When Rick Burgess was growing up, his father, Bill Burgess, was also his football coach. But Bill was a mentor on and off the field not only for his own son but for the many young men he coached at both the high school and collegiate level. Though Bill has passed on, his lessons remain timeless and valuable for all men. Today on the show, Rick shares some of his old-school wisdom with us.

Rick is a radio host, a men’s ministry leader, and the author of Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father. In our conversation, he discusses what his dad taught him through football and beyond, including why men don’t run in the rain and why you need to get out of the stands, avoid being stupid, refuse to rest on your laurels, understand the difference between confidence and arrogance, and take full responsibility for your life without making excuses. We also talk about how Rick drew upon his father’s wisdom when tragedy struck his life.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Bill Burgess
• Sunday Firesides: Quit Acting in Bad Faith
• AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo

Connect With Rick Burgess

• The Man Church

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When my kids were little, I was an involved dad. I changed diapers, did middle-of-the-night feedings, and took the tykes to the doctor.

I wouldn’t say I was inherently drawn to doing these tasks. There wasn’t some paternal urge to nurture our kids when they were newborns and toddlers. I did it because I loved them and Kate, and I didn’t want Kate to carry the entire burden of childcare while also working full-time.

But as my kids have gotten older, into their pre-teen and teenage years, I’ve noticed something interesting happening. I suddenly have an intrinsic impulse to be more involved in my kids’ lives.

I have an instinctual urge to teach them how to do stuff in the adult world.

Here’s an example: A while back, as I was sitting on the couch reading, a thought occurred to me: “I need to help my kids open their own bank accounts.” So I took 14-year-old Gus and 11-year-old Scout to the nearby bank branch and had them talk to the teller about opening a checking account. In the process, I had to teach them about Social Security numbers and had them memorize theirs. I also taught them about debit cards and how to check their balances online.

It turns out that this shift I noticed in my fathering isn’t just anecdotal. In my podcast conversation with anthropologist Anna Machin, she noted that across cultures and throughout history, fathers have had a unique role in preparing their children for life outside the home.

Dad’s Outward Orientation

C.S. Lewis once observed that while a mother fiercely prioritizes the immediate interests of her own family, the father’s role is to consider the family’s connection to the broader community: “The relations of the family to the outer world — what might be called its foreign policy — must depend, in the last resort, upon the man . . . A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.”

Research backs up Lewis’ observation. Sociologists have consistently found that one of the things that separates moms and dads in how they parent is that dads typically have a more outward-facing orientation. While mothers tend to focus on the intimate, nurturing aspects of home life, fathers think more about their children’s place in the wider world.

Fathers are more likely to encourage risk-taking, independence, and exploration, while mothers are more apt to prioritize safety and caution. For example, fathers are likelier than mothers to push children to engage with strangers. They’re also more likely to nudge kids outside their comfort zones.

This is completely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but I’ve noticed that when parents use those chest baby carriers, moms typically have their baby facing toward them, while dads often have the baby facing out. That’s how I did it with my kids. A father’s outward orientation shows up in a lot of places.

The outward focus also appears in how dads communicate with their children. Fathers tend to use more complex and varied language, often referring to events and ideas beyond the immediate home environment. This serves as what researchers call a “linguistic bridge” to society, expanding children’s vocabulary and worldly knowledge.

The Younger Years: Father-Child Roughhousing Prepares Kids for the Outside World

Research shows that fathers consistently engage in more physical play than mothers, and roughhousing has a positive impact on children’s development. One key benefit is that it helps kids learn emotional regulation, which is essential for successful social interactions. Through roughhousing, kids learn to read cues indicating when someone has had enough and how to calm down if play becomes too intense. Consequently, children who regularly engage in rough-and-tumble play with their dads tend to be more socially adept with their peers. They’ve learned the unwritten rules of getting along with others: taking turns, recognizing limits, and resolving small conflicts.

The Teenage Era: Dads Build the Scaffolding to Independence

As children grow into teenagers, Dad’s role as a bridge builder to the outside world becomes even more critical.

During adolescence, kids naturally seek greater autonomy and begin facing the challenges of adult life. At the same time, anthropologists like Machin have noted that dads often feel a growing impulse to play a bigger role in their children’s lives. During a child’s adolescent years, a father’s job is to teach their children the skills they’ll need to survive and thrive in the world beyond the bounds of the familial home.

The content of this teaching will vary, depending on the environment the dad is sending their kids out into.

In environments where physical survival is the primary concern — say, where hunger or violence are common threats — fathers focus on teaching their children how to hunt and how to defend themselves.

In societies where economic hardship is the main risk, fathers teach practical skills: how to tend livestock, negotiate prices, or build trade relationships.

In the modern West, where physical and economic survival is generally assured, fathers tend to focus on cultural and social survival — helping kids get into good schools, handle “life admin,” make the right connections, and navigate complex social hierarchies.

This explains the sudden urge I have to teach my pre-teen and teenage kids how to do stuff like open banking accounts. I want them to have the skills necessary to be a functional, independent adult in suburban America. My dad-instinct is kicking in, telling me, “You’ve only got a few years to get these kids ready to head out on their own. Get busy teaching them all the skills they’ll need so they don’t end up living in the driveway in a van!”

The Fatherly Art of Launching Kids

You’ve got the instinct to teach your kids to get ready for the outside world — follow it. But if you’re seeking concrete ways to help build the scaffolding that will support your kids’ transition from dependent childhood to independent adulthood, here are some suggestions:

• Bring them along on errands.
• Have them order their own food at restaurants.
• Let them see you confidently talking with strangers.
• Take them to work with you occasionally.
• Include them in conversations about what is going on at work.
• Have them ask store clerks questions.
• Give them pointers on driving as they prepare to get their driver’s license. 
• Let them help you with your weekend chores and expect them to complete age-appropriate chores of their own.
• Start paying them an allowance.
• Teach them basic maintenance for cars and bikes, like how to change flat tires on both.
• Teach them age-appropriate lessons about personal finance.
• Help them open a savings account at the bank, and encourage them to interact directly with the teller when they do so.
• Have them memorize their Social Security number.
• Have them be the one to call a business to ask a question they have.
• Take them to community activities you’re involved in, like church/community service projects.
• Show them how to file their own tax return when they get their first W-2 job.
• Explain how insurance works the next time you have to renew a policy.
• Have them schedule their own haircut appointments.
• Have them fill out their own applications for camps and sports.
• Get them our book Heading Out On Your Own — it covers lots of other life skills they’ll need in adulthood.

Fatherhood is about gradually launching the next generation into the world, equipped with the tools they need to thrive. This guiding role may be more crucial now than ever, given the complexities of our modern world. There’s a lot kids need to learn to manage in order to successfully live on their own.

Thankfully, nature has given dads the fatherly urge to teach their children how to do stuff. Lean into it, and help your kids become capable, confident, functioning adults.

For more insights into dads’ unique and essential role in childrearing, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent. But it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette.

Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette, and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the “no elbows on the table” mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette
• AoM Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More
• AoM Article: The Importance of Good Manners
• AoM Article: How to Acquire Good Manners
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Dining Etiquette and Proper Table Manners
• AoM Article: How to Make Introductions Like a Gentleman
• AoM Article: How to Make Small Talk
• AoM’s Complete Guide to Giving a Great Handshake

Connect With William Hanson

• William’s website
• William on TikTok
• William on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent, but it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette. Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the no elbows on the table mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette. All right, William Hanson, welcome to the show.

William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professional etiquette teacher. How did you become an etiquette teacher?

William Hanson: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily sort of woke up one day and thought, right, that’s it, I’m going to become an etiquette teacher. It wasn’t a profession I was even aware really existed. As a child growing up, I wanted to either be the Archbishop of Canterbury, for whatever reason, or a spy or a newsreader. That’s the trajectory I was heading in, I had decided. But then my grandmother gave me this book of etiquette for Christmas when I was 12. And sort of after a few sort of, have I read any of it type questions, I thought, well, I bet I just better read a bit and then I can tell her I’ve read it. And it was actually very interesting and very funny and I bought more books on the subject. And then when I was 16, 17 at my school, they came up to me and said, oh, we’re looking for someone to teach the younger years how to set a table. Do you think you could do that? And I said, well, when do you want me to do it? And they said, oh, Tuesday afternoons. And I said, oh, instead of playing sport? They said, yes. So I didn’t need to be asked twice, really. And that’s how the teaching side of things started.

Brett McKay: And so you got a new book out called Just Good Manners, where you take Americans and just anybody through the ins and outs of British etiquette. And we’re gonna dig into that because I think it’s applicable to whatever country you live in. But I thought it was really interesting, you talk about the history of etiquette education in the United Kingdom. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I didn’t know about this.

William Hanson: Yes, I think Britain has always, or England even, we should say before it sort of became Britain, has always sort of led the way in education, in manners and etiquette and civility. Swiss finishing schools as well were very popular and they basically did the same thing, but they just had the mountains skiing. That’s what they could offer that we in Britain couldn’t. But even going back to the Dickensian England, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but men would sort of go on what was called the grand tour around Europe just before they settled down. And whilst that was happening, the ladies were being finished and you would have sort of characters like Dickens portrays one in Little Dorrit called Mrs. General, who is there sort of taking these group of sisters under her wing, finishing them and telling them sort of how to behave and what was expected of them. So this sort of education has always existed, certainly in the last sort of 300 years or so.

Brett McKay: And you’re the director of one of like the last English etiquette schools, correct?

William Hanson: Yes, so sort of at the height of the 20th century, which is when these finishing schools, we still had presentation at court, which is when young girls would curtsy in front of the king and queen, as it were, before they were sort of eligible to be married, completely outdated practice and one that Queen Elizabeth sort of quite quickly when she ascended the throne knocked on the head because she thought it was ridiculous. But you had finishing the schools such as Winkfield Place or Lucy Clayton. And Lucy Clayton actually in 2001 sort of regenerated into the English Manor, which is the company I’m now very pleased to run and own.

Brett McKay: So at the beginning of the book, you make a distinction between manners and etiquette. And I’ve seen this distinction before, but what do you think is the difference between etiquette and manners?

William Hanson: I would say manners are sort of the top line fundamental requirement for being a human being wherever you are in the world to treat people with civility, charm, grace, decorum, respect. How we do that is by using a set of rules. Most of the time, the etiquette is correct. Sometimes it isn’t. We actually have to break the rule of etiquette. But etiquette is, it can change from country to country and what is considered polite in one country can be very different and actually impolite in another. So you use the set of rules according to your environment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and a lot of people, when I see them make this distinction between manners and etiquette, manners is just sort of how you comport yourself with other people to make sure things go smoothly, etiquette of the specific rules. They often say, well, manners are more important than etiquette. And you make the case, well, maybe not.

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say I think it is impossible to be a well-mannered person without knowing something about etiquette. You don’t necessarily need to know that a dinner napkin at its largest is 26 inches. For example, I think you will be able to get through life without knowing that pearl of wisdom. But I would say following the rules of etiquette makes you a more well-mannered person. You can be a well-mannered person without knowing etiquette, but I think you can be an even more well-mannered person if you use the two. I think they work together.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think what etiquette does, it gives you something concrete to do. Because oftentimes people just don’t know what to do in certain situations. Like, I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Well, here, follow these rules. You can be well-mannered by following these simple rules.

William Hanson: Exactly. As a child, I don’t know about you, Brett, but as a child, I liked to know what was expected of me. Because as a child, of course, we’re all petrified, or most children are petrified of being told off or grounded or whatever the form of punishment is. And so we sort of want to know when we go to this person’s house, what are we doing? What are we expected? How am I meant to behave at schools? For example, we were given parameters and boundaries. And that’s sort of all it is, really, in adult life. I think adults thrive with parameters and boundaries and knowing what is expected of them. Because we all want to get it right. And we’ve bizarrely got to a point in life where so many people will say, oh, I don’t need etiquette. Who knows etiquette anymore? And actually what they’re doing, rather badly, is masking the fact that they don’t know the rules themselves. And so they are sort of saying it doesn’t matter because actually they don’t know and they don’t want to admit their sort of blissful ignorance.

Brett McKay: And something I’ve noticed, and I think you’ve noticed this as well with your career, because I think you’re really popular on TikTok, I feel like a lot of young people crave that knowledge of etiquette because they want to know how to act in the world with other people in a way that’s well-mannered and smooth.

William Hanson: Yes, absolutely. I think there are so many sort of ways now for people to be sort of, rightly so in some instances, called out or flagged down for bad behavior. And so younger generations who have grown up knowing that actually they can’t really be an awful human being and get away with it, are more conscious of it. One of my biggest demographics on my social media videos is Gen Z. And actually when the Gen Z people come and sort of say hi to me in the street, if they pass me, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever, they’re so nice and so polite and cautious about coming up to me. Whereas some millennial followers that I have, and I am a millennial myself, will sort of charge up to me and almost demand immediately without sort of being conscious that I may not be working, I might be out in a social capacity and demand that I do a photograph with them. I don’t mind doing a photograph, but sort of ask me nicely. So Gen Z get a bit of a bad rap, but actually from what I’ve seen, I think it’s quite good that they’re interested in how to behave and just sort of being aware of how their actions affect other people, which is really all it is.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig in to some of the rules of etiquette that you highlight in your book that can help us guide our social interactions. I think a lot of etiquette is primarily about interacting with other people

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And making those interactions as smooth and as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. Let’s start off with introductions. What’s the best way to introduce yourself?

William Hanson: Well, I think when I was writing Just Good Manners, this was one of the things that I found sort of faintly interesting was that in the etiquette books, the Emily Post original edition from the 1920s, for example, there is nothing about introducing yourself because it used to be the etiquette that it was incredibly taboo to introduce yourself, but there was lots of advice about introducing other people. Whereas now etiquette books, Just Good Manners aside, will have information about how to introduce yourself, but nothing about introducing other people. And certainly a lot of Brits or people that spent too much time in Britain and sort of picked up some bad British habits, when they go to introduce themselves to someone, whether it’s on the street or at a cocktail party or whatever, apologize for introducing themselves. Maybe that’s because we in Britain are programmed to know that it’s not really good form historically to introduce yourself, although absolutely fine now, but they’ll say, oh, sorry to interrupt, or, oh, sorry to come up to you today. And actually, well, I don’t know anything about you, but I have just, I do now know that you’ve just interrupted me and that you’re apologizing. So already I’ve noticed that you’re apologizing and you’re interrupting me, whereas I may not have noticed actually. So just, I think something positive and upbeat. Hello, my name’s William. Very lovely to meet you, for example, is all you need to do. And say your name clearly as well. It is so important to say your name that so few people actually bother to say their names when they’re introducing themselves, which is extraordinary behavior because otherwise I don’t know what to call you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so be positive, be upbeat, don’t apologize, say your name clearly. You mentioned people don’t know how to introduce other people. And I’ve noticed that as well. Whenever I’m interacting with individuals and let’s say they’re with their spouse or you’re going over to a friend’s house and their grandmother’s there, no one knows how to introduce people to other people. So I end up usually just having to introduce myself. So what is the proper protocol on making introductions?

William Hanson: So it can get quite complicated. And actually, when I started teaching etiquette 18 years ago, this was the bit that I would in class dread coming to teach because it can be quite wordy. But what you don’t need to do is you don’t need to say both parties’ names twice. So if you’ve got Bill and Ben, for example, you don’t need to say, Bill, this is Ben. Ben, this is Bill. You don’t need to reverse it. And the example I would give you is to sort of show you why that is wrong, is if you take the head of state in any country. In Britain, it would be the king, the president in America. Let’s take the president, for example, whoever that president is. If I said, Mr. President, may I introduce Bill, that is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I put the president first. I’m giving him the respect as head of state. But if I then switch it, Bill, this is the president, that second time I have elevated Bill and relegated the president, which in a diplomatic context is completely the wrong thing to do. So you only need to say the most important person’s name first. How you define who that most important person is, is up to you. And it depends on context. In a professional setting, the CEO of the company is probably going to be more important than the intern. A client to a company is going to be more important than the CEO. Socially, you probably now would go on age rather than looking at gender. So Granny being 85 is going to be sort of elevated above Annie, who’s 18.

Brett McKay: Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talk about whenever you make an introduction to add some context to the introduction.

William Hanson: Yes. None of us really like making small talk if we’re completely honest. I mean, small talk with complete strangers for some is absolute purgatory. So you can make life easy for the two people that you are introducing by saying, Bill, this is Ben. Ben’s just flown in from Sydney. And Bill, I believe, didn’t your mother used to live in Australia? If you can find a link, that’s perfect because then they do have common ground. But if not, you just say, Ben just flew in from Sydney, leave it at that. And then hopefully one of them goes, oh gosh, I’ve always wanted to go. And just says something. But if you just say the names and do the introduction, people just stare at each other like, great, you’ve introduced me, but who are you?

Brett McKay: We typically shake hands when meeting someone new. This is the art of manliness. We got to talk about the etiquette on handshaking.

William Hanson: Yes. I mean, handshaking, which of course it slightly went out of fashion during the pandemic, but is thankfully now back. It’s probably the only physical contact you will have with most people. And I think, and I don’t know about you, Brett, you can tell so much about someone by the quality of the handshake. Do you judge someone?

Brett McKay: Of course. If I get the limp fish, it’s an immediate like, yeah, yeah I don’t know, yeah, yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. It’s an ick to use a modern parlance. Already in the first couple of seconds whilst we’re judging a new person, I’ve met them and it’s a limp fish handshake, as you say. And it’s unpleasant. Similarly, if it’s a bone crusher, you think, wow, why are they having to overcompensate and come across as overly assertive? So the handshake is so important. And I, again, in the book, when I was writing, I thought, well, actually maybe, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on people that have bad handshakes because I can remember, I think my parents telling me how to shake a hand age five, maybe, roughly around age five. But then no parent, I mean, maybe there are parents out there that sort of are the exceptions that prove the rule. No parent then revisits that handshaking lesson when their child is now 15. And actually the strength of their handshake is going to be very different for what they were doing when they were five. You’re sort of told what to do and then nobody revises it. And actually having a good handshake is often half the battle, particularly in business.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. Handshake is important. Something I’ve taught my kids. And I like a good firm handshake for men and women alike. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to that sort of thing.

William Hanson: Oh, absolutely. And I would, again, one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing writing the book is sort of tracking where the changes have come in and what these changes are. And again, if you read the original Emily Post or books published in the 1920s, ladies didn’t massively shake hands. The hostess might’ve shook hands with guests, but other than that, ladies didn’t do it. Now, anyone of any gender, business or professional, everybody shakes hands. Everyone should take off their right glove if they’re wearing gloves. It’s flesh to flesh. Obviously, if you’re in absolute minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, fine, you can keep your glove on. There are always sort of caveats to it. But yes, a handshake is pretty equal.

Brett McKay: So this is related introductions, but this has happened to me a few times. It’s whenever you encounter someone you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name. You’re not really acquaintances, but you know of each other. How do you make those, what we call reintroductions to each other?

William Hanson: Yes, I think a lot of people sort of can get quite offended that the other person hasn’t remembered you. But actually, you know, sometimes we’re the most memorable and interesting person in our own lives because we’re there, we’re the only person that is sort of the world expert on ourselves. But other people may not necessarily remember you like you remember them. So just say your name quickly. Hello, so lovely to see you again. It’s William, of course. What have you been up to since I saw you at Brett’s, for example? Just help them out rather than sort of expect them to remember every detail about you. Obviously, if they can remember everything about you, that’s fantastic. Actually, a really simple trick I often do in restaurants or hotels I go to a lot, I just write down the staff’s name in a note in my phone. And so when I’m going back in, I can remember that, you know, Grant is the tall waiter with the ear piercing. And so when I go in again, I can say, oh, hello, Grant, how are you? And generally, you find you get a thousand times better service when you actually bother to learn their names. It also helps, I think, trains your brain to remember people’s names better as well.

Brett McKay: I like that. That’s a classy move. I’m going to start doing that. What happens if you forget someone’s name? Any tips on navigating that?

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, apologize and move on quite quickly. So, Brett, if I called you Ben, for example, and you say, oh, no, it’s Brett, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brett, I’d probably say, using your correct name and then move on. But again, it’s quite a British thing to make that into a drama and to over-apologize. Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Oh, that happens all the time. And the more of an issue I make it, the more of an issue it becomes. So just say sorry, say the correct name, make a mental note not to get it wrong again, and move on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned after reading your book. British people like to apologize, very apologetic.

William Hanson: We do. I mean, look, hey, it’s better to over-apologize than not apologize at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: But it can go the other way as well.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about small talk. Any etiquette to small talk? Are there topics that are taboo that you definitely don’t want to go there?

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say this is something that has not changed very recently. Sex, money, politics, health, and religion still remain for small talk. And this is conversation with people you do not know well. I’m not saying when you’re talking to very good friends. But with strangers, avoid sex, money, politics, health, or religion to begin with because you just don’t know what people’s opinions are, what makes them engage, what disengages them, what offends them. And it’s so much better to sort of play it safe. And some cultures just don’t get small talk. The Germans absolutely don’t get it. The Dutch sort of get it but aren’t particularly good at it. But think about small talk as the slip road onto a major highway. If you didn’t have that slip road and you were joining the conversational highway going at 70 miles an hour, you would crash. And so you need that slip road to just sort of build your speed up into a slightly more interesting conversation. That is the point of small talk. I’m not pretending it is fascinating, but it is needed in order to have a proper conversation with someone.

Brett McKay: Okay, for our American listeners, a slip road in England is what we call an on-ramp over here. And that’s the metaphor I always use for small talk. Some people say they hate small talk and they just want to jump to the big talk. But you’ve got to take the on-ramp of small talk to get up to speed into that deeper conversation. So what are your go-to topics for small talk?

William Hanson: I mean, look, in Britain, we’re obsessed with talking about the weather. I was being interviewed yesterday. It was a British journalist. We spent five minutes talking about the weather at the start of the interview. But in Britain, our weather, we often can have three or four seasons in a day. If you’re in gorgeous California or you’re in the Middle East where the weather is sort of fairly consistent, the weather’s not going to be spoken about. But beyond the weather, I just talk about the environment that you are in there and then. You’re trying to find a shared experience or something in common with that person. And if you have nothing else in common, you don’t sort of have lots of hobbies in common, what you do have is the room you’re in. Gosh, what a beautiful ceiling. Aren’t the band fantastic? Something upbeat and positive is what we want. Talk about the canapes. How do you know the host? That’s safe and better small talk than, gosh, well, it’s a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?

Brett McKay: In America, we’re obsessed with work.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So often work is a topic of small talk. What do you do? In Britain, apparently, that’s frowned upon to talk about work in small talk.

William Hanson: Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, your American tendencies are sort of creeping in. And I think particularly younger generations are slightly more work-focused and find it less taboo. But people really shouldn’t be defined by their jobs. I mean, I do speak as someone who’s an etiquette coach. I’ve got a slight vested interest in this and pushing my own personal agenda. But if I go to a party this evening, I’m going in my social capacity. Whether I’m a dentist, a tax lawyer, or an etiquette coach, it’s got no bearing on whether my friend has invited me to that party. And as much as I love my job, I mean, I have no other talent, so I don’t know what else I’d do, I don’t want to talk about it all the time, actually. There’s more to me than my job. And so certainly to begin with, and again, when you say to people you’re an etiquette coach, people sort of either freeze or start panicking. I’d quite like to talk about something else, thank you very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, or if you ask someone about their job, they hate their job.

William Hanson: Oh, and then you’ll say, oh, God, I don’t really care, really. Especially if you meet someone, yeah, and they start moaning about their job, and you think, well, I was just asking it to be polite. I don’t really need a whole rundown.

Brett McKay: What do you do when you’re engaging in small talk and let’s say the conversation starts going into some of those taboo topics you mentioned earlier? Any way to navigate that deftly?

William Hanson: Well, I mean, hopefully, most of your conversation is listening and being able to pick up on what you’re being given back. And if you’re asking a question, especially if you think it’s controversial and you’re not getting much back from the other person, it is probably time to move on. But often it’s other people witnessing or listening into the conversation that will have to step in and could see the car crash, to use another driving analogy, about to happen. And so, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but it works, is just stepping in and going, well, what lovely weather we’re having today and saying it very pointedly. I’ve only ever had to do it once at a dinner I was hosting. And that should be a clue to the people that had started to get a bit heated, but also to the other guests. We need to move this on. Everyone needs to step in and help me here.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party, a mingling event, and you’re going there by yourself. You don’t know anyone and there’s already established little circles of conversation going on. How do you enter a conversational group with class and smoothly?

William Hanson: This is hard to explain on an audio podcast, but generally you want to, first of all, before you actually move in, make sure there are what we call an open body language group. And usually that means there’s a great big gap for you that you can go and stand in. If there’s no gap, don’t try and approach them because they’ve sort of subconsciously or consciously closed that gap off. And so you’re not going to get much success. But really, basically, if you know somebody in that group, much easier, you just make eye contact with them and hope they bring you in. But if you don’t know anyone in that group, it’s as shallow, basically, I hate to say it, it’s as shallow as picking the one that looks like you. So that could be you’re tall and blonde, they’re tall and blonde. It’s a group of women and one man, you look at the male, for example, or man in a tie, man in a tie, just anything that you will have most success joining a group if you basically pick the person who looks most like you, smile at them, make a really nice positive signal. If you get a smile back, you step forward and do your approach and would say, oh, hello, may I join? My name is William. Again, don’t say sorry to interrupt. If you don’t get a smile back and they sort of look away or close the gap, you just move on and try and find someone else.

Brett McKay: That tip of looking for people that look like you, you talk about in the book, you go into a party where the invitation had ambiguous instructions on dress code and it was either black tie or 1970s apparel.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So you’re the etiquette guy. You went black tie. Of course you’re gonna go black tie. But there was only three other guys that went black tie. You guys just ended up talking to each other the entire night.

William Hanson: We did, because again, it’s shallow. When people don’t know many other people, they don’t take risks. If you’ve got a group of mice, you’ve got a group of cats. Okay, the cats might want to play with the mice, but the mice don’t want to play with the cats. And it’s the same. So I didn’t know there were two dress codes. I was someone’s guest. I was going on secondhand information without having seen the invitation. I always ask to see the invitation now after that drama. But yes, there were, you know, in a room full of 100 people, there were three of us in black tie, tuxedo. And it was quite boring after a while because no one else wanted to talk to us. And it’s sort of playground stuff, but it does happen.

Brett McKay: I’m sure a lot of people have had this happen to them when they’re at a party and they start talking to someone and this someone does not want to let go of you. But you want to go talk to other people. How do you politely break away from someone who’s talking your ear off?

William Hanson: Well, ideally you want to introduce them to someone else and pair them off. It’s not great to leave someone standing on their own. If they’ve said something objectionable or you absolutely have to go because you’re going to miss your flight or something, then fair enough. But try to pair them off with someone else. Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however? And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go, Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking and off you go. So that’s what you ideally want to do. But if there is no one, you’re going to have to leave them standing on their own, but you can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like, well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to, but maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser. Shake hands and off we go.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think we’ve handled introductions, we’ve handled small talk. Let’s talk about table manners. Let’s start with this question. Why do the British have what seems like such complicated and fastidious rules of table etiquette?

William Hanson: Well, I would say, I mean, thankfully, it’s not the case anymore in Britain. We have such a wide and varied cuisine. But historically, our food was always a bit rubbish. And I think a lot of these rules might have been developed just to sort of slow down eating it. You didn’t want to rush it because it wasn’t very tasty. And so we came up with these sort of rules to have very small mouthfuls and small portions. And we had a lot of alcohol with our food, different alcohol for each course. And also, you know, in Britain, we like a rule, we like structure. And I think British dining is the most complicated compared to European, which is a different thing from British dining, we should say. And that’s not a Brexit thing. It’s always been that way in sort of etiquette land. We’ve always had British and then European dining and then American dining. But we do like to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Brett McKay: And you recommend that people learn British etiquette because that’ll basically cover your bases.

William Hanson: Yeah, and that’s something I picked up from my great friend and colleague, Myka Meier, who’s the leading expert in America in etiquette. And she teaches British dining as the sort of the gold standard, because if you can do the top standard, you can easily do the bottom standard, whatever that one is. I guess it’s like driving. I mean, I know it varies now, but if you learn to drive on a stick, you can drive an automatic. But if you learn just on an automatic, you can’t drive on a stick. And so it’s probably best to learn the hardest one. And then you’re covered for all bases.

Brett McKay: So I think most of us growing up heard the rule, no elbows on the table. And you talk about the history of why we have that rule. So what is the history of the rule, no elbows on the table?

William Hanson: Yes, and this is what people seem to forget, particularly with etiquette and dining etiquette, is that we have not just come up with these rules to annoy people. There is a rich history behind all of our cultures. And the no elbows on the table one goes back to sort of medieval Britain and Europe, where the tables were not secure tables like we’re fortunate to eat from today. They were created from benches and sheets of wood twice a day when people were eating two meals a day back then, not three. And if you put your elbows on the table, because of the way the food would be laid out down the center of the table well balanced, if you put your elbows on the table, the table would tip and it would not be secure. And so thus it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table because you didn’t want the food dropping onto the floor. I would say now we as humans, we’re sort of so ingrained knowing all our ancestors have learned not to do that. We sort of subconsciously or consciously know it as well. And so something we still follow, even though our tables are by and large secure.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it also doesn’t look good when you’re at a nice dinner to have your elbows on the table.

William Hanson: No. It’s horrid. I mean, it’s actually very difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. I challenge anyone to do it nicely. Maybe at the end of a dinner when you’re sort of chatting over a cup of tea or coffee with your host, maybe having a little bit of a chocolate or something, I can sort of see that it’s okay in that instance, especially if your host is doing it. But formally, whilst there’s proper food on the table in the middle, then no elbows off.

Brett McKay: When you’re a guest at a dinner, when should you start eating?

William Hanson: So once the host has started, basically, is the rule. If there’s a guest of honor, you would wait until the guest of honor has started. But generally on most meals that we have, there isn’t a guest of honor. And so once the host starts, and they should be served last, then you may pick up your cutlery and begin.

Brett McKay: I think everyone knows that when you’re out to eat, you don’t start eating your dish until everyone has been served. But if it’s like an informal dinner at your home with friends and family, do you need to wait until everyone’s gotten their food to start eating? I mean, is that the rule?

William Hanson: Oh, yes, yes. Everyone’s got to have food in front of them and be ready to go. And they’re not still waiting for potatoes or sprouts or anything like that. You wait until everyone’s got it. And that’s when the host then picks up their cutlery as a signal, we may now begin.

Brett McKay: If you’re a host of a dinner, how should you pace your own eating?

William Hanson: Yes, you want to sort of identify the slowest eater around the table. And obviously for family dinners, you can probably work out who that is quite quickly because you dine with them quite a lot. Growing up in my household, if my parents were hosting, it was always granny. Granny would do a lot of talking, but not a lot of eating. And so my father was always sort of there dissecting a singular garden pea or something because that’s all he had got on his plate whilst granny started, whilst still taught and did less eating. But host starts first, but host finishes last. And that’s a huge discipline. And the idea is that you don’t leave one person still eating with the rest of the table staring at them. So the host sort of picks who’s the slowest, follows them so that they can match pace. And so they are included and are not feeling like they’re holding things up, even though let’s be honest, they might be.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk dinner place settings. This is how you got your start as an etiquette teacher. First thing you did was teach how to do dinner place settings. I’m sure if you’ve been to a fancy dinner, you see just this layout and you’re like, oh my gosh, which fork am I supposed to use? Which one’s the bread plate? There’s that whole advice that was in the Titanic, start from the outside and work your way in with the silverware. Does that really do the trick or are there nuances to that?

William Hanson: That does generally do the trick. I mean, all of these dining etiquette rules only work if a table has been set nicely. But working on the proviso the table is set nicely and correctly, that one generally works. However, in American dining etiquette there is what’s called the American informal play setting where a teaspoon, used for dessert, will actually precede the dinner knife. American etiquette books often will show both the standard play setting with outside in and then this American informal and the outside in rule does not work at all because it’s sort of zigzagging all over the shop. So I’m very against the American informal one because I don’t think it helps people and the whole point of etiquette is it’s meant to sort of help people whereas this is one exception too many and also nobody that I have spoken to and please if you’re listening to this and you know where that rule came from please tell me because my colleagues and I, even the American ones, just can’t work it out. Who came up with that? What was the logic behind that? I think with any rule if you can’t find the logic behind it it’s probably time to ditch it.

Brett McKay: What’s the etiquette of napkins? Apparently you’re a big napkin aficionado.

William Hanson: Yes, I’ve got an unhealthy amount of napkins for a grown man of my age but I love a good quality napkin. I’ve yet to get to the stage in life where I take my own napkin to a restaurant but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point because in Britain, I don’t know what it’s like in America as much but in Britain some places are obsessed with paper napkins and I’m just not convinced. I don’t think it doesn’t need to be paper because it’s bad for the environment so a perfectly serviceable linen napkin that can be reused is I think a bit better but yes, napkins on the lap, not round the neck. Historically you had different types of napkin for different types of meals. The larger the meal, the larger the napkin. Today it’s very unlikely unless you’re me that you have different sizes of napkin which is fine just as long as it’s sort of clean and ironed that’s all I ask.

Brett McKay: Should you put your napkin in your lap as soon as you sit down?

William Hanson: Not the second you sit down unless food is sort of hovering behind you ready to be placed down.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: I would sort of within the first minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Is when you can do it. You don’t want to look too keen.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your napkin if you need to leave the table for the restroom for example?

William Hanson: Then it would go on the chair and again some people get sort of when I say this sometimes in class people will recoil because they’re like oh well the chair is so dirty. Well if the chair’s got arms put it on the arm of the chair never put it on the back of the chair because then we can see it but actually if you’re worried that the chair is that dirty what sort of establishments are you dining in? So just rethink where you’re going. So yes seat of chair or arm of chair and then on the table when you’re leaving but you’re not coming back.

Brett McKay: Okay that’s what you do with it when you’re done you put it on the table?

William Hanson: Yes

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Absolutely I’m not coming back goodbye thanks so much and really everyone should do that at the same time as well.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your silverware when you’re done?

William Hanson: So it depends if you’re eating what is in America called continental style which is not a term we have over here but if you’re eating continental style or you’re eating zigzag style continental style again many American etiquette coaches advocate for that knife in right hand fork in left hand you would sort of place them in a triangle on the plate when you’re resting with the bridge of the fork going over the knife almost creating like a pizza wedge shape in front of you and that is just to show I’m paused I’m just going to take a sip of my drink I’m chatting to my neighbour I’m pacing myself whereas when you’re finished they would go together and you know different countries have slightly different angles in Britain we do 6:30 if you imagine the cutlery is the hands of a clock with Americans it’s generally 5:25 some Europeans it’s 4:20 some it’s 3:15 I don’t really care as long as they’ve gone together that’s all the wait staff are looking for they’re not going to look at your cutlery and go well they’ve done it in the Dutch way and we’re here in California so we’re not going to clear that plate they’re not looking for that as long as it is together that’s what they want to know.

Brett McKay: Let’s go back to handling utensils how to hold them so you mentioned the two styles the continental style and the zigzag style so the continental style is when you got your knife in your right hand your fork in your left hand and you got the tongs or the face of the fork pointed down right?

William Hanson: Yeah and they work together and in Britain or continental style we let go of both of them when we’re resting but other than that we have got one in each hand they’re almost extensions of our hands whereas in zigzag style you might cut one or two pieces up with the knife place the knife down on the upper edge of the plate turn the fork over into the dominant hand stab and eat and then transfer it back pick up the knife cut another bit set the knife down transfer the fork I mean that’s an aerobic exercise Brett.

Brett McKay: Yeah no I don’t like the zigzag style I like where you just use the utensils as extensions of your hands for the duration of the dinner.

William Hanson: I think it’s a lot easier but some people insist it isn’t but you know to each their own as long as the food’s going in their mouth and not all over the shop.

Brett McKay: The other benefit of it too is it allows you to take up less space because your elbows are tucked in you can keep your elbows tucked in you don’t have your elbows all jutting out and bugging the other person.

William Hanson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. And that’s key as well, because some dining tables you’re really tightly packed. Now in American dining, you prefer round tables, and actually at state banquets at the White House used to be straight edge tables like we have in Britain a lot more, but Jacqueline Kennedy switched them over to round tables, and that seems to be how it’s stayed at a state level at the White House. And the beauty of a round table, other than being more sociable, is that you are less restricted and you aren’t immediately sitting next to somebody where you could elbow them. But on a big, grand, straight edge table, you do have to be very conscious of where your elbows are going.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a dinner where you’re being served family style, so all the dishes are on the table and you’ve got to pass them around to make sure everyone gets serving. What are the rules of passing dishes?

William Hanson: So I have to be honest, Britain is the only country that makes things difficult and passes things in the opposite direction to every other country. In Britain, we pass things around to the left, so clockwise around the table, whereas in America, in India, in the Middle East, in Africa, every other country, Europe, the plates or the dishes go counterclockwise to the right. That said, I would say most Brits don’t know that rule. I’m just telling you from an etiquette profession rule, that’s the rule. I think as long as you are offering the people each side of you, no one really cares whether it goes to the left or to the right.

Brett McKay: That is interesting. You talk about in Britain, it’s kind of faux pas, maybe it used to be, not so much anymore, but to ask someone to pass you a dish, like directly, hey, can you pass me the potatoes?

William Hanson: Oh, no, that’s a slap in the face in Britain, traditionally, because you’re sort of saying, look, William, if you had said that to me, the subtext to that is, William, you have not seen that I’m sitting here surrounded by no potatoes. You have failed, because again, good manners are about other people. And so we’ve developed this very passive-aggressive way in Britain, and we sort of say it now as a bit of a joke, but I can assure you it does work in practice. If you had, and I know you wouldn’t, Brett, but let’s, for sake of argument, say that you didn’t pass me the potatoes, I would say, Brett, would you like any potatoes? And you might say, no, thank you, William, but would you like some potatoes? Oh, yes, I think that I would, actually. And then they get passed.

Brett McKay: When I read that, it reminded me, I think the Dowager did that a few times in Downton Abbey.

William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Or I just imagine the Dowager’s just saying some sort of passive-aggressive thing like that.

William Hanson: Well, exactly. And I think someone asked me a few weeks ago, do you think passive aggression is a good thing? And I think, you know, it’s better than active aggression.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right. There’s also etiquette on passing the salt and pepper. What’s the rules of passing salt and pepper?

 William Hanson: Yes, so salt and pepper travel together is the mnemonic that we teach children, but it works beautifully for adults as well. They are a marriage couple, in effect, and you don’t want to split them up. So if someone says, please, could you pass the salt? You would pass both the salt and the pepper together in one hand if they’ll fit in one hand, but two hands is fine. And I think that goes back to necessity. When salt and pepper pots used to be teeny tiny, they weren’t great big mills or grinders like we have now. They were much smaller, and so you didn’t sort of want to split them up because then you might not find them.

Brett McKay: Tell us about salt cellars. I never heard of these things until I read about them in your book.

William Hanson: Yeah, salt cellars are sort of small little dishes. So I guess a lot of salt. What does your salt and pepper look like in your house?

Brett McKay: They’re just shakers that we just… Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah, which is sort of the more contemporary style. But going back to the Downton or even pre-Downton era, salt was served in a little, it would often be a silver little pot, but with an inlay of blue glass, because if you put salt directly on silver, it will erode the silver and it doesn’t taste then very good and it doesn’t do the silver much good either. So you’d have this sort of blue little glass inlay that sat in there, and that’s where the salt was. And a tiny little silver spoon that you would spoon out granules of salt and put it in a neat little pile on the edge of your plate. And you would sort of add a couple of granules then using the tip of your knife. Sounds terribly complicated onto whatever was loaded up on the fork.

Brett McKay: Are they still used today?

William Hanson: I would say this one is being slightly relaxed. Most restaurants you go to now, you don’t get salt cellars. I would say salt cellars now, you would see it in a very grand private house, if at all.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But most restaurants, it’s the salt shaker with one hole in it. Pepper has several holes and you can apply it more or less wherever, but try and taste the food first.

Brett McKay: All right, but for listeners, they ever have a dinner at a manor, they know what to do when they see a salt cellar.

William Hanson: They do know what to do, exactly.

Brett McKay: Any other rules that a guest at a dinner party or maybe even an extended stay in someone’s home should follow to show proper hospitality, proper manners?

William Hanson: Yes, I mean, I think it obviously depends on context and whether you know them well or not. But, you know, particularly I get so many, I do a podcast as well, and so many letters we get in about, oh, I had my family to stay. They stayed with us for an entire week and they didn’t once offer to cook or they didn’t take us out for a dinner to say thank you. Yes, it’s an awful lot of work having someone stay in your house for anything over one night. And even that can be quite tricky. So if you are going to stay, don’t assume that your hosts will be entertaining you all three meals of every day either and the stuff in between. But do offer to take them out, to say thank you, to give them a night off cooking. I mean, that’s, I don’t know about you, most hosts don’t want other people cooking in their own kitchen.

Brett McKay: No, I wouldn’t like that.

William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.

Brett McKay: Yeah

William Hanson: But please, let’s order takeout or let’s go out for a nice meal in a restaurant. It’s on us. Just something to acknowledge the effort that they’re going to. Take a nice gift, write them a decent length thank you letter afterwards.

Brett McKay: What’s a good gift to bring as a guest? What’s your go-to? Because I think a lot of people say like wine or maybe that’s not a good one.

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good one if you know that they like Italian Merlot, for example. If you know that that’s their favorite wine, take them a couple of bottles and it should be a couple of bottles if you’re staying for several nights. It might even be a case of wine if you’re staying for a week plus. But if you don’t quite know what they drink, or indeed if they drink, and more and more people aren’t drinking now, particularly with the younger generations, alcohol is probably not the best thing. So chocolates, I mean, the practice of post-desk gifts goes back to Chicago in the ’30s and chocolates were the absolute sort of that was all that was acceptable. Most people like chocolates or can quite easily re-gift them if they don’t. But ideally you want to take something personal and personalized to them.

Brett McKay: You know, when I heard, and I would like if I got this, which is like a nice bottle of olive oil, because I use olive oil a lot.

William Hanson: Do you know, olive oil is becoming such a popular gift over here as well in London. And it’s great. I mean, a good quality.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Particularly if it’s Italian olive oil. I mean, over here it might be easier to get that than with you. Yeah, it’s a nice novel thing. Doesn’t matter if you drink. I don’t think many people are allergic to oil. So it ticks a lot of boxes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it often comes in a nice bottle that presents well too. So I like that. Let’s talk about elevators. Is there an etiquette for elevators?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. If you’re in a really old building in Chicago or New York or London, the elevator is probably going to be a little bit tighter than in a great big new build somewhere in Los Angeles. And so the senior person, whether that’s the senior in the business or a lady or granny, whoever would go into the elevator first. The person who gets out of the elevator first when it arrives at the floor is the person closest to the elevator doors. And that’s the person who got in last. It winds me up in hotels where they’re taking you to your room and you turn up at floor seven and they put their hand in front of the lift doors and you sort of have to edge past them because they want you to go first. But that’s all very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve not been to this hotel before. So actually I want the hotelier to get out of the lift, put their hand across the lift doors from the other side of the lift and point me in the right direction, much more courteous than sort of awkwardly edging past them.

Brett McKay: Is small talk appropriate in an elevator or should you just keep to yourself?

William Hanson: I was having a heated debate about this only a few hours ago. No, in Britain, it’s so taboo to speak in an elevator. I’m going to film a social media video, I think, that just sort of has a group of us saying nothing in an elevator. And then I’ll just say at the end, we’re British, we don’t talk in elevators or lifts as we call them over here. But look, if you and I got in an elevator and we knew each other and there was no one else, you can absolutely speak. But with everyone else, Brits are so private with their conversation and thoughts, we couldn’t possibly have someone else over here what we’re thinking or saying. So there is normally this very awkward silence in an elevator.

Brett McKay: Well, I prefer the silence too. I’m a big fan of that.

William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So the British are famous for queuing, standing in line. Any etiquette for line standing?

William Hanson: Yes I mean just sort of, it’s so democratic it’s first come first served. It’s so straightfoward we get very irritated when someone tries to jump the queue. And so etiquette rule number one is, if you don’t mind the rules, don’t play the game, basically. So if you don’t want to queue don’t queue and I think you are all going to be shocked down in flames in Britain, if you sort of try to jump the queue. And I would say that is actually the commonalities between Britain and America, I mean, I think we are all sort of the Olympic gold medalist of queuing in Britain, but I would say you’re probably the silver medalist in America. Whereat it doesn’t even get bronze is the Europeans. And actually when you go to Disney in Paris oversee the American concept as British I’ve been to a lot of the Disneys the American ones are great, because everyone follows the queuing standing in line pressure call, but in Euro Disney or Disney Paris as it’s now called yeah it’s a little bit of a freeforall and it’s quite stressful.

Brett McKay: How do you handle line jumpers? Lets say someone tries to break that sacred social order, should you call them out?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. No we would and I think we would sort of call them out probably giving then the benefit of the doubt to begin with. We might say something like, oh actually the back of the queue is just here. For example because it might be an innocent mistake, if they then go “No, no I’m gonna join it from here” then well that’s a war crime.

Brett McKay: Is it proper to save places in line? Can you do that?

William Hanson: If its not a busy queue you could perhaps do it for maybe like a minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But I would be very careful even don’t so I would probably not advice that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. It has to be done in moderation [0:48:16.9] ____. Well, William, this has been a great conversation and we only scratched the surface of what’s in this book. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

William Hanson: Yes, the book is out now, Just Good Manners, published by Gallery at Simon & Schuster. It’s available in all formats. There’s an audio book. So if you’re not sick of my voice after this interview, there’s more of it on audio book, e-book and hardback in all good bookshops.

Brett McKay: And any other place on the internet where they can learn about you?

William Hanson: Oh yes, there’s my Instagram @williamhanson, TikTok @williamhansonetiquette or my website, williamhanson.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, William Hanson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was William Hanson. He’s the author of the book Just Good Manners. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website williamhanson.co.uk. Also check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes.

Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free, all-volunteer men’s leadership organization that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide.

In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the “wish dream” of idealized community, and why expecting perfection kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader and how to measure success when building a community of men.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• F3
• AoM Podcast #324: How Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith Are the Cure for Sad Clown Syndrome
• Q Source: The F3 Manual of Virtuous Leadership by David “Dredd” Redding 
• AoM article on phronesis/practical wisdom
• Dying Breed article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of community

Connect With Frank Schwartz

• Frank on LinkedIn
• Frank on X

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes. Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community, and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free all volunteer men’s leadership organization, that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide. In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the wish stream of idealized community, and why expecting perfection, kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader, and how to measure success when building a community of men. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/mensgroups.

Frank Schwartz, welcome to the show.

Frank Schwartz: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay: So you are, is it the CEO or president of F3?

Frank Schwartz: This is a very good question. And up until a couple of years ago, I could have said president, but now CEO. We kind of eliminated the president position. And the thing about F3 is, and guys who are familiar know, but those who aren’t, everything’s kind of very made up. So we have sort of different names for what we do that are a little bit kind of inside baseball. And so, yes, CEO on paper, but the official title within F3 is Nantan.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Frank Schwartz: Which is an Apache word kind of meaning cultural and spiritual leader.

Brett McKay: All right. So you’re the CEO of F3. We’ve had the guys who started F3 on the podcast. This was back in 2017, episode number 324. And we’ll link to that in show notes. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is F3?

Frank Schwartz: So F3, it’s a free men’s leadership group that uses workouts to trick you into coming out so we can teach you about leadership. That’s really what it is. But essentially it is to men’s workout group. Our stated mission is to plant, to grow and to serve small workout groups for men, in order to invigorate male community leadership. The founders, as you mentioned, Dave Redding, Tim Whitmire, Dredd and OBT, affectionately known within F3, kind of looked around and said, “Hey, we see a lot of guys at church and other civic organizations and at work, and whatever. A lot of guys just standing around with their hands in their pockets, and nobody doing anything about the world around them. And influencing their community, and there’s just not a lot of leading happening.” And Dave with his special forces background said, “Hey, the place I learned the most about leadership, and the way I think we could spread leadership throughout our communities and in our world, is via training, physical training.” It’s a great place, pretty low risk to do that. And that wasn’t the intention when it started, which again, you’d probably go back and listen and hear it, but when the intention when it started, but it is kind of where it ended up.

So the short answer to that very long answer I gave is, it’s a place where men can come into community with one another and get physically fit and learn leadership.

Brett McKay: And again, it’s all free, man. You can go to their website and you can find, there’s like chapters all over the world at this point. How many chapters are there at this point?

Frank Schwartz: Ooh, I should have had that much more readily available on the tip of my tongue. I think it’s about 450, maybe just shy of 450.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, typically the workouts are early in the morning before work, and it’s a bootcamp style workout, calisthenics, things like that?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, typically body weight, although some places, there’s kettlebells or sandbags and some of that kind of stuff that guys use. But yeah, typically, if you sort of shot at the middle of the curve on an F3 workout, it’s gonna happen about 5:15, 5:30, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, and it’s gonna be a lot of body weight and calisthenic type, some running, pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and then really get a lot of whatever we can find.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you do the workout, and then there’s also a fellowship aspect to it, a leadership aspect to this. Tell us more about that leadership component, because again, the workout is the hook. That’s like the Trojan horse for that other stuff.

Frank Schwartz: Right, yeah. It’s just the way we sneakily trick you into coming, ’cause you go, hey, free workout, and a guy goes, aha, I could try that. What’s the problem? So the three Fs are fitness, fellowship, and faith. And really, we don’t have a program per se, but again, if you were to kind of shoot at the middle and go, “Well, what’s typical?” Guys get together early in the morning, and work out together. It’s a pretty strenuous, pretty vigorous workout, generally speaking. And then we get together for what we call a cafeteria afterward. You hang out, you make friends, and you get deeper in fellowship with one another, because, and you know this probably as well or better than most anyone, community is really where we’re gonna save the country, where we’re gonna do our best work, is in community with one another. So we put men in community with one another. And then what happens inevitably, once you do that, is guys start looking at their lives and go, “Well, now that I’ve got these things more or less squared away, I’ve lost some weight, I’ve got some friends. Well, now what? What am I supposed to do now?”

And they start looking outside themselves. Now that they are more settled, they start looking outside themselves and saying, “Well, what can I do for others?” And that’s the big question of faith. What is it that exists outside yourself, and how can you live in such a way that you can kind of wear yourself out in the service of that thing?” So we don’t make any kind of determination about, well, a guy ought to believe in Jesus Christ or a guy ought to believe in Buddha or a guy ought to believe in whatever. We just say, you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself in order to be a virtuous leader. And that’s what we do. And so, a lot of times in those meetings after workouts, guys will study. They might study certain kinds of books or whatever. We have a book that Dave wrote, Dredd wrote, called “The QSource” And it sort of outlines our overall leadership philosophy and framework. And so, guys will study that together, and we’ll discuss that together. We’ve got podcasts about it and all kinds of stuff. So I wouldn’t say there’s like a super formal program, but we do have what we call stuff worth trying.

And so, you kind of get in there, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, I don’t know if this will work for you or not, but here’s the framework, and maybe try it, until you find something better.” But that’s the idea, is to create leaders amongst men, and to take those things that we learn in what we call the gloom, which is that those pre-dawn hours when your family’s sleeping and work hasn’t started calling yet, those things that we learn there and take them home, take them to the community so we can be better people.

Brett McKay: And the leadership structure of F3 is unique. It’s decentralized. Tell us more about that, how that works.

Frank Schwartz: Absolutely. And this is conceptually, I think Dave and Tim early on were like, we can’t lead everywhere. We can’t be everywhere. And if really what we’re called to do is to create leaders, then we’re gonna have to hand off the power here as time goes on. And so, the idea is that, if you start making rules, then you have to make more rules to enforce those rules, and it kind of becomes this big spiraling thing. And then pretty soon, you’ve got 5,000-page bills getting introduced into Congress, right? So we live by a mission, a credo, and five core principles. And the idea is, that every man has been born and put on this earth to be a leader. That is his job. That is what he has been created to do. And so, what we try and do is help guys to recapture that. We want men to lean into that part of themselves, and to figure out how to not just lead a workout well or to even manage something well, but to truly influence others for good, in every place that they’re in.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, it’s all volunteer?

Frank Schwartz: I feel like I didn’t answer the question very well.

Brett McKay: No.

Frank Schwartz: Right. So to decentralize it, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: So since every man is a leader, we say, okay, then I can’t be in charge of where you are. Because Brett, you’re in where? Tulsa, right?

Brett McKay: Correct.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. So I don’t know what’s happening in Tulsa. I can’t tell you what to do in Tulsa. I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do will be where you are. So I have to teach you how to lead, and give you the power and the empowerment, I guess really, to say, hey, you make those decisions. I think that honestly, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s been one of the best things I learned for myself from F3 is that, I don’t need permission to be a man. I don’t need permission to be a leader. I think that’s something that I think men and maybe people in general, kind of crave in our world anymore. We want someone else to tell us what to do. I don’t know whether it’s because we just don’t wanna make the decision, or because we want it to be their fault if it doesn’t go well or something. [laughter] I don’t know. But we don’t seem to wanna take the personal responsibility. And F3 teaches us that there isn’t anybody else responsible but you.

Brett McKay: And you’re the CEO, but again, this is volunteer. You’re not paid to be the CEO?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no.

Brett McKay: This is all voluntary?

Frank Schwartz: No salary here.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell us about your experience with F3. When did you join and why did you join?

Frank Schwartz: So I joined in late 2014. And the reason I joined is because I was overweight, and I had sleep apnea, I had high blood pressure. I had high cholesterol. And my doctor was like, “Hey, guess what? You’re a stroke waiting to happen.” So I’ve got to get you healthy somehow. We want you to live for your young kids. And I’ll send you the picture. You’ll love it. But essentially, I was like, I got to get in shape somehow. So I started going to the gym, but I kept hearing about this F3 thing. Kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it. And finally, I was like, fine, I’ll just go. And so, I showed up one Saturday, and I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked. There was just something very magical about the fact that it’s always outdoors no matter what. It was freezing cold. Like horrifyingly cold, ’cause it was November when I went out for my first one on a Saturday. And there was just something invigorating about like, we’re outside in the elements. And then at the end of every F3 workout, we have something called a COT, or a Circle of Trust.

And it’s a place for men to kind of lay down their burdens next to their brothers, where we can pick it up together. The old saying, a burden shared is half a burden, a joy shared is twice the joy, something along those lines. And so, it’s a place where you can kind of lay down your burden and say, hey, help. And I’ve heard everything in those things. But there was something about that end piece, laying my hand on another guy, ’cause you get in kind of a big circle and you kind of huddle up and then feeling that energy from other men, who were in the same spot I was trying to figure this out together. It was just magical. It was magical. So I kind of jumped all in, both feet and ended up finding myself in just weird coincidental places. [chuckle] If you’re a believer in coincidence, then it was coincidental. For me, it was providential. And I just would find myself bumping into the right kind of people, and just volunteering and jumping in to say, yeah, no, I can help with that or whatever it might be around sort of the F3 universe.

And then pretty soon, became really good friends with Dredd, Dave Redding, and we kind of figured out how we’re gonna do this together. So, there was a guy he handed it off to, and then that guy, stepped down and handed it off to me. And that’s the way it’ll always go forever. And I think, kind of to touch on both things, how I got involved and why I got involved is, A, how it was almost by accident, and how I became the leader of this whole deal, I think also was almost, again, coincidence or however you wanna look at it, but almost by accident. Where I just sort of right place, right time. And I think God put me where he wanted me to be. But I think that the nice thing or maybe the nice thing, but the beautiful thing about this is that, I will serve for a period of time, and then I will have accomplished what I need to, and I’ll hand it off to somebody else.

And so, to kind of harken back to the how do you decentralize this thing is, first thing you have is a mission. Second thing you have is no ego. I can’t lead, the mission must lead. The mission must take us to the next level. The mission must take us where we wanna go. I’ll help make decisions along the way, to support that mission or to move us forward toward that mission. But ultimately, that’s how we decentralize it. Is we only commit ourselves to these very few things. We don’t try and run an organization. We try and keep a mission in men’s hearts, and they’ll run the organization. They’ll figure it out where they are. You guys will figure it out there in Tulsa.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, like how, your life has obviously changed because of your involvement with F3, but how have you seen other men’s lives change during your involvement with F3?

Frank Schwartz: Sure. There’s easy ways, obvious ways, guys lose weight, they get a little more fit, they start looking better in the mirror, their health gets better, their mindset gets better. That’s the easy stuff. We have seen things in F3 where, look, and one of our core principles is that it’s open to all men, no matter what. So number one is it’s always free, as you mentioned. Number two is that it’s open to all men. And when we say all men, we absolutely mean it, Brett. And so, we have convicted felons working out next to billionaires in the same workout. You’d never know. You’d never know. And so, the way that this changes men or the things that it does, is it turns a light on in their hearts again, because it doesn’t matter what your lifestyle has been or will be. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you came from. What matters is that you’re a man. When you are a man, you have this need inside you. You have this desire inside you. And the world has a tendency to try and figure out a way to quiet that spark down.

To get that drive tamped down so that we can control you, and we can make sure that you become non-dangerous to the things that we’re trying to do. So F3 kind of wakes you up. And so, we hear stories of guys who beat alcoholism. We’ve saved marriages, and guys attribute it to F3. And people who have been steeped in addiction, who have come out of it because they say, “Hey, being around you guys has made me realize I got to do better in my life.” And turn their lives around. So it’s almost innumerable. The number of stories that we could tell, that are out there in guys that in a very acute way, “I changed my life today.” That’s almost innumerable. Probably in some ways, for every single guy, however many there are, we estimate something like 75,000, 80,000 guys. So there’s 80,000 different stories that we could tell of how it impacted a man’s life and made his life better.

Brett McKay: That’s awesome. So I wanted to bring you on the podcast today to talk about leading groups, like leading men’s groups or even just forming a group of guys who, you’re trying to get some friends going. So I know a lot of our listeners, that’s something that they’ve been trying to do. They struggle with, and they run into these issues and they just feel like it’s impossible. So I wanna tap into your expertise with your experience, establishing the culture in F3 of where guys get together. And you also have other leadership experience as well. And maybe you can find some insights from F3, that we can apply to other domains of our lives ’cause I think you can. So the first question is, you hear a lot about the male loneliness crisis. Men today, they seem incredibly lonely. They’re looking for friends. But at the same time, men, they seem resistant to joining a community group or even getting things going with another guy just to hang out. What do you think is going on there? What’s the tension going on there? What do you think’s behind that?

Frank Schwartz: I tell you, here’s what I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that the hesitancy on the part of men to do this kind of thing is, well, a number of things. One is fear. Terrifying. He’s afraid to fail. He’s afraid to fail, and he’s afraid to have people criticize him. He’s afraid to say, “I’m making a stand, because that’s not an easy thing to do.” And I think guys are afraid of that. And I don’t blame them. It ain’t fun, to have other people be like, you suck. So I think there’s some of that. I think there’s some fear and some trepidation around doing that kind of thing. But I think also, it’s kind of like we were alluding to before, the thing that I think keeps guys from doing this, is they really believe that there’s some right way to do it that they’ve been just kept out of the loop. They just don’t get to know what that right way is. And other people seem to be doing it just fine, but gosh, why won’t anyone write the book so I can just follow the program?

Well, the problem is there’s no program. And if you believe there’s a program, that just means you’re following somebody else’s dream. You’re following somebody else’s way of doing it. And so, I think that to some degree, it’s like, why won’t a guy do this? Well, ’cause he thinks there’s a right way to do it, and he’s afraid to fail. I think that’s a lot of it. And I think guys get lonely because they have been convinced that somehow that that’s what they are, and that that’s the epidemic. And so, we just believe it. We’re like, well, I guess we’re lonely. If they say so, I guess we’re lonely. They’re the ones doing the research. Or maybe sometimes I think too, they’re like, I’m afraid of putting myself out there. I don’t really wanna get hurt. I don’t really wanna whatever. I don’t wanna lead. I don’t wanna have to take on all that responsibility and all that kind of stuff. But I also think, that one of the things that keeps a guy from feeling that connection or wanting that or whatever it might be, or to start a group like this is, he just thinks that, again, since he thinks there’s some way to do it right, that he shouldn’t start until he knows that exact way. When the fact of the matter is, and again, this probably as well or better than anyone, is you won’t know until you get out there and start.

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: You just got to start. You just got to do something. And I think the momentum will help carry you, but this alleged epidemic of loneliness, and I do think it exists. I think that people do feel lonely. I think it gets solved by doing things, by being out there and being with people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you hear people talk about a lot like, oh, well, we no longer have any third places anymore to go to, et cetera. And it’s like, well, you can make a third place, like find a park and do a workout. Nothing’s stopping you from doing that.

Frank Schwartz: Nothing, it’s funny. And not that you and I frequent Starbucks as a whole lot necessarily, but I love that the new CEO brought mugs back.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if he has the intention of turning it back into more of a gathering place or a third place or whatever you wanna call it. I don’t know. But nothing says, get out of here, like a paper cup with a sleeve, that they shove at the end of a counter and they just yell your name. They don’t want you to stay. They want you to get out. They got to turn tables, man, ’cause they got money to make. ‘Cause they got investors and shareholders to answer to. And so, you don’t have to wait for Starbucks to create a third place for you, although I do see it starting to trend more maybe back that way. You don’t have to wait for church. And you and I both know, theoretically, that should be a great third place to do that. It doesn’t end up that way sometimes. And so, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. I was telling somebody this morning, actually, men look around people, look around a lot and go, somebody ought to do something about that.

The thing that we teach and that we talk about a ton in F3 for sure is, hey, if you think that thought, the instant you think that thought, the next thought ought to be looking in the mirror and going, wait, I just remembered, I’m that somebody.

Brett McKay: Yeah, totally agree. It’s that whole Tocquevillian ethos, Alexis de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, talked about, when he came to America, he noticed how Americans at the time, if there was like a tree in the middle of a road, they would just form a group together and solve it. They wouldn’t wait around. He said, well, in Europe, they would like, wait, okay, who are we supposed to go to to get this thing?

Frank Schwartz: Which government agency is gonna fix this? Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I feel like we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve kind of become like Europeans in the 19th century that Tocqueville was criticizing.

Frank Schwartz: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. And I think that’s why I’m so grateful that, well, I say I found F3, but I think F3 found me, to a large degree. And I think that’s the way it always goes. If you want something good in your life, you’ll either find this or it’ll find you. But that’s been the best thing is it’s like, guys no longer, guys that I hang out with anyway, we don’t sit around going, somebody ought to do that. It’s done before anybody had the thought of whether or not it should get done. ‘Cause we knew it should get done.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something I’ve seen in different organizations, whether it’s like a sort of informal group of individuals, just guys trying to get together to do a workout together, a poker night once a month, or even more structured organizations like at a church group, you’ll see this phenomenon, you’ll get it going and then you’ll have guys who enthusiastically show up once or twice, and then they just vanish. You’re like, man, what happened? What’s going on? So what do you think is going on there? Is it a failure of unmet expectations or something else going on?

Frank Schwartz: I think it’s a similar problem. You know what January 19th is? I think it’s the 19th.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s like Quitter’s Day or whatever?

Frank Schwartz: Quitter’s Day, right. [laughter] Exactly. So I think some of it’s that. Everybody starts with great intentions, but boy, when the rubber meets the road and it starts to get hard, I don’t wanna show up for that. Someone’s supposed to… I’m supposed to be entertained, Brett. My phone taught me that. I’m supposed to be a consumer. The commercials, my YouTube pre-rolls taught me that. I’m supposed to just eat and drink and be merry. I’m not supposed to go do stuff. I’m not supposed to be something. And so, I think guys show up, and it happens in F3, as you might imagine. Some guys come out and they blaze out, and I always get nervous. The guys who are just a little too enthusiastic, and I want to be like, eh, you’re gonna need to save some for the fifth lap here, biggin’. You need to pump the brakes just a little bit because consistency, is gonna beat energy every time.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Forever and ever, amen. Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Simon Sinek talks about the infinite game. I don’t know if you read that one, but it’s a fantastic book. And essentially, he kind of says, most of us run around with this sort of finite mindset that there’s winners and there’s losers. And there are in sports, in places where there is a definite ending, a finite time period or whatever it might be, but there’s no winning in life. It is not a race. It never has been a race. It’s a journey that we’re all on together, theoretically. Or we should be. And I think it’s part of our culture where it’s like, well, I showed up to the gym three times, I’m not in shape. I can’t figure this out, I quit. And you go, well, no, you have to show up for months and years. And then you have to stay at it. There’s no arrival. Again, it’s this finite mindset of, well, I thought after three times it was gonna be perfect for me. And you go, well, the only way it was gonna get perfect for you brother, is if you stood up and made it perfect for you.

You have to do it. You have to be the one responsible. You have to be the one involved. And so, even if you showed up to church or to the poker night or whatever, and after a couple of times you were like, this was great, maybe something didn’t go your way and you’re like, well, screw that. I’m supposed to have everything I want all the time. Man, what a finite mindset. You’re just, you’re setting yourself up for failure. But if you recognize that everything you do has purpose, because it’s part of this long and infinite journey toward your ultimate self-actualization or whatever term you wanna put on it, but for you to become what it is that you were meant to become, if you recognize that, and you can kind of, I hate the term, but lean into that. Man, your life becomes infinitely better because you realize you’re playing a long game. You’re playing a very different game than other people are playing. And that’s what I think is the great thing about F3, and really Art of Manliness and a lot of the things that are out there, that we’re doing is because it isn’t a finite thing.

Everything that you see and encounter is a tool to help you on this journey, and to make you a better person as you go. And I think people forget that, and they think, well, I didn’t win after the third time, so I don’t wanna do that. I wanna go where I feel good and happy and get my dopamine hit all the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, I’ve seen that in my experience with different groups, whether it’s a church or even just friend groups, or we even see this on The Strenuous Life within our geographic groups. I think some guys, they go into these, like, oh man, here’s a group of guys doing things. I want to be part of this community. And then I think they have what’s called, my wife, she wrote this great series on our Substack, Dying Breed, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on how to live in a spiritual community. And Bonhoeffer talked about one problem he sees, is that a lot of people have, he calls it the wish dream of community, this idealized version of what it should be. And then once they actually encounter the reality of it, it doesn’t meet that. And they’re like, this sucks. It’s not as great. I’m not getting what I thought I’d get out of this. I’m out of here. And I’ve seen that in so many groups, where people, I think they have too high expectations or they have this overly idealized version, it’s gonna be like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Everyone’s just in the barber shop, singing, playing the banjo, and it’s this community. And community can be that, but it’s also, you have to deal with just annoying people. You have to deal with friction. And it’s like, I tell people, if you want community, you have to want all of it. You have to want the good stuff and also the frustrating parts of it as well.

Frank Schwartz: Oh man. Preach as they would say.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Because that’s exactly it. We’ve been taught to think, and I don’t know, maybe this existed before and we just didn’t know, because it wasn’t as prevalent and it wasn’t in our face like it is now with social media. But certainly, social media has made it so that we look around and I look around and we go, well, but they’re in Italy again. We think that only the good parts get to exist and if there’s bad parts it’s because we did something wrong or the thing is wrong or whatever because the lie is that everything is, it’s utopia all the time. But the messy is what teaches you the things you need to know, so that you can refine and make it better as you go. So when you show up to the whatever it is or if you start the whatever it is, and I can’t tell you, and you probably did the same thing before AOM or Strenuous Life or any of those things came along too. I’ve started, I don’t even know how many things that have just gone out either in a nice blaze of glory failure or a slow whimper into the death in the corner failure.

I’ve started all kinds of groups. I’ve tried all kinds of crazy things to try and get done what I wanna get done or to bring people together or whatever it might be. And then I just look and go, well, it’s kind of that Thomas Edison idea. I didn’t invent a light bulb. I invented 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb. [laughter] I didn’t discover the light bulb or whatever it was. And I feel similarly. I didn’t discover how to lead a men’s group. I discovered lots of ways to do it wrong. And then, I’ve tried to practice on the other end how to maybe not do it so wrong this time.

Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s continual learning, Kaizen, or whatever you wanna call it.

Frank Schwartz: Sure.

Brett McKay: Talking about your experiences forming communities, can it be intentionally engineered or does it have to be random or serendipity or is it a mixture of both?

Frank Schwartz: I’m gonna say, yeah, it’s probably a mixture of both to some degree. I don’t like the word engineered, just because I think it implies that there is something that you can build. I want my bridges engineered, ’cause I don’t want them to break. We don’t want a lot of failure when it comes to bridges. So I don’t mind failure when it comes to people, because that’s life. That’s just part of how we do it. So I think intentionally engineered, maybe not engineered, but does it have to be intentional? Boy, I tell you what, it better be. It better be. ‘Cause it can’t be complete chaos and just hope for the best. I think just like any good leader or any good leadership model, you’ve got to have a mission in mind. You’ve got to have an end state in mind. Where are we headed? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish here? And not just tasks, but what, again, going back to Cynic, what he might say is a just cause. What is that thing that is much bigger than all of us that we’re trying to get to?

And if we have a good sense of what that is, then we can be intentional toward that. And then what you have to do, I think is you have to allow for the chaos around you. So you be intentional about the things that are supposed to be controlled, which is adherence to mission maybe, or enforcing standards when it comes to like, hey, you’re not living the core principles or whatever. But that’s more of an arm around a guy and telling him in a one-on-one kind of thing. But then I think you have to allow for the chaos around you and the serendipitous accidents or whatever you wanna call them. And it’s actually a good example, in a way, to harken back to the early days and kind of the founding of F3. And I don’t remember, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the original podcast that you were talking about from ’15 or ’17, whatever it was. But the guy, the group that this sort of broke off from, was a guy who wanted to control things.

He was capping the membership. He was the one leading every time, stuff like that. But what was recognized was, if I let go of control, and if I let go of the leadership and if I simply teach others to lead, rather than try and be the leader all the time and if I adapt to the circumstances that are in front of me and incorporate them, then I’ll come out with a better product. If it had only gone the way that Dave and Tim and even myself, if I was only willing to accept the things that I think are good ideas, we’d die. We’d die. I have some good ideas every once in a while, but that’s why the other thing I would people who are starting groups, don’t do it by yourself. Don’t do it by yourself. You can be the person that has most of the vision or you might be the good organizer or whatever, but by golly, you better find some people who have some complementary skill sets and mindsets and bring them in, and you’ve got to influence them and love them into buying into the dream and the mission of what you’re trying to get done.

‘Cause, there’s no way I could do this thing by myself. So I embrace the chaos, because either A, I’ll get stronger as a man or a leader, or B, I’ll learn some stuff that will actually make the group much stronger. There might be ideas that it’s like, oh, well that actually is a whole different direction we might take things that we hadn’t thought of before. If it was up to me or if it was just up to my vision or our initial thoughts, it would be engineered to failure.

Brett McKay: That makes sense. It makes total sense. I’m curious if you’ve seen this problem in groups or in F3, ’cause I’ve seen it in groups that I’ve belonged to. Everyone joins a group for different reasons. You think they’re all joining for the same reason, but oftentimes they’re not. I’m sure for F3, it’s the same thing. Some guys, they just want the workout. Others are there for the friends. Others are there for the leadership training. I’ve seen this in other groups where I belong to, where you think, oh, you’re here for this thing, and then you see them getting really persnickety about another issue. It’s like, oh, actually you’re not here for that thing. And then it causes all this conflict. So how do you balance competing ends in a group?

Frank Schwartz: Well, I often say if it was easy, we wouldn’t need leaders. You got to recognize that any time you do one thing, you’re gonna get dynamically more of it, and dynamically less of something else. And so, there is always this eternal tension in leadership of figuring out all the different competing factors. So one thing I would say is, yes, everyone joins a group for their own reason, but they stay typically for a very similar reason. And I think ultimately for a successful group, I think they have to stay for the mission. If they’re dedicated to the mission, if they see those things and if they’ve experienced something in that group where they go, no, no, but I understand what we’re really trying to get done here, then you can look past a lot of the other stuff. Dave introduced me to something he called the Augustinian Code, although apparently it’s dubious as to whether or not St. Augustine actually said it. And that is in essentials, we will have unity. In non-essentials, we will have liberty. But in all things, we will have charity. And so, I think you have a desire and a dedication and a focus on a mission, and then a guy joins for whatever reason he joins for.

But I think he stays because he says, no, I understand that there’s stuff that is greater than me, these things that are bigger than me. Those are things that I serve. I take myself out of it. And then he stays because he wants the same thing we want, which is, in our case, to help build leaders and to unlock men’s hearts and minds so that they can be maximally effective in their areas of influence, whatever that might be. So I think that’s the answer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the key there is just communicate the mission constantly. And…

Frank Schwartz: That’s all I do.

0:32:36.2 Brett McKay: Yeah, and if you think you’ve communicated it enough, you probably haven’t. So in a traditional leadership setting, say like a company or even a church, there’s typically a clear hierarchy, like president, vice presidents, et cetera. F3 doesn’t have that in these groups. So what does leadership look like in a decentralized volunteer community like F3? ‘Cause I’m sure, there’s lessons we can take from F3 to any other voluntary group that you might belong to.

Frank Schwartz: Well, that is our hope. In fact, we would like you to take it to the non-voluntary groups that you belong to as well. ‘Cause I think there’s things that we can teach about leadership that are definitely applicable in every area of life, even those that are non-voluntary. But to your point, I think the number one thing to remember is, you said, what is decentralized leadership? It looks messy. That’s what it looks like. [laughter] To have no leader, set person that you’re like, well, he just told me, I guess I have to do it, is messy. And it’s funny because this is something that came up early on in my sort of serving at a national level in F3 was, one of the guys got really frustrated and he was like, “What are the men thinking? Why can’t they just do the thing that I want them to do? What are they thinking?” And I had to say, I was like, well, I think they think that they’re free to lead. [laughter] I think this is your fault. You taught them, that they’re leaders and then when they do the thing, they’re trying to lead, you get mad at them.

So it’s kind of funny. But I think that we want you to recognize in a decentralized situation, that every person ultimately is responsible for the outcome of their own lives. And so, if they’re leading a workout that day, yeah, they might be responsible for the individual outcome of that workout. And they may have sort of positions or kind of different areas of responsibility or something within a region or group of F3 or whatever. I have a different job, I guess, technically, than maybe some others. But ultimately, it isn’t that one job is more important than another. It’s understanding that A, if I called the guys in Tulsa and said, hey, you’re gonna do this for your workout tomorrow. When they stopped laughing, we could probably have a discussion about it. Right?

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: I can’t tell anyone what to do. I wouldn’t even pretend to. I wouldn’t attempt it, because number one, it’s not my job. Number two, they understand now, that they’re the ones with the responsibility. And coming from me, it would be comical, because they ask me questions all the time. Guys ask questions like, well, how old should a kid be before we let him come to an F3 workout? Man, you’re looking for a rule and I get that and I understand why you want it. But ultimately, you have to make that decision. You’re the one responsible. And I know that frustrates you, but that’s just the way that it is. I can’t tell you what to do. So my job is not to tell you what to do. My job is to stand and to help you discover the right answer that you already know or that you have in your heart. Or what is the answer that aligns most with the mission that we theoretically all believe in? That kind of a thing. And so, I think it looks messy, but it also looks like just a lot of love, a lot of influence. I don’t remember how many times I’ve not answered a question to a guy, but suddenly at the end of our conversation, he seems to know what to do.

Brett McKay: No, I’ve had that experience too with The Strenuous Life.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, right.

Brett McKay: I’ll get questions from guys like, well, does this count for this requirement? Or if I do this, will it count? Or how about if I do this for our group? Is that okay? And we have this guiding principle in The Strenuous Life. I’m sure Strenuous Life listeners know what I’m about to say. Phronesis, which comes from the Greek, ancient Greeks, and it’s basically practical wisdom. It’s like knowing what the right thing to do for the right reason, the right time, for the right purpose. And I just tell people, use your phronesis, man. Use your brain. You’ve got it. I trust you. You can make that decision.

Frank Schwartz: It’s in there.

Brett McKay: And a lot of guys, they get frustrated with that, ’cause they just wanna be told exactly what to do. I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. I want you to develop this capacity to make decisions and use your judgment.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. I think that fundamentally, and this is something that I think is so critical to leadership of any kind, certainly of any small group, and very, very certainly of any sort of volunteer-type organization, like what we’re doing out here. It’s a different one when you got a boss and a boss can just tell you what to do or they can threaten you to get fired or whatever. That’s not leadership. That’s just management. And so, if you’re gonna be in real leadership, I think another thing that we forget amongst the many, is that this is a love endeavor. This is a love endeavor. And our world has taught us that, if I love you, that I will kind of plow the road ahead of you and you never have to worry about anything. I will accept you exactly as you are, and I will let you do whatever you want because that’s love. But it’s not, it’s permissiveness. And permissiveness actually is it’s own kind of sin in my estimation. And so, I think that what you’re talking about there, that’s real love.

Real love is loving you enough to let you fail. It’s loving you enough to let you figure it out and struggle through it and make your own decision. Dude, if I could just tell my kids exactly what to do, and have them do it, my life would be infinitely easier. Infinitely easier. It is messy and horrifying, that I send them on their way and I’m like, and they come to me and they’re like, dad, what should I do? And I look at them and I go, you’ve been taught how to make decisions. I think you should do that. They don’t love that. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: As you might imagine. But that’s how I answer the things to the guys in F3 too. They’re like, well, what should we do? I think you should employ those tactics and those techniques that you’ve learned along the way on how to make decisions, and you should do that. Because I can’t tell you and I should not tell you. In fact, I love you too much to tell you. You have to know for yourself. If I tell you, it’s what I think, if it goes wrong, then it’s my fault, if it goes right, then it was my success somehow, and I love you too much. You get to do this. This is your deal.

Brett McKay: How should leaders of small groups of men, whether it’s a church or you got a book club or whatever, how should they define success?

Frank Schwartz: That’s a good question. Every group is gonna have it’s own definition, I’m sure. And so, I would say, success looks like adherence to whatever that mission is. So for me, how about this? How about I answer it this way? For F3, here’s what I think success looks like. And guys all over the country and even our board sometimes and certainly from outside organizations, look and they’re like, well, how are you measuring success? And I’m like, well, that’s a good question. It sounds like you probably have an opinion about that. Why don’t you tell me what you think? And they’re like, well, growth numbers. Like how many men are in F3? You should be tracking that. You should know. And I’m like, okay, but what if every guy in F3 is an idiot? But we have 500,000 of them, but they’re idiots. And they’re like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Exactly. So that can’t be it. Okay, well, what if we have only 10 guys that are in it, but they’re really dedicated to the mission? Is that success? Again, I go, well maybe. I don’t know. Here’s what I know.

For me, success looks like, I wore myself out, my personal success. I wore myself out in the service of the mission. And I think success across the organization, for us anyway, is largely anecdotal. It’s the stories I hear about men saying, I recaptured my life. My wife and I get along now. We snatched our marriage from the jaws of divorce. Or it looks like I quit drugs and alcohol. Or I lost 100 pounds or whatever it is. The individual results of “success” I think you’re gonna have as many, as there are individual guys. So I think success for us, is knowing that we did the best we could to adhere to the mission and serve the thing that is greater than us. That’s the best I can answer on that one.

Brett McKay: Something I’ve had to struggle with as a leader of different groups I belong to, is cultivating the patience that’s often required to lead whenever it seems like things are just going slower than you want. Have you had that struggle as well? And if so, what have you done to overcome it?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no, I struggle from a condition known as perpetual dissatisfaction. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if you’ve said something similar, but no, patience is not my jam. I tend to move fast. I decide things fast. I live fast. In fact, a guy, CEO of a very large fitness company just yesterday was like, “You have an intensity issue.” And I was like, do I? That’s interesting coming from you, but okay. So I recognize that that’s my bias. I say that to say, I have tons of biases, Brett. And I’m always gonna be slightly dissatisfied. I’m always gonna think that it’s not moving fast enough. I’m always gonna be unhappy with the result of something. I’m happy with a lot of results too. Don’t get the impression that I walk around sad all the time going like, why can’t everything be wonderful? It’s not that at all. But I know that I have biases. So the advice that I would give to someone starting a thing or who’s looking to lead in any way, the way to cultivate that patience, is to segment your life a little bit. So exhibit patience where in those environments where it’s appropriate. And then by golly, get yourself a mentor and get yourself a small group.

In F3, we call them shield locks. You lock shields with two, three other guys. And those are the guys that hear the best and the worst and the hardest and the whatever. And I unload it to those guys and they get to hear it. And then they get to tell me that my head is in my rear end, or they get to tell me where I might be choosing poorly or where I might be choosing well. So, okay, it’s not moving as fast as I want. Fine. Too bad. It’s moving as fast as it can. It’s moving as fast as it’s supposed to. The analogy I give a lot of times to guys, is I go, all right, ’cause I’ll say it in their marriage. Something went wrong in their marriage, and they’re struggling. And then, they’re trying to make good on it, but they can’t seem to get their wife to forgive them and to move forward or whatever. And I said, well, here’s the thing.

You think of it like a seed that you put in the ground, and you can put all the nutrients you want in that soil and you can cover it up at the perfect depth, and you can measure the pH and the moisture content and you can make this thing just as optimal, the perfect amount of sunshine, keep the temperature, whatever it is. But that seed, is gonna sprout above the edge of that soil, when it is darn good and ready. And the only thing you can do, is to consistently try and create a perfect environment or as optimal an environment as you possibly can. That’s your job as the leader in the group or in the organization or whatever it might be. That’s your job, is to consistently try and create optimal conditions so that when growth is ready to happen, it happens. So again, we get our minds caught in this finite game of, well, but I didn’t get this done by X date. And so, it must be not going well, or it must be a failure or any number of things. And I just say, no man, again, I think you’re just, you’re playing the wrong game as a leader, particularly of a volunteer organization.

But I think as a leader in general, it only serves us to remember, that this is an infinite game, that goes on forever and ever and ever. And so, patience is all you have. Time is all you have. You can’t control any of the other factors. I can do what I can to maintain an optimal environment. And then when that seed is ready, it’ll come up.

Brett McKay: Well, Frank, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about F3?

Frank Schwartz: Just go outside and whether you hear some crazy guys in a parking lot somewhere barking in cadence, then you’ll know. That’s where we, no, I’m just kidding. Yeah, go to f3nation.com. There’s a place like if you’ve never heard of F3 before, and you think to yourself, man, that sounds like a thing I might wanna try. Go to f3nation.com. You’ll see a link in there up at the top that says locations. I think it’s under new or get started or something, I don’t remember now. But you find the map, find the locations, find one near you. And men, just show up. Just show up. And then we’ll help you through the rest. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll guide you. We’ll get you moving. But yeah, go someplace. Just find one near you, and show up. And you can read all about us on the website there.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Frank Schwartz, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Frank Schwartz: Brett, I appreciate the time, my friend. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Frank Schwartz. He’s the CEO of F3. You can find more information about F3 at f3nation.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/mensgroups. We find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not just to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few weeks ago, I came across an article about how young people these days are tired of dating apps and want to meet romantic partners in real life. You know — the way people developed relationships in the good old days of the former millennium.  

The only problem? The kids today don’t know how to take part in the dynamic that kickstarts the in-person development of romantic relationships: flirting.

The Death of Real-World Flirting

Several factors have contributed to the lack of flirting ability among young adults.

The biggest one is smartphones. Because Gen Z and Gen Alpha have lived in a world where they could mediate all their communication through a device, many haven’t developed the social skills necessary for adept, in-person flirting. This has resulted in increased social anxiety when striking up conversations with potential romantic interests.

Dating apps have also exacerbated the decline in flirting ability. The nice thing about dating apps is that they guarantee initial, mutual romantic interest. You can only chat with someone on an app if they’ve also expressed interest. It takes the uncertainty and risk out of shooting your shot. When you flirt in real life, you don’t have the same guarantee. The person you approach may or may not be interested, and the only way to find out is by chatting them up and engaging in flirty banter.

COVID lockdowns didn’t help flirting skill development either. When I spoke with Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies and the author of The Five Flirting Styles, he observed: “Post pandemic, there’s a lot of young folks who kind of missed out on some key developmental stages where you fall in love for the first time and interact with the opposite sex. A lot of young adults in their twenties right now, because of the pandemic, missed out on what it felt like to have those experiences.”

A final factor in the demise of flirting is the increased skittishness modern men feel as to what’s appropriate in terms of making romantic overtures towards women and what might come off as creepy or as sexual harassment.

To help young dudes who want to revive flirting and strike up relationships with women in real life, I took a deep dive into the research around this timeless skill. Here’s what I learned.

What Is Flirting?

Researchers define flirting as a mix of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that express attraction and gauge the other person’s receptivity to a romantic relationship. A coy smile, a playful tease, a casual lean forward, a compliment — all are flirtatious signals across cultures.

Here’s an important thing about flirting: it’s usually ambiguous. When you’re interested in a woman, you typically don’t just blurt out: “I think you’re hot and want you to be my girlfriend!” You’d risk immediate rejection from unrequited attraction. It would really weird the gal out. And it would be super ineffective: ambiguity is what makes flirting work and builds attraction; certainty is boring, while uncertainty turns our brains on and makes a situation or a person compelling.

The ambiguity of flirting allows you to show your interest without outright declaring it. It’s a way to test the waters in a low-pressure way. If the other person responds positively (smiles back, laughs, touches your arm), the flirtation can escalate; if not, both can save face by pretending it was just friendly banter.

There’s a thrill in trying to figure out if someone is picking up what you’re laying down. But because the uncertainty inherent to flirting is not just exciting but confusing, young people often want to avoid it. For those used to the security of dating apps, engaging in this dicey dynamic can feel too socially risky.

The 5 Flirting Styles

When we typically think of flirting, we think of it as something extroverted that you do in bars and clubs where you throw out pick-up lines with sexual innuendos.

Jeffrey Hall has found that’s actually just one type of flirting style among many.

Hall has identified five distinct flirting styles that people naturally tend toward. Understanding these styles can help you recognize your own approach and read others’ signals better:

1. Traditional: Follows conventional gender roles where men initiate and women respond. Values courtesy but can lead to missed opportunities.
2. Physical: Openly expresses sexual attraction through body language and touch. Great for quickly establishing chemistry but can come on too strong.
3. Sincere: Creates emotional connections through meaningful conversation. Most effective for starting long-term relationships but can be mistaken for mere friendliness.
4. Playful: Treats flirting as a fun game or confidence boost. Creates excitement but can send mixed signals about serious intent.
5. Polite: Emphasizes courtesy, respect, and subtlety. Comfortable for everyone involved but often so subtle that interest goes unnoticed.

Based on Hall’s research, there’s no best way to flirt. All the different styles can lead to romantic relationships. The best thing to do is to lean into the flirting style that’s most natural for you. Doing so will not only allow you to be more authentic, which is attractive, but help ensure you find someone who’s compatible with you. If you have a sincere flirting style, you’re probably not going to get along with someone who’s a more extroverted, physical flirt. And that’s okay! “I wrote this book [The Five Flirting Styles] to my younger self because I wanted to know that the way that I communicated attraction was okay,” Hall told me. “You don’t have to be some suave, dashing guy to flirt effectively.”

These styles aren’t mutually exclusive. You might be mostly sincere with a dash of playfulness, or mostly polite but become physical once you feel more secure with someone.

If you want to know what your flirting style is, you can take Hall’s flirting inventory here.

Science-Backed Tips to Improve Your Real-World Flirting

Research shows that flirting is a learnable skill. Here are evidence-based tips to help improve your game:

Have fun and keep it light! This is the most important tip. Studies suggest a lighthearted attitude makes flirting more effective because it puts both people at ease. “When you have a mentality of being interested and excited about another person and just having fun with them, it shifts your perception and your behavior,” Hall explains. “Being present for the moment and enjoying the excitement of meeting someone who has romantic potential actually changes your nonverbal behavior. You can become more attractive in the eyes of the other person.”

Make her feel good about herself. Flirting is about expressing attraction, and it feels good to feel attractive! If you approach a flirtatious encounter with the mindset of helping someone feel good about herself, you’ll do well.

Start with basics. Smile and make (non-creepy) eye contact. Studies consistently show these simple signals indicate approachability and interest.

Use humor. Both men and women rate humor as highly effective in sparking attraction. Telling a funny story or offering a little gentle teasing creates rapport. Equally important: laughing at her jokes shows you appreciate her sense of humor.

Be a good social dance partner. Flirting is a social dance. Ask questions and show genuine curiosity. When she asks you a question, answer her and then throw the social ball back to her.

Mind your body language and create light touch when appropriate. Uncross your arms, face the person, and lean in slightly. If the situation allows, brief touches — like a tap on the arm when making a point — can enhance connection.

Show clear intent and follow up. If things are going well, you should segue into making your romantic interest more explicit. Hall’s research has found that “when you make very direct requests like, ‘I enjoyed our time together, I want to see you again, can I get a way to contact you?’ and the other person says yes,” it clearly shows that the flirting between you and the other person was indeed flirting, and not just friendly banter. “It says, ‘I’m interested in you as a person for romantic reasons, not just having a nice conversation.’ Showing clear intent can help you avoid the friend-zone.”

Also, make sure to follow up if there’s mutual attraction. “Lots of young women’s complaints about men’s behavior on flirting is men don’t follow up,” Hall says. While men often think they need to increase their allure by playing it cool and making a woman wait to hear from them, this isn’t the case: “There’s very clear research that being consistently available, showing clear interest repeatedly in a woman when there’s mutual attraction is key to creating a romantic relationship.”

Will a Man Come Off as Creepy If He Tries to Flirt With a Woman in Real Life?

A lot of young men hesitate to flirt in real life because they’re afraid they’ll come off as creepy. Hall says this worry is unfounded:

“If you’re worried about coming off as creepy, then you’re probably not the creep. Creeps don’t think that they’re being creepy. If you’re concerned about whether you’re coming on too strong, that’s okay. It means that you’re actually aware that how you treat another person matters. You’ll be fine.”

Just observe how your overtures are received, reading a woman’s signals as to whether your advances are welcome or not, and proceed accordingly.

How to Tell if a Woman Is Flirting With You

Flirting is a social dance, but how do you know if someone wants to flirt with you? It’s hard! Research found that men correctly spotted flirting only 36% of the time.

Signs a woman might be flirting with you include: frequent smiling and laughing (especially at your jokes), maintaining eye contact or making coy glances, finding reasons to be physically close or lightly touching you, playful teasing, asking personal questions, and offering compliments.

The key is looking for multiple signals appearing together over and over again. One smile doesn’t mean much, but if someone is laughing, leaning in, making eye contact, AND asking about your weekend plans — that’s strong evidence of flirting.

Make sure to check out our detailed article on how to tell if a woman is interested in you.

Conclusion

If you’re a young dude wanting to meet women out in the real world, you’ll need to up your flirting game.

As Hall advises, “This is truly some of the best stuff you’re ever gonna do in life. So prioritize it — even when you’re like, ‘I could go out to this party and there’s new people and it could be uncomfortable.’ Go to the party anyway. Everyone feels uncomfortable when they’re talking to new people. Do it anyway. The stakes aren’t nearly as high as you’ve imagined them to be. And it’s fun!”

So get out there and practice. Strike up conversations at coffee shops, bookstores, or social events. Start small with a simple smile and hello and see where it goes from there. Keep your flirting light and fun and don’t worry about the outcome. By doing so, you’ll paradoxically find that romantic success naturally follows.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I’ve been doing this dad thing for almost 15 years now. During that time, I’ve read books and articles about how I can be a better parent.

One parenting framework I’ve found helpful in rearing my kiddos comes from a child development researcher named Diana Baumrind.

Back in the 1960s, Baumrind observed how parents and children interacted in their homes. During her studies, she noticed parents typically resorted to different parenting styles, which could be placed along two dimensions: responsiveness and demandingness.

According to Baumrind, varying mixtures of responsiveness and demandingness resulted in several different parenting-style typologies, each of which was associated with a corresponding outcome in child behavior and well-being.

In today’s article, we’ll unpack what these styles look like and which, according to Baumrind (and subsequent childhood researchers), is the best for kids.

The 4 Parenting Styles

First, some definitions of responsiveness and demandingness:

Responsiveness (based on the level of warmth/supportiveness). This is all about how emotionally responsive and attuned a parent is to their children. A parent high in responsiveness is nurturing, affectionate, and accepting. Low-responsive parents are cold, rejecting, and uninvolved.

Demandingness (based on the level of control/expectations). This is about the extent to which parents set rules and expectations and enforce discipline. High-demand parents set high expectations for their children and consistently enforce those expectations. Low-demanding parents place few expectations on their children and rarely enforce the few rules they establish.

These two dimensions can be visualized on an x/y axis, with responsiveness occupying the x-axis and demandingness forming the y-axis.

Let’s unpack each quadrant:

Authoritarian Parenting (Low Responsiveness/High Demand)

The authoritarian parent is low on responsiveness but high on demandingness. This is the “because-I-said-so” parent who expects immediate obedience without explanation. Rules are non-negotiable, consequences are often harsh, and warmth can be in short supply.

Let’s say a kid throws a tantrum because he doesn’t want to stop playing video games to do his homework.

An authoritarian parent’s response to this situation might sound like: “Stop being lazy and do your homework now! We are not going to discuss this! And if I catch you on your Switch before it’s done, you’ll lose it for a month.”

Kids raised with the authoritarian parenting style are more likely to be socially withdrawn, more likely to be anxious or depressed, and might have behavior issues when they hit adolescence. The authoritarian parenting style doesn’t help children develop an internal locus of control. They don’t learn how to govern themselves because they’ve always had a parent to tell them exactly what to do.

Permissive Parenting (High Responsiveness/Low Demand)

The permissive parent flips the script of the authoritarian parent. They’re high on responsiveness but low on demandingness. This parent is warm and nurturing but sets few rules or expectations for their kids. Rules are always negotiable. They avoid confrontation and often treat their child more like a friend than someone they’re responsible for guiding.

To the child who doesn’t want to stop playing video games to do his homework, the permissive parent would say something like, “You don’t feel like doing homework right now? That’s alright, sweetie. Maybe work on it later, okay?”

As might be expected, kids with permissive parents struggle with self-discipline and impulse control, are more likely to be self-centered, and can have a harder time following rules in school or other structured environments.

The children of permissive parents often get the message that their wants should always be accommodated, which doesn’t prepare them well for the real world, where limits and frustrations are inevitable. They tend to flounder in adolescence and young adulthood.

Neglectful Parenting (Low Responsiveness/Low Demand)

Baumrind initially didn’t include neglectful parenting in her typologies. It was added later by child development researcher Eleanor Maccoby.

The neglectful parent is low on both responsiveness and demandingness. This parent offers their kids neither guidance and structure nor emotional support and nurturing. In extreme cases, the neglectful parent may fail to even meet their children’s basic needs.

A neglectful parent doesn’t care if their kid plays video games or does homework. If their child is having a hard time in school, the parent doesn’t even bat an eye. They’re just completely zoned out when it comes to caring for their children.

Not surprisingly, kids raised with this style tend to fare worst of all. Research shows that children who grow up with neglectful parents often develop attachment issues, are at higher risk for behavioral problems, and are more likely to engage in delinquent behavior.

Authoritative Parenting (High Responsiveness/High Demand)

The authoritative parent is high on both responsiveness and demandingness. And according to Baumrind, it’s the parenting style that provides the most benefits to kids.

Authoritative parents blend warmth and firmness. They set clear expectations for their children but explain the reasoning behind them. They’ll consistently enforce the rules, but not rigidly. They’re also warm and responsive to their children’s needs while still expecting an age-appropriate level of maturity from them.

In the video game/homework scenario, the authoritative parent would neither give in and let the kid keep playing video games, nor offer a harsh, “Get off now because I said so!” edict. Instead, they would approach their child with something like, “You know the rules. No video games before homework is finished. If you finish your homework now, you can get back to your Fortnite match. If you need some help with your homework, I’m happy to help.”

Kids raised by authoritative parents tend to have the best outcomes. According to Baumrind and subsequent child development researchers, kids raised with authoritative parents have better emotional regulation, perform better academically, become more self-reliant, and have a higher sense of agency than kids reared with other parenting styles.

Parenting Styles Aren’t Boxes — They’re a Flexible Framework

Like a lot of advice based on psychological research, there’s a tendency to treat parenting styles as rigid categories — as if being the “best” parent means consistently maintaining authoritative mode at all times.

The reality is that parents naturally shift between different styles depending on the situation and their kids’ needs.

If your 5-year-old is about to bolt into traffic, a stern, authoritarian “STOP RIGHT NOW!” works better than a warm, reasoned, authoritative explanation about road safety.

Some kids thrive with more nurturing and fewer demands, while others need firmer boundaries. Even the same child needs different approaches through various developmental stages.

The best parents aren’t parenting-style purists. Instead, they’re the ones who can read their child in the moment and respond effectively, even if that means changing their typical parenting approach.

In my 15 years as a dad, I’ve used authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles at different times (I don’t think I’ve ever been neglectful). I’ve had my days when I perfectly balance warmth with clear, firm expectations; I’ve also had days when stress and my kids’ petulance pushed me into authoritarian drill sergeant mode.

While I’m not a perfect dad, having the parenting style framework in the back of my mind as I interact with my kids has helped me aim for the authoritative ideal, while adjusting my approach to family life’s ever-changing dynamics.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Face-to-face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups, like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%.

But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon: rising aloneness without rising loneliness.

Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications. Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled “The Anti-Social Century.” In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments — and no, it’s not just the smartphone — that have created what he calls the “convenience curse.” We then get into why even self-described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating, sedentary leisure, and practical ways we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
• AoM Podcast #742: The Power of Talking to Strangers
• AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse
• AoM Podcast #176: The Vanishing Neighbor & The Transformation of American Community
• AoM Article: Use Technology Like the Amish

Connect With Derek Thompson

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. Face to face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%. But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon, rising aloneness without rising loneliness. Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications.

Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled the Anti-Social Century. In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments. And no, it’s not just the smartphone that have created what he calls the convenience curse. We then get into why even self described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating sedentary leisure and practical way we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/alone.

All right, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.

Derek Thompson: Great to be here. Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: So you recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century, which traces how much less time Americans are spending socializing than they used to. What are some of the numbers on this front? Like what’s been the general decline in in person socialization?

Derek Thompson: The basic story is that American socializing declined in the second half of the 20th century. And then in the early 21st century, it pretty much fell off a cliff. Overall, face to face socializing has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like black men and teenagers, decline is more like 40%. And so almost half of the face to face socializing that people had is gone now in just 20 years. That’s a remarkable remake of human experience. And then some of the individual statistics are really jarring, like the fact that couples now by, I think, a margin of 4 to 1, spend more time watching television together than talking to each other. Women who own cats. This one got me in trouble with some people, but I’ll say it here. Women who own cats now spend more time caring for their pets than they do speaking to another person in a face to face situation. So we’ve really seen just a total transformation of how Americans spend time with each other.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talked about how it’s particularly pronounced amongst young adults. There’s a line from the article, the share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours, has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s.

Derek Thompson: It’s pretty nuts. I don’t know what else to say. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s wild. And it’s one reason why when I found these statistics, I was like, I need to do something big on this. I write essays for The Atlantic. I have a podcast, Plain English, those outlets, those 1,000 word essays or 40 minute podcasts, those let me get a little bit into a subject like this. But I really was getting the sense that the decline in face to face socializing and its flip side, which is the rise of mere aloneness of absolute solitude, was becoming one of the most important social facts in America. And I think the implications of this decline in socializing that you’ve pointed to are just truly immense.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And besides some of the numbers we just mentioned, you talk about some of the things that Robert Putnam talked about in his book ‘Bowling Alone.’ The rate of people being involved with community organizations declined. The frequency of people entertaining at home like hosting friends for parties, games to entertain, that’s all been declining as well.

Derek Thompson: And that had been declining for a while. That’s the stuff that had been declining since the 1960s. So, brief history of ‘Bowling Alone,’ for those who haven’t read it or maybe have just heard of it or have heard of it so many times they feel like they’ve read it, here’s the upshot. Between the early 1900s, the 1960s, practically every measure of socializing was going up. People were spending more time together. They were more likely to join associations and clubs. And then somewhere around the 1960s, 1970s, the tide turned and America became much more individualistic. Our cars allowed us to drive away from each other, homes got more comfortable, entertainment got more awesome. So it became more fun just to stay at home and sit on the couch and watch TV or play video games or look at your phone. And then finally, in the 21st century, if the automobile privatized our lives and the television privatized our leisure, the smartphone privatized our attention, it meant that we could be in huge crowds of people and be essentially alone on our phone getting involved in some psychodrama millions of miles away in phone land. And so that’s the story that Putnam sort of sets up.

And what I try to do is to extend it into the 21st century. When he published his book in 2000, there were a lot of people who said, I’m not entirely sure that you’re right about this, Bob, I think maybe you’re wrong, and we might see a great surge of socializing in the world remade by the Internet. And in fact, everything just got worse from one perspective. And so that’s really where this piece picks up.

Brett McKay: How did the pandemic accelerate this trend? So this has been going on for, you say, 50, maybe 40 years, this trend of people not getting out and socializing as much. How did the pandemic accelerate this?

Derek Thompson: Well, the pandemic accelerated it because if you’re locked down, you certainly aren’t spending a lot of time with other people outside of your home. So clearly, we know that the pandemic increased time spent at home and decreased time spent with other people. But what’s interesting to me is what happens if you compare, say the years 2021, which is when people were coming out of lockdown. What if you compare 2021 and 2023?

Well, it turns out that alone time actually increased. So even in the post pandemic era, we were spending more time alone. And if you look at time spent at home, the work from home revolution is sort of its own secular thing. There’s some people being called back to the office. There’s some people still working at home. But the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who looked at time spent at home, concluded that in 2022, the average American was spending about 99 minutes more every single day at home. And that wasn’t just about working from home. It was about eating more at home, praying more at home, entertaining more at home, socializing more at home. We really did become more of a phone bound and home bound nation, even around the acute crisis of the pandemic.

Brett McKay: Yeah, see, I think something that the pandemic did is, it kind of built an infrastructure. Like, the infrastructure is already there to do this stuff, but it kind of forced us to do it. We’re like, oh, this is actually an option. Instead of going to a restaurant, I can just do DoorDash. Instead of going to the movie theater, I can just stream a movie to my home. I mean, I’ve noticed that in my own life.

Derek Thompson: Well, yeah, and all that’s great. I want to be very clear. That stuff is awesome. Like, sometimes you’re just exhausted and you’re like, I could cook dinner or I could go out, but damn, I really just want to order a burrito to the house and watch whatever on Netflix, right? Like, catch up on Severance, watch White Lotus. Like, we’ve all been there. Okay? I am not trying to tell people in any way that these conveniences are somehow evil. I’m trying to get them to recognize the cost of progress, the cost of convenience.

I think with television or smartphones, we’re becoming more familiar with the fact that, yeah, television is incredibly entertaining. Smartphones are ludicrously entertaining. But maybe smartphones are causing a bit of anxiety. Maybe watching too much television means being a bit of a recluse and pulling yourself out of the physical world. And in fact, I’ll just pause here to say one of my favorite statistics from this piece is that, between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American added about 300 additional hours of leisure time per year. And you’d think, like, what would you do? What would you, listener of this podcast, do with an extra 300 hours of leisure time next year? Well, it turned out that people spent almost all that extra leisure time watching television.

So we really, really love watching television. That’s for sure. What I’m trying to get us to recognize is not television’s bad, smartphone’s bad. Ordering food to eat at home is bad. No, these are conveniences. But convenience can have a cost. And the cost of what I call the convenience curse is that leaning too much into these behaviors and devices and technologies often means pulling ourselves out of the physical world.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that what you just said about the increase of leisure time, I think a lot of people think, oh, if I had more time, I would hang out more, I would do creative hobbies, I’d become an artist, I’d write a novel. But it seems like what we typically do is we just plow whatever time opens up into the path of least resistance activities, which is mainly screens, which is interesting.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, screens are incredibly entertaining. I mean, they’re amazingly entertaining. And they’re also super easy. I mean, I don’t remember every single thing that you just listed, but you talked about hanging out with friends, becoming an artist, writing a novel. Writing a novel is freaking hard. Okay? Becoming an artist means sucking for a while before you become an artist, that you’re not embarrassed of being. Learning a new language. I’m thinking of things that people might say if you ask them, what would you do with 300 extra hours of leisure? I think most people might imagine that they would do hard things, but we’re exhausted and simple creatures to a certain extent, and we prefer many times to do easy things. And there’s practically nothing easier than folding yourself into a comfortable couch and turning on a streaming service. That’s very easy. And that’s why I think we’ve been essentially donating our time and our dopamine to screens rather than to physical world activities.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the television increased the amount of time we spent alone in the second half of the 20th century. The smartphones in the early part of the 21st century. You also talk about the role that cars played in this. What role has the car played in us not socializing as much?

Derek Thompson: The car’s another great example of a really wonderful technology that has costs. One cost, I guess you could say, is, pollution, unless you’re driving like a plug in electric. But one social cost of cars is that they allow us to be away from other people. The vast majority of time that an American spends in a car is not carpooling. It’s alone. The vast majority of time that Americans spend in cars is alone. Which means that, if Americans overall they are increasing their car use, they’re probably increasing their time spent alone as well. And what happened in the 1950s and 1960s is that we built these ribbons of asphalt leading from cities into suburbs, and people could buy bigger houses. That’s cool. But that also meant lots more time spent in the car. It meant longer commutes, and it meant houses that were a little bit further away from other people.

And so when you put all that together, I think you have the beginning of this revolution that Putnam was talking about, where this nation of clubs and associations and people coming together became a nation of not front porches, but backyards. People pulling back into their own spaces, their private spaces, and associating the American dream, associating a sense of wealth, of having made it, as maximizing control over private spaces. And I think that sort of kicks off this revolution that I’m talking about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it’s even, as you mentioned earlier, it’s influenced how our homes are designed today. And it’s created what you call this idea of a remote life where we’re trying to do everything in our home. Homes, if you’re out in the suburbs, some of these homes had those giant cinema rooms in the bonus room upstairs. A lot of homes these days have garage gyms so they don’t have to go… I have a garage gym. I haven’t been to a public gym in almost a decade. And even bedrooms are being designed like, how can we maximize people being by themselves? And what’s interesting, if you look in the 70s, in the 60s, 70s, like, homes were designed for socializing. I remember 70s, there’s that trend of conversation pits, that doesn’t happen anymore.

Derek Thompson: Yeah. Right. Sunken living rooms. That’s my wife’s favorite piece of home decor. Yeah. Whenever we’re on Zillow and she sees a sunken living room, her heart goes aflutter for sure. Everything you said is very true. And when it comes to architecture, two of the more interesting conversations that I had were with Clifton Harness, who’s the co-founder of TestFit, which is a company that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. And he told me, the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room has to be built to accommodate maximal screen time.

So whereas in previous conversations about how do we build a beautiful space, it was like, how do we let the light in? High ceilings. How do we make it a perfect space for light? And now the question is, how do we give the most comfort to the most people? And the answer is, make sure that there is an obvious space to put the flat screen television and a couch. And Bobby Fijan, who’s a real estate developer that I also spoke to, offered up an amazing quote. He said, “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.”

This is something that architects and developers are thinking about. They have our preferences in mind. They wouldn’t be able to make money if they didn’t. They are designing not for our stated preference of, oh, if I had an extra 300 hours of leisure, I would learn a new language with 10 new friends, and we’d all become Picasso. No, you make money by watching what people do, by watching the revealed preference. And the revealed preference of Americans is we want to spend as much time at home as we can. And I would just say here, before passing back to you, is that like, when it comes to things like, home gyms, I work at home all the time. I work out at home all the time. I definitely don’t want to give people the impression that I’m trying to stigmatize a bit of solitude or stigmatize activities done at home. What I want to do is to show people the receipt of the choices that we’re making. You can make a series of totally understandable choices and then lift up and recognize that your socializing time is declining year after year after year. That is the awareness that I want us to have. It’s more about awareness than it is about stigmatizing.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the amount of time people are spending by themselves has been increasing. You’d think since alone time is increasing, loneliness has increased. Is that the case? Is there, as we often hear in the media, a loneliness crisis going on?

Derek Thompson: No, I don’t think there is. I think the loneliness crisis is overblown. And that might seem like a very confusing record scratch moment for people if they’re like this guy talking about the surge of aloneness, doesn’t think there’s a loneliness crisis. Well, here’s what the data shows. The data shows that for young people, loneliness is up a little bit. But for people overall, there’s really not a lot of evidence that loneliness is increasing. What we have instead is rising aloneness without rising loneliness.

Now, one interpretation of those two statistics is that there’s no problem. People are absolutely thrilled being alone. That’s why they’re not lonely. But turns out when you use the same American Time Use Survey to ask people if they’re happier around other people or alone, people tend to be much happier around other people. So here’s what I think is happening. I think that loneliness in small doses is actually good. I think that loneliness is a biological cue to tell us to get off the couch and get out into the real world and to see people and be around people and touch and high five and hug. I think that what’s happening instead is that people are spending an enormous amount of time on their phones and they’re dumping their dopamine onto their phones.

They’re scrolling on TikTok, they’re scrolling on X, they’re scrolling on Instagram. They’re basically getting all of this dopamine flushed into their brains looking at their phones. Also probably a bit of cortisol if you’re on X or if you’re just made anxious by whatever you’re seeing on Instagram or these other platforms. You’ve got all of this anxiety and all this dopamine that’s being flushed into our brains. And then we put our phone away and how do we feel at the end of this leisure time? We feel exhausted. We feel like we’re absolutely spent.

Ironically, this leisure time has made us feel less inclined to want to have the drive to go out and be around other people and even risk the hazard of, I’ll drive there, but there won’t be parking. I’ll get on the subway, but it’ll be delayed. So I think that people aren’t feeling the historical biological impulse to be around other people. And it’s registering in surveys as our not feeling as lonely as we should be. And that’s why aloneness keeps rising year after year after year. I think we are quietly making ourselves miserable because we’re not feeling the healthy pinch of loneliness.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let me just recap that. So you’re saying because we’re on our phones all the time, we’re kind of getting like this pseudo socializing going on in our phones. When we actually want to spend time in real life with people, we’re like, the signal’s not there. ‘Cause we’re like, well, I already got my fill. Like, I’ve already been around people.

Derek Thompson: I think it might be that for some people. I mean, there’s so many different people in the world, and so I can’t speak for all of them, but there’s two different things that could be happening here, and I want to make sure that I’m precise about distinguishing between them. So one thing that you’re describing is that lots of people think that time spent on the phone is a sort of substitute for time spent with people. I think that’s wrong for a variety of reasons. I think it’s much harder to build intimacy by catching up over text than spending time with someone over a table.

I also think that people have a much stronger relationship with other humans in a physical world presence than they do on their phones. So I think there’s a problem of replacing sociality, hanging out with people in the real world with para-sociality, which is spending our time with people on the Internet and imagining their inner weather and their inner lives. So I absolutely agree to a certain extent with the picture that you just painted that time spent on phone is a poor substitute for time spent with other people in the physical world.

But something else is happening that I think is biochemical. With dopamine cycles, there’s something called phasic dopamine, which is the dopamine hit. The amount of dopamine that we get when we experience something that elicits a bunch of dopamine. And there’s tonic dopamine, which is our underlying baseline levels of dopamine. And I think one thing that’s happening is that people are spending so much time on their phones that their phasic dopamine is going nuts, and it’s leaving them with lower levels of tonic dopamine, which means their baseline level of dopamine is depleted when they put down their phone. And that means when a friend reaches out to you at say, 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, when you’ve spent the last hour and a half just scrolling through TikTok, and that friend says, hey, do you want to hang out? You say, “I don’t know, man. I’m kind of beat. Work was really a lot. And also, I’m really stressed about whatever thing is happening in the world, and it’s just too much of a misadventure for me to get out of the house. I’m going to pass. I’m sorry, dude.” And we see this to a certain extent.

There’s a section of the article where I describe this TikTok trend that my wife introduced me to where you have young people who are socializing less than any young generation that we have on record celebrating when their friends cancel plans. It’s called cancellation among some folks. That makes no sense if you think about young people being lonely. It does make sense if you consider my biochemical explanation that young people are spending so much time with their phones that when a friend cancels plans, they’re happy because they’re dopaminergically exhausted by their phone experience. So I think by summary, two things are happening. Not only are our phones a poor substitute for real socialization, but also our phones are absorbing the dopamine that we should be giving to the friends in our life.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’re spending more time alone, but we’re not necessarily lonely because of it. And that’s because while loneliness usually manifests as a signal that drives us to be be with other people, we’re not feeling that drive anymore because we’ve donated the thing that gives that drive, our dopamine, to our devices. And you point out in the article that even though studies show that alone time increases unhappiness in the long term, you say this in the article. Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone in their home, away from other people. Perhaps one might think they’re making the right choice. After all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want or what will make them happy.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s an idea. The Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, I believe, called it miswanting. And it’s this idea that people aren’t very good at understanding what they’ll want. And in a way, it’s a bit of an extension of the principle that predictions are hard, especially about the future, right? Predictions are hard, especially about the future, especially about us. It’s hard to predict exactly what’s going to make us happy. So sometimes you buy a piece of furniture that you’re obsessed with or a coat that you’re obsessed with, and three months later, you never really think about it. It doesn’t really offer any additional unit of happiness to any particular day. This happens all the time. It’s what Gilbert calls miswanting.

Well, I think people might miswant aloneness as well. I think they might miswant introversion. And how would you prove this? Well, there’s a University of Chicago psychologist named Nick Epley who did a really interesting study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if asked to spend that train ride in Chicago talking to a stranger versus being alone? And the vast majority of participants predicted that the quiet solitude would make for a much better commute than being forced to talk to a stranger. But then Epley’s team creates this experiment and he has some people keep to themselves and other people are instructed to talk to a stranger. And those people are told the longer conversation, the better. And then afterward, you have both groups fill out a questionnaire. How do you feel in this moment? Not a prediction of the future. How do you feel right now?

And despite this broad assumption that the best commute is the most silent commute, it was the people instructed, randomly instructed, to talk to strangers who reported feeling significantly more positive than those who kept themselves. So this is a really, really fascinating and possibly fundamental paradox at the core of human life. As Epley told me, we are social animals. We are made better by being social. But we are afraid of sociality in various ways. We’re afraid of not being light, we’re afraid of boredom. We’re afraid of the awkwardness of an initial conversation with someone who we don’t know well or maybe the initial awkwardness of conversation with someone we used to know well or even do know well. There’s all sorts of social anxieties that can accrete around the social animal. But fundamentally, it does seem like in a variety of research settings, if you force most people to be social, even those that consider themselves introverts, they will tell you immediately after the experience that they’re happier than the people who were not forced to be social. So, yes, to your point, I do think that we misunderstand something very core to human nature.

Brett McKay: I liken to making the analogy of like, social life to physical fitness. Like, you cannot exercise and not eat well, and on a day to day basis, you’ll feel okay, you’ll feel fine. But then eventually you reach a point where you realize, oh man, I’m overweight, I’m really out of shape, my cholesterol’s high, I’ve just got really poor health. And it’s the same thing with socializing. If you’re not socializing very much, I mean, you feel okay on a day to day basis, but then you realize, oh, man, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong here. Like, not only have your actual social skills atrophied or you get rusty in how you interact with people, but you feel like something is wrong internally.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I would love to hang out in this metaphor here, this equation of physical fitness and social fitness because I think it’s a really fruitful connection. How is social fitness similar to physical fitness? Well, at the highest level, modern life isn’t built for it. So why do we exercise? Why do you have a gym in your garage? Well, the answer is that you’re not a hunter gatherer. You’re not getting your exercise from the essentials of life. From day to day living. You probably spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe you’re sitting right now. You probably spend a lot of time just not walking that much by being in your house. And so we had to, in the modern world, invent this bizarre thing called a gym where we go and work out, which is not something our ancestors did. They lived. They didn’t lift weights just to get ripped.

There’s a way in which modern life has made it harder to be physically fit unless you make physical fitness a priority. And in the same way, I think modern life has made social fitness more difficult unless you make it a priority. It’s all too easy to just work from home in certain jobs, work from home, order into home, cook for yourself at home, entertain yourself at home, watch the infinitude of stuff that’s on Amazon Prime and Netflix and Max, watch a bunch of stuff on TikTok on your phone, infinitely divert yourself without ever leaving the four corners of your house. It’s very, very easy. And it’s especially easy right now, looking out in North Carolina. It’s been snowing for the last 24 hours. I don’t want to go out. So this is easy. But I would love to think about ways that we can equate physical fitness and social fitness, the same way that we purposely divert from our lives to go to the gym and work out. How can we purposely divert from the convenience curse to be more socially fit as well?

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You also talk about the idea of introversion. I think because we live in a very therapeutic culture, we like to psychoanalyze ourselves. And people are like, well, I’m an introvert, and so I don’t need to socialize as much ’cause that doesn’t give me any energy. It drains me. Is that the case. Can introverts get away without socializing as much?

Derek Thompson: I think introversion probably exists. I definitely don’t think it exists in a binary. This is not like males and females. This is like a normal Gaussian distribution. This is like height. There’s the vast majority of people who call themselves introverts are like sort of kind of introverts. If you really put truth serum into them, then they would be introverts in some circumstances and not introverts in others. They might feel a little bit shy at a party where they didn’t know anybody, but if you put them in front of their best friends, they would open wide up.

And I would add, according to Nick Epley, the University of Chicago psychologist, if you nudged them just a bit to be more social at a party, what you would have is someone who has a slightly better experience than the wallflower who just sits in the corner of the party and looks at their phone. Yeah, that’s the evidence. I’m sure some people are listening, thinking, you know what? I hate parties. When I go or when my friends make me go, when my wife makes me go, I’m fine standing in the corner and just reading Espn.

I don’t know your life, right? Maybe that works out for you. But it does seem like for many people, introversion is a bit of a delusion. Yes. It can be nice to recharge. Yes. Of course, a bit of solitude can be a blessing, but people tend to be made happier in other people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think people typically… I’ve done this too. They use introversion as an excuse to not socialize. It’s like, well, that’s just my personality. It’s like, well, actually, if you did it, you’d feel good. You’d actually enjoy it.

Derek Thompson: Yeah. My colleague Olga Kazan has a great book out called ‘Me, But Better,’ which is about the science of personality and personality change and the TL;DR, I read it. It’s wonderful, is that personality change is not only possible, it’s kind of easy if you commit yourself to it. Personalities are a little bit fixed by genetics and environment, but not that much. People can absolutely change their personalities. And people’s personalities change all the time in different circumstances. Someone listening might know a friend who was really closed off and shy in high school and then just found their community in college and suddenly became like a totally more confident person. Or maybe they knew some nerd in college who went off and made a bunch of money in their 20s and 30s and now are very different in many ways, personality change happens all the time. And a part of it is the recognition that our personalities, I think, are much more elastic than we think.

And sometimes, to your point, we define ourselves in very narrow boxes in order to justify our behavior. If we don’t want to hang out with people, oh, I’m an introvert. That’s concrete unchanging behavior. If we’re a little bit mean to someone, oh, I’m just a little bit neurotic. That’s just who I am, right? If we’re too much of a hard ass, oh, you know, I’m just a conscientious person. I can’t help it. Nope, you probably can help it. Personality is incredibly, incredibly liquid. And it does seem like if people use that liquid nature of their personality to become a little bit more social, overall, it makes them happier.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in the book, you talk about how men are spending more alone time than women. And you talk about this trend in which young men on the Internet are becoming secular monks. What’s a secular monk? What’s going on here?

Derek Thompson: So, yeah, secular monk is not my term. It’s a term that I love from Andrew Taggart, who wrote an essay in the religious journal First Things in 2020. And he was describing this group of men who he said seemed to be foregoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto rather than focus their 30s and 40s on getting married and having kids. They were committed to their bodies and their bank accounts and their meditation practice and their cold plunge. And he called them secular monks because he said it’s interesting that they are, on the one hand, really committed to this idea of like, monitored self control. They want to master like the monkey within. Master the demon within. And at the same time, they aren’t particularly religious. What they believe in isn’t God, but cold plunges or intermittent fasting or meditation boot camps.

And what I thought was interesting about it is, again, not that I think cold plunges are bad or meditation’s bad, but rather that taken to an extreme, you can see how this kind of behavior is very lonesome. And when I read the essay, I really felt this shock of recognition because in the previous months, I’d been thinking a lot about this sort of TikTok Instagram trend that I’d seen where it was basically like men showing off the perfect morning routine. And these videos were always of a piece. It was always like a good looking guy wakes up alone with his eye mask and in a beautifully lit room. And he journals and he cold plunges and maybe he saunas and he meditates and he works out and all these things happen. He eats something ludicrously healthy, farmed from some algae farm in Nepal or whatever, and all these things happen alone. We see him wake up and meditate and journal all alone. There’s no people in these dioramas of a life perfectly lived.

And I just thought that was really interesting because if you look at the data, the group with the largest increases in alone time are young men and particular young men without a college education. And I was just very interested in the possibility that we were building a vision of masculinity that was a bit like caveman masculinity. It was a set of behaviors that an individual could do alone in a cave in Siberia. You can wake up, you can meditate, you can journal, you can work out, you can do push ups, you can do incline, you can do all of that alone in a cave in Siberia. But you can’t be a friend and you can’t be a dad, you can’t be a son, you can’t be a mentor or a mentee. All of these relational aspects of masculinity are wiped away in the caveman masculinity depicted in these videos.

And I’ve done a bunch of episodes for my podcast, Plain English, about how I think the ultimate expression of 21st masculinity needs to be a more relational masculinity. It’s not about being strong for yourself. It’s about being strong for other people. And, yeah, that can mean, bench pressing your body weight times 2.5, but ultimately, the expression of masculinity should be for other people, because life is about other people. I mean, like, I don’t think that we want to represent the ultimate expression of happiness and strength in the 2020s as being a ripped person who journals perfectly, masters the interior weather of their psychology and basically doesn’t use it to help anyone other than himself. That seems like a really impoverished version of masculinity.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back into history, even like a couple hundred years ago, that was the ideal of masculinity. Like, to be a man was like to be useful to your family, to your wider community. It’s about giving back, giving more than you take. But, yeah, something about our culture, the hyper individualized culture, we’ve gotten away from that. And I’ve seen those videos you mentioned. They give off very Patrick Bateman vibes whenever I watch them. I’m like, this is weird. And I think it’s interesting. What’s ironic about this whole, like, you know, some of these guys call themselves secular monks or they’re going into monk mode. Is that monks, they do have… There’s solitude plays. I’m talking about real monks. Solitude is a spiritual practice, but most monks live in communities because they’re looking for that friction and accountability that other people can provide to help them live a disciplined and holy life. So, yeah, if you really want to go into monk mode, you need to be with a bunch of other guys or people who are helping you. You need to be in a community if you want to be a real monk.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And then you also talk about how, even with these men are spending time alone with self improvement, there still is a lot of depression, anxiety, despair. And something you talk about is men, I think all people need this, but I think men, in particular, young men, they want to feel needed. They want to feel like a group needs them. And because they’re spending so much time alone and not within a group or community, they’re not getting that.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, I think neededness is incredibly important. And this is what Richard Reeves, who’s the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me. He says this is what men need. They want to feel essential to their families, to their community, to their office, to their work. He said… The quote that I loved in the piece is, “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” And it can come from… This neededness can come from all kinds of directions, friends, children, partners, colleagues, religious congregations. But it is, again, about moving away from this sort of caveman sense of what a man is for and toward a more relational sense of how can I use the strength that I’m building to help other people?

Brett McKay: Continuing on young men. For every secular monk out there using his alone time to work on his body and productivity, there are many more guys out there using their free time alone to engage in sedentary leisure. What is sedentary leisure?

Derek Thompson: Yeah. So the sociologist, Liana Sayer, who is at the University of Maryland, shared analysis with me about how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. And the most important, most interesting thing is that she divides leisure between engaged, which is stuff like socializing or going to a concert or playing a sport, and sedentary leisure. And sedentary just means like sitting down, watching TV, playing video games. And the largest increase, the largest increase, the most dramatic thing she found is that single men without kids who have the most leisure time are overwhelmingly likely to spend their leisure time by themselves in solo, sedentary leisure. So playing video games, watching TV, looking at your phone.

And again, that’s just kind of sad. I mean, I just think that I don’t know these guys, so I don’t want to be this writer who hops on the horn and just tells people how to live their lives. I don’t know them. I don’t know what makes them tick. But it really does seem, from the best evidence that we have, like a life spent alone is a bit of a life wasted. We really are made into happier, more meaningful people through relationships with others. And if young guys without kids are going to spend most of their time watching TV alone, that really does seem like a wasted decade.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I imagine there’s consequences of that. Psychosocial, physical consequences. If you’re sitting around doing nothing, playing video games, you’re going to have health consequences, obviously, psychology. You’re probably going to be depressed. And yeah, I mean, all the things we talk about, deaths of despair, drug abuse, et cetera.

Derek Thompson: Right. All of that serious stuff. And this is serious, but it’s also a little bit… Has a little bit levity to it. You’re also not going to get laid if you spend all of your time at home playing video games and watching TV. You do, in fact, have to go out into the physical world to meet other people at some point. And I’m very interested, separate from this article, in the decline of coupling that we’re seeing throughout the world. It’s not just that teens have fewer friends or that teens, as you said at the top of the show, have reduced their face to face socializing with friends by 50%. People in their 20s are dating less. People in their 30s are getting married less. And then people in their 40s, consequently, are having fewer kids. Something really big is happening here in terms of the pulling away of people. Not just the pulling away of sexes, but the pulling away of people. And I do wonder, to your point, whether the behavior of today’s young men who are maxing out on solo sedentary time is going to create all sorts of problems for these guys in their 30s and 40s.

Brett McKay: And it could. It’ll probably have consequences on a society level eventually.

Derek Thompson: Yeah, yeah, right. I agree. I think it could. I mean, I don’t… I can’t say exactly what those consequences will be. But we talked briefly about the political consequences here, and it does seem like from research by Michael Bang Petersen, who’s a Danish political scientist, people who spend more time alone and who have more social isolation are more likely to look to politics as a place of entertainment. And he calls these voters need for chaos voters, because what they want most from politics, isn’t any particular outcome for any particular group. What they want is the feeling of chaotic entertainment. So that’s just one flavor, I think, of how we could absolutely see some of the changes happening today have real repercussions in the future.

Brett McKay: You say that while some of our social ties are getting weaker, some are getting stronger. Which bonds are getting stronger and which ones are getting weaker?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, so this is probably the part of the essay that was quoted most often back to me. Marc Dunkelman, who is a researcher at Brown University, has a great book that just came out called Why Nothing Works. I talked to him a couple months ago, and he said, the irony here is that the Internet has actually made some of our relationships much stronger. I am texting… This is Marc talking. I’m texting my wife all day long. When my daughter buys butterfingers, I know the moment she’s bought that butterfingers from CVS because of the credit card data that I have on my phone.

So in many ways, our most intimate relationships are tighter than they used to be. And then you think of that as the inner ring of socializing, and there’s an outer ring of socializing that’s sort of like the tribe, not the family, but the tribe, the people in the world who share your affinities and interests. So maybe if you have a favorite sports team in basketball or football, it’s everyone in the country who’s a fan of that team. And you’re probably following people across the country, maybe even across the world, who are fans of that particular team, certainly if you’re a fan of English Premier League.

So that’s sort of the outer ring of tribe. There’s a middle ring, though, of village. It’s not the people related to or are best friends, and it’s not the people we just find online and form groups with. It’s the people who live around us. It’s the village, it’s our neighbors. It’s the people we know when we walk around the street. And it’s there that our relationships have really atrophied. We really know our neighbors worse than we used to. And one good question is like, okay, who cares? What if you just have friends who aren’t your neighbors? Totally fair question. I would say that if the inner circle of family teaches us love and the outer circle of tribe teaches us loyalty, the middle ring of village teaches us tolerance. It is naturally tolerating to be around people you’re not related to who you disagree with a little bit because you’re not already best friends. And I think that we are losing touch with that village layer, and I think it is showing up in a variety of ways in our politics and in sort of the social fabric.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Marc Dunkelman on the podcast a long time. It was like nine years ago is episode 176. So, yeah, he wrote that book the Vanishing Neighbor.

Derek Thompson: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Where he introduces those three rings. And ever since I read that book, I think about that all the time, that sort of concept about the three rings. And I think he’s right. Like, that middle ring of village has gotten weaker, and you see it in just declines in people participating in PTA, volunteering for organizations. And even when you do get in those sorts of things, people don’t know how to interact. Like, they just yell at each other because, like you said, they haven’t practiced the virtue of tolerance. And you can see this play out, like on Nextdoor, the app. Have you used Nextdoor before?

Derek Thompson: I have, and I stopped very quickly because I realized what a cesspool it was.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think it’s a perfect example of how we no longer have the skills to handle how to live in a village. So if you have a problem. Used to be if it was like 1985 and you had a problem with your neighbor, say your neighbor was blowing leaves into your yard. Well, you’d have to go over to your neighbor and calmly say, I understand you’re trying to clean your yard out, but can you not blow in my yard? People don’t do that anymore. What they do now is they’ll just post it up on next door and just put the person on blast. Like, look at this idiot. He’s just so inconsiderate. And then people are chiming in. Yeah, what a dummy. And the middle ring is gone.

Derek Thompson: I have a question about Nextdoor. The people who are commenting, what a dummy. Are they all direct neighbors or are they in some like… Like, where are they?

Brett McKay: It’s like in your sort of an area. So when you sign up for Nextdoor, you can sign up to only get updates within a certain Geographic radius. So like maybe the neighborhoods around you.

Derek Thompson: I see.

Brett McKay: And so, yeah, it becomes very polarized. Some people will just be like, yeah, the guy blowing leaves is dumb. You’re like, oh, you’re a dumb. You shouldn’t care. And it’s just like, oh my gosh.

Derek Thompson: And what’s interesting about that is you’re taking like the village, you’re turning it into the tribe. You’re essentially taking the relations that would theoretically be neighborly, but you’re turning them into a social network which creates in groups and out groups, which is not what you want in any pleasant neighborhood. Yeah. It’s been a while since I did a full ethnography of Nextdoor, but sounds no good.

Brett McKay: It is no good at all. I get on there every now and then when I have to sell something. I’ll get on there and then I’ll just kind of check in what’s going on. Like, oh, no, I don’t want to go to that feed anymore. So, yeah, the middle ring, the skills of socializing of dealing with people we’re not really close with, don’t have a lot in common with. Those are atrophying. And there’s some consequences that you’re just… Neighborhood life isn’t as pleasant, isn’t as productive. It has consequences for civic life in your town, your city, and also you can even say our national level with our politics. What can be done as individuals to restore a richer social life? Because it seems like we have all these external factors that are kind of nudging us towards spending more time alone. So what can we do to restore a richer social life in our lives?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, fortunately, this is easy. You know, you don’t need any medical invention to spend time with other people. You don’t need any kind of invention at all. You just need to choose. You need to make different choices. You choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting a friend to meet up. And then you choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting another friend to meet up. And then you spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but rather thinking about how can I create a new habit in my life that puts me around other people rather than puts me on my couch at 7:30 PM. Every single night.

It’s really easy on the one hand, unfortunately, it’s not so easily done because a lot of these issues are collective action problems, and I totally recognize that. So if you’re a couple and you want to have dinner parties with your couple friends. Well, it’s much easier to do that if there’s already a habit of dinner parties. If there’s not a habit of dinner parties, then you’re going to have a harder time getting people to come over. You’re going to feel a little bit more embarrassed about making the ask and maybe being turned down because people aren’t in the habit of going over to each other’s houses on Thursday nights or Friday nights.

And I get that it’s a collective action problem, but I also think that it’s important to give people this sense of agency. Like the topics that I’m writing about here are huge. We’re talking about national politics and things that exist. The level of nationwide and planet wide technologies. The automobile and the television set and the smartphone. These are big, big things. And it’s ridiculous to ask people to be absolutely Amish and just reject all technology. But the truth is the Amish have a very interesting way of thinking about technology that I learned when I was reporting for this piece. They don’t just reject all technology that’s modern. They reject technology that isn’t in keeping with their values. So they look at a technology and then evaluate it and then choose to accept or reject it, depending on whether their virtues are amplified by the use of that technology. And that’s very interesting. I think that the Amish probably go way too far.

I’m not interested in becoming Amish anytime in the near future. But it is very interesting to think about a sort of a mystic approach to one’s own life. Which is to say, what if rather than embrace every technology that made our life a little more convenient, we instead were really explicit about the values that we had. Maybe even we wrote them down and said, the most important things in my life are my family, my child, spending time with friends, work that’s meaningful to me, a fitness routine that keeps me healthy as long as possible. What if you wrote down your values and then only embraced the technology that furthered those values rather than took away from them? That might be a way for people who are not Amish to inject their lives with just enough Amishness that they reorient their living around a set of values rather than a set of dopamine giving devices?

Brett McKay: I love that idea that you can change the social texture of your life in just 15 minute blocks. So instead of using 15 minutes to just to surf Instagram mindlessly, use that 15 minutes to connect with a friend or make plans to get together. And I really like the idea of just being intentional and going back to that, the fitness analogy. We need to get out of this habit of thinking that I’m only going to hang out or socialize when I feel like it before you socialize?

Derek Thompson: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve all been there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. Just make it like working out. It’s like, well, it’s 6 o’clock. I don’t feel like working out, but this is my workout time, so I’m gonna go work out anyway. And it’s the same thing with socializing. It’s like, well, there’s a party tonight. I don’t feel like going out tonight, but my social muscles need exercising, so I’m gonna go anyway.

Derek Thompson: This is why I love this analogy of physical fitness to social fitness. Because what you said, I think is really slyly subversive. Like, it’s common among people who work out to say, you need to commit to the habit because there’s going to be days you don’t want to do it and you should do it anyway. So this sense that essentially working out is a little bit like a vegetable, you should eat it even when you don’t want to. I don’t think we think of socializing like a vegetable. I think we think of socializing like a fruit. Something that tastes delicious. And if you don’t want to have a blueberry that day, no one cares. No one’s going to scream at you for not having a strawberry on a Wednesday. But what if we thought of socializing as more like a vegetable, more like something that was good for us, more like something we should commit to even when we didn’t feel like it. I think it’s a very clever way of subtly recasting this activity that we think of as being sort of frivolous and extraneous, as being actually fundamentally core to a healthy life well lived.

Brett McKay: So we talked about some individual things we can do. You mentioned that this is also a collective action problem. Are there any communal rituals or maybe some new things, some things we can implement into our culture to help this along? Have you seen anything in your research where there are groups, communities, towns who are cultivating more in person socializing?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s definitely new trends that I’m following. You know, independent bookstores are booming. I think they’ve had more than 50% growth since 2009. And a lot of them are basically like miniature theaters. They’ve got author talks every night. And so that’s sort of a new ritual that’s starting. Here where I live near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, there’s a ton of board game cafes. And I know that board game cafes are sort of flowering across the country. And this is sort of an interesting inversion of the typical trend of American entertainment.

Typically, it’s like movie theaters where you used to have to drive to the movie theater, and now you can just stay home and do the activity. With board games, they’re invented to stay at home and do the activity. But these new board game cafes mean you actually drive to a third place in order to play board games to other people. I think that’s really interesting, and it gets people out of their house and around other people. But I’m most interested in really, really humble rituals. I’m interested in rituals that are essentially the equivalent of Friday night Sabbath, where in the Jewish tradition, you say a prayer, you break the bread, you pour some wine, you have a meal.

And that sounds just about fantastic to me. And I hope that it’d be, I think, really lovely to have a renaissance in dinner parties. This is a trend that we actually have data on it. The number of dinner parties in America or at least the number of dinner parties people say they go to, has been collapsing, not just for the last 20 years, but really for the last 60 years. I mean, the cocktail party is practically extinct compared to where it was the 1950s, 1960s. I think it’d be absolutely beautiful to bring that stuff back. And that’s simple. You don’t need another building. You don’t need any other infrastructure. All you need is an email and a person willing to send it.

Brett McKay: Well, Derek, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

Derek Thompson: Well, there’s three places they can find me. I’m a staff writer for The Atlantic. I host a podcast, Plain English with Derek Thompson, with the Ringer Podcast Network. And March 18th, I have a book coming out called ‘Abundance,’ co-written with Ezra Klein, about the future of American progress. And if you like some of what you heard today, I think you’d love the book.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Derek Thompson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Derek Thompson: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Derek Thompson. He recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century. You can find that at The Atlantic. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/alone where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps a lot, and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Pornography is more prevalent and accessible than ever before, yet its effects on relationships, mental health, and human development aren’t popularly well understood. Discussions on the topic are often engaged in from an emotional or religious point of view; less typical is a discussion of pornography from an empirical frame.

My guest today, Dr. Brian Willoughby, a social scientist who has spent the past 15 years studying porn’s impacts, will unpack what the research actually says about how it affects personal well-being, relationship satisfaction, and sexual expectations. We discuss the latest data on porn use across different demographics, how porn impacts religious versus non-religious populations differently, and how exposure affects kids. Brian shares whether using porn causes erectile dysfunction and depression, what parents should know about talking to their kids about porn, the main risk of porn that’s typically under-discussed, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM’s series on porn and how to quit it (also available as an ebook)
• NYT article that Brian was interviewed for: “It’s Time to Talk About Pornography, Scholars Say”
• Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It
• NYT article: “The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking”
• Brian’s research

Connect With Brian Willoughby

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett Mckay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Pornography is more prevalent and accessible than ever before, yet its effects on relationships, mental health and human development aren’t properly well understood. Discussions on the topic are often engaged in from an emotional or religious point of view. Less typical is a discussion of pornography from an empirical frame. My guest today, Dr. Brian Willoughby, a social scientist who has spent the past 50 years studying porn’s impacts, will impact what the research actually says about how it affects personal well being, relationship satisfaction, and sexual expectations. We discussed the latest data on porn use across different demographics, how porn impacts religious versus non-religious populations differently, and how exposure affects kids. Brian shares whether using porn causes erectile dysfunction and depression. What parents should know about talking to their kids about porn, the main risk of porn that’s typically under discussed and more after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/porn.

All right, Brian Willoughby, welcome to the show.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Brett Mckay: So you are a social scientist who studies family life and for the past, oh, almost, I think it’s 15 years now, you’ve been doing a lot of research about porn use and how it affects relationships. Before we get into your research, let’s start with definitions. In academic research, how do you define pornography? Because there’s that famous with Justice Stewart, Potter Stewart quote about obscenity. I know it when I see it. So academically, how do you define pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, it’s interesting because that’s actually a question that kind of got me into this research in some ways. I came from a background of studying healthy relationships and dating during young adulthood. And the reason I started to turn my research into this area is because just so many young adults were mentioning 15, 20 years ago, like, hey, this, this is an issue I’m trying to navigate. I’m trying to figure out what it means for my life, what it means in my relationships. And so I kind of came over to the pornography research from that area and one of the very first studies I published is I was looking at the research is 20 years ago to answer your question is we weren’t defining it for anyone. We were just asking people, how often do you look at pornography? You know, what kind of just kind of these basic questions where we weren’t defining the term. And so I published a study that showed that when you just ask people, do you look at porn? You have no idea what they’re saying. Because people have such varying definitions for one person. That’s a, hey, I was looking at the SI swimsuit issue.

And I think that’s porn for another person. It’s like, well, unless it’s like super explicit group sex, if it’s just a couple having sex, even explicit hardcore sex, I don’t really consider that porn. So it was all over the map. And so today the field has gotten a lot better. Where we do tend to define now that we haven’t agreed completely on one clear definition, but probably the most common definition, at least in the research that we use, is that pornography is a form of sexual media, where the media, so the video, the picture, whatever we’re talking about, was produced and designed specifically or centrally to create sexual arousal. And that’s typically to differentiate it from, you know, Game of Thrones or a movie that might have some explicit sex scenes. But that wasn’t the main reason to produce the show or the film or the picture, you know, whatever it might be. So that’s usually the definition we’ll give people when we do research, say, hey, this is media designed specifically or centrally to create sexual arousal.

Brett Mckay: Well, let’s talk about the research. How prevalent is porn use amongst the general population in the United States?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, well, I mean, the simple answer is very prevalent. Again, it’s, it’s something that we kind of assume is happening and the research suggests that it is and that it’s likely been growing in popularity in terms of frequency and how common it is. We’ve got some good national data sets now that have looked at that question and obviously each data set’s going to have slightly different numbers. But our, our best estimate is, I guess the easiest way to, to answer that is more than half of all people view pornography, men and women. We still do see a little bit of a gender difference where men use porn more often than women. Most of the estimates have about 70 to 80% of men viewing pornography at least somewhat frequently, meaning at least a couple times a year, about around 60% of women. Those are kind of the averages if you look across the different samples. So it’s, it’s over half of both men and women with about a 10 to 20% difference between men and women.

Brett Mckay: Okay, you’ve also done research about how porn use differs amongst religious people. What does the research say there?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, that’s, you get two really interesting things when it comes to religious people is for men, if you look at just kind of overall use of porn, like I said, usually a year span is, is a common one in research. So if you look at the percent of religious men and non-religious men that have viewed Porn in the last year. The numbers are actually not really different. There’s not much difference between religious and non-religious men. Where the difference comes is in the frequency within that year. So religious men tend to use porn less frequently. They’re more likely to be in kind of a monthly pattern where they might use a couple times a month or use for a month and then not use it for a couple months and then come back to it. And then that’s typically due to, you know, moral beliefs or disapproval of porn where they’re trying to stop it or they don’t want it to be a habit in their lives. Non-religious men tend to be much more kind of a weekly pattern if they’re using porn. So it’s more kind of regular part of their, their sexual routine.

Women have much more of a difference when it comes to religious and non-religious women. Non-religious women, like I said, typically have not as high frequently as men. And we actually have, I think, less clear data about frequency patterns for women because I think women are more varied in their patterns. But religious women are the one group that tend to be much lower. Like 20-30% of religious women report using porn. And so it’s the one group that looks like they tend to actively avoid it, which in religious populations creates some interesting dating dynamics because then you often have men that have some history in use of porn and then a lot of religious women that have very little exposure and little use of porn. And so that, that creates some interesting dating dynamics around it.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, hopefully we can talk about that later on though. You’ve done some interesting research on that. Oftentimes when people talk about porn use, they talk about it as an addiction. And I think that word addiction gets thrown around a lot, probably too easily. How many people actually have a bona fide porn addiction?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, this I think is a really important topic because like you said, is the addiction term gets thrown around a lot and oftentimes misused in a lot of cases. So we’ve come a long way, I think, in the last 10 years on the clinical research on pornography. And, and there, there was and is still to a certain extent some debate about how addictive porn is and how much potential there is to develop a full compulsive behavior around it. But I think there’s a growing consensus that like gambling and like other kind of behaviors that have some reward attached to them, that they can be compulsive over time. The World Health Organization a couple years ago designated pornography as an addictive potential behavior. But having said that, the percent of the population that uses porn that would qualify clinically for kind of true compulsive addictive behavior is relatively small. Our best estimates are maybe somewhere between 7 to 15%, depending on the sample. So it’s a pretty small group that has really developed compulsive patterns. Now there’s a larger group next to that. If you want to kind of think about this like a continuum, you’ve got, you know, maybe 10% of your population that’s truly addicted.

Another Maybe, you know, 10 to 20% qualify for what, what’s oftentimes called PPU or problematic pornography use, which basically means, like, you’re not fully dealing with a compulsive pattern of thinking and obsessive thinking. It’s not that full addictive behavior, but it’s something that’s causing distress in your life. So maybe you’ve tried to stop a porn habit and haven’t been able to. Maybe it’s caused some issues in your relationship, it’s caused personal distress in your life. So there’s another kind of 10 to 20%, we think of people that qualify for problematic use because of that distress. And then you’ve got, you know, your other 60% of people that are somewhere on that continuum of I’ve experimented with porn and never really gotten into it to. I’ve used porn on a regular basis, but it’s never really become compulsive. It’s never really become a problem. It’s something that, you know, I’ve been able to stop at different points in my life and not really had any distress around. So if you want to kind of put it in terms of what percent of the population has some level of distress and a bad habit, slash, compulsivity estimates are somewhere between maybe 30-35%, somewhere in that range.

Brett Mckay: Okay. And I thought that was interesting distinction between problematic porn use and addiction. Something I’ve noticed, I think you’ve written about this too, is that people who are religious and they have, you know, moral qualms about pornography, they’ll often label their porn use as an addiction, even though it might be more of a problematic porn use. It’s not like they’re using porn like multiple times a day. It’s just like, well, I use it once a month. I don’t want to. And if I’m going to call this an addiction because I feel like I can’t help myself.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the research on problematic porn use has been centered not on religious people in, in general, but trying to capture that group that does have distress, it’s causing some mental health issues, it’s causing relationship issues. It’s distracting. And acknowledging that there can be a need for clinical resources for that people, but wanting to distinguish it from someone, like you said, that’s truly dealing with a addictive behavioral pattern where this is every day, maybe hours a day. I’m not sleeping, I’m having trouble going to work or school. I can’t hold a real relationship because of this. Like, those are two very things we want to make sure, clinically, in terms of resources and therapy, that we distinguish those. But like you said, we do know that religious men in particular oftentimes will report what’s called perceived addiction, which is they label themselves as addicts even though they aren’t. And there’s been some good research that shows that that self labeling, that perceived addiction sometimes can be more harmful than the, the porn use itself. That, that both those things are at play. But when I label myself a certain way and I get kind of a defeatist attitude about things because, oh, I’m an addict, there’s nothing I can do actually causes depression and causes some mental health issues above and beyond what the porn’s doing.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, and I think I’ve seen research too. It makes breaking or stopping the habit harder.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah.

Brett Mckay: What’s the percentage of the population that have, like, never seen porn?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: A very small dwindling population. When we look at teenage adolescent use and especially exposure rates, like, not just, you know, have you ever regularly used porn, but have you ever seen porn? Intentional or unintentional? That exposure right now is just about 100%. It’s not 100%. We do have, you know, some teenagers that manage to navigate their adolescent years and completely avoid pornography, but that number is dwindling. And I would guess, you know, realistically, Maybe you’ve got 5% of your population by 1819 that’s never seen porn. Now again, that’s intentional or unintentional. Obviously the, the number of people that have never intentionally sought out porn, you know, other than, hey, I clicked on this link and it took me here. My friend sent me this, or I saw this on social media, but that’s the extent of my, my porn use. Then you might be able to get up. I did one study that showed that maybe 10 to 20%, roughly of the population by 1819 has, has kind of avoided intentional porn use. But it is certainly the minority. It’s just, it’s so prevalent on social media. A lot of the pornography companies have gotten very good at hiding their links into other ads and other things you might click on.

I think most people have had that experience where you know, you’re on the Internet, you’re on social media. You. In fact, my teenage son, who’s 17, just referenced this to us. He was clicking on LED lights advertisement on social media. Nope. Took him to a porn site. So I think it’s just a very common experience to get exposed to porn, even if you didn’t intentionally mean to seek it out.

Brett Mckay: And something you’ve written about is that because it’s so prevalent, you kind of make the case that we need to normalize porn use. What do you mean by that? Because I think when people hear like, oh, normalized porn use, it means it’s good. What do you mean by normalizing porn use?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think it’s important to distinguish, like you said, is normalizing something doesn’t mean to say that it’s healthy. We have a lot of research that I’m sure we might talk about, about the harms and the risks of using pornography at really any age, any stage of life. But the normalization is just acknowledging that it is normal for most teenagers, for most young adults to have exposure for pornography. Like I said earlier, we know the majority of our young adults and teenagers, especially as they get up to 17, 18, 19, have not just seen porn, but are actively using it on a regular basis and masturbating to it. And so if this is a normal behavior, meaning most people are doing it, then it’s I think even more important for parents, for young adults, for really anyone to educate themselves about the potential risks of pornography and educate themselves about what this is, the effect it could have on your life, you know how to navigate it individually and with couples. Because there’s a whole now new area that’s opened up in the last 10 to 15 years where because most men and women have some history with pornography is when we date each other and particularly when we form long term relationships.

There’s this whole new thing now that’s opened up in relationships where we have to talk and navigate pornography together. There is a study that I did two years ago, or one of the big findings we found in a national sample in the United States was that the majority now particularly of dating couples are using pornography together, which was kind of a new finding. We knew it was happening, but we didn’t know that we had hit the majority point for couples now too. So it’s not just most people use porn on their own. Most couples now use porn together as well. So it’s Just, it’s something that has to be taught. It has to be talked about. And we need just more resources.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, you can’t pretend like it’s not happening, basically. Let’s talk about age. You’ve kind of been mentioning this. Typically, people are getting exposed to porn at a younger and younger age. What’s the average age when people are first exposed to pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, so average age right now in the United States is 10 to 13, which is a lot younger than a lot of people realize. But it very closely follows when most kids get their first smartphones. You know, that’s right around the age, kind of those preteen years where parents are giving kids phones for the first time, or at least they’re getting regular access to the internet. And as we talked about, you’re on the internet long enough, you’re on social media long enough, it’s pretty common then to come across some sort of explicit sexual material. And so that’s, again, that’s the average. You do get people that don’t come across porn, don’t seek it out ’til later in adolescence. You get a smaller group that’s exposed even earlier to that. But right now, 10 to 13 is pretty common. That’s kind of the norm right now in the United States, which is one of the reasons why I typically really try to urge parents to be aware of this, because most parents aren’t really thinking about the sex talk, aren’t thinking about the porn, aren’t thinking about these things ’til their kids really hit adolescence, you know, 13 plus. But by that time, a lot of kids have already been exposed to it.

Brett Mckay: You’ve done research on how the age of exposure influences porn use later in life. Can you walk us through that?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. So this is, this is when we talk about the risks of porn. This is one of the ones that I think is really most critically, culturally to talk about, because we know the risk to kids is a lot higher to adults. You know, there’s a whole conversation you could be having about consenting adults and free speech and letting people, you know, access the pornography that they want as an adult. But when we talk about kids, a lot of the risks in the research become much more straightforward, much more consistent, meaning that the risk that kids have from regular viewing of pornography are fairly straightforward in terms of what they do. And earlier exposure tends to elevate a lot of those risks. So, for example, one of the most consistent risks we see is elevated risky sexual behavior, which makes sense if you watch and view a lot of porn, particularly as a preteen, as an early adolescent, you’re at a higher risk for sexual risk taking. So that, you know, sex with multiple partners, unprotected sex, things like that. In the earlier work, a child’s exposed, we tend to see elevated risk for that. The other big one, circling back to what we were talking about before, is an elevated risk later in life of compulsive and addictive use.

Just, you know, if you’re exposed earlier, which also makes sense. If you’re exposed earlier, you’re more likely to be hiding it, you’re more likely to be using it with, you know, less impulse control, underdeveloped brain, all that stuff. There’s a study that my grad student and I did also a couple years ago said one of the biggest risks of early exposure was an increased frequency of habitual use later in life. And so those are kind of the two main risks of earlier exposure is increased risk of developing that addictive pattern and an increased risk for risky sexual behavior later in adolescence.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so that’s important for, for parents to start talking to their kids as young as 10 even. You mean, to start having that conversation. And I thought it was interesting, the research you saw about how porn use changes throughout the lifetime. I think what you’ve seen is like, it usually spikes around teenage years, young adulthood, and then for a lot of, I’m talking about men. I’m sure it applies to women as well. When you get into your 30s and your 40s, it kind of tapers off for a lot of people or they just stop it.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, there’s a study that I did looking at this specifically, and we saw three main groups as we kind of tracked it through adolescence and young adulthood. So like you said, we did see this group that had a very typical risk taking pattern. So it’s a similar pattern we see with binge drinking, with sexual behavior, where it kind of builds through teenage years, kind of peaks around 18, 19, 20, 21, and then it starts to come down after that. And for a, a large group of people that use porn, that’s the typical pattern. It’s that kind of typical, you know, experimentation, I guess, pattern. We did see another group in that same study, though, that had this escalating pattern that never really went away. And we think that was probably capturing kind of this problematic compulsive group where it also built and kind of increased during adolescence, young adulthood, but it never really came down. It was something that the people were still dealing with or using at a high level throughout their 20s and 30s. And then we saw a third group, which is kind of what we call the abstaining group. But we acknowledge that most people in the abstaining group still reported seeing porn infrequently throughout their adolescent to young adult years. It just never became a regular pattern. And that was actually the biggest group. It was under 50%, about 40% in the study. And then the other 60% were kind of split between those two other groups.

Brett Mckay: I think it’s interesting because you see similar trends with other vices or other potentially addictive behaviors. Alcohol, cigarettes, drugs. And people don’t talk about this, but oftentimes what the research has found is people just grow out or they age out of their addictions. They might have an addiction to alcohol or cigarettes in their 20s, and by the time they’re 40, they just, it wasn’t like they tried to. It’s just they stopped for some reason. And I remember reading an article, a research article. I can hopefully find a link to it in the show notes. But a huge amount of people just age out of problematic vice behavior.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, you know, sometimes I hear people throw around drug analogies with porn, and oftentimes I hear, you know, porn is like heroin, porn is like cocaine, and those are really poor analogies. But for me, the one I always tend to use is alcohol. Alcohol is a really good comparison point for a lot of the research on porn because, like you said, is, you know, pornography or if you look at alcohol, you see this wide spectrum of how people engage in alcohol. And technically, every time you drink alcohol, you know, you’re hurting your body a little bit. You know, your liver is processing it and things like that. At least most, you know, hard liquors and stuff. But you get a segment of people that are able to utilize and use alcohol in ways that doesn’t really have a huge negative effect on their life and they use it responsibly and all those things. And then you have a group, like you said, that kind of, you know, goes through their typical young adult years and it spikes. And they go through college and they’re binge drinking and passing out, and, you know, it’s certainly having a lot of risk during that time in their life, but they kind of age out of it and they, they come down.

And some people go through that and say, you know what? I think I’m done with alcohol in my life. Some people say, no, I’m going to at least bring it down and be more responsible with it. And then you’ve got that group that, you know, struggles with alcohol, and it develops into an addictive, compulsive pattern, and they have to deal with that for the rest of their life. I mean, it’s not most people that drink alcohol. It’s a small percent of people that drink alcohol. But I think pornography tends to follow that, where there’s these kind of distinct groups that, you know, technically I think all have risk, but the risk profile is very different.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I bet pornography is similar to sports gambling or online gambling. Same sort of thing. I bet it’s like a lot of young people who are primarily doing the online gambling and then fewer older people people.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the only caveat sometimes I note to all these patterns we’re talking about is there have been some in my field, including myself, that have at least noted that all the stuff we’re talking about has been based on data over the last 10 to 15 years. In the past, what we don’t really know is we have, because right now, the current young young adult Cohort in their 20s was kind of the first group that were digital natives to the smartphone. Right. As they grew up. The smartphone was there when they were born, and now they’ve spent their whole life with the version of the Internet that we have now. And so although all the patterns we’ve talked about have been kind of true of the past 10 to 15, 20 years, we don’t really know if that’s going to hold. There has been some discussion of, because of how the porn industry has shifted because of how much exposure to online technology and smartphones this generation in their 20s is now. There is the question of, do we see a larger portion of our current young adult generation that struggles with pornography into adulthood? In other words, is that group that has typically had a decrease into adulthood, is that group going to get smaller in the current generation? It’s been a question that’s been posed, but we don’t have the data yet.

Brett Mckay: We’re going to take a quick break for our word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I’m sure a lot of people listening to this podcast, you know, if they got like a lecture from parents or a pastor about porn use, they probably were told these scare things about how porn will, you know, it’ll give you ED erectile dysfunction, it’ll make you depressed or will turn you into a sexual deviant. What does the research say about those things? Does porn use cause depression? Does it cause erectile dysfunction? You’ve seen a lot of that reporting in the popular press. And like, what’s porn’s connection with sexual violence to sexual crimes?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. So this is where understanding those kind of distinctions around patterns of use is really important because the research shows very different effects based on if we want to kind of simplify and say, hey, we’ve got that compulsive group and that problematic use, if we kind of separate them out into people that are having clinical issues with pornography and then everyone else, the research suggests the risks and the effects of porn are fairly different in those two groups. So if we go over and talk about the people that are struggling with an addiction, struggling with problematic use, that’s typically where we see the mental health pieces. Now I guess I want to step back for a second and address something you said, which is the erectile dysfunction kind of arousal dysfunctional stuff that that’s out there. Very little to no research that suggests that’s the case. In fact, most of the research suggests that watching porn increases your arousal, it doesn’t decrease it. And actually that increased arousal can cause issues for people. But we don’t see a lot of compelling evidence. We do see links to the mental health stuff. So the depression loneliness, lower self worth and lower body image, those kind of things are in the research and particularly for that group that has kind of a high frequency problematic to compulsive use pattern.

That’s usually where we kind of see the majority of that research. And so pornography carries a mental health risk, particularly once it gets to that really high frequency compulsive pattern. That’s typically where we start to see that kind of outcome emerge for the majority of people that fall into that kind of occasional use. You know, maybe it’s a regular pattern, but it’s not, you know, becoming a bad habit, it’s not causing distress in my life. Where we see the risk there is largely relational. And so we have several meta analyses now that have shown that any kind of porn use, or the more porn that you use, relationship satisfaction and particularly relationship stability tends to decrease. What we think that’s about is pretty straightforward. It comes down to expectations and what we call sexual scripts, which are kind of when you go into a sexual situation, what do you think is going to happen? What are your expectations, how do you behave based on those expectations? And what we see is that people that use porn tend to carry with them unhealthy scripts and expectations into their real relationships. And part of this is often because pornography starts in adolescence.

And so when you don’t have a lot of sexual experience and porn becomes kind of the primary way that you think about sex and how you expect sex to look like when you become an adult or when you start to engage in your own sexual relationships. And the reality I think most adults understand is pornography is not showing a fairly normative view of sexual intimacy. You know, people don’t look like that. They don’t act like that. They’re engaging in a lot of sexual behavior that a lot of people in their real relationships don’t even enjoy. So that is the main negative outcome and risk that we see for pornography is just making real relationships, just generally and also specifically with sexual intimacy, more difficult. Now, there isn’t also, the other consistent thing we’ve seen in research, with a couple meta analyses, which are kind of studies of studies, is the violence piece. And it’s not quite as straightforward as the satisfaction stability research, but there is research that suggests that more frequent porn use is linked to more aggressive and violent attitudes, particularly about men towards women. There’s some research out there that suggests that it does increase the risk of aggressive behaviors towards women.

And again, that just ties back to the content. We know there’s a lot of pornography that depicts aggression and violence towards women, with women oftentimes enjoying or being depicted as enjoying that violence. And so that media use, just like any form of media use, has an influence on people, and it tends to make, again, healthy relationship formation more difficult. And that’s where most of the research has been for most people, is the main risk of porn is just making your actual human relationships a lot more challenging.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, there’s been articles about this in the popular press about how the scripts you pick up in pornography, you carry that over into your relationship and it just, people don’t like it. Right. You know, you’re a young guy and you watch, oh, you know, anal sex is normal. And you try that and like, your girlfriend or wife’s like, I don’t like that, or choking. That’s a violent thing. And there was a study that was done, I think they said that two thirds of female college students have been choked by their partner during sex. And that can obviously be a really scary thing for them. But guys think, oh, yeah, well, that’s what you do during sex. But I’ve also seen articles where the men themselves who do these things actually don’t even like doing it. But, yeah, they feel like they’re supposed to, because that’s what you do when you have sex. Because, well, that’s what I saw in porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah. Yeah, it sets up that expectation we did a survey two years ago where one of the questions we were asking couples, these were largely young adult and adult couples. And we asked them, you know, when you’re having sex with your partner, are you thinking about porn? Are you worried about porn? And what clearly came out is there is a significant group of people that were in a committed relationship that said, yeah, I’m worried, like when we’re having sex, I’m worried that my partner’s thinking about porn. I’m worried, I feel pressured that they want me to perform a certain way or engage in behavior that they’ve seen in porn. And that’s what I was referencing before about modern couples having to navigate something completely new that previous generations haven’t had to navigate. And it’s this. It’s knowing that both partners have history watching porn. And oftentimes a male partner who has maybe an extensive history throughout their life of watching porn, it’s just there. Even if you’re not talking about it, both partners kind of know that it’s there. It’s subtle, you might be able to pick up on it and what your partner is kind of asking for or kind of hinting at.

And so it creates a whole ‘nother dynamic. Particularly, like you said, when we know that a lot of people might be feeling pressured because of porn to act a certain way with their partner, that’s not either A, what they want to do or B, what is creating actual connection between the two of them. Because we know that sexual intimacy is meant to be and can be this very bonding, connecting, positive thing in a relationship. But when it starts to be this pressure filled, anxiety filled interaction, because we haven’t really openly talked about how porn’s influencing that, but we know that it is, we think that’s where some of the satisfaction, stability, you know, communication stuff we see in the research starts to come in.

Brett Mckay: So that’s another thing you talk about with your kids. Like, porn is not real sex. It’s designed for a specific purpose and they’re going to do things. Like the analogy that I use, like porn is like a fight scene in a movie. Like, no one really fights like people fight in movies. It’s the same sort of thing. Like, no one really has sex the way you see in porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, a common question I’ll get from parents is, is when, when should I have the porn talk? And I always try to quickly correct them and say, well, I don’t think you should have the porn talk. This is about the sex talk. It’s part of the Sex talk that hopefully you know, earlier than you think. Like we Talked about like 9, 10, you should be talking to your kids about sex and hopefully part of the message to your kids, you know, whether you’re religious or not or what your personal values are about sexual intimacy. I’m assuming most people would agree that, that sex between adults is a powerful and can be very positive thing in a relationship and that should be part of the message your kids is getting. And then if, if you have a desire like most parents do, that hey, I someday I want you to grow up and have this healthy, long term committed relationship with another person. Now let’s talk about porn in that context and let’s talk about how porn is showing you things and might make some of the things you think about sex. And in contrast to this positive, you know, message about connection and bonding and commitment, it might make that more challenging so that you can talk to your kids about the risks of sex in the context of some of the more positive and hopeful messages you’re giving them about intimacy as an adult.

So, so that, that way the message they’re getting isn’t just porn is bad because sex is bad. And so really what I’m learning is that if I have any sexual desire or sexual arousal, I probably shouldn’t talk to my parents because, because everything about that is bad.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so porn use negatively impacts all relationships. Does the degree of harm differ between religious and non-religious people?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: We, we don’t see that typically in the, in the relationship outcomes. So like the stability satisfaction is oftentimes in fact a lot of the research just controls for religion or religiosity and shows that same effect regardless. Now having said that like we said before, is, is what you can get in religious populations with couples is someone that might be in that, that occasional use. You know, hey, I’m using porn a couple times a year pattern that can now in addition to the relationship stuff, do two additional things in religious couples. One is like we said before, it could have some element of perceived addiction. You know, where I kind of exaggerate how bad and how negative use is and that causes personal distress and depression and stuff that, that wouldn’t happen in a non-religious couple. The other thing you get in religious couples because you get so, so there’s another term we haven’t mentioned, another academic term called moral incongruence, which is basically when you do something that is in opposition to a moral belief you have and that, that becomes relevant in religious couples because what can happen then in addition to all the stuff we talked about is that if we both hold these moral beliefs that porn is wrong morally.

And I find out, you know, if we go, you know, stereotypically gendered here, if I’m a wife and I find out that my husband’s been looking at porn three times in the last year, you can certainly get a much more exaggerated what we sometimes call behavioral trauma effect, which means, I feel violated in this relationship because you’re looking at porn. And in many cases in religious couples, for religious women, I feel like you have cheated on me. That, you know, they perceive it as a form of infidelity. And so now that perception, kind of like perceived addiction, that perception is going to increase the distress in our relationship because, not necessarily because of what the porn’s doing, but because I perceive this as this moral violation of our relationship or our marital covenant or however, you know, they’re perceiving it, that has that exaggeration effect. That’s oftentimes how I talk about this with religious populations is that there’s an exaggeration effect of all the other outcomes that we see.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I’ve seen just anecdotally, marriages end because of that very thing. Like, the wife finds out, oh, my husband looked at porn two times in the past year. Divorce or like, engagements called off because the lady found out that her fiance had seen porn before.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah, you see that typically only in religious couples. And again, that’s often due to this kind of moral incongruence, this moral boundary violation that religious couples have, where they have a more expansive view of what the boundary of fidelity is in a marriage. And in many religious couples, particularly a lot of religious women, do perceive pornography as, hey, you’re looking at another woman. You’re masturbating to another woman. I view that as infidelity. And then oftentimes it has the same effect psychologically and in the relationship as, you actually cheated on me. And it’s a hard thing sometimes to navigate clinically because from an outsider’s perspective or a therapist, you know, you can be tempted to say, hey, your husband looked at porn twice. That’s not cheating. Stop acting like it is. But if the woman perceives it to be that and it feels like that to her, it’s going to feel very real. And so oftentimes you have to work that couple through that as if it was infidelity, because it feels that way to one partner.

Brett Mckay: So is there any advice that you have? I know you’re looking at this from a descriptive point of view. You’re trying to describe the situation, but let’s say someone’s dating. So there’s this discrepancy between porn use between men and women or attitudes toward porn, women typically view it less, especially if you’re religious. Religious men are viewing it about the same percentage of non-religious men. How do you navigate, how do you have that conversation when there’s such differing expectations?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think first off you need to have the conversation because that’s what the descriptive research tells us is most people when they’re dating or married just don’t talk about this very openly. And that’s obviously an issue. And I think there’s two clear things to start talking about when you’re dating and to be clear. You know, this isn’t necessarily a first date, type of topic. But you know, once you’re committed and you’re kind of moving forward with the relationship, there’s two big things to talk about. One is disclosure, which just means that you should be talking about your history and your use of porn. And again, I’m always clear. Kind of like I talked about with parents is this isn’t this high pressure porn talk where you kind of awkwardly approach each other and say, okay, let’s hear it. You know, do you have a porn history when you’re dating someone you know, over the course of several months to several years, there’s this natural disclosure that happens. You start telling them about your family and you know, this hard thing that happened when I was a teenager and mental health struggles that you’ve had, you, you naturally do that in a committed relationship. So it’s simply adding porn to the list of things that you disclose to each other naturally that, hey, you know we kind of assume both of us probably have had some history with porn. As we get more committed, we should be talking openly about that so that we’re not hiding it.

Then the other thing that I think is really important to talk about is boundaries. What are the boundaries in our relationship? And I think this goes for all couples now, religious or not, it’s important to have a conversation openly with each other about boundaries. You know, if I’m dating someone again, I might be even a non-religious person, but I might in my head say, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be watching porn four times a week when you’re dating me. That doesn’t make me feel good. Well, if you feel like that, you should talk about that and negotiate the boundaries in your relationship around porn just like you would other boundaries like, hey, I, you know, I’m not comfortable with you hanging out with your co-worker at night alone, or I’m not comfortable with this. You need to talk about that with porn, about individual use, couple use.

Brett Mckay: Those are the two conversations that couples need to be having. I think all couples need to be having now is disclosure of what’s been happening in your history, and then discussion and negotiation and agreement about what the boundaries in the relationship are moving forward. That’s not going to necessarily alleviate all the stress and all the issues tied to porn, but doing those two things will alleviate a lot of the stress on this topic for most couples.

So we’ve talked about how porn use can negatively impact all relationships. Is there anything couples can do to mitigate the negative impacts of porn use? Is it just like not, you know, not using porn? Is that what the… Is that what you do?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, the, the simple answer to that is what you said. And in fact, again, tied to some of the studies, national studies that, that we’ve done, we always have the small group of people and couples that have decided, you know, whether it’s for religious reasons or other reasons to avoid pornography. And that’s always the healthiest group that we see. And, and so, yes, there’s some research to support the idea that, again, if you think about pornography as a risk at any level, if I want to maximize my risk of a positive relationship, then I would say, yeah, then, then avoid pornography. If you want to be in the, what we might call minimal risk category, then a lot of it goes back to what we talked about is clear, open communication, clearly establishing boundaries with each other. And then, I think, you know, I don’t want to say moderation, but I think being aware, like we said, if one of the main effects of porn is, is based on content, I think being really open and talking to each other about what the content is that we’re viewing. Again, we haven’t gotten quite to the point in the research where we’ve really paired content, specific content to specific outcomes, but I think we’re certainly moving in that direction that suggests that, hey, you know, if I’m watching porn and it’s consenting adults, and that’s all I’m looking at, that’s probably different than consistently watching porn that’s group sex or violent content.

Or, you know, depicting underage content or incest porn, you know, all these other things that I think will probably in the next 10 years in the research come out as having a more negative effect than, you know, maybe what you might call vanilla porn in some ways. So I think that’s another factor to be thinking about is what is the content that I’m consuming and how that might be affecting me individually and how it might be affecting us as a couple.

Brett Mckay: So we’ve been talking about, you know, you should start the porn discussion early with your kids and put it in the context of like, hey, look, I want you to have a satisfying long term relationship in the future. Sex is a part of that can be a really great part of your relationship, how you connect to your spouse and then porn use can harm that. I think that’s a great way to frame the conversation. I’m more, I’m curious too, particularly if you’re religious. We mentioned there’s that discrepancy between men and women where women view it less and have negative attitudes towards it and there’s that exaggeration effect. Should part of the conversation. As a parent, let’s say this is kind of very gendered, but let’s say you have, you know, if you have a son, you’d be like, don’t look at porn because it’s going to hurt your relationship. Right. Try to avoid it. With your daughters and if you’re religious, should you tell your daughters, like, look, hey, you’re going to be dating guys. And most of them probably seen porn.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I, well, first off, I, I do think with your daughters is still have the porn conversation because I will say that being a religious woman who has a regular pattern of using pornography can be very isolating. A lot of religious women feel very isolated. They feel, they recognize that they’re kind of outside the norm and because of that they feel very anxious about talking to people about their porn use. You know, whether that’s going to a religious leader or their family or dating partners. It can be a very stigmatized, isolating experience. So I, I do think it’s important to talk to daughters about that just like you would with men and boys. But yes, I, I do think part of the message for religious families talking to daughters is again back to normalization, helping them understand that the vast majority of guys they date and our potential marriage partners down the line are very likely to have viewed porn at some point in their life, are very likely to have had some pattern of porn use in their life and teaching them that doesn’t necessarily and probably shouldn’t be this automatic no to a dating or marriage partner because immediately you shrink your, your, your dating pool down to a very small group of guys.

If that’s what you’re looking for and that it’s more about, like we said before, talking openly about it, talking about the potential impact it could have on your relationship. Understand the difference between a guy that, you know, had a year when he was 16 that looked at porn and that’s been the only thing in his life, versus a guy who’s been looking at porn and struggling with it for eight years of his life. Those are two different things that you need to approach differently in a relationship. I think having those nuanced conversations with. With your daughters and helping them understand it’s something they’re gonna have to navigate is a really important part of, of parenting, particularly for religious families.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. I think the openness, just the, the honesty whenever you, Of course, you know, I’m not saying I approve of porn, but if you stigmatize it so much, what ends up happening? You did some research on this. Like, guys just lie, particularly religious guys, because they know. I think you did research on. They know how much their value will go down in the dating market or the marriage market.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yes.

Brett Mckay: If they admit to porn use.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah.

Brett Mckay: And so they just lie about it.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yep. Or either outright lied to about it, or they do what I call toe dipping disclosure. You know, where you, like, kind of stick your toe in the pool to see what the temperature before you jump in. So what a lot of religious guys will do as teens and young adults and even adults is they’ll say, okay, I, I know the porn question is going to come up. So when it comes up, I’m going to tell you this little thing that happened. You know, So a lot of times, like, what a guy in his 20s might do when he gets asked about this in a religious dating context is say, well, yeah, I looked at porn a little bit when I was like, 15. And then they’ll wait to see what the reaction is. And if the reaction is, okay, we just had this very stressful conversation. You almost broke up with me because of that. Okay, well, now I’m definitely not going to tell you what I did last week. And so sometimes it’s not just outright lying, but it is that kind of partial reveal and then holding everything else back, which in some cases ends up being worse, because then down the line and when this inevitably oftentimes comes back out, it felt almost worse that you didn’t just lie to me, but you kind of half told the truth and then you withheld all this other stuff. And now I feel like I’m constantly peeling the onion back to get to different levels of the truth. And so, yeah, just being open is a really important part of that.

Brett Mckay: Do you have any advice on, I mean, you’re, you’re a parent of a teenager. Any advice on helping our kids avoid pornography?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, again, to be clear, completely avoiding it is likely not going to happen. But I do think there can be things parents can do that can really reduce one, the risk of early exposure. So at least kind of push that age out into the life course a little bit into adolescence, and then just generally reduce the frequency or likely engagement. And part of that goes back to just what we call digital literacy, which is understanding the current digital and technological environment that kids are in. Honestly, the, the easiest and best thing parents can do to help their kids avoid porn is delay giving them a smartphone and delay giving them access to social media. And those are two things that a lot of media and other scholars in my field that have looked at adolescent development in the context of technology have been saying for a decade now. I think the voices on that are getting stronger. There’s just not a lot of positives that come in the research from giving a preteen or even an early adolescent access to a smartphone and to social media. There’s just so much research that’s come out on cell phone addiction, on social media addiction, on the negative mental health effects that social media brings.

And then when you bring in the porn stuff, where those two aspects of technology are oftentimes the gateway to porn, for a lot of young kids, that’s a really easy thing to do, is just limit access and delay access. And it’s hard, again, I’m a parent. I’ve had, now four teenagers, got two kids in their 20s now. And it’s hard to be the parent that, that your kids are coming to you and saying, hey, every one of my friends has a smartphone. Every one of my friends has access to TikTok. Every one of my friends has access to Instagram. But helping kids understand that, you know, one, you’re not barring them for life, that you have a plan with them about how they’re going to slowly get access to these technologies and, and how it’s not an all or nothing. I think that’s a common approach parents give is they set this age, you know, whether it’s 10, 11, 12, 13, and say, okay, that’s the age where we give you this device. And then it’s just kind of go, you know, maybe we put some filters on your phone that kids can get around really easily instead of, I think a more nuanced and appropriate plan for helping kids slowly manage that.

Say, okay, you know, we’ll give you a cell phone early on, and it’s not going to be as smart smartphone, but we’ll give you a cell phone so you can start messaging and start getting access, and then we’ll get you a smartphone here. So you kind of lay it out to kids that, hey, there’s this plan from 10 to 18 where we’re going to slowly help you manage and learn how to use technology in an appropriate way. Just doing that will really help on the porn side, especially if you’re pairing that with the conversations that we’ve had. I think that’s kind of the magic formula oftentimes for parents is you have good digital literacy and you have a good, clear plan for slowly helping your kids navigate technology with a regular, ongoing conversation about pornography itself.

Brett Mckay: I don’t know if you have any advice. I’m sure there’s guys listening to this. They’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s. I mean, they’re married, they use porn. They’re not. It’s not compulsive. They’re not addicted. If you are addicted, you need to go get professional help to help you with that. But let’s say you just hit that problematic point. It’s like, you’re not happy with it. Any advice there based on your research and just talking to people in your field about what you can do about that?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I think there’s two good resources to turn to. One is, and this feels simple, but again, back to the fact that so many guys don’t openly talk about this with other people. Is social resources really help? Again, so we talked about the drug analogies earlier, but there’s another analogy for most guys when it comes to porn, because again, for most guys, if they want to stop porn, it’s more of a bad habit when it comes to eating. So if you think about, like, diet and exercise, like, I want to exercise more, I want to stop eating so many donuts or drinking so much soda. And you think about what we know and what has worked for a lot of people about getting healthier. It’s not going to the gym by myself. It’s not buying all the home gym stuff like that. Some people can be super dedicated and do that. As soon as I get a group and I go to the gym with someone and, you know, I’m online in an environment where we’re doing a fitness challenge. People tend to be much better at breaking bad habits when it comes to eating and getting better habits when it comes to fitness, when they turn to other people and porn’s the same way.

Talk to your wife, talk to your friends, talk to someone. If you want to kick a habit, talk to someone about it and say, hey, you know, I’m trying to kick this habit. I want someone that’s checking in with me or setting goals with me. That in and of itself oftentimes is all people need to really move in the right direction or move in a positive direction when it comes to porn. They’re often just not willing, because porn’s kind of a taboo topic, to utilize those social resources. And again, it could be a spouse, it could be a religious leader, it could be friends, family members. Just using other people to help support you through that is oftentimes all someone needs to kick a habit that’s, you know, maybe a very infrequent or, or maybe in an occasional use type of pattern. That’s one thing. The other thing is there are apps and websites out there that are specifically designed to help people avoid porn. And they range from services that will basically lock your phone down for you, that are more meant for people struggling with compulsive use. But there’s other programs out there that are more kind of coaching based, that are more kind of geared towards the occasional use.

That again, I think when paired with social resources can really help you because oftentimes people just need to, to regularly remind themselves about avoiding porn. They need to recognize triggers in their life, like, oh, I’m stressed today, or I, you know, saw something on Instagram that kind of made me start thinking sexual thoughts. Usually just recognizing those triggers, having something that has me reflect on them is again, often enough to help someone kick a habit if it’s something that’s just a couple times a month to a couple times a year.

Brett Mckay: And I think the other thing too is just like, don’t beat yourself up too much if you backslide, because that’s just going to put you in that defeatist attitude. You’re going to get depressed, which is going to want to make you look at porn again. So just creates this vicious cycle and it’s just, it’s just going to make it worse for you.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, definitely.

Brett Mckay: I’m curious, is there any lines of research that you’re curious about exploring to understand pornography’s impact on relationships and emerging adulthood development?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, I mean, I think two areas. One is just better understanding the relationship dynamics. Again, we’ve got all this research now about the risks of porn to relationships like we talked about, but we don’t know a lot yet about how modern young adults and even teenagers are actively or not actively discussing or navigating it in the relationship. Again, we’re kind of assuming that couples are probably having some version of these conversations, but we’re not really clear right now in the research about how those conversations are going. Like I said earlier, we know that most couples are using porn together, but we don’t know how they got there. Like, how did that happen? Like, did the guy introduce it? Did you have a conversation about it? How do you navigate, like, what porn you look at together and what porn you don’t? So there’s a lot of questions about just kind of the coupled dynamic stuff that’s happening that I think we need more research that I want to do in the future. The other big thing, and this is actually where I’m putting most of my energy in, like, most things, it feels like when it comes to technology is artificial intelligence.

I think artificial intelligence is about to change the game when it comes to sexual media. Actually got a report that’s coming out through the Wheatley Institute, which is a group I’m affiliated with at my university, that’s going to be showing some national US Data when it comes to AI companion apps and AI generated images on social media that are oftentimes sexualized and AI porn. That’s showing that, particularly among people in their 20s, this is actually a very common behavior. It’s not more than half, but we’re finding 1 in 4, 1 in 3 young adult men are using AI companion girlfriend apps at some level now. And I think that’s really going to change some of the dynamics around pornography and sexual media in the next. I think it already is, but particularly in the next five years, is that technology becomes more and more popular. That’s another area that we really need to start having some more public discourse about, because I think it’s really potentially going to impact relationships in some unique way.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I think so, too. I’ve been reading some articles about that. I think Esquire did one, New York Times did one about the AI companions. And what’s interesting with the guys, of course they’re using the AI to create, you know, explicit images. But what they’ve found is that the guys really just like the companionship. It’s an emotional thing. And so when they talk to the chat bot, they just get this great dose of affirmation, like, oh, she just loves everything I say. You know, it just. It just feels good. And that’s probably not Good for forming human to human relationships.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: That’s my, my big concern from the early research that’s coming out is that pornography, as common as it’s become, has never really threatened to replace a real relationship. It’s just kind of there. People are still, you know, dating and having sex with real people and getting married. And pornography doesn’t seem like it’s having a huge impact on that. It’s just impacting the trajectory and the dynamics. I think the AI stuff has the potential to really impact just baseline desire to engage in a real relationship. Because like you said, now if I have this companion app and most of these AI platforms are allowing me to now emotionally engage with someone that seems very real, that I can call on the phone and hear a real, you know, a real human voice that does not sound like a robot anymore, that can send me images and eventually videos that are explicit. So I can tie the porn piece that we’ve been talking about to now, someone who is perfectly validating, perfectly emotionally connecting, that always cares about what I have to say, that never fights with me. It starts to very quickly create an environment and an ecosystem that says, why would I engage in a real relationship if I can get almost everything I need over here instead?

Brett Mckay: And also, I think it complicates the infidelity aspect of porn. So, you know, a lot of, you know, men and women, they might think, well, if my spouse looks at porn, it’s not. He’s not cheating on me. I don’t like it, but it’s not cheating. The AI thing’s weird is like, oh, my gosh, I found these text messages my husband’s having with his AI girlfriend. This feels like it’s infidelity, like he’s cheating on me with a chatbot.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I’ll give you just two fun, not fun, but scary scenarios that they’re tied to that just how complex this can get. Because a lot of these companions also have deepfake technology where I can feed an image in and use that to kind of generate the avatar. And so what happens when, you know, I feed our next door neighbor’s wife into that? And so I’m now engaging in a relationship with an AI companion, but it looks like our neighbor, or here’s another just crazy scenario that I think will happen. I can feed my spouse’s picture into it. And so I’ve created an idealized, perfectly sexual, perfectly, you know, shaped version of my spouse. Can you cheat on your spouse with your spouse? Is going to be a question people are going to ask themselves in the next five years.

Brett Mckay: And she doesn’t nag me, she just affirms me. Wow. Crazy world we live in. Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Yeah, so you can go to my faculty website at Brigham Young University. It’s usually where I’ve got my latest research published. Like I said, I’m a fellow at the Wheatley Institute at BYU as well. We’re regularly be publishing public reports on a variety of topics. Like I said, we’ve got the AI one coming out in the next couple days. So those are two of the the best places.

Brett Mckay: Fantastic. Well, Brian Willoughby, thanks for time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Brian Willoughby: Thank you.

Brett Mckay: My guest today was Dr. Brian Willoughby. He’s a social scientist at Brigham Young University. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/porn where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to directly support the show. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally.

The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational.

But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness.

Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting
• AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management
• AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap

Connect With Nate Klemp

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Your friends saw the red flags. Your family voiced their concerns. But you were so caught up in the excitement of new love that you missed all the warning signs. Now you’re stuck in a relationship that’s making you absolutely miserable.

Why does this happen? According to researchers at University College London, “feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought.” In other words, love can not only make you blind, but stupid.

So, how can you keep your brain switched on while dating and dodge potential bullets in the realm of romance? According to relationship expert Dr. John Van Epp, author of How to Avoid Falling in Love With a Jerk, it’s about using both your head and your heart by taking the time to understand your partner’s F.A.C.E.S.

F.A.C.E.S. — The 5 Key Areas You Should Know About Someone Before Making Romantic Commitments

Over decades of clinical experience working with couples as well as decades of research, Van Epp found that there are five areas — represented by the acronym F.A.C.E.S. — that a couple should know about each other before making romantic commitments: 1) family dynamics and background, 2) attitudes and action of a mature conscience, 3) compatibility potential, 4) examples of previous friendship or relationship patterns, and 5) skills for relationships. These five areas can give you an idea of the individual and relational character of the person you’re dating to help you decide whether you want to get more involved with them or not.

Below, we offer some questions, including ones recommended by Van Epp, that can help you more objectively view what your significant other is like in these key areas, spot potential red flags, and assess your compatibility.

(F)amily Dynamics and Background

Family experiences strongly influence our attitudes and behaviors in romantic relationships. Gender role expectations, communication patterns, and approaches for dealing with conflict or stress are all shaped by the experiences we had in our families of origin. So in the beginning of a relationship, ask someone about her family. As it gets more serious, meet her parents and other family members and observe the dynamics that exist between them.

Just because a dynamic exists in her family, doesn’t mean she’s bound to repeat it; while patterns do tend to carry over from generation to generation, sometimes the apple does, in fact, fall very far from the tree. But seeing a dynamic in her family may help you recognize it in her behavior and can simply prompt revealing conversations as to what she wants out of life and how she imagines her future family.

 As you’re figuring out the dynamics that exist in someone’s family, explore questions like:

• What’s the state of her parents’ marriage? Even if they’re still married, are they happily married?
• Did both her parents work, or did one stay home with the kids?
• What was her parents’ parenting style?
• How did her parents split household tasks and childcare responsibilities?
• How were finances handled between her parents?
• What was her relationship like with her father? Her mother?
• Is her family affectionate or more stand-off-ish?
• If she has siblings, does she get along with them? Does she still stay in touch with them? Why or why not?
• Was her extended family highly involved in her life?
• What family traditions were important in her family growing up? Does she want to continue them?
• Has there been any family cut-offs or estrangements?
• What was the mood or atmosphere of her home growing up?
• Were there any addictions in the family?
• How similar or dissimilar are your families?
• Does she like to spend time with her family? Does her family like to spend time with her?

(A)ttitudes and Actions of a Mature Conscience 

This is all about figuring out if the person you’re dating is a healthy, mature adult. Unlike the family-related questions above, which are more neutrally exploratory, these are questions where you’re looking for a certain kind of answer: one that indicates that the person you’re dating is more mature, rather than less.

• Does she have a personal code or set of principles? What is her sense of right and wrong, and where does it come from?
• Does she make wise and kind choices or just consider her own needs and wants?
• Does she show that she has a sense of how her words and actions affect others?
• Does she try to see the perspectives of others?
• How does she handle stress and setbacks? Is she resilient?
• How does she handle being in the wrong? Does she get defensive, or is she open to feedback?
• How stable versus moody is she?
• Is she impulsive?
• Is she neurotic? (Neuroticism is the personality trait most correlated with unhappiness in relationships.)
• Does she respect boundaries?
• Does she take the initiative or wait until someone tells her to do something to take action?
• Does she set goals for herself and work to achieve them?

(C)ompatibility Potential

According to Van Epp, the strongest relationships have both similarities and differences. What matters most is alignment on the big things — values, life goals, and lifestyle preferences, especially around family, religion, and money. While you don’t need identical interests, sharing some leisure activities strengthens bonds, too. And when differences exist (like one partner being more spontaneous, the other more organized), they should complement rather than clash. The key is finding someone different enough to help you grow but similar enough to build a stable, harmonious life together.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out your compatibility potential; the more questions you can say yes to, the more likely you are to be a good match:

• Do you share the same values?
• Do you share the same religious beliefs?
• Do you share similar political positions?
• Are your long-term goals compatible?
• Do you have similar ideas on how many kids you want?
• Do you have similar ideas on family roles?
• Do you share a similar sense of humor?
• Do you have similar ideas about how to spend and save money?
• Do you have hobbies or activities that you share in common?
• Do you have a similar level of interest in travel?
• Do you have a similar level of interest in health and fitness?
• Do you have similar energy levels?
• Do you have a similar inclination toward socializing?
• Do you desire a similar level of physical affection?

(E)xamples of Previous Friendship or Relationship Patterns

How we act in one relationship typically demonstrates how we’ll show up in others. Healthy relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers suggest that an individual has developed the skills to maintain a strong, respectful, and fulfilling connection with a romantic partner.

Here are some questions to explore as you figure out if the person you’re dating exhibits healthy relationship patterns:

• How does she treat service people—restaurant servers, cashiers, attendants, and so on?
• Does she have road rage?
• How does she get along with people at work? How does she treat subordinates? Her boss?
• Has she been fired from a job before?
• Does she have close friends? How does she treat them? Do you like her friends?
• Does she gossip about others and criticize them beyond their backs?
• Did she date others seriously before you? Why did those relationships end? Were the breakups acrimonious?

(S)kills for Relationships

Relationship skills are connected with the attitudes of a mature conscience. You’re looking to see if your partner has the ability to navigate the ups and downs of a relationship maturely. Relationship skills include communication, conflict resolution, empathy, and emotional regulation.

Look for the following when assessing your partner’s relationship skills:

• When you’re talking, does she pay attention to you or check her phone?
• Does she interrupt you when you’re talking?
• When you speak with her, does she ask follow-up questions to ensure she fully understands you?
• Does she show compassion and genuine concern for others’ feelings?
• Does she open up to you when you sense she’s got something on her mind or does she clam up?
• When she has a problem, can she talk to you calmly, or does she blow up or get passive-aggressive?
• Does she stay composed when you have disagreements?
• Does she take responsibility for managing her emotions rather than blaming others?
• Does she make compromises and seek win-win solutions?
• Does she apologize when she’s in the wrong?
• Does she respect others’ needs, time, and autonomy?
• Does she communicate her boundaries without being aggressive about it?
• Does she express gratitude?
• Does she lie?

Know Someone Through Talk, Togetherness, and Time

That’s a lot of stuff to learn about someone you’re dating. And we just scratched the surface of what Van Epp talks about in How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk.

So what does this getting to know each other process actually look like?

According to Van Epp, you get to know someone through talk, togetherness, and time.

As you’re dating, ask thoughtful questions about your potential partner’s life, values, and character. These conversations shouldn’t feel like an interrogation but should emerge naturally as the relationship progresses.

Van Epp also encourages couples to spend time together outside the traditional date. You want to see how you handle different situations, particularly when stressed or overwhelmed. Also spend time with her friends and family to observe her existing relationship patterns.

We often don’t reveal our real selves right away. People are usually on their best behavior during the early stages of a relationship, so that someone’s true patterns and behaviors don’t manifest themselves for three or more months. That’s why Van Epp encourages couples to take their time before escalating a relationship. You need time to have those crucial conversations and to see how each of you behaves in different situations.

Love needn’t be blind, or stupid. By taking time to understand someone’s F.A.C.E.S., you can make a clear-eyed choice about whether they’re right for you. This doesn’t mean finding someone perfect (we’re all works in progress) but finding someone whose habits, values, and character align with what you need in a partner. Remember, it’s all about loving with your heart and your head.

For more insights on how to avoid falling in love with the wrong person, listen to our podcast with Dr. Van Epp:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.