Whenever I have dinner with friends, the conversation always ends up on one of three topics: how hard dating is, the hunt for affordable housing, or an update on everyone’s pets. The last on that list includes cute photos and veterinarian updates. I love hearing about my friends’ cats and dogs. But I also have to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t have a pet. I never have. (We won’t discuss the ill-fated caterpillar in elementary school.)

I’m in the minority: Over half of American households have pets. Which means that over half of American households have also seen the cost of pet care go up in recent years.  

Helaine Olen is the proud pet parent of a Havanese poodle mix named Barney Rubble. She’s also the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust organization, and she says people often aren’t prepared for how expensive it can get. 

Some of it is inflation, Olen says, but veterinary care is a major factor. “The same medical advances that have kept us alive longer and we consider miracles — whether it’s cancer drugs or stem cell therapies or various pharmaceuticals — the same is true for your cats and dogs,” Olen says.

Decades ago, a cat having an MRI was unheard of; now, it’s common. But it’s not just expanded access and improved technology that’s driving prices up. Olen says that who’s behind that healthcare is a factor. “Big corporations and private equity have seen all of this, know that people say they will do anything for their pets, know that they think of their pets as children, and they have rushed into the sector,” she told Vox.

So how did private equity get involved in the lives of our pets? And what happens when the prices keep climbing? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Olen, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What kind of costs are we talking about?

When your pet is young, you’re probably spending several hundred dollars a year for various vaccines, spay and neuter, annual checkups. But the real costs start coming in as they get older and they need maintenance. 

For tooth cleaning, pets need to be put under anesthesia. You’ll spend a minimum of $1,000. That will be even higher if a pet’s tooth has to be removed. 

I’ve spoken to people whose pets have back legs that have collapsed or disc herniations. You can easily be out over $10,000 on a surgery. You can easily spend four figures on a 24-hour overnight. I spoke to somebody who was quoted $3,500 a night for just an observational overnight.

You mentioned that some of this comes down to who owns pet clinics and how that’s changing. Who owns them now?

Traditionally, it was an independent practice. But in the past 10 to 15 years, big corporations and private equity have moved into the space. The largest owner of vets in the United States right now is a group called Mars. And if Mars sounds familiar to you, that’s Mars as in Skittles. 

They own around 2,500 vets under the names of VCA, Banfield, and Blue Pearl. I’d say somewhere between a third and 50 percent of vet clinics are owned by corporations. It was 10 percent or less than 10 percent a little over a decade ago.

What caused this spike and why is a candy company behind it?

As people realize how much can be done to help their pets, the corporations and private equity basically saw what one analyst described as low risk, high reward. I’ve spoken to employees of some of the larger chains who have told me that prices went up routinely every six months or every nine months or once a year. 

In Britain, there was a recent government investigation into all of this by the Competition and Markets Authority, their equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission. They determined that private equity and corporate ownership is responsible for a billion pounds spent on pets over a five-year period that otherwise wouldn’t have been spent, and that people were paying about 16 percent more at vets owned by large corporate outfits versus independent vets.

How are people paying for this if it’s so expensive?

I live in Los Angeles, and I wrote a piece for New York magazine a few months ago about all the people here who are now driving their pets down to Tijuana because it is so much less expensive down there. 

Pet insurance is a very mixed bag. It is extremely expensive in many cases. It goes up at very high rates. My own pet insurance increased by 30 percent from last year to this year. And by the way, my dog Barney Rubble is 2 and a half years old.

Wow. He’s still so young.

He has had no issues that I am aware of that would account for a 30 percent increase. 

The other thing with pet insurance, unlike human health insurance, is there is no preexisting [conditions] clause. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve interviewed over the years who discovered too late that their pet health insurer deemed something a preexisting condition.

What do people do when they get to the point where this costs too much? 

In some cases, they run up debt. Buy now, pay later services are increasingly moving into the veterinary area as well.

In other cases, they surrender the animal. If you talk to people at shelters, they will say that they believe that part of the uptick they’ve gotten in surrendered animals has to do with the increase in costs of veterinary care.

I imagine that just feels like such an impossible choice, like choosing between this money you don’t have and the quality of life for something that you love.

The emotions are huge. This is in part why private equity and corporations have moved in: They know people are going to feel very emotional about their pets and that they’re going to want to do anything they can to keep them alive or keep them healthy or keep them pain-free, and that they will pay almost any price. 

When my last dog was diagnosed with heart disease, I was determined to keep her going for a couple of years. I had her on one medication that cost $300 a month. I was like, “I can’t lose my Katie.”

The tragic thing about pets is they are both better than us — in my opinion — and they live shorter lives. You are going to lose your pet eventually. It’s just the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

Think about what you’re wearing right now. Did you pick it out? Or was it chosen for you by an algorithm you haven’t even considered? 

You may think it’s the former, but with the state of the fashion industry, it’s likely the latter. There was a time when taste was decided by designers at luxury fashion houses, à la Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, or Anna Wintour-type magazine editors (think of the famous cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada). Now, in the era of fast fashion, our clothing options are often dictated by computers. 

Amy Odell writes the Back Row newsletter and hosts a podcast with the same name. She told Vox that what’s known as fast fashion has been kicked into hyperdrive by companies like Shein. 

“I’ve also heard it called instant fashion,” she says. “The way it works is that they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in, and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items and they test demand.” She says this model has allowed companies like Shein to introduce around 4,700 new apparel styles per day. (For comparison, fast-fashion brand Zara produces around 20,000 a year.)

Some are trying to claw back their personal style by hitting the thrift store instead. Traditionally, it’s where people go to find less expensive clothes. But fashion journalist Hannah Marriott says it can be so much more than that. 

“For the last probably a hundred years, [the thrift store] has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures,” Marriott told Vox. “Whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma.” 

So how did thrifting go from stigmatized to chic? And are thrift stores still thrifty now that they’re more mainstream, especially in an era of ultra-cheap Shein clothing? We find out that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Marriott, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

There’s sometimes this stigma that’s attached to buying secondhand clothes. How has its perception changed over time?

Secondhand clothing used to be something that there was a real sense that if you couldn’t buy new, you would buy secondhand. At the same time, it has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures. 

People within countercultures — whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s — secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma. It’s also been a really important resource for people on lower incomes for a long time. 

I think it was a gradual shift by various things that happened in the pandemic, including this absolute influx of apps [like the RealReal and Depop] that got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers. 

Thrifting became a social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. It’s a vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching. The stigma has really gone away, and it’s almost reversed.

What does that ecosystem look like?

There are different layers to it. There are consignment places like the RealReal where they take quite a big cut, but they will promote your items for you. I think those sites tend to work best if you’ve actually got designer clothes that have quite a big margin, particularly handbags. 

“I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster.”

Then there are other sites that are a bit more laid-back: eBay maybe skews a bit older, Depop skews a bit younger and trendier. There’s Vinted, which I know from the UK, but is making inroads into the US now. There’s ThreadUp as well. Poshmark. 

It’s an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching.

One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the US is still Goodwill. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom?

Neighborhood thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that people on lower incomes do rely on more. It’s less trend-led than something like Depop. And it is somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. 

Goodwill undeniably has put its prices up. Inflation is such an issue for everyone, so I’m sure that there would be an element of prices going up anyway, but a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they’ve gone up a lot — that you can’t find bargains anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. 

It’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly how true all of that is, especially because Goodwill is run as 150 autonomous [nonprofits], and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut charging $75 bucks to go on a thrift tour coach to get early access to a Goodwill store, and then you get to go to another store. You used to be able to buy 10 things in Goodwill for $75.

It’s so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy original thing, but it’s really gone mainstream. Has it sold out? 

I remember when I was much younger, people would say, “Ooh, you got that secondhand.” I just don’t think anyone would ever say that now because that’s kind of how we shop. 

But I still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has, and I still think you’re more likely to find it secondhand or in certain other under-the-radar brands that aren’t fast fashion. 

I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster. I think we’re all feeling a bit tired of that business model, so we’re trying to find other ways to shop and express ourselves.

Recently, while taking the metro to work, I encountered something that shocked me. The train was pulling up, just as the man in front of me tapped to pay to go through the gate, and a woman pushed past me to cut me in line. I still made the train (after I briefly considered acting in a way that would have made us both late for work), but as I passed each stop I got angrier and angrier. Why did she think her commute was more important than someone else’s? We learn to wait our turn when we’re children — why was that lesson lost all these years later? 

I’m not the only one irritated by this kind of thing. Almost half of Americans say that they’ve noticed people are ruder in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Whether it’s poor behavior at the airport or blasting music from your phone with no headphones in public, it’s like people don’t know how to act anymore. 

Kirsty Sedgman is a professor at the University of Bristol and the author of the book On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better. She argues that while people might not mind them as much anymore, manners are important. 

“They encourage us to think about others and to behave in ways that are not antisocial and potentially even dangerous,” she told Vox. “How can we have these conversations so that we figure out what we all want social life and public space to be like in a way that benefits everybody and doesn’t accidentally exclude [anyone]?

While some etiquette rules are pretty self explanatory (let’s not cut in line!), others are more difficult to navigate. “I always try to make a point and I’m not perfect, believe me,” Sedgman said. “I’m not saying that I know how to behave in every single circumstance and I’m always right. I’m no Emily Post.”

Post was the socialite who literally wrote the book on the subject: Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home was first published in the 1920s. More than a century later, her family is still in the business of teaching us how to mind our manners.

Lizzie Post is Emily Post’s great-great granddaughter and co-president of the Emily Post Institute. That’s a title and pedigree that could come with a lot of pressure. But Post says it’s all about your audience. “A lot of times, as long as I don’t get the sense that they would prefer a very formalized version of me, I try to reassure people: laugh, joke, swear, it’s okay,” Post said.

Audience isn’t the only thing that’s changed — the times have too. How has etiquette shifted over the years? And how do we navigate newer things — like our phones? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Post, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

For a long time etiquette has just been something that’s agreed upon. You have to have certain manners to socialize in certain circles and within certain classes. But I think that’s changed. Why do you think that’s happened?

My great-great-grandmother wrote from 1922 to 1960. While she talked about the standards of the day, she also allowed those standards to change. Think about 1922 to 1960 — there were huge swings in how people behaved. Chaperones were gone from the book by her second edition. Life was changing and evolving and she changed and evolved with it. 

Etiquette is a French word — it sounds fancy. I think that it can very easily have these connotations of being something that is about a secret society, or it’s only about formality, or it’s only for people who are very wealthy. It can also start to feel a lot like judgment. 

One of the reasons etiquette can feel so out of sorts, particularly right now, is because times are changing and they’re just changing really quickly. 

I think phone etiquette is really, really emblematic of that. One thing that is so common is people playing music or having their phone on speaker, no headphones. Do we just not know how to act when it comes to our phones? 

There are definitely rules of courtesy and blaring anything out of your phone, whether it’s a phone call, it’s a FaceTime call, it’s your TikTok feed, or that movie that you’re watching, is all inappropriate when other people are a captive audience and haven’t asked to be. 

It’s this mindful moment where people forget where they are. They’re so used to being in their own world with their phone six inches from their face that they forget that anyone can even hear what it is that they’re doing on their phone at that particular moment. 

It’s really hard to correct this behavior because generally, we don’t correct other people’s behaviors.

I admit, especially in public spaces, I am Team Mind My Business. But at what point do you step in?

It’s a really tough judgment call, and it’s going to be different for every situation. 

I think that when I am in a space that I’m only going to occupy for a short time, I am telling myself, “Mind my own business, don’t worry about it.” When it’s that train ride that we’re starting, or that four-hour flight that you’re on, I think we start to have to say something and to ask, “Hey, could you put some headphones on while you’re enjoying that or watching that or on your call?” 

I say, “Could you,” because they might not have headphones with them, but even if they don’t, it’s a reminder. It’s like that check of awareness that, “Oh, this thing I’m doing is impacting people around me.”

Here’s the rub: You can’t control other people’s behavior. You cannot control if this person is going to get defensive. If you’re going to ask the question, be prepared for rudeness in return. And I hate saying that, but it is the reality. We can’t control other people’s behavior.

So there’s clearly a wrong way to use speakerphone and FaceTime. What’s the right way to use them? 

We do a lot of talking on our speakerphones, even in our own homes. You might be moving from one room to another, passing through the living room where people are watching TV or you’re in the kitchen and all of a sudden a roommate has come into the room while you’re on a call that’s on speakerphone. You really want to let the person on the other end of the phone know that there’s other people present now. 

My cousin is so good about this. He always tells his daughter when she gets into the car, “Hey, Aunt Lizzie is on the phone. Say hi to her.” Then I know to watch my language. She knows to say hi to her auntie. And that’s just so much nicer than all of a sudden having a voice pop up and realizing, “Oh my gosh, I was just telling a really personal story and I didn’t realize there was a bigger audience for it.” 

What about having your phone on the table you’re at dinner? People feel very passionately about that one.

I am so bad about this one. I often have mine face down on the table. The funny thing is, I’m not looking for someone to call with an interruption, but it’s not good etiquette. 

It is really best to have that phone put away, to make sure that it’s on silent and it’s not going to interrupt your time together. To have it there, especially face up where any message that comes in is now going to catch the attention of everyone at the table, that’s an unnecessary distraction. 

Is there an obligation when you need to text someone back? Does it have to be within a certain time? You go about your day and the next thing you know, you look at your phone and you have 80 unread texts and it’s like, “Oh no, what do I do? My friends will all be mad at me.”

I wish there was, but it depends on the text itself. 

The ones I don’t think you should wait on is when friends or potential romantic partners offer a time to get together. Don’t let that sit. If there’s a reason why you’re letting it sit, talk to someone about that. Say, “Oh, I’ve got to check with my partner about that. I know we had talked about doing something else Saturday at that time.” 

Give them some kind of an understanding, because it’s a really beautiful thing to be invited to go spend time with someone. I think we want to treasure that a little more than we do in today’s age.

We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic: More than half of Americans say they feel isolated, and we’re getting together less and less. In 2023, only about 4 percent of adults said they went to a party on a weekend or holiday. 

According to Imogen Willetts, a party historian and author of the book Up All Night: A History of Going Out, this moment is an outlier. 

“For most of human history, the experiences that we associate with nightlife — drinking, dancing, music, hedonism — those experiences were simply part of religion because religion was so all-encompassing,” she told Vox.

If parties are so ingrained in humankind, then, what are we missing when we don’t get out the door on a Friday night anymore? And what lessons can we learn from the turnups of yore? We get into all of that and more — including how to throw a great party and how to be a good guest — on the latest episode Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Willetts, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Can you talk about the role religion played in early nightlife? Because I think we often think of religion and partying as two separate things, but that was not the case for all of history, was it?

[Religion] contained people’s hedonistic instinct. There was nothing really outside of it. And so there’s even evidence, which I love thinking about this, that the churchgoing experience in medieval England was actually quite rowdy and quite raucous. 

On feast days there would be drinking, there would be dancing. And there’s one theory that wooden pews were introduced in Wells Cathedral in England to subdue the dancing because it was so raucous. And so in some sense, it takes us a while to get to nightlife because we sort of didn’t need it for a very long time. Religion contained hedonism quite comfortably within it.

Seventeenth-century Japan, I would say, is the beginning of modern nightlife because we have these commercial party scenes, nightlife environments, which have nothing to do with religion, 

“Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence.”

Crucially, they’re also separate from court. Another part of party scenes is court spectacle — think Louis XIV and Versailles and all of that stuff that was contained within these monarchical structures. So the first real nightlife destination is Yoshiwara, which was built on the outskirts of Edo, which is now Tokyo.

The idea of church being a place to party is so interesting. I do get the same feeling I get at church when I’m on the dance floor and I hear Kaytranada. I can imagine how these religious experiences allowed people to access that feeling of release through music and through dance.

An expression that I came across when researching the book that I think really wonderfully kind of captures the essence of nightlife and partying is this term coined by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, which is “collective effervescence.” That’s the feeling that we experience during peak communal experiences. 

Whether it’s at a sports match or a concert stadium, and even within religion — that is collective effervescence. That is the same sensation, that surge of euphoria that people feel on dance floors. I think parties and nightlife are such an important way to access this very important human feeling, particularly in societies that are increasingly atheist or increasingly secular. 

We need nightlife to have these communal euphoric experiences and feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

You’ve written about how, yes, parties are fun, but they’re also at the epicenter of some pretty important cultural and societal shifts.

I think nightlife is very uniquely poised to allow for experimentation and innovation and transgression. Also, in a very practical way, if you’re part of the abstract expressionist scene of mid-century New York or something, you need somewhere to meet and talk to people and figure out how you’re going to sell your work that’s like nothing people have ever seen before. 

These social spaces play a really, really important role in culture. The abstract expressionist artists were hanging out in the Cedar Tavern, and then you have things like the Viennese Secession Movement and Cabaret Fledermaus was part of that meeting space.

Similarly, you get things like dance and music that’s very much created for dance floors, for clubbing, for nightlife: the can-can and then disco and then techno. Nightlife has been so crucial to the propulsion of culture.

A lot of this is happening in the club, but what about parties happening in private homes?

One of the great examples of people opening up their homes in a sense of turning the home into a club was turn-of-the-century New Orleans. On Saturday nights, people would host fish fries: Basically, when you would open up your home to the public, you would charge entry at the door. Once inside, people were treated to this amazing spread of food, drink, and there would be bands that would perform. It was often a way for households who were struggling with rent payments to earn some extra cash.

It happened again in Harlem in the 1920s. Langston Hughes writes about the Saturday night rent parties, where people’s apartments would be opened up in the exact same way. He said they were more interesting than anything that was going on in the cabarets and the clubs. He was going to those as often as he could and collecting the invitations for them. 

People would write their address on business cards, leave them in different shops and pubs and hairdressers or whatever, and then you would pick them up and then go to the party. Langston Hughes collected them, and they now are randomly in a Yale archive of all places.

As you think of parties over the centuries, are there elements that all the best parties have in common? 

At their very core essence, you need good music, you need good lighting, and I think also you need to create this atmosphere where the sense that anything can happen. What you want is for the people that are at your party to feel like they can behave differently or do something a little bit wild. 

I think that there’s something very satisfying in experiencing a domestic world upturned. I think seeing the kitchen become a gloomy cocktail bar, the living room becoming a dance floor — there’s something very satisfying in experiencing that.

It goes back to what the heart of nightlife culture or party culture is all about. We want to shed our daily lives. You want that sense of slight disorder that makes people feel alive.

If you want to hear someone complain, one of your best bets is to ask one of your single friends what the dating landscape is like right now.

You’ll hear tales of first dates that lead nowhere, conversations that feel like they were ripped from a social media feed, and more and more people resigning themselves to partnerless existence. Even what once seemed like an ever-flowing fount of new romantic possibilities has now dried up: It feels like the days of meeting The One via a dating app are behind us.

We are officially in a romantic slump. As dating coach Lily Womble explains: “Dating can be so exhausting, depleting, demoralizing, and I only think dating apps have increased that experience for single folks.” Despite how discouraging it can be, though, a lot of people still desire partnership.

Womble is the author of Thank You, More Please: A Feminist Guide to Breaking Dumb Dating Rules and Finding Love, and she spoke with Vox about how to overcome dating fatigue. “If you do want to find love in a romantic partnership, there is a more healthful and empowering way to go about it that centers you as the main character,” she explains.

So how do you center yourself? How do you take your dating life off of your phone and into the real world? We answer those questions and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Womble, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

If you’re used to dating apps and you want to meet someone in person, how do you make that happen?

Dating in person is a lost art of social connection. I think that our reliance on dating apps has made us all sicker in some ways. These apps are built like slot machines. They’re designed to keep you sitting there with a gallon bag full of quarters and a Big Gulp, hoping to pull the triple cherry and get lucky. 

It’s really important to reset your brain [from] dating apps, to get in-person to build new connections. It is as simple and as complicated as three steps. 

What are the steps?

Number one: joy-building. Joy is connective. You need to exit your house, get off your couch, and go do something in your town or city that brings you some amount of joy with other people. 

It could be something free or something paid. The point is not to be in proximity to hotties at this event. The point is to make a new friendship, to make a new connection, to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” From there, you’re expanding your social circle. The function of a dating app is purely to expand your social circle and expand your opportunity window to meet somebody. Same with expanding your social circle with joy-building. 

You never know which 70-year-old you meet at your quilting night in your small town, whose son’s boyfriend’s cousin comes to a party and suddenly you’ve met the love of your life. I met my husband through joy-building. I went to an improv class, I made a friend that introduced me to her social circle, then I met Chris, my husband. Joy-building helps you meet the right people.

Second, you’ve got co-conspiratorship: helping your friends help you better. Now, your friend might say, “I don’t know any single people.” To that, you say, “I don’t either. So let’s co-create creative solutions. We’re both smart. You have a workplace, you have a work conference. Are you looking out for me there? Here’s the kind of person that I’m looking for. Here’s the questions I want you to ask somebody.” 

Two of my clients were each other’s co-conspirators. They lived in different states. That didn’t matter because one of them visited the other, and in the airport met an eligible man, asked the qualifying and disqualifying questions, found out he was single, that he was eligible, that he was a good fit, and set them up. They literally started dating. So you need to have co-conspirators, you need to have friends looking out for you. Just like your friend asked you to be in their wedding, you need to ask them to support you in this way too.

Finally, we’ve got flirting, which is the most vomitous, nerve-wracking part of this plan. The good news is that it’s a buildable skill set. It’s not just something that your favorite friend who is so naturally flirty has and you don’t. I think that flirting is essentially a joyful, courageous connection. 

People overcomplicate flirting to be this game. But I really believe, and have seen in my own experience, that flirting is just simply approaching somebody, asking a genuine question, and seeing if that person wants to co-create a conversation with you. To see if it’s romantic, you just ask, “Hey, random question. So are you single?” All of this requires 10 seconds of courage to go up to somebody and say, “Hey, you’re cute. I just wanted to come tell you that.” One of my clients did that on a crosswalk with a man that she found cute and they ended up dating. 

You make it sound so easy, but that joy-building, that getting out and talking to people, that can be really hard. One, it’s hard to be joyful when it feels like the world is falling apart around us. Also, some of us are more shy than others. And there are people who lost a lot of valuable flirt skill-building time during the pandemic. I hear you, but how do you do it? 

We have lost a lot of social skills. Those years that we were in lockdown were reps missed, especially for Gen Z, who literally were in school during that time. I’m a millennial, so I had already cut my teeth in New York circa 2015 with IRL flirting. It does require a rejection resilience plan.

I recommend that people have in the notes app on their phone a plan to be courageous and to know how they’re going to react and care for themselves after a hard moment. There are people, when you flirt or joy-build, who don’t want to be your friend, who don’t want to talk to you, who are uncomfortable themselves. That rejection resilience plan can really prepare you to be courageous and to know that no matter what, you’re going to be okay. 

It’s as simple as understanding that your brain’s going to think it’s dying after an experience of rejection. Just say, “I think I’m going to die after rejection. It’s a thought, not a fact.” Then have a plan to be compassionate towards yourself. Self-compassion isn’t just a fluffy phrase. It is a science-backed tool that decreases cortisol, and increases resilience. 

I also recommend a flirting ladder to increase your distress tolerance. 

How does that work?

Start at the very basic level: I’m going to make eye contact with somebody for one second and then look away. Great, boom, done. That’s the first level on the flirting ladder. 

Next level, I’m going to hold it for three seconds. It’s in small steps. Plan to do it in small, bite-sized steps so that you can increase your distress tolerance window. What flirting can be is a practice that you build up gradually towards. So wherever you are on the flirting ladder, if you’ve never made eye contact with somebody, you’re super shy, you’ve never gone up to a cute stranger and said hello, just literally write down five simple steps that you could do this week: eye contact, saying hello. One of my clients did a wink and run. 

When you plan to do something courageous and say, “I’m going to do it for 10 seconds and then I can bail,” you’re more likely to do courageous things. You’re more likely to have more connections in your life and you’re more likely to meet the right people for you.