How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love - Softcover

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Behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury is an internationally recognized expert on modern love. As the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge, Logan leads a research team dedicated to helping people find love. After studying psychology at Harvard, she ran Google’s behavioral science team—the Irrational Lab—and created the popular interview series “Talks at Google: Modern Romance.” She is a 2018 TED Resident and a featured dating coach on the Netflix series The Later Daters. Logan lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Scott. She credits her relationship success to the techniques outlined in How to Not Die Alone. Learn more at LoganUry.com or follow her @LoganUry. 

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A “must-read” (The Washington Post) funny and practical guide to help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams―from the Harvard-trained behavioral scientist and featured dating coach on Netflix’s The Later Daters.

Have you ever looked around and wondered, “Why has everyone found love except me?” You’re not the only one. Great relationships don’t just appear in our lives―they’re the culmination of a series of decisions, including whom to date, how to end it with the wrong person, and when to commit to the right one. But our brains often get in the way. We make poor decisions, which thwart us on our quest to find lasting love.

Drawing from years of research, behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury reveals the hidden forces that cause those mistakes. But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to results. You have to actually change your behavior. Ury shows you how.

This “simple-to-use guide” (Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone) focuses on a different decision in each chapter, incorporating insights from behavioral science, original research, and real-life stories.

You’ll learn:
-What’s holding you back in dating (and how to break the pattern)
-What really matters in a long-term partner (and what really doesn’t)
-How to overcome the perils of online dating (and make the apps work for you)
-How to meet more people in real life (while doing activities you love)
-How to make dates fun again (so they stop feeling like job interviews)
-Why “the spark” is a myth (but you’ll find love anyway)

This “data-driven” (Time), step-by-step guide to relationships, complete with hands-on exercises, is designed to transform your life. How to Not Die Alone will help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams.

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Chapter 1: Why Dating Is Harder Now Than Ever Before

CHAPTER 1 WHY DATING IS HARDER NOW THAN EVER BEFORE How to Understand the Challenges of Modern Dating

Each generation faces its own set of challenges—wars, recessions, shoulder pads. The same holds true for dating. While people of every era have bemoaned their love lives, today’s singles might just be right: Dating is harder now than ever before. And the next time your mom pesters you about finding someone nice to settle down with, you can tell her I said that.

In this book, I’ll offer solutions to some of life’s most difficult dating decisions. But before I get to the tactical advice, I want to set the stage and explain the factors conspiring against modern daters. If looking for love has left you feeling incredibly stressed out, here’s why.

WE SHAPE OUR OWN IDENTITIES

Religion, community, and social class dictated the lives of our ancestors. Expectations were clear, and personal decisions were few. Based on where and into what kind of family you were born, you knew, for example, that you’d work as a textile merchant, live in Bucharest, eat kosher food, and go to the synagogue. Or you’d work as a farmer, live on the outskirts of Shanghai, and eat livestock and crops from your land. When it came to finding a partner, the answer often came down to the dowry—who could offer the best acres of land or the largest caravan of camels.

Today all these decisions are up to us. Modern life is a path that we must chart on our own. Whereas our predecessors didn’t have to weigh where to live or what to do for a living, we make those choices now. That gives us incredible freedom to shape our identities—to pick Nashville over Atlanta, to choose whether to work as a meteorologist or a mathematician—but that freedom comes at the cost of certainty. Late at night, our faces lit by the blue glow of our smartphones, we wonder, Who am I? and What am I doing with my life? The dark side of all this freedom and endless choice is the crippling fear that we’ll screw up our lifelong pursuit of happiness. If we’re in charge, then we have only ourselves to blame. We could fail, and then it would be our fault.

And one of the biggest questions left up to us—a decision that used to be made by our parents and our community—is Who should I pick as a romantic partner?

WE HAVE TOO MANY OPTIONS

We’re experiencing a seismic shift in dating culture. Dating itself only began in the 1890s. Online dating started in 1994 with Kiss.com, followed shortly by Match.com a year later. And we’ve been swiping for love for less than a decade. If it feels like we’re in the middle of a gigantic cultural experiment, it’s because we are.

We’re no longer limited to the single people we know from work or church or our neighborhood. Now we can swipe through hundreds of potential partners in a single sitting. But there’s a downside to these seemingly infinite options. Psychologists, including Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus at Swarthmore, have shown that while people crave choice, too many options can make us feel less happy and more doubtful of our decisions. They call this the paradox of choice.

People are struggling. Like that obnoxious person in front of you in the fro-yo line who can’t pick a flavor (“Can I try them all one more time?”), we’re crippled by analysis paralysis. And this is especially true when it comes to choosing a life partner.

WE YEARN FOR CERTAINTY

What’s the last purchase you researched online? Which electric toothbrush to buy? Which wireless Bluetooth speakers to get your brother for his new apartment? We live in an information-rich society that offers the false comfort of research. It can feel like the perfect decision is only a few more Google searches away. Whether we’re selecting the most authentic taco place or the best-performing vacuum cleaner, we can consult endless rankings and reviews. It feels like if we can research all our choices, then we can select the right one.

We’ve gotten hooked on this feeling of certainty, and we crave it in our romantic lives. But when it comes to relationships, that kind of assurance doesn’t exist. There is no “right answer” to questions like Who should I be with? and How much should I compromise? and Will they ever change? No amount of Googling will reveal if James or Jillian will make a good spouse. We can’t achieve complete certainty before any big relationship decision—and luckily, we don’t have to in order to be happy. Great relationships are built, not discovered. But our minds are often stuck in a trap, thinking that by combing through hundreds of options, we’ll be closer to knowing whether the one in front of us is “right.”

SOCIAL MEDIA LEADS US TO COMPARE AND DESPAIR

Years ago, people lived in communal villages. They witnessed other couples being affectionate, fighting, and making up. There was no such thing as a private problem. Today our primary view into other people’s relationships is staged, curated, Instagram-filtered social media feeds—excited mid-hike engagement announcements, vacation pictures with a snoozing baby strapped on someone’s chest. This leads us to feel like we’re the only ones experiencing heart-wrenching struggles in our love lives (just in much less flattering lighting). Feeling like everyone else’s relationship is perfect when yours is floundering (or nonexistent) exacerbates that pain. I find this is especially true for men, who tend to have smaller social networks and fewer people with whom they can share their fears. They’re even less likely to talk to their friends about their problems and learn that everyone, at one time or another, experiences relationship hardships.

WE LACK RELATIONSHIP ROLE MODELS

We want to find the best possible partner and build the best possible relationship, yet many of us have witnessed few functional relationships firsthand, especially when we were young.

Divorce rates peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s. And while they’ve gone down since then, many of us are what couples therapist Esther Perel calls “the children of the divorced and disillusioned.” Around 50 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation, and about 4 percent of married people report feeling miserable in their relationships. Put it all together, and a majority of married people have either chosen to end their relationship or are enduring it unhappily.

This is a problem. Study after study demonstrates the power of role models. It’s much easier to believe something is possible when you’ve seen someone else do it, whether that’s running a four-minute mile or eating seventy-three hot dogs in under ten minutes (#lifegoals). For example, women are much more likely to become inventors if they grew up in a zip code with many female patent holders. In fact, they’re more likely to patent in the same categories as older female inventors in their neighborhood.

The same is true with relationships. We all want to build lasting and fulfilling partnerships, but it’s harder to do that when you lack relationship role models. Many of my clients confess...