Chapter 1: What is the connection between twin flames and modern dating?
Every human being fantasizes, maybe imagines hitting the lotto, possibly finding that lover they've always dreamt of, or perhaps carrying out a diabolical murder in the most brutal way imaginable. Dr. Swartz was face down in a pool of blood. A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy. A very gruesome and disturbing scene. Persons of interest obsessed with role-playing and the occult.
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Thanks so much for listening to our show. Today we're getting into one of the most talked about spiritual concepts to take over Hollywood in the past few years. Twin flames.
Chapter 2: How does Alice Hines define twin flames?
You've heard Megan Fox gush about Machine Gun Kelly being her twin flame, watched their whirlwind romance play out like a gothic fairy tale, and wondered, is this love or is this something else entirely? But Megan Fox and MGK are far from alone.
From Justin Bieber declaring Hailey Baldwin his one true soulmate, to the love between Beyonce and Jay-Z, Hollywood, and those that follow it, are absolutely obsessed with the idea that some souls are cosmically bound to find each other, no matter the chaos that follows. But what does the concept of twin flames have to do with heterosexual dating today, and the way men and women interact?
Vanessa and I are going to talk about that now. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Infamous, a Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis. And I'm Natalie Robomed. So this week, we are going to be talking about love and also anti-love.
We are going to be speaking with Alice Hines, a journalist for Vanity Fair and New York Magazine and the host of a new podcast, Mind Games, which is all about neurolinguistic programming and its connection to self-help gurus, cults, and maybe also love.
Alice also made a documentary entitled Desperately Seeking Soulmate, which is about the Twin Flames group, which I'm sure a lot of you know about. It was all in the news a few years ago, and we'll discuss also what's happening with it now. Alice actually wrote an enormous story about this group for Vanity Fair and then made a documentary about them as well, which is quite the hot trick.
Twin Flames is something that I never heard when I was growing up.
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Chapter 3: What role does neurolinguistic programming play in self-help?
Everybody would just talk about soulmates. It's this concept that there's somebody out there for you who is the person that will complete you, right? Alice, tell us more about why you think that concept of twin flames caught on so much a few years ago. I think Twin Flames is more than a soulmate.
People often use them as synonyms, but if you dive into the Twin Flames theology, which is promoted not just by the gurus that I exposed, but also many, many other Twin Flames teachers, it's like the soulmate isn't enough. The twin flame is your soulmate across all of your lifetimes.
This is someone who is innately destined to be with you in this multiverse of the universe that is orchestrated by God. You have this past life history with this person. And that is why often in twin flames relationships, people talk about conflict. People talk about having to learn really difficult lessons from your twin flame.
So it's somehow not just associated with content, happiness, happily ever after, though it's also that. It's this deeper type of connection that is somehow your destiny. The idea of soulmate just got a little played out, just got a little commercialized, and now people want something else.
What you're describing, there's a level of spiritual buy-in that you have to have, which is that you have to believe in the concept of past lives, right? And so it's perfectly positioned for the rise of woo-woo spirituality that's just in the water these days.
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Chapter 4: How do twin flames differ from traditional soulmate concepts?
Yeah. If you go and look at Twin Flames videos on YouTube or on TikTok, you'll get recommended kundalini. You'll get recommended crystals. People want not just meaning in their life in terms of like a ritual practice where they go to church or go to temple or do some type of spiritual ceremony with their friends. Like they want some grand narrative of their life.
And that's what Twin Flames is about. I mean, this is like modern manifest destiny, what you're describing. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I dug into the history of Twin Flames.
It relates to American spiritualism and many different versions of positive thinking doctrine, where if you meditate or really focus inward on the thing that you want and whatever this grand narrative for your life, discovering it and making that your priority, that somehow it will then occur in the physical world.
And for the people who are really into Twin Flames, the culmination of that narrative is finding your ultimate lover, your twin flame. But what's so fascinating about Twin Flames is that it's happening at the same time when it seems like everybody who's on a dating app is saying it's the worst experience they've ever had, right?
And it's this idea of this endless buffet, this endless sushi carousel of choice.
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Chapter 5: What are the psychological implications of looksmaxxing?
It just feels so bleak. So you have this epidemic of choice in dating apps, and then you have this idea of Twin Flames sort of hovering above it. So the gurus who started Twin Flames, Jeff and Shalia, this married couple, they are very explicit in recruiting people in response to dissatisfaction with dating apps. And they say that dating apps are too commercialized, right?
It feels like you're internet shopping. It doesn't feel like you're looking for spiritual love. So people who want that, funnily enough, they're going back to arranged marriages, which is what ended up happening with Twin Flames.
It's like the response to that sushi carousel of choice on dating apps, modern love, modern dating culture turned into people wanting to get set up by a guru who forces them into a marriage with someone they never met before. Yeah. This is also happening online. I think to some degree this could only happen online because in the real world, young people are reportedly having less sex, right?
Like marriage rates are declining. You know, there was a really viral article recently saying like having a boyfriend is even cringy. Love is sort of out in the real world. Yeah, I think that's in response to the same sort of dissatisfaction with the normative ways of finding love.
Chapter 6: How do online dating apps contribute to relationship dissatisfaction?
Meaning dating apps. Yeah. Or just dating a million people. Right. The idea that, I mean, I grew up with, which is like, oh, yeah, you'll like date a bunch of different people before you settle down. And like, that's fun and that's cool. And dating apps facilitate that and that you learn something from these different relationships. People are people are dissatisfied with that. Yeah.
But in my age range, in Gen X, you have a lot of people who are just like, I haven't been on a date in three years. I'm just basically now a forced celibate. And that's funny because Gen X is the generation, when you look at the stats, that had the most sex, right? Like the teenage Gen X years, they were really bad. People were acting out. Yeah.
Chapter 7: What are the dangers of coercive practices in the twin flames community?
I also think there's something happening with regards to dating, at least in heterosexual relationships, and also with Twin Flames, about gender. The state of gender in this country is in flux. Women are outpacing men in college completion, and maybe a heterosexual relationship doesn't offer the... promise that it once did. I've also written about incels.
And I wrote about incels before I wrote about the Twin Flame community. And I do think that they're a strange mirror of each other. In what way? Well, the Twin Flame community is overwhelmingly women. It is overwhelmingly heterosexual women who have been dissatisfied by their relationships and who are looking for love and not finding it. And they are turning to spiritual gurus to be set up.
And meanwhile, the incels are saying we're so dissatisfied with the state of heterosexual relationships that we're nihilistic about it. And we think it's going to be completely impossible to find love. And I think there's an interesting difference in ideology there where the incels are kind of they give up. They're nihilistic.
Chapter 8: How can listeners identify manipulative language in everyday interactions?
But these women are like still trying to like take personal responsibility for their failure in the dating world. I mean, you also were famously the person who. who introduced the word Chad to the cultural lexicon. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so that was the incel article that I wrote for New York Magazine like a couple years before the Twin Flames piece.
That was called This is a Chad, and it was about this ideal specimen of male that all of the incels were obsessed with becoming. It was early looks maxing culture. So they were already getting plastic surgery and trying to change their bone structure to find some sexual satisfaction.
And yeah, it's just really interesting to me that they're like, yeah, there's literally nothing we can do to get laid besides break our skull and make us look more like a male Dolce & Gabbana model. That was their ideal at the time. Today, it's like clavicular. But yeah, here's what we have to do to like...
to ascend and all these women in twin flames are like just taking this totally different but equally turbulent and disturbing and self-destructive path to finding love that in neither case does it end in a relationship it's so weird i'm obviously describing these people as archetypes right now and there's many individual stories that turn out a bit differently in both cases but i think yeah there's just something about those narratives that i feel like is sort of this
microcosm of what's going on with heterosexual dating now. Yeah. And clavicular being the influencer who is even more extreme than the old school incels and chads, right? About looks maxing and the different ways you need to have your face look. It's weird. Like things are weird on the internet between the sexes. There's just no question about it. And in real life.
But sorry, is looks maxing not just like what women have felt the need to have to do for the male gaze forever? A hundred percent. Yeah, I think they needed their own word. At the Oscars, which some people may have watched recently, the way that people's faces looked was so uncanny, Valli.
No matter if you're Demi Moore and you're like over 60 years old or you're Emma Stone or you're Elle Fanning, all of these people look about the same age to me now. And every single one of their skin looks like a baby's butt. I don't know what they're doing. Maybe it was the lighting? at the Oscars, but I did not see a blemish.
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