Bestselling author and Director of Relationship Science for dating app, Hinge, Logan Ury joins the show to explore talking about mental health and therapy on a first date. Logan also discusses vulnerability, pandemic dating trends, and her book How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love. Listen now to find out why opening up about your mental health might just be what gets you a second date!

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Monday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, and surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow Logan Ury on Twitter and Instagram

Read Logan’s book: How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love

Learn more about Logan’s Date Smarter workshop

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The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(2:11) - How Logan’s work shows up in her personal life - “My husband and I have this sweet/cheesy thing that we do where sometimes I'll lean over to him in bed at night and put my hand out and be like ‘Are we connected?’ and what that means is like ‘Are we on the same page right now?’”

(07:31) - On pandemic dating trends - “What we actually found in our research was people were like ‘I'm afraid of a dance floor makeout. I want a relationship and somebody to hold me while I cry about all the stuff that I lost, or literally people that I lost.’”

(13:36) - Logan’s advice on how and when people should disclose details about their mental health journey in romantic relationships - “It's really about saying ‘This is something in my life that will impact you potentially, but I am not asking you to take care of me. I am asking for you to be curious, ask questions and really explore this with me as you get to know me.’”

(16:52) - Self perception theory and the realities about ghosting - “Nobody wants to be ghosted, but then when you say, ‘Have you ghosted someone?’ most people say, ‘Yes.’”

(20:29) - Logan’s final advice to improve your dating life - “So often the thing that we think makes us ineligible for dating is actually the thing that makes us approachable, relatable, lovable, special.”

88% of people would rather date someone who prioritizes their mental health and who talks about therapy or mental health on a first date, but only 7% of global Hinge users said that they would start talking about this on a first date, and so I think there's really an opportunity there to destigmatize this and say, "When you talk about this, you are being vulnerable. You are creating a handle for someone to grab onto and connect with you."

Welcome to Taboo Tuesday on the Emotionally Fit podcast. I'm Dr. Emily Anhalt, and I've always loved talking about taboo subjects, sex, money, drugs, death, because being a therapist has taught me that the feelings we're most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal, so join me as we flex our feels by diving into things you might not say out loud, but you're definitely not the only one thinking. Quick disclaimer, that nothing in this podcast should be taken as professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment, because while I am a therapist, I'm not your therapist and I'm not my guest's therapist, so this is intended only to spark interesting conversation. Thanks for tuning in. Hey there, Fit fans. I am so excited for today's Taboo Tuesday, which will be with behavioral scientist turned dating coach, Logan Ury, who is the author of the bestselling book, How to Not Die Alone.

As the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, Logan conducts research to understand and help people find love. After studying psychology at Harvard, she ran Google's behavioral science team, the Irrational Lab, and Logan now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Scott. Logan, thank you so much for being here today.

Yay. So happy to be with you, Emily. I think you're my number one favorite person to follow on Twitter, and we've become friendly over the last few years and you did help me out with my book as well, so very happy to be your guest here.

Oh, the feeling is so mutual and it's my honor. I'm so excited to dig into this very interesting crossover of taboo topics. We sort of have the sex angle, the therapy angle, so what we'll be talking about today is what it means to talk about mental health and therapy on dates, especially early dates and what the research shows about it, but before we get there, Logan, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself in this role of Director of Relationship Science at Hinge.

I feel like looking back on my career, I'm like, "Did I know where I was going? Did I know what I was doing?," and I would say, "I really knew the domain. I knew that I loved dating and relationships, and that was really important to me," and then when I quit my job at Airbnb about five years ago and I was trying to figure out what's my place in this field, I sort of just went one step at a time, and so for me, it was working with this relationship scientist named Eli Finkel and figuring out, "Okay, I'm super interested in this. I see that Eli is amazing in the academic world, but how could I bring that to the average person, and maybe my role is being a translator, and then work as a dating coach and really get those stories and do my own research, and test my theories if someone's having this problem, and I give them this advice, what happens to them?," and really honing my advice about dating like a scientist, things like that. Then, I got a book deal with Simon & Schuster and wrote my book, How to Not Die Alone, and through that, which gave me a lot of credibility and helped me develop my philosophies, I was able to get this great job at Hinge, and so I've been working there for about two and a half years, and it's just so fun.

Every day, I get to think about dating, think about trends in dating. If I have a hunch, I get to test what's going on in dating, and so it's really a dream job to be able to basically run experiments and do research on a topic that I never get sick of thinking about.

I'm imagining that your work probably has informed your own relationships, romantic and otherwise. How have you seen that be true?

Yeah. A few years ago, I did a series of videos with The Gottman Institute, which if people listening aren't familiar with them, John and Julie Gottman are some of the foremost leaders in the field of relationship science. They've done really important research on what makes relationships last. They call it the relationship masters versus the relationship disasters, and so one of John Gottman's key ideas is this idea of a bid, that actually what separates these two groups is not going on a big trip or having passionate sex all the time. It's really when I ask you a question, when I indicate through a sigh or a pat on your back that I want to connect, do you choose in that moment to connect with me or do you turn away from me and ignore me, or even turn against me and actually fight with me a bit?

And so in doing a video about the concept of bids, I realized, "Wow, I am not making enough bids towards my partner and I am not turning towards his bids," and so I've really had a concerted effort since then to see an email as a bid, see him making tea and asking if I want some as a bid, and I really do try to put my phone away, put my laptop down, whatever it is in the moment and recognize a bid and turn towards it.

I love the idea of a bid. I feel like the equivalent in my language is attunement. Are we connected in such a way that we're attuning, what each other needs, and are we willing to meet those needs? In our push-up, we talk about how complicated that can be when we are in relationships, so how have you seen things shift since you've applied the knowledge that you've learned, because I know similarly, I tell founders all day long, "Oh, you should rest. Mental health is so important."

"Take your vacations," and then as a founder, I often don't do those things, so how have you kind of stepped up to walk the walk?

Yeah, I think it's just, first of all, from a personal level, it's felt really good to not be hypocritical. I think it felt bad to be like, "Oh, I know this is the best practice and I'm not doing it," so just in terms of sleeping well at night, that's been great. I like your word of attunement and feeling connected. My husband and I have sort of a sweet/cheesy thing that we do, where sometimes, it's not often and it's not set, but sometimes I'll lean over to him in bed at night, like put my hand out and be like, "Are we connected?" What that means is like, "Are we on the same page right now?"

"Are we getting along? Am I thinking about you when I'm making decisions? Am I making you feel important?," and sometimes they'll say, "Yeah, we feel great," and sometimes we'll both be like, "No, we are not connected." I told this story to this woman, Jesse, a friend of mine, and her husband is from the Midwest, and she just laughed out loud, and she's like, "If I said to Ryan, 'Are we connected?,' he would literally be like, 'What do you mean? Is there a problem with the Wi-Fi?'," and so this is not for everyone.

I don't think that phrase needs to be used, but I really do like the idea of a check-in, and sometimes I can just feel within myself, "Oh, I am resentful of my husband for doing X, Y, Z." Then, when he does this

other thing that's unrelated, I'm going to snap at him, and that's really because I haven't addressed the first thing, and so I think it's that I am, of course, a flawed human that can be petty and selfish and short-tempered, but I also do have that meta-knowledge of, "All right, what's going on here? What could I do better, and what do I need to address?," and so I would say, I usually know the right thing to do. I do not always choose to do it.

Oh, well, you're not alone there. I think you've just described humanity in general. I love the idea, the check-in though. I think that's wildly undervalued, how powerful it can be just to take an intentional moment to be back on the same page with your person.

Totally.

Tell us what is one thing that has surprised you from all of the research you've done on dating, and sex, and relationships?

Yeah. My Hinge research is super interesting because my first day at Hinge was March 3rd, 2020, and so, of course, we know what else happened at the beginning of March 2020, and so I had never worked at Hinge, so I didn't know what it would be like and I couldn't compare Hinge during the pandemic versus Hinge not during the pandemic, but I really think it was a unique time to become basically like an in-house researcher, and so really tracking from early March until now, "What's going on with dating? How are people dating differently?," and there were so many interesting themes. There was the rise of video date and the phone call. There was people feeling really isolated, spending a lot of time alone, getting more intentional, "Who am I? What do I want?"

There were supposedly the hot vax summer of last year, which we actually found in our research was people were like, "No, I'm afraid of a dance floor makeout. I want a relationship and somebody to hold me while I cry about all the stuff that I lost, or literally people that I lost," and so really, just being able to track the national and international narrative around what was changing with dating and still doing that work, I think has been so fascinating because I love one-on-one coaching, but I'm only working with a small pool. With my Hinge data, I'm really seeing how millions of people around the world are dating and dating differently.

It sounds like one of the things you found too, is that it is becoming more common, more acceptable, less stigmatized to bring the topic of mental health and therapy to the table even on a first date. Tell us more about that.

Yeah. This was actually inspired by a coaching session I did in the fall of last year, where I was talking to this guy, he was so sweet, he was about 27, and there was just some disconnect for him. I was just getting to know him, and there was something going on where he would get first dates, but he wouldn't get from the first date to the second date, and I really like these naughty problems and I was trying to figure out what was going on on his first date, and so I was like, "What do you talk about on these dates?," and he's like, "Well, I often mention that I had been in Y Combinator, this business accelerator," and he was just talking so much about business. Kind of teasing him, I was like, "Look, buddy, being in YC is not a personality, and I think you need to bring something else to the date." I was like, "What about reading?"

"Do you like to read?," and he's like, "Yes, but I read a lot of self-help books, and so I would never bring that up." I was like, "Why?," and he's like, "Oh, it would be so embarrassing to talk about mental health on a first date." I was like, "Ding, ding, ding. This is the next thing that I'm going to research," and so it was really this 27-year old having trouble connecting, getting past the first date, saying to me, "I don't talk about mental health or self-help on a date," and so then, I did all this research at Hinge and I worked with a great research team, really good partners there, and we basically found out that more than ever, people are really prioritizing mental health, and so people said to us, "It's been a hard two years. I've done the work, I've improved myself, and I want to be with someone who is on the same journey and has done the work," and so we found that 88% of Hinge daters would prefer to date someone who's prioritizing their mental health, and actually probably my favorite stat, which is that not only is bringing up therapy on a first date a good sign, not a bad sign, you're actually more likely to get a second date if on the first date, you mention that you go to therapy.

Oh, yeah. Hallelujah to that. Something I talk about a lot is I feel like up till now, our relationship philosophy has been, "I'll take care of you if you take care of me," but that, I think it's really time that we switch to, "I'll take care of me for you if you'll take care of you for me," and I think going to therapy is one of the ways that we make sure that our partner doesn't have to be our therapist and that we are not playing out all of our shit on our partner that we should actually be working through ourselves. I've also seen some funny memes that it used to be that on a first date, you would say like, "What do you do?," or, "Where did you go to school?," and now it's like, "What kind of therapy are you in to work through your issues? Let's just cut to the chase immediately."

Yeah, I absolutely love that switch that you just made. I think that's really strong and that really resonates with what I heard in my research, and so I remember speaking to this woman who was like, "Hey, I was not put together. I had a bunch of issues. I had family stuff I needed to work through, but I have done that. I have done the work, and so when I was looking for a woman to marry, I wanted someone who had also done the work," and people just say that phrase so often, "Are you doing the work?"

"Have you done the work?" I think that also speaking of memes, people don't want a date to be a therapy session, or they don't want to feel like somebody arrives to the date and dumps a bunch of stuff on them and wants to process it because they refuse to go to therapy, and so I think there really is a feeling of like, "Hey, let's both be our best selves," and part of that is talking about therapy or the importance of mental health on a date. One more thing I'll add is that I really think this has been a pretty quick change. Like obviously, you are in this space of mental health and the conversation around it, but I would say even five years ago, I think this topic was much more stigmatized.

Definitely.

I think with the rise of therapy and coaches on Instagram, there's a lot of mental help TikTok, I think there's so many podcasts that talk about this, but I really think the driver is the pandemic. It was very hard. People needed help, and in seeking help, people said, "This matter to me. I want to find someone who also did this," and so I really feel like it's gone from this, "Oh, no, what an awkward, stigmatized thing to talk about to. Yes, show me the receipts from your therapist."

Yeah. It's funny too, it's so very common that people come into therapy, wanting support with a particular thing, and you find out pretty quick that that particular thing is just one little symptom of

deeper patterns and more complicated dynamics, and so my feeling is that the pandemic was kind of a foot in the door for work that we all need to do in an ongoing way. Logan, I'm curious, what advice would you give to someone who's jumping into the dating pool and unsure how much to disclose about their own mental health journey on a first date, on a second date?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and inspired by the mental health research that we did, kind of this big campaign that we had around the hottest accessory for dating in 2022 is going to be talking about your mental health, Hinge actually just came out with this idea of Self-Care Prompt, so now you can put on your profile some of the ways that you do this. Even before the first date, you can say, "My therapist would tell you that I ...," or, "One of my boundaries is ..." And so I think that's a really cool way to kind of explicitly bring it to the table and be like, "I'm the kind of person that goes there. I'm deep." It's not even about expressing what the boundary is, it's like, "Hey, boundary is a word that I know," and so if you're thinking about the dating journey, it's like you could choose to use a Self-Care Prompt on Hinge to talk about that upfront on a date.

What I would say is it's something that you could talk about, but I really want you to own your narrative. I don't want you to apologize, and this is something that I coach people on all the time. I had a client who had a difficult relationship with her family, and it actually was so embarrassing to her and created so much shame that she wasn't dating, and so we spent a lot of time crafting what she would say, and it was really simple. It was something like, "You know, I'm from X state. I don't go there that often."

"Unfortunately, I'm not that close with my family, but that has actually made me even more focused on creating a family, and so I have friends that feel like family and I'm really excited to create my own family one day," and so it was really about knowing what you wanted to say, not apologizing, not asking for permission, but basically saying like, "Here's what happened, here's how I'm dealing with it, and here's how I'm moving forward," and so with any mental health issue, that's also something that someone could say, whether something like anxiety, depression, OCD, you want to share it at a point where you feel like the person deserves it or has earned that intimacy that's not necessarily on the first date, although it could be, but it's really about saying, "This is something in my life that will impact you potentially, but I am not asking you to take care of me. I am asking for you to be curious, ask questions, and really explore this with me as you get to know me."

It's a perfect example of something we talk about at Coa called Boundaried Vulnerability. How do you share enough of yourself that you invite connection, you invite someone to step closer to you without sharing so much that you wake up with an emotional hangover or ask them to take care of you in a way that they're not set up to take care of you? I love that framing of, "Here's what's true in my life and ask any questions," so that sounds really lovely.

Yeah, I love that. I would just add, I just did a book event with Allison Raskin. She wrote a great book called Overthinking About You, and it is specifically about dating with anxiety, depression and/or OCD, and she talks about her personal journey, but she also has some really good advice there from lots of researchers and therapists, and so that's a book that I would recommend people check out.

That's great. That's a great suggestion. What else has surprised you as you've dug into this research on sharing about mental health and therapy in these early dates?

One thing that's jumped out to me, and I really love stats like this, with ghosting, almost nobody wants to be ghosted, but then when you say, "Have you ghosted someone?," most people say yes, so it's like, "I don't want to be ghosted, but oh, sure, sometimes I'll ghost." Well, this actually came up with the mental health research. I just told you that 88% of people would rather date someone who prioritizes their mental health and who talks about therapy or mental health on a first date, but only 7% of global Hinge users said that they would start talking about this on a first date, and so I think there's really an opportunity there to destigmatize this and say, "When you talk about this, you are being vulnerable. You are creating a handle for someone to grab onto and connect with you," and if you're experiencing dating burnout, one of the things that might be happening is that you're having these shallow, small talk dates where you're just like, "I don't want to talk about which neighborhood of San Francisco I live in. I don't want to talk about my ideal trip."

"I've done that a million times. It's not fun," but you know what is fun, having a conversation about what's actually going on for you and using the mental health or therapy angle to enter that could be great. For example, you could say something like, "One thing I've been talking about with my therapist recently is putting myself first over my friends. I love my friends and I will always say yes to them, but I realized that I was starting to resent them because I was saying yes so often that I wasn't prioritizing myself," and so now, I'm doing XYZ training program, and I'm really making sure that I go to my sessions and that I connect with the network and I see my friends as often as I can, but it has felt really good to put myself first in a new way.

By kind of digging into the taboo topics in a way on a first date, you are inviting connection, and I'd imagine there's a ripple effect. I know I have a friend who is really intentional about not ghosting. He sends very thoughtful messages even when he'd really prefer to just disappear, and he has had people circle back and say, "Hey, just want to thank you for doing me the dignity of letting me know where you were at. You have inspired me not to ghost on other people because I saw how much better it felt for me," so there really is this opportunity to change just starting with yourself.

100%. I would say that what you just said is absolutely my philosophy in general when it comes to dating. I have a whole part in my book about the Ghostbusters Pledge and basically research that I conducted prior to working at Hinge, I actually did it through Reddit, where I recruited people who are serial ghosters, and I had some percentage of them the next time they were going to ghost someone continue to ghost. The other people, I had them send a text that I had written, something very simple like, "Hey, Emily, great meeting you. I don't think we're a romantic match."

"Thanks so much for the date," and then I measured how did they feel after taking both actions. The people who had sent the, "I'm not interested" texts actually felt better than the people who had ghosted. My theory on that is that there's a concept called self-perception theory, which is this idea that it's not that I necessarily know who I am, it's that I look to my actions to show me who I am, so if I volunteer, I say, "Wow, I'm volunteering. I must be a great person," and if it's ghosting, it's, "Well, I know ghosting is a bad thing to do, so when I ghost, I know I'm kind of an asshole," and so I really like the idea that you don't just protect the other person's feelings, you actually feel better yourself.

What a profound piece of information that we have so much more agency to make change for ourselves and for the people we're connecting with than I think we give ourselves credit for. Any last piece of advice or thoughts or anything that's on your mind right now as you think about people who are, their gears are turning about how to apply this in their own dating life?

This is definitely in line with Brené Brown and all the amazing work she does on vulnerability, but so often, the thing that we think makes us ineligible for dating is actually the thing that makes us approachable, relatable, lovable, special, and so for example, I have a friend who was in a sex cult, and this was something that he had spent a lot of money on, he's super smart, but he had been embarrassed that he had fallen into this, and it was something that it was hard for him to talk about on dates, but he decided, "No, I'm going to come forward with it. People will figure it out." Then, he met this woman, and when he told her, she was like, "Great. I'm sober. I'm a recovering alcoholic."

"We're in this together," and she felt so much more comfortable. What she said to me is his baggage matched my baggage, and it made her feel like she could be real, she could be vulnerable, she could be herself, she could connect, and so if there's something about you that you feel shame around, what if you actually turn that story around and say, "This is what makes me relatable. This is what makes someone feel comfortable in my presence, and I do need to own that narrative, but it's not something to hide. It's something to share," it will help someone connect with you and feel more comfortable.

I absolutely agree that compatibility is when someone's issues are complementary to my own. Like we're all just navigating our own stuff in this crazy world, so thank you so much, Logan. The way that we end our Taboo Tuesdays is I'm going to show you a list of taboo questions that are about all kinds of different topics, and you can pick whichever one that appeals to you, read it out loud, and then answer it.

Okay. The taboo question I'm going to answer is, "What is the most recent thing, item, vacation, experience, et cetera that you splurged on?" For me, I got married two years ago in summer of 2020, but because of COVID and my husband was dealing with a cancer diagnosis at the time, we did not have a big celebration. We didn't have anything with our friends and family, and so we actually have tried to have a wedding several times, but this summer, we are going to have V.4 of our wedding, and I'm so excited about it, and it's definitely a splurge. Because we've had so many false starts with it, we've had many chances to say, "Who cares about a wedding?"

"It doesn't matter. Why would people spend money on this? It's just a party. You should do something more reasonable, more rational," but honestly, just doubling down on it, I feel so excited. I'm like, "I think this is going to be one of the best weekends of my life."

I have a chance to bring together my East Coast friends, my West Coast friends, my parents, my husband's parents, all of that. I'm not excited about walking down the aisle. That stuff doesn't matter to me. I already feel very, very married. I'm just like, "This is the chance of my life to bring together my people, and this is my friend since kindergarten."

"These are the 12 people I live with in my intentional community. These are the people in my world," and so I was like, "Hell, yeah, I'm going to spend money on feeding them all weekend," and I just feel very happy about my decision to actually have a wedding and I feel good about that splurge. Spending that money has felt really good.

I love it and it feels very appropriate that the Director of Relationship Science would have a really thoughtful, wonderful collection of connection for her wedding, so that's beautiful. Logan, thank you so much for coming on to Taboo Tuesday. Where should people find you who want to connect?

Yes. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Emily. Of course, love your Twitter and Coa and all the content that you're putting out there. If people want to connect with me, they can follow me on Instagram or Twitter @loganury. I also teach these really fun, interactive dating workshops, and people can check out the upcoming one for datesmarter@loganury.com, and then, of course, I have my book, which is also an audiobook called How to Not Die Alone.

Amazing. Thanks so much, Logan. Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New Taboo Tuesdays drop every other week. How did today's taboo subject land with you?

Tweet your experience with the #emotionallyfit and follow me @dremilyanhalt. Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com.

That's joincoa.com to learn more and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @joincoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.