How To Save Dating & Relationships - With Louise Perry

In this episode, we are joined by author and podcast host Louise Perry to discuss solutions for improving modern dating and relationships. We cover how to better find a spouse through social connections, college years being optimal, and why delaying marriage and having "practice" relationships often backfires.

Louise explains why dogs are a poor substitute for children when it comes to satisfying maternal/paternal instincts. We discuss arranged marriages, the risks of teenage relationships, and why conservative women often have an advantage. Louise argues frustrated maternal impulses can motivate young childless women toward "empathetic" political causes.

We also touch on policy ideas like giving tuition incentives for having kids in college, supporting multi-generational living, and reforms to enable combining work and motherhood more smoothly. Overall, a fascinating discussion on improving the "dating market" and cultural approaches to marriage and family.

Louise Perry: [00:00:00] The other thing that I'd add, this might not apply as much in the workplace, but definitely in terms of politics, I would say that frustrated maternal impulse is a very politically potent and potentially dangerous force. Yeah. And I think that like, say, I dunno, attitudes towards refugees in the UK, this might not be as, as acute in the U S I don't know.

But I, I. Or any number of political causes, this is just one example, I, I think that the reason you see disproportionate numbers of young women who don't have children drawn to these kind of high, like, highly charged, empathetic situations where you are like trying to save groups of people, right, who may well be adult men.

But I, I honestly think that a big part of that is, it's, it's like, it's like with getting the dogs, you know, it's this, it's this tug towards mothering. Something is really good

Malcolm Collins: heart take.

[00:01:00] Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, this is Malcolm Collins here today with, of course, my lovely wife, Simone Collins and Louise Perry, our special guest today. You would may know her from the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, or you may know her from her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

And if you do not know her we recently did a tour in the UK talking with a lot of rising political, well, conservative political stars, because of course that's who talks to us. And, she was repeatedly named as the number one conservative thought leader in the intellectual side in the UK right now.

And so we are thrilled to have her on our podcast. The question I wanted to focus on was in this episode, is how Can we make dating? Because I think if we look at the world today, everyone who is being honest is saying gender dynamics do not seem to be working right now. So what do you advise when you're advising young girls or young boys [00:02:00] about how to go out there?

Because let's be honest, they are in a dramatically worse situation than we were. How do you advise them to go out there and find partners and how much you build a new systems that could help them?

Simone Collins: It's

Louise Perry: really difficult. And I say this as someone who's, I've been with my husband for 10 years and I, and I have that feeling of being the sort of, um, last chopper out of Saigon, right?

Because it was, because it was, because it was pre dating apps that we met and, and we just met through, it's through friends, the sort of good old fashioned, well, not quite good old fashioned, right? Like good old fashioned is actually an arranged marriage. But there was this sort of, like, brief window, right, post sexual revolution, pre dating apps, where, where you generally met people through actual existing social connections.

And I would always advise, where possible, to meet people through actual existing social connections, because apart from anything else, it means you have some kind of vetting process available. The problem with a dating app is it's just a stranger from the internet. And they can, and people will admit people who, who [00:03:00] like friends of mine, male and female who've used dating apps will admit that they behave worse with people they've met on dating apps in terms of ghosting or whatever, because they know there are no social consequences because you know that no one is going to then spread a rumor that they're.

That they're like a shitty person who ghosts people. This is, you know, particularly if you're in a big city like London, there are just so many millions of people that they disappear into the night. It's like, it almost doesn't feel real, I think, when you're used to dating out. So, yeah, real social connections is better.

It is difficult though. I'm sure you've, you've seen these graphs about how people meet over time and you went from being like an enormous number of people met at church for instance and then and then and then you see all of that stuff and or at work and then you see all of that stuff declining and um uh the apps taking their place and hey sometimes people do have flourishing marriages that started on the internet.

It's not, you know, it's not nothing. One of the things that we've tried to do with the podcast is we had a, we had a matchmaking event in [00:04:00] London a few months ago. Yeah. And we're going to do another one. We're planning on doing another one on Valentine's day. In fact, I mean, I'll tell you, they are not a good way of making money because you have, you can completely see why the people who created the apps are, you know, multimillionaires plus, right?

Because it's that the internet is like endlessly reproducible, whereas in real life events are not endlessly reproducible and actually put a lot of work and effort into having, I mean, I think it was 60 people who came to the first one. Having all these 60 people in a room is actually very like logistically demanding.

We thought, no, we're going to do it because. The podcast, if you're listening to my podcast that tells you something about your values, right? It's

Simone Collins: culturally selective. They're somewhat aligned values.

Louise Perry: Yeah. It's a very useful filter. What was the structure of these events? So we got people to email or to fill in an online form where they gave some basic stuff.

The kind of demographic details of photo and a [00:05:00] few other things about like. religiosity and stuff. And then we we, we mostly just, we mostly selected on the basis of having even numbers of men and women and having roughly the same age ranges. Like for instance, we had, we had like too many young men apply.

So we had to exclude some of the young men because a 35 year old woman is not likely to be interested in it. 20 year old man, right? So we did a little bit of tailoring like that and we'll do that for the future. I mean, people have requested, you know, specific age range events and things like that.

So with sufficient demand, we can do that. But like you can see why this isn't as popular as you'd hope because it is, it is like, it is labor intensive and it's quite small numbers that you're dealing with, but it's also much, much higher quality. Because you're filtering on the basis of one, everyone there had to want to get married.

Like that was one of the key things. So no one was there just to hook up. And everyone had, you could kind of have a basic assurance of shared values, which you can't really find anywhere else, except maybe in religious communities. But then I hear from, I mean, I, I [00:06:00] have a friend, for instance, who met.

who met his who met his wife at like a young adults Catholic thing, you know, that you can meeting through church is, is pro