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Chapter 1: What are the biological challenges of dating in midlife?
The game is kind of rigged against us, right? Human biology is rigged for reproduction. It's not set up to find long-term committed love.
It turns out when looking for love, most people filter potential partners through a list of wants that's all wrong for them. 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.
Chapter 2: How can a partner's qualities differ from your dream list?
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?
There are so many challenges. Some of them have lost a spouse or a partner that was beloved to them. Some have been through the fiery tunnel of divorce. Some have never been married and are wondering, okay, does love exist for me? So I see people from all three pipelines. And I think they're all worried about, you know, some people will say, I don't want to be a nurse.
I don't want to be a purse. Oh, my gosh, I've been divorced multiple times. Is somebody going to think I'm broken? So what I would say is if you're a single in midlife, the census data show that there's 35 million singles over 50. And if you back that up to 40, it's even more. And the total number of singles is 118 million adults in this country. So it's a giant swath of the population.
Everybody feels the thing. There's fear. There's heartbreak. There's, you know, am I pretty enough? Do I look good? Am I sagging?
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Chapter 3: What is the 'elevator people' exercise and how does it help?
Whatever it is, what I want to tell every single person that's listening today is that the I have full certainty love exists for every person that wants it. I say there is a lid to every pot at every age. So I want you to take people call me a psychotic optimist because I say this. I'm like, love it. They're like for everyone.
I'm like for everyone that wants it, that's willing to follow a system that might be different than what we've done before. But love exists for everybody that wants it. And I've seen stories that would blow you away.
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?
Yeah, I think there's two things. In this time in midlife, right, people think, oh my gosh, I don't have enough time. And that fear and that deeply ingrained belief kind of surfaces in so many different ways in the dating world. So that's one. And then the other one.
Chapter 4: What are the common fears people face when dating in midlife?
Right. I tell everyone the game is kind of rigged against us. Right. Human biology is rigged for reproduction. It's not it's not set up to find long term committed love. Right. Family attachment patterns can make a big difference in that as well. And then cultural messaging, the things that our culture says, there's a three-day rule, butterflies are good, right?
All of these things lead us to making decisions that That aren't good for us. So these three things, biology, attachment and cultural kind of phrases and metaphors can all lead us to dating people that have red flags over and over again. It's like lather, rinse, repeat. And that's what I see.
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?
You know, I wish people thought that more. Some people think, OK, finding love, if I go on a dating app, it should be like Amazon Prime. And I'm going to tick off a bunch of boxes and then my partner is going to be drone shipped to me within 24 hours. The thing with time is they believe that they don't have a lot of time left. And that they've wasted a lot of time.
And I think so many people ultimately, like the fear in the gut is, I don't want to be alone. I don't want to die alone. And I don't have that much time to find somebody.
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.
Exactly.
Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. When you think about that also, I would imagine folks who are especially coming back into the world of dating or whatever is the mechanism that they say yes to as a way to try and find love later in life, that the The technologies have changed profoundly. I'm with my wife 34 years now. We're married 29 years.
And so we went on a blind date, introduced by one of her childhood friends. It was a radically different world when we first met. And now, if you've been out of that world for a long time, You haven't even thought about it. And then for a variety of reasons, you find yourself back in this space. I would imagine just the technical aspects of this have got to be a little bit terrifying.
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Chapter 5: How do biology, attachment, and cultural messaging affect dating choices?
There are resources like me that can teach you how to date using the app so that you're not going to end up with the Tinder swindler or getting catfished, right? I think people have so many fears about what being on the apps mean. But what I would tell you is if you're a listener debating like, oh, my gosh, could I get on the app? Should I get on the apps? Yes. The answer is a resounding yes.
Do it with guardrails around you. But think about, it was hard enough to meet people in your 20s and 30s today, right? And now, thank goodness for the dating apps. We don't use words, if you think about it, like old maid, old spinsters, right? Terrible terms. But you don't hear about those things anymore, partly because we're a better...
I think we've all evolved and we don't say things like that anymore. But really, what's happened is there's so many options now with the dating apps. You can be 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years old on the apps. I was in a fitting room the other day and the young lady was bringing clothes in and out. And she says, oh, what do you do for work?
I said, oh, you know, I founded this company called Smart Dating Academy and we do, we date coach people. And she says, oh my gosh, that's so amazing. My 83-year-old aunt... met her new boyfriend on J-Date. I was like, I love this.
That's amazing. I love the invitation to sort of like say, yes, you may be concerned. And it's a yes and thing. Like there are probably precautions you can take. There are things that you could think about the way that you're going to step into them or not.
But these technologies are available to open doors that never would have been open before if you understand how to engage with them in a way that feels good.
Yeah.
Yeah. And if you look at it that way, right, I have people that have met people within a mile of where they live. I've had people meet within three or four hours. I've had people meet on different coasts and they make it work. Right. So I think today with technology, the beauty is the world can be your oyster, truly.
And I know we'll get into this a little bit further into our conversation. Approaching, whether it's technology or any other thing, with a methodology and a system and approach is incredibly helpful. Before we get there, though, I don't want to leave behind those three sort of imperatives slash fears that you talked about. So one was biological, one was cultural. What was the third again?
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Chapter 6: What mistakes do accomplished women often make in dating?
So now we've got lots of rumination, obsession, attachment going on at this point. When if you add up the cumulative hours that you've actually met somebody, let's say you've been on three dates with somebody and it's hot and heavy. Like if you've spent two hours with this person, right? That's six hours over three dates. It's not even Monday at work.
And now we've got these hormones that are not only making us want to be with this person obsessively, we feel emotionally attached to them. What also happens concurrently is our prefrontal cortex starts to get quieter. Serotonin starts to reduce. So what happens? Our brain, that's normally more vigilant and looking out for red flags, sort of goes on offline, right, when we need it most.
So there's this cocktail of hormones that are going on that want us to procreate. Now, what our brains, right, if you think about it, at the year 1900, the average age to mortality was about 30%. So it was like, okay, I see you. You see me. Great. Let's do this thing. Have some kids. A couple of them will probably die, and we will too by 30. Your farm's a little bigger than mine. Let's do this.
But now we want so much more out of partnership. We're living into our 70s, 80s, and 90s, but our brains don't know how to find that long-lasting, enduring love. And that's what I say. Love isn't luck. There's a system to find it. You just have to know that your biology is working against you in this arena.
That's interesting. So you take that into account. And so it sounds like part of this is just understanding what the underlying drivers really are. And I would imagine that applies also to things like culture. If you look at what is my family culture, what are the assumptions, what are the things that I've
observed about how to move into finding relationships into finding love what have i been directly or explicitly told by parents by cousins by uncles by whatever community or congregation or you know gathering that you're a part of um that probably so much of that it affects the way that we think about the process of finding love but on an invisible level until we actively service it does that land
Yeah. Oh, 100 percent. And it's the things that they told us. And now with regards to our parents or our caregivers, it's what they've role modeled for us. Right. And if you have one parent that, you know, was, you know. narcissistic or avoidant or just not great. And we can repeat those patterns or we can repel those patterns. But why do we repeat those?
Because the brain is a pattern recognition machine. And now, if your nervous system has grown acclimated to kind of being anxious all the time because you never know if one or both of your parents are going to show up, cook you dinner, get really angry for no reason, you live in this state of anxiety, which we call activation.
So this constant state of being hopped up starts to feel comfortable to us. And so what happens when we get into the dating world without knowing this and understanding this? When we meet somebody that might have red flags around them, that might feel good to us because that's what we're acclimated to.
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Chapter 7: Why is pacing important in developing attraction?
I need to understand my attachment patterns and what I've been exposed to. I need to understand the cultural imprints that have been on me. And dot, dot, dot. I can't go out and find love or do the thing or even try until I actually do all this work. I don't think that's what you're saying, right?
No, I'm saying if you haven't been able to find the right partner, you're not broken. Nobody's ever taught you how to do this. And when people say, okay, my picker's broken, or I haven't been able to do this, I've been divorced three times, I've been never married, and I'm 61 years old. The The fact of the matter is it's not your fault.
These are the factors that are weighing into why we make the choices that we have. So it's not like we need to do, you know, all this work. I think that there is some work that you want to do to have sort of a meta awareness of yourself, like, OK, I think I might constantly be dating people that have a lot of red flags and have accolades.
Activated me and I'm really I've been chasing butterflies and anxiety and that hasn't been working for me. But no, it's just to understand what are the factors that sometimes lead us to do the things that we do in romantic relationships.
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, which brings up another curiosity, right? So if we have these different things that are sort of invisibly influencing the way that we seek partnership and also step into and actively engage in the process and the experience, it sounds so technical when I say that. It's like... Let's just talk about that for a second, though, right?
Because this has got to be one of the things that I would imagine gets brought to you, too. People are like, I just want to fall in love. I want the feeling. I want that thing. And does it have to be this sort of technical, mechanical, step-by-step intellectual process for me to actually find the thing that I so dearly want? Or where's the dream part of this? Where's the softness to it?
There is so much softness when you're with the right person, but it's like anything in your life, right? People will say, I mean, the Harvard grant study shows it. Are you familiar with the study? Yeah. And so the grant study shows that it's the quality of our relationships that matter, right? And if you, again, if you think about it, we're never taught how how to do this.
And remind me of what your question was, because I was going somewhere and I want to make sure I answer the question you asked me.
Yeah, it was, I feel like it's really easy to sort of like go down this slippery slope of saying, we can break this down to a highly mechanical process. But like, there's a voice inside so many people that say, like, isn't this supposed to be just more, more intuitive, more emotional, more soft, more alive with electricity? Or is it a yes and thing?
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Chapter 8: What advice is there for those returning to dating after a long break?
Yeah, true, true. Walk me through then sort of on a high, I realize there's a massive amount of really in-depth, high level of personalization, tailoring, customization. But I'm really curious now, walk me through on sort of like a meta level, a high level of the core elements, the core steps, however you would sort of define it of this methodology.
I think one of the most profound things that we do with people kind of harks back to what I did when I was sitting in the library in college trying to figure out, OK, how do I do this? And so we have people. I'll tell you the whole exercise. So let's say I'm working with a woman who's looking for a man. I'll say, describe to me in all of his glory, just tell me who your dream guy is.
And I actually have one of these, I know. Like, this literally, describe to me who your dream guy is. And so, funny side statistic, take a guess as to the number one thing that women have said to me over the last 16 years about their dream guy. The number one characteristic.
Well, I mean, I think the trope would be sense of humor.
Tall.
No kidding.
Ideally over six feet.
Wow. I would be so busted.
My husband's five, six on a big hair day. Okay. So I'm with you. You know, and I tell them, so we go through this whole exercise of who's their dream guy, right? And sense of humor, funny falls into that. But then I asked them, so we get their whole list ready. Boom. Okay. We know exactly who the dream guy is. Then we ask them the second question.
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