Is Dating A Lost Cause? Lori Gottlieb On How to Find Love In The Age of Apps, Ghosting, and Too Much Choice

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Paid subscribers get full access to my interview with Lori Gottlieb.

The first half of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb visited The Unspeakable in 2021 to talk about her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. She returns for a Valentine’s Day episode about finding love, staying in love, and what to make of all the social scientists constantly going on about how marriage and family are essential for mental, physical and even economic well-being. To that, Lori says, “well, obviously!” But she also asks “how are you supposed to find someone when our social systems are so dysfunctional?”

Her own story involves becoming a mother on her own in her 30s (her son Zach is a budding Gen Z thought leader in his own right) and trying to balance her own dating life with childrearing and a busy career. In this conversation, she talks about how she tries to help clients who are struggling to find love, how honest talk about female fertility became taboo sometime in the 2000s, why dating apps are making things so much worse, and why age gaps in romantic relationships seem more prevalent than ever. She also explains why, for older daters, widowed people can make the best partners and, finally, why more singles should seriously consider hiring a matchmaker.

GUEST BIO

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and the New York Times best-selling author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” and “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.” She is also a TED Speaker, the co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists" podcast, and the “Dear Therapist” columnist for The Atlantic.

Listen to the last time she was on the podcast.

Check out her website.

Follow her on Twitter here.

Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here.

HOUSEKEEPING

📖 🌵Come see me in Austin, TX on February 29 at Moontower Verses, talking about my book, The Unspeakable, and other literary matters.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I think this attitude of being a satisfacer, it doesn't mean that you're just kind of settling for something that's okay.
0:10.2	It means that it meets all of your very high standards versus the maximizer who's just going to keep saying, yeah, I like this person, I had a good time, but let me just see who
0:21.4	else is out there.
0:22.5	And you keep thinking that you're going to find something slightly better in this area or
0:26.6	that area.
0:27.7	This person is funnier.
0:29.6	This person is taller.
0:31.2	This person is, you know, whatever they are.
0:34.1	And it's actually not going to make you happier.
0:36.7	It's going to make you happier. It's going to make you miserable.
0:41.1	Welcome to The Unspeakable Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. It is Valentine's Day
0:46.6	week, the week you've been waiting for all year. And to honor this most sacred of holidays,
0:53.2	I'm bringing you a conversation with Lori Gottlieb.
0:56.4	Lori is a best-selling author and a psychotherapist. And we're going to talk about how to find love,
1:03.1	if you're into that kind of thing. But first, a couple of announcements. You can find me in Austin very soon, February 29th, talking about writing and stuff,
1:16.7	talking about a couple of my books, whatever people want to talk about, at Moon Tower versus.
1:22.1	You can go to Moontowerminion.org and find out about that. We're also doing an unspeak-easy retreat that weekend in
1:31.3	Austin, March 2nd and 3rd with guest speakers Sarah Hepila and the comedian Ariel Isaac Norman.
1:39.7	Sarah is, of course, a writer who's been on this podcast many times. To find out if there's
1:44.0	any availability left, you can go to the unspeak easy.com.
1:48.3	We have several retreats coming up, as you know, including Seattle, May 18th and 19th,
1:54.7	with guest speaker Katie Herzog.
	...

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