Jonathan Fields

Bella Gandhi, founder of Smart Dating Academy and a longtime dating expert on Good Morning America, has spent 17 years showing people why that list is usually pointing them in the absolute wrong direction, how to really find love, especially later in life.

In this conversation, we get into what she calls elevator people, those who lift you up and how to find them.

why your biology works against you when you're dating in midlife, and how attraction can actually grow rather than just appear.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

And the place I want to start with, Bella, is right at the beginning with the big dating fears.

We'll jump right in there after this short break.

So you've worked with literally thousands of people navigating dating at all ages and also through the 40s, 50s, through the season of midlife.

And I would imagine that many of them come to you having tried so many different times, so many different ways and failed or not even knowing where to begin.

In this season in particular, what's the biggest challenge or complaint that you often have brought to you from people who are earnestly out there trying to find love in midlife?

Yeah.

What are the fears that you see that are unique to the middle season of life when you step into dating, regardless of how you're ending, you've ended up?

Do you see sort of like common patterns where they're, they're just these deep seated gremlins that keep coming up repeatedly when people are trying to step into the space of finding somebody?

I want to dive into those three a little bit more.

But you started out talking about time.

And I want to dig into that a little bit more because underneath that, I'm going to make the assumption that people feel like to actually do this takes a very substantial amount of time.

True or not?

Yeah.

So it's an urgency type of thing where you're sort of saying, I don't know how much runway is ahead of me.

Yeah.

I mean, that makes a lot of sense.