of what the end goal of a romantic, of the right romantic relationship actually ought to be, which is a permanent pair bond, is falling in love, staying in love for the rest of our lives. Is that what you want, Laura? Yeah. Daniela?

Yeah. But I have a question. I mean, how would you define a pair bond and, you know, distinguish it from like a toxic, you know, bonding.

Well, a pair bond that we're talking about, one which actually is healthy and true and good, is one that is axiomatically not toxic.

Yeah.

You know, it's one in which there's plenty of laughter and which you complete each other spiritually, right? That doesn't mean that there's no disagreement because there's two human beings and there's going to be plenty of disagreement that actually goes into that. And nobody goes into a relationship unless you got all of your information from Disney, which by the way, might be the problem, right?

Yeah.

Because you got from the media, the concept of what a healthy relationship was all about. It's iron sharpens iron, as it says in the Proverbs. That's ultimately the case with a pair bond that works. But that's what I'm talking about is one in which, what do they used to say, ride or die. That's what I'm talking about. Right. As opposed to die and then stop riding, which is what a more toxic relationship would be like. I know your answer.

Yeah.

You've made a, you wrote the contract on earth and heaven and you too, Carolyn, is this the, is this the goal? That's the goal too. Now, why did I ask all, all of the 6 of you this? Because people my age don't know this about you. They don't know this about you. They think that you're somehow trivial in your pursuits, as they say, that it would be that you, you want something different than people my age do. Why? Because you date differently and because your experience of love is different. And because the stimuli and what you say is different and what the media reports on you is different. But it isn't different, is it? You want the same things that we did, don't you? You might get it in a slightly different way and you're more frustrated in the way that's being delivered today. But that's a really, really important insight, I think, for everybody to understand, isn't it? How important is it for you to be able to articulate that in the dating market right now? To say, what if you put on your dating profile? Those of you who have— none of you have dating profiles anymore. There's no dating profiles in here anymore. But what if somebody said, My goal, ride or die. I mean, it's true. What would happen if you said it?

It might not go well.

No, no, but why not? I don't know.

It seems really intense.

Yeah. Go deep or go home, right?

It seems like there are people who do kind of put that on their profiles and I don't know, maybe that does work out for them, but they're still on the apps when you see them. So it might not be working out.

It's a good point. That's a good point. No, no, that's really, that's, that's a revelation. No, no, for sure. Yeah.

So yeah, it just seems intense because I think a lot of people our age, like it is ultimately what they want, but that is a long process to get there. And so what you first look for is like, do we get along? Can we laugh? Like, do we laugh at the same jokes? And like, you go for the less intense stuff first because again, like vulnerability, it's hard to actually get to the point of like marriage and like for the rest of your life. So if somebody just puts that on their profile right away, it's kind of like, Right.

Not okay.

So basically it's the same thing as if you were, if you went in, you came in too hot on a friendship, you'd scare people off.

Well, also these, these apps are gamified, right? So if you're, if you're playing the game effectively, you know, that's probably not your best strategy is to come out guns a-blazing cuz they might scare people off.

Yep. Right, right.

Okay.

So I get it. But this also raises one more point and I think it's important, which is that the, And a lot of you have actually come sort of said this, that the focus, the core of the romantic relationship actually is friendship. It's really, it is, isn't it? I mean, you want somebody you can have laughs with. Yeah. Right. You want somebody who's going to be your soulmate, which is the same thing you were talking about in the depths of your friendships. Right. And you, you told me you're married to your best friend, right?

Yeah.

We were friends before we started dating. And, and you're trying to find somebody that you actually like, that you actually like as a person. And so the key is actually finding good deep friendship, right? The literature on this is very clear that people think in Disney films that the secret is staying passionate for your whole life. The secret to the happiest marriages is called companionate love, which is another way of saying is, is living with your best friend, which there's no greater privilege than living with your best friend. So you have to find somebody who might be your best friend before you find somebody who's your spouse. And that's not coming in too hot. Is that what we're talking about? Is that a fair conclusion that what we're looking for?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's putting the cart before the horse in a lot of things, in a lot of ways. Like, I think it's the end goal, but I think the journey there is also something really lovely.

Yeah.

So I think wanting to skip to, to, to marriage, to ride or die is you, you skip over a lot of really great things.

Yeah, for sure. Got it. Good. So, and then this gets us back to where the conversation started. Which is what is actually getting in the way of friendship. And that's an antagonistic culture that has insufficient compassion and that has a lot of polarization in it too. It's the inability to look into somebody else's eyes who disagrees with you or who might be very different than you and say, that's a human being. That's another me.

Yeah.

Right.

And I think there's a tremendous amount of spiritual bypassing, you know, in today's society as well. Like not even a conscious neglect, but a neglect nonetheless to do the work. Right. Like I think we have to recognize that in this life we have to do healing. Like a lot of us have to heal from different traumas, different pains. And that has only served me in like, I think your growth is directly correlated with how much suffering you're willing to endure to some extent, right? Like I've grown a tremendous amount by the challenges and the griefs that I've had to encounter in my life. And those have only magnified my relationships. I've loved more deeply every time I've fallen in love. I think as a result of that.

Yeah. Which one more statistic, the average person before they find their permanent pair bond has her or his heart broken 5 times.

I'm a few short.

Which is keep going. It's like lather, rinse, and repeat. No, no, seriously. I mean, that's a really important thing in much the same way that entrepreneurial businesses tend not to be successful before a few failures along the way. This is actually how we learned you got lucky, didn't you?

Super lucky.

Yeah. It's like you never came up on the first try.

Who are the outliers there? 8, 9, 10 times?

That's crazy. There might be a, there might be a pathology that's involved in some of the larger numbers. So basically something else we did. Anything else anybody wants to add before we come up with, uh, with our, our, our group's rules for successful love and dating? All right. Let's try, let's give, let's try this on. Number 1, what is sickening our society today, our inability to actually see each other as people. The polarization is also killing What is the fuel of what we most deeply want in our souls, which is to connect to each other in this romantic way. Polarization is the enemy of romance. First, number one. Now we got to fix that, but I guess that's a different episode. Second, the way to meet each other ideally is through mutual interest as opposed to straight up tech, right? It's something that we're both really interested in because we want to connect over some area of values. Or interest. This is what connects human beings in general, which is the same point that we made for friendship, which leads to the third point, which is that the basis of a good romance actually is friendship. So think about friendship first. And I recommend by the time that everybody's married, like me and Michael, that you'd be thinking about friendship last too, because the last thing you do is you take your dying breath is to look into the eyes of your best friend, which is Right. The fourth idea is that what's really pulling people apart besides just the tech per se and the mediation of relationship with screens is anxiety and self-absorption, which once again are being accelerated by the overuse and misuse of technology for sure. As Daniela puts it, and we talk about it in our work, it's all me, me, me, me, as opposed to looking out into the world, what William James called the me-self versus the I-self. What the technology is, is massive mirrors, and there's nothing that's actually more antagonistic to romance than looking in the mirror. And last, the last idea is that there, the permanent pair bond is what people still want, you know, and don't let anybody fool you. Don't let anybody tell you that something's changed. Don't let anybody tell you that kids these days don't care about the serious things because I see a lot of seriousness here. Are on this table. They want the serious business of falling in love and staying in love, of loving and being loved, which is the business of being alive. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And thanks to all of you. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for staying with us on Office Hours, our show dedicated to love and happiness. This has been a wonderful year for all of us that work with me, Daniela and me, and our our happy little band of happiness warriors, but all of you too, please stay with us. Please recommend these ideas to friends, like and subscribe as they say, look for us on social media as well. Even though social media isn't perfect, we can use it for good things. And most importantly, I hope you find the love that you have in your heart such that you can enjoy it for yourself and share it with other people. That's what it means to be fully alive. See you next week.