68 Make Your Move: The Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge with Jon Birger

Hello and welcome to RxChill Pill. Meditate your brain to resilience. Resilience is about bouncing back from setbacks to a place higher than before by learning and adapting so you can thrive through life's challenges. Your time is precious, so I work to deliver research-backed tools to boost you and your family's resilience. Each of the episodes strive to leave you with an action or meditation prescription that you can apply immediately to your life. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a board-certified physician and mom of two amazing kids. And my purpose is to make the neuroscience of wellness accessible to you and your family's everyday life. My almost decade-long experience teaching high-performing students of all ages have now led me to the creation of my newest courses: Brain Boss Planner and Digital Course for K-12 and the Rx Chill Pill Digital Course and Planner for stress management and resiliency training for high school and beyond, as well as for healthcare workers, educators, and parents. I'm so excited to say that they've already been a great success in their beta versions, so please email me at info@mindbodyspace.com if you're interested or if you know an organization that would be interested in participating in this early rollout phase. "Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty." Marcus Cicero. Isn't that an amazing quote? And happy Valentine's Day to you. I have to say, I really miss those days when my kids were little and we would fill out all those little tiny Valentines and put some candy in and think of every single classmate that they had. Those were very sweet days, and I'm a little nostalgic. So I'm really lucky that I get to have John Berger here today to cheer me up and give us some pearls from his new book. John is an award-winning magazine writer and author of two dating books, "Datonomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game," and most recently, "Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge." John is a former senior writer at Fortune, and he was named by Always On Network onto the list of power players in technology, business, media. He's also a familiar face and voice on television, radio, and podcasts, with appearances on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, Girls Gotta Eat, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and much more. I really enjoy John's take on love and dating because he's not your traditional self-help guru. He's actually a finance analyst, and so he loves data, so he gives you real facts and opinions based around statistics. He also gives us some really interesting insight into relationships in the digital age. I just want to add that his audience is very specific, and he was answering a very specific question because that's how books get published these days, I'm told. But whatever your relationship situation is, you're going to get some really cool insight out of this conversation. Hey John, how are you?

Hey Juna, how's it going?

Good, thank you so much for being here today.

I'm excited.

So your special relationship episode for Valentine's Day coming up, and I love the title of your new book.

Yes, the, the, it's Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge. And the, um, the, the little-known secret of the book publishing world is that Authors don't generally get to choose their titles, or they're kind of heavily monitored, essentially. So I actually did not pick the title of my first book. This one, actually, a friend of mine, another author, came up with the Make Your Move title, and fortunately everybody at my publishing house loved it. So I'm actually happier with Make Your Move than I was with Datanomics.

Your first book was heavily focused on statistics. I love hearing about facts. And I know you're a numbers person, right? Because you started out as a financial writer.

Yeah, I covered investing in oil and gas and super boring stuff like that at Fortune magazine for many years. So yeah, the first question I usually get is, how did a Fortune magazine writer end up writing dating books? And if you care, if you want me to answer that, I will.

I know that answer. It's because you were wondering why some of your most talented and attractive female professional friends were always griping about meeting men, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And even there— and not just my friends, my co-workers at Fortune. I mean, the editorial staff at Fortune was, was, and probably still is more women than men. And all the men were basically married like me, and the women who I can honestly say had more going for them dating-wise than we did, you know, they had these like Dating Horror Stories. And I couldn't figure out why dating seems so much harder for women, particularly successful, educated women, than for men.

So are these books really for— you call it at one point, it says high achievers. So is this for high-achieving kind of professional women, I think?

Yeah, I would say so. So Make Your Move kind of picks up where the first book, Datanomics, left off. And the problem I identified in the first book was, you know, for the past 20, 30 years, we've had one-third more women than men graduate from college, not just in the US, really, like in every Western country.

Wow. So what is that numbers-wise? Is one-third—

that means about 30 to 35%. Yeah, basically. In college and in the post-college dating pool, there are 4 women for every 3 men. Now, obviously, this wouldn't matter so much if we were more open-minded about whom we date and eventually marry, but we aren't. There's— college grads generally want to date and marry other college grads, and both men and women feel this way.

Is this a trend? Like, the men, it's, uh, go— the numbers are going down since you wrote the first book, or has it stayed stable?

I think they've gotten a little worse, but probably not materially worse. It's still, it's still 33, 34%. I mean, it varies country to country. This is not like a policy problem. This is a— and we can talk about it if you want.

And this is a whole nother episode of why, why that's happening.

It's a brain science thing that girls' brains mature faster than boys' brains. And as a result, the girls are better at schoolwork.

Wow. That's a really important topic though, because is it also the way that we are teaching school and it might be lopsided and unfair to boys and discouraging them? So that's a whole nother episode, right? Anyway, so there's this trend.

There's this trend. And yeah, in the first book, I have some regrets. Let's put it that way. I mean, the first book, it's really more pop science than a dating advice book. And I had this really snooty view towards the whole self-help genre. Like, I thought I was a serious journalist, and the idea of putting myself out there as the love doctor, like, just was not— it was not something I wanted to do. But in hindsight, that was a mistake because women would show up at my lectures, my book events, and I thought the whole knowledge is power thing would be enough, that women would be relieved to hear that it's not all in their heads. There really aren't enough good men. And they can stop listening to their moms griping about them being not so good at dating. But what I discovered is women still wanted me to— they would still say, okay, thank you, I'm glad it's not in my head. Now tell me what to do. I didn't, I didn't have a good—

because they're smart women, they're achievers, they want an action plan.

Exactly. Yeah. And I did not have an action plan. And because I didn't have an action plan, Some of the women who found the book most interesting also told me it was incredibly depressing because, because I didn't have like any hope, any strategies. I identified this enormous problem and the book got a ton of publicity and it, it, it shined a spotlight on this, this huge problem that exists in the dating pool of not enough educated men. But I didn't really offer any solutions to the problem. I mean, I was much more interested in solving the boy problem in our schools than I was the dating problem for, for educated women. And the new book, Make Your Move, is my attempt to sort of do what I should have done in the first book, which is kind of offer hope, offer ideas and strategies for how single women who are struggling with all this can still beat the rough odds.

Okay, so we're going to get to some of those solutions, right? But what about for men? Like, I think that the first book was pretty good for men too, if they wanted to read it. It's like a lot of good statistics.

Yeah, I think, yeah, it bodes well for men. But a lot of the men I interviewed for Datanomics, they resisted this idea that the reason they were having such success was just because of a numbers game. I mean, they thought it was them. I mean, they thought that they were special. They were— they were— they were deserving of all this attention. And particularly as the men aged into their 30s and early 40s, the numbers became better for the men. And I can talk through why. But basically, if a guy who has a decent job and is moderately good looking remains single into their 30s, the dating pool just becomes that more—

really?

And I can run through the why if you're interested.

Yeah, let's run through a real quick why.

Okay, so Juna, do you remember playing musical chairs as a kid?

Yes.

Okay, do you remember how in the first round of musical chairs when there were 25 players and 24 chairs, you really have to not be paying attention to not get a chair in the first round, right? Yeah. Like, I mean, every— I mean, yeah. But once you get to the last round of musical chairs, you have a 50% chance of losing the game. So each round, every time one chair and one player is removed, that your chances of losing in the next round increase. And this is what's happening in the dating pool, particularly in obvious— again, this wouldn't matter if we were more open-minded, but there's been this simultaneous trend towards assortative mating, which is college grads only marrying other college grads. So imagine a dating game of musical chairs in which you have 40 women and 30 men, which is essentially what young women, young college grads are graduating into dating-wise, if you're in your 20s.

And the man is the chair.

The man is the chair. Yes. The woman is the woman and the man is the chair. But we're going to take away the chairs. We're just going to talk. Real people, 40 women, 30 guys. Once half of the women, once 20 of the women marry 20 of the men, the ratio in the remaining pool of singles becomes 20 women and 10 men. So halfway through, we've gone from a 4-to-3 ratio to a 2-to-1 ratio of women to men. Once 5 more couples pair off, you go from 20 to 10 to 15 to 5. So you have a 3 to 1 ratio of single women to single men. So what happens is the longer people remain single in the, in today's dating market, the, the better it is for the educated men and the worse it is for educated women. And that's why, as New Yorkers and other of your listeners who live in, in these big cosmopolitan cities, We all know these women who have everything going for them dating-wise, and we're baffled why dating is so hard for them. I mean, they look better at 38 than they did at 22, and, and they have everything going for them. They're fun, they're good company, they're successful. Why should it be so hard for them to find a half-decent guy? And this is why.

Well, New York City is also— you might be dealing with homosexual men population, or bigger, and centers might have more LGBTQ perhaps. Are we talking just marriage among heterosexuals here? So that's what you're covering in the book, right? Okay.

Yes. Yeah. So, so you do have cities like Miami and Washington and New York and LA that have outsized populations of, of gay men And what's interesting from the research on this is that while gay men do tend to move to these cosmopolitan urban centers, queer women do not. There's less of a trend of lesbians moving to cities that are supposedly gay-friendly. So there's actually this imbalance within the the gay community in cities like New York, in which you have more gay men moving in but not, not the same number of queer women.

So then you're outnumbered again. Okay, so let's get to the juicy parts. So, yep, what was your— I mean, we don't want to give away the whole book, but what was your top advice for— to follow up on the depressed women who read your first book?

So one of the things I did with Make Your Move is I interviewed all the women I could find who had successful dating stories. And I think you agreed that we can admit that you and your husband Paul are two of the people I interviewed for the book, and we can get to that later. Yes. I tried to back into it and figure out, okay, what made dating easier for these people and what can readers learn? And one theme that kept recurring over and over again, not the only one, but a lot of the women who found dating easier were willing to make the first move. And not all of them, but it actually jived with the science on this, which shows that men are increasingly open to women making the first move and often want women to make the first move. And you can kind of see culturally why this is changing. And if you think about it, pretty much every bestselling dating Bible that's been written over the past 30 years, from The Rules to Ignore the Guy, Get the Guy, They all advocate this very complicated version of playing hard to get, and they push this idea that if you seem too interested in the guy, he'll be less interested in you. And the message these books want young women to send to young men basically boils down to: not interested means keep trying. I wasn't dating in 1970. You weren't dating in 1970. So I don't know if this worked back then. But think about how this plays out in the post-MeToo era, right? Like, the whole 'not interested means keep trying' message does not work. And if there's one— I'm not saying guys have learned the lessons of MeToo as fast as we should have. We haven't. But I do think most guys understand nowadays that if you're talking to a woman at a party and she doesn't seem so interested in the conversation, or if you're texting her and she's not returning your text messages, or if she just— if she generally seems disinterested, the correct response is not to assume she's playing hard to get, not to pursue. Yeah, it's to leave her alone.

So all of these books you're saying is kind of outdated now? There's been a big cultural shift?

Yes. And the guys are gun-shy and they're just not sure.

Maybe they have so many choices.

They have choices, but Yes, they have choices, but it's harder for them to figure out, particularly for the younger men. Yeah, I think are especially anxious, especially awkward. They're not sure what to do. And I think this is why for a 23-year-old guy, it's much easier for them to log on to Twitter and try a line out on Twitter with a complete stranger than it is to ask out a woman who he knows and actually likes.

Or like Tinder. Or—

right, because in real life life, he's worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. And then Tinder, it's all anonymous, so he can, he can screw up on Tinder.

I don't know.

I mean, basically, I mean, it's— yeah, I mean, it's the person you're interacting with is not part of your social sphere. She's not part of your, your daily life.

You're not going to run into them if you, you— something goes wrong at the cafeteria, right?

And I, I just think there's, particularly among the Gen Z types, and you know this, that there's this this fear of awkwardness, right? Okay. That— and it's not just the men, it's the girls too, that they're just worried about doing or saying the wrong thing. But the thing about dating is it requires a little bit of risk-taking. I mean, the— I mean, just think about physical touching, which is kind of verboten these days. But there's something about, you know, a woman who touches a guy's face, or you're holding hands at a movie theater. And these little acts of physicality, like, used to be really important to building a connection.

And flirting—

in flirt—

yeah, well, physical things.

Yes. But they were often pre— they were often preludes to a first kiss. And that's because touching releases hormones that, that kind of reduce anxiety.

But let's go back to the, the internet part of it. So, like, dating apps, you know, approaching people that you don't know, that you don't see in your normal life, right? Yeah, is much easier is what you're saying. But in your research, you found that, that those apps maybe overblow the, the success rate of the, the matches.

Yeah, I mean, it seems easier. I mean, you can do it from your couch, um, you can pre-screen for all these things that you think are important, like height and income and whether he's a dog person or a cat person. All these things you can like check off these boxes and and seemingly find the perfect guy or gal. But the problem is this isn't how human beings evolved to connect with each other. Human beings bond through shared experience. Mm-hmm. And nobody turns on a computer to find a best friend, right? Those two relationships, your soulmate and your best friend, really shouldn't be all that different. So if you wouldn't turn on a computer to find a best friend, why do you think it would be such a great idea and so easy to turn on an app to find a life partner or a soulmate? And I'm going to acknowledge that there are reasons to use dating apps that have nothing to do with finding a soulmate, you know, and that's fine. But I'm— people who buy dating books tend to be looking for life partners. And that's, that's my, my audience.

Quote in this book the stats about where you meet people and how long these relationships last, right? Do you want to go over those stats?

Yeah, yeah. So there's this professor at Stanford University, Michael Rosenfeld, and Rosenfeld, if you Google him, you'll see he's been quoted a lot as kind of a backer of online dating. He considers online dating to be generally a net positive. The thing is, if you dig into his scholarly report and into the appendix in Table 3. Yeah, he has this table in which the headline is "Breakup rates not much influenced by how couples meet." Now, I think I have a very different definition of "not much" than he does. So he found that the 1-year breakup rate for couples who meet online is 16%. And I'm going to compare that to the other ways of meeting he discussed that are the ones that I am endorse in Make Your Move. So meet through friends or family, the 1-year breakup rate is 9%. And again, that's compared to 16% for online dating. Meet as neighbors, the breakup rate over 1 year is 8%. Meet as coworkers, which is my favorite way of meeting somebody and something I know we'll talk about later. The breakup rate for coworkers over 1 year is 6%. Meet in college,— it's also 6%— meet in grade school, which is actually how my literary agent met her husband. The breakup rate is 5%. And meet in church, the 1-year breakup rate is only 1%. And by church, I assume he's talking about houses of worship generally, not Christian churches in particular. So you can see that these online relationships are less durable. And again, I think that's because this isn't really how people connect with each other. These shared experiences that we have with one another kind of become the mortar for deeper connections. There are these stories that we love to tell and retell, and the stories themselves make, make us almost more invested in the relationship itself. And I know that you and Paul have this wonderful story about how you guys met, and I'm sure you enjoy telling the story. Well, a couple who meets kind of in a mechanical way on Tinder and exchanges cautious text messages for a week before fact-checking each other's life story, meeting for coffee, but also creating an escape plan with your friends just to make sure, you know, in case it goes south, they know where you are. Well, that is not a recipe for falling in line.

So I want you to talk about that lecture you were telling me about when you visited a bunch of college students, and we're going to say that In your book, you suggest that you meet and date people that you're around physically, right? So, and I totally agree with that, honestly, because I, I have students who are at, you know, schools, and I always say, these people around you have already been vetted for similar interests. Exactly.

Yeah.

And it's the same thing with the workplace, although sometimes I wonder about two lawyers together or two, or two psychotherapists together.

But if you— yeah, I mean, it may— if you work in a law firm or if you work for Google, you can assume that these employers have done some vetting. Okay, but, but so anyway, I was— I have a friend or a friendly acquaintance who's an English professor at Rollins College in Florida, and Rollins has this interesting requirement. So all the graduating seniors are required to take kind of a life skills class, an adulting class.

That's a nice idea.

Yeah, I actually think it's a great idea. And she teaches one of these classes, and one of the topics they cover is relationships and dating. And she had read a review copy of Make Your Move, and she asked me to talk to the class. I explained my misgivings about online dating. I discussed the breakup rate that we just ran through. There's another study that shows the couples who who initially meet face to face are 25% more likely to report feelings of closeness than people who initially meet online. So there's all this data showing that, that it's easier to make a connection with somebody, a real human connection with somebody face to face than online. So at the end of the class, this young woman asked a question and she, she said, look, I hear what you're saying, but essentially, how the heck am I supposed to meet somebody if not through a dating app? So there were, you know, we were doing this on Zoom and we went into Brady Bunch mode, or I put my, my, uh, my screen on Brady Bunch mode. And there were 30 kids in the class, and I said, okay, I'm going to ask a question to the whole class. I want to see a show of hands. And the question I asked was Do you have somebody in your real-world life, somebody who you know and like, who's single and whom you're attracted to? Is there somebody like that who you've ever wondered about dating? 30 kids in the class, 30 boxes on my screen, 30 hands went up. So if you already know somebody single who you like and are comfortable with and are attracted to, Why not just ask out him or her? I mean, why, why start from zero with a complete stranger on a dating app when you could almost be halfway there practically in terms of compatibility by asking out somebody who you already know?

So what'd they say to that?

You know, they— yeah, there was some nodding and it was the, it was the last, it was the very last question of the class. So there wasn't a whole lot of discussion. But, but, but actually I have another, another example.— that I was on a, I was on a Christian dating podcast. One of the hosts was a woman in her 30s who'd had really only bad experiences using dating apps. And I basically asked her the same question that I asked the kids at Rollins College. Was there a man that she knew from her daily life who's single whom she'd ever wondered about dating? And she said there was. And I suggested that she take a chance and ask him out on a date and see what happens. So I recently got an email from her and she had taken my advice, and this verbatim is what she wrote to me. Quote: We are now dating. We had mutual friends and interests, and I messaged him on Twitter, and we go out on dates once a week. Still very early into things, but the story thus far seems to highlight the wisdom of your book. The person I'm dating and I have both reflected that our dates have been so much better than anything we found through the dating apps. Apps. So I mean, obviously that's anecdotal, it's only one story. For me it was—

that's a really nice story. What about during the pandemic though? So I just want to make a point that we're talking about apps, we're not talking about like meeting people on Zoom, because I think that's happening now where people actually meet on Zoom and it's like a one-on-one situation. Or I've met excellent friends over the pandemic online only because we were in the same group of you know, something we signed up for that we had mutual interest in. And I've made some really great friends, which is funny, you know, and I've probably spent more time with them now because we were in the pandemic. So for those young people out there who are single and, you know, meeting people on Zoom, that's a possibility. We're talking about apps, that's totally different.

Definitely a possibility. And I, yeah, and I, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm entirely negative on dating apps or online dating. And in fact, there are some niche dating apps that I write about in the book that I like a lot. And I also talk about, you know, dating during COVID times. And I realize, just as you said, that online dating may be the only dating people are comfortable with right now. I'm all in favor of making the best of a bad situation. But one of the challenges I have as an author is that this is a book and not a magazine article. So I'm not— I'm not writing for the here and now. I mean, I'm I'm assuming, hoping that life 6 months from now will not be the same as it is today, or 6 years from now. I mean, I assume that we'll get back to some kind of a life that's more familiar. And while I acknowledge and I talk about COVID times dating in the book, it's not, it's not the focus because I, I don't want the book to immediately become dated once we all get vaccinated. It would become dated. Become dated once we all get back.

Or maybe you swab the other person before you go on a date.

Yes, but you're right. I mean, certainly there are ways to meet people.

But again, I'm talking about people that I met through common interests or like an organization that I belong to. So that's different also from just total strangers.

Yeah, it's totally different. And I mean, in my— and while I realize that in these times It seems so much easier to just go on Match.com or Tinder and to find somebody. If you look at the studies that have been done, there was a Pew Research report that came out last year and it found that the majority of women think dating has only gotten harder. Two-thirds of women have experienced harassment on the apps, and 20% of women on dating apps say they've been threatened with physical violence. So, you know, my thought is, okay, if there was a singles bar where 1/5 of the women who walked in were threatened with violence, that's awful. Who would go back there? The breakup rates are higher, it's harder to connect with somebody, and there are these safety problems. So to me, it's like a 3-star.

Okay, so let's recap. So the first thing is the title of the book, Make Your Move. So women should not be afraid to make their move. Men no longer find that, or if they ever did, they don't find that to be a turn-off, obviously. It might— you might be even helping them along.

And what I've discovered is that when you— when I make this argument, the people who love books like The Rules, that they basically so say, oh, I would never chase a man. And this word chase is so antithetical to what I'm talking about, but it's like a scare tactic that, that, um, but that's kind of old-fashioned maybe.

So that brings to mind an episode that I heard on Guy Raz's How I Built This, one of my favorite podcasts. It was a conversation with Vicki Tsai. She's the founder of Tatcha Skincare that sold to Unilever for hundreds of millions of dollars, and she was talking about her husband and how she asked him out and he initially said no. There was also a New York Times article about their courtship. It says here, in 1998, Vicki Tsai, then 20, met Eric Bevin, then 21, at a college dance. She was a junior at Wellesley. He was a senior at MIT. She wanted everything to do with him. He wanted nothing to do with her. 6 months of determination from Ms. Tsai made that change. "I kept asking him out. He turned me down. I tried talking to him. He acted disinterested. I thought he was cute. I'm not used to taking no for an answer, and I think I wore him down," said Ms. Tsai. They have now been married for 15 years and 5 months and have a daughter together. And they're, they're partners in their business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that is a great story. My point is that, that what I'm talking about rarely involves the same kind of persistence that used to be expected of our male suitors. And I'll just give you a simple story. Young woman I know, she actually used to be our Saturday night babysitter when, when she was in college. So I've gotten to know her reasonably well over the years. And Laura and I have kept in touch with her, and I started telling her about the book. And just as a little context, the thing to know about her is while she is quite attractive, the bigger thing with her is that she has this outsized personality. She's like an extreme extrovert. She probably should be doing stand-up if she wasn't, you know, doing something else. Um, and as you know, some guys are a little bit intimidated by the extrovert thing. And that has, you know, for her, that had been a little bit of a dating problem over, you know, you know, in her 20s. So she told me the story about how she was at a party. This was a story about how she met her current boyfriend. And she was at a party. The two of them were talking, and she could tell that, like, he was a little unsure what to do. So she just blurted out, "So are you going to ask for my number?" And that was it. She just opened the door wide enough for him to feel comfortable walking through. He didn't— she didn't have to buy him a beer or ask him out on a proper date or grab his ass or anything like that. All she had to do was open the door wide enough for him to feel comfortable about walking through, and that's it. And that's all I'm talking about, really, when I suggest women make the first move, because The reality is it is so much easier and there's so, so much less you have to do as a woman making the first move than traditionally we've come to expect from our male suitors who are supposed to display this over-the-top persistence.

Okay, so this is a big switch in culture, so don't be shocked if your teenage girls start to ask boys out, right? So it might be a real switch for some of us. But, and then the second rule is meet people where you are, right? Maybe in person, hopefully.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm, as you, as we talked about earlier, I'm a financial writer by trade. And one of my favorite financial books is One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch, the Fidelity fund manager. And his motto, was always buy what you know. Like, you know, you as a, as a mom-and-pop investor, he would argue that mom-and-pop investors are better off buying companies they deal with on a daily basis. So he gives the example of he had a friend who was raving about what at the time was a brand new product from Hanes, these legs pantyhose. And he ended up making a killing investing in Hanes just because one of his friends told told him about, about legs. So the argument I make in Make Your Move is that the same ideas that apply to buy what you know when it comes to investing also apply to date who you know when it comes to dating. As I write in the book, my favorite date who you know is dating in the workplace because there's really nobody who you know better. And there's no vet— there's no better vetting process than working with somebody 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day. I mean, your personality traits are really on full display. I mean, if you're kind and empathetic in the workplace, you're probably going to be those things in a relationship. If you're deceitful and unkind in the workplace, you're probably not going to make a great boyfriend or girlfriend either. I kind of feel like this, this is why the workplace is such a great way to meet people.

You can observe them over wide ranges of situations.

Right, right. I mean, if you're, you know, if you're spending all this time with them, you also basically know whether you're compatible.

So where did you meet your wife? At school?

Yes, Laura and I met in college.

Oh, okay. So that's a great place too, right?

It is, yeah. I mean, it's a similar vibe. In that you're spending all this time together. Now, we weren't dating throughout our time in college, but I didn't— you know, Laura and I knew each other from literally my first day on campus, or our first days on campus. So we knew each other for 2+ years before we ever started dating. Um, wow. And I, I—

so don't rule anyone out.

Exactly. Yeah, I, I think I I think I sometimes joke that we were dating for 2 weeks before we went out on an actual date. So, yeah.

Well, they can guess who I am in the book, but Paul and I met in a hospital when— but I was a medical student. Well, now I told the story of who I am in the book. But I have to say that we were on call and neither of us had actually maneuvered that. We were on call together all the time. Neither of us manipulated that schedule. So there was something mysterious as well. But we did end up getting to know each other very well over all those calls that we took together.

Right. And by the, by the time you guys actually went out on a proper date, I bet you guys felt you were— I know from what you've told me that you guys felt like you were almost halfway there, right?

Oh yeah, it was so easy. It's interesting. I don't even remember who asked anything. Like, we just sort of moved, started going out, we moved in together. I don't think we really neither of us—

I don't remember one of us saying, hey, would you like to go on a date with me on Friday night? It was organic.

Yeah, yeah, we didn't even talk about it. It almost just happened.

Right. If you think about like our favorite TV couples, like, you know, so many of them in the workplace, whether it's Sam and Diane on Cheers, which is dating myself and ourselves, or more recently like Jim and Pam on The Office. I mean, if Jim and Pam had met on Tinder, it probably would have been the most boring first date ever. I mean, they never would have connected.

That's true. That is true.

One of the arguments I make in the book is that it actually matters how we connect, that you could have two people who are very compatible on paper, but if they meet in this really mundane way, they're not going to connect the same way that they would if they met in the workplace, or they met in church, or they met as part of a bird watching club or whatever, whatever kind of shared experience or shared interest they had together. It's, it's that, it's that—

so going through an experience together, shared experiences. Okay, like if I met Paul on a bus somewhere, it just wouldn't be the same as if we had taken coffee together.

I mean, I mean, if there was a fender bender involving the bus and you had this like fun—

some sort of emotional connection to like that situation Yeah, I mean, there's a—

this is a man making the first move, but, you know, I've been tweeting a ton about the book, you know, spending a lot of time on social media promoting the book. And when talking about some of this stuff, there was a guy who wrote back to me on Twitter, and he told me this, you know, in however many characters or less, this is really nice story. He lives in Seattle with his wife, and he met his wife out, you know, in sort of the outside balcony, you know, the railing area on a ferry. Because in Seattle, there were lots of ferries taking you from place to place. And he just said there was something about the hair, the wind blowing through her hair, and making eye contact with her. And he just— this wasn't his nature to, like, chat up women on ferries, but he did. And they've been now married 20 years. And as you can imagine, This ferry story to them is somewhat magical, you know, like the same way your story about meeting on rotation in the hospital has this kind of poetic quality to it. And the telling and retelling of these how we met stories is actually really important to the success of a relationship.

But in the case of the ferry, they're just total strangers that met on a ferry.

Yeah, I mean, this was on Twitter, so I think there was I think there might have been a, uh, like a 3-page version of— but there's something about meeting in a real-world space because there's so much you can learn about another person just by being in their physical presence and looking at their body language, hearing the intonation in their voices, the vibe.

You get a vibe that you don't get—

yeah, exactly. I was on a dating podcast a few weeks ago with a very young audience, and one of the hosts was telling me a story about going out on an online date and being surprised by the sound of his voice. And to me, my reaction is, why would you ever go out on a date with somebody you've never actually at least had a phone conversation with? Because there is so much you can learn just from the sound of somebody.

True, true. Okay, so the third point I want to make is that you do talk about dating outside of your socioeconomic education level. So you suggest to women to open up their expectations as far as—

Yeah, I, I like to preface this by saying I'm not saying that women are fussy and men are not about this stuff. The research shows that men are actually just as choosy about women's education levels as women are about men's. And in fact, women are more likely to marry somebody with, with a lesser education level than men are. So this notion that, that men will marry, like, you know, the first cute cocktail waitress that comes along, it's just not true.

I mean, of course there's highly educated cocktail waitresses, especially in New York and big city areas.

And of course, no offense to cocktail waitresses, men are just as choosy when it comes to socioeconomics and education as women are. So I'd like to get that out of the way because otherwise it feels like I'm picking on the fussy women but not on the fussy men.

Okay, no, that's good to know. There is a myth to dispel about that.

Yes, but fairly— no, I mean unfairly— men don't get punished for this choosiness just because there is this vast supply, so to speak, of educated women. So if they— if men discriminate when it comes to dating, it doesn't really come back to haunt them the way it does with women. So this, so this is why, you know, my argument in both books, in both the first book and in Make Your Move, is that, look, if there's too many men in the non-college dating pool and if there were too many women in the college-educated dating pool, it seems fairly inevitable to me that these two groups will find each other. And I do not believe that a college degree makes you a better husband or a better wife. And I, you know, I call these relationships mixed collar, white collar, blue collar, mixed collar relationships. And because I have friends who have mixed collar marriages, mixed collar relationships, I tend to get a little peeved whenever I hear people describe this as settling or compromising or dating down. Because one woman I'm thinking of right now, because she was a friend of Laura in college, actually a friend of mine as well, but more Laura's, who like after college there would be all these like teary late-night phone calls to Laura about the latest, you know, jerk dermatologist who mistreated her. And she's a, she's a high school English teacher in upstate New York. And she'd always been friends with the guy who was like the head of physical plant at the high school, like the, the maintenance guy who was in charge of the sprinkler system and the lighting system. And he had asked her out a couple times before, and she always said no because in her head that wasn't the kind of guy she was supposed to end up with. But after one particularly bad breakup, she went to him and said, so can I still take you up on that dinner offer? And they've been married 25 years. He is amazing. Um, Uh, he's a great husband, a great father. And I'll tell you, if anybody suggested to their son that mom had dated down or married down or settled or something, I think my head would explode. So I, I think all of us would be better off if we were more open-minded about whom we date and marry.

Okay, so you're talking about cross-collar, blue-collar, having more traditional—

so I'll give you, I'll give you an example that I'm I think the next thing you and Paul can relate to, and that is that back when I was at Fortune and Laura was in her first, you know, stay at the U.S. Attorney's Office and later, you know, as a partner in a big law firm, Laura and I used to have this daily negotiation, you know, at around 5 o'clock or 5:30 about who had to be home in time to relieve the nanny. This was always kind of a little bit of a of a battle, right? Uh, like, it— not battle, but, but it was, you know, it was a, it was a daily conversation. It wasn't easy. And as you know, and as probably a lot of your listeners know, it's not easy melding two demanding careers. Um, this is why I kind of feel like having one person be an electrician and the other one one's the lawyer or the doctor.

Or me teaching and you writing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just to finish the story with me and Laura is that eventually something had to give. And this is why I kind of, I went into first, I did some ghostwriting. I ghostwrote a book and now I've written my own books because, you know, I can do this from the library, which is where I used to write, you know, but now, you know, now I can't go to the library anymore. You know, somebody's career has to give, and in that case it was me. Um, and I just think, yes, it's easier if you do— don't have two people with two really demanding careers.

Okay, so you're also talking about a shift in culture as far as who's staying home with the kids now. So that's something that's been changing over time. There's a lot more dads who are more flexible, and now especially with remote work. So you're talking more about like cross-caller, and then the dads can also be the person who makes less of the big paycheck. That should be something we should be open-minded to.

Yeah, I'm not really, you know, I don't really write about stay-at-home dads in the book, but I will say that, you know, in recent years, I've certainly been the lead parent in our house because my schedule is more flexible. But to your point, maybe a year ago I was on Metro North, which is the commuter train system here in the New York area, and I was sitting in one of those, um, you know, those seats that are across from each other on the train. And there were two women who were probably age 30-ish who were talking to each other, and one of them said to the other, "When are you and Jack gonna have a second kid?" And without even missing a beat, the response was, well, it depends on, on how long Jack is willing to stay home with the baby. And I loved it. Like, I, I love the fact that they had this very matter-of-fact conversation that, that, you know, when you and I were in our 20s, if we had heard that conversation, we— it would have been like, uh, who's Jack?

Jacqueline?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it would have been almost incomprehensible.

So I think your book is like a cultural statement So I love that. I love the book. I love the title, Make Your Move. I think that it's really about talking about how everything is changing. It's totally acceptable for a woman to make the first move. It's even welcome, maybe. And then to meet people in your own profession, but also open yourself up to mixed color possible relationships.

You've nailed it.

Right? Those are the top 3 things. Any other? Is that big advice?

I mean, the only other thing I'd point out is that while the culture is changing, a lot of the people who advocate kind of traditional dating strategies and dating roles, they, they like to say, oh, it's biology. It's, you know, human biology kind of pre-programs men to chase and women to be nothing more than passive filters of male advances.

Mm-hmm.

There's a book out there, an incredible book called— the title is Inferior, and it's written by Angela Saini, who's a science writer in London. It's this masterpiece in which she explores all the ways that science has gotten women wrong over the years. You know, so much of this notion that men are hardwired to chase and women are supposed to be passive filters of male advances, so much of that is built on complete junk science that's been debunked over the past 10, 15 years, mostly by female evolutionary biologists at places like UCLA and other, other top institutions, showing that the science that all these male biologists have been touting over the years was incredibly wrong. And it's kind of confusing how this kind of junk science ever got elevated to canon in the first place.

Interesting. I'm gonna have to get that book.

It's a shocking read, and it's really well written too. I mean, not as well written as Make Your Movie.

Thank you so much, John. I'm so happy that you were able to give these women advice, or— and men too. I think men should read it too.

I think everybody should read it.

I gave it to my son and he's in college. So thank you so much. Thank you for following up with practical advice and plus the science and the real numbers behind what your advice is.

Yes.

Okay. Thank you, John.

All right. See ya. Thanks for having me on.

That was John Berger, author of Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge. It's time to flip the script. Find out more about him and order his book at johnberger.com. Link is in the show notes. Send us your questions, and you can also shape the contents of this podcast by signing up at mindbodyspace.com/podcast. When you opt in, you'll get extras from episodes like cheat sheets, worksheets, and special tips just for our newsletter subscribers. You'll also get information on our neuroscience-powered planner, and online courses for kids, parents, and educators. If you appreciate the content and want to help, the absolute best thing you can do is to share. Text or email your friends, share on social media a link to your favorite episode, or use the sharing links on your newsletter. Good old-fashioned talking works too. Please share this podcast with all your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who believes in the scientific method and are curious about natural ways to boost performance, health, mental and physical resilience for themselves or their kids. Thank you so much. And until next time, this is Dr. Juna wishing you and your family wellness.