Why 'Finding the One' Is Terrible Advice (And What to Do Instead) | Cindy Gallop

0:00You do not need to be in love to be fulfilled. I am someone who has never ever wanted to be married. I have never wanted children. I adore being single. I cannot wait to die alone. I date younger men casually and recreationally for sex. Wow. They tend to be in their 20s. What kind of gave you that confidence to stand there and say it just so strongly? Cindy Gallop, sex educator and on a mission to make the world happier in bed. We don't have enough role models in our society, for women and for men, that demonstrate you can live your life very differently to the way that you're expected to and still be amazingly happy.

0:37And I'm one of the happiest people I know. We are told that our entire life is a search for the one. Fairy tales, you know, our parents, every social event you go to, will he be there? One of the best days of my life, at some point in my early 30s, I went, fuck this for a game of soldiers, I'm not looking for the one anymore. For people that are just trying to listen to this and go, oh, well, yeah, I get that, but it's different to a partnership love. Dissect that for me. Ask yourself, what would really make me happy? Because it may not be what your parents want you to do. It may not be what all your friends around you are doing.

1:08It may not be what popular culture tells you you should be doing. That is the secret of human happiness. Living your life and working your work in a way that is always true to your values. such a big conversation around happiness and what that means and how we get there. Overwhelming topic to kind of dissect, which is why. Guys, I have written a book and I've just heard it's a Sunday Times bestseller, which is very exciting. Now it's called Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard because truly that is the reason why I really started this show. Healthy really shouldn't be this hard. And the one thing that I found from all the years of being in the wellbeing space and working as a nutritionist and interviewing incredible people is that there is one vital step that is missing in our health information us and ourselves and being self-compassionate treating ourself as we would a best friend seems to be fully overlooked and maybe even seen as soft but this book is going to help you re-explore that and realize there is so much science behind just how we think shapes every cell in our body shapes our physiology how we metabolize food how we respond to food and even the choices that we make.

2:18So if you want to know more, this book quite literally might change your life. So head to the show notes where I put the link. You can head to Amazon or any good bookstore and you will be able to buy Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard. And if you do, I'd love to know what you think. Cindy, welcome to Live Well Be Well. I'm so happy you're here. Thank you. Thrilled to be here. So I am going to start this off with actually a very important topic that I've had to learn to grasp over the years. And I'm still learning, if I'm honest with you. You seem like an incredibly confident person is that true is that really how you feel honestly um that is 66 years of life that's what life and experience does so do you think you were born feeling quite a confident person or have you grown and developed that over the years no I mean I'm like all the rest of us you know I was born um in the same way you know from the moment we're born as women everything around us conspires to make us feel insecure about absolutely everything to do with ourselves the way we look the way we talk the way we dress nice girls do this nice girls don't do that women spend the rest of our lives coming back from that and some of us never do so no I mean I was absolutely born into all of the usual um you know cultural influences um that girls women are subject to but you know the older you get the better life gets and at the age of 66 I don't give a damn what anybody else thinks.

3:45Great line. See, you've just mentioned something that, you know, you've learned this over the years, but when did that start to shift? Because, you know, you said that you were born into kind of the societal norms that we're all in, but some bit must stay in that and we never get the confidence. So where did your shift of confidence come from? Honestly, just through living my life. You know, I can't point to one moment when you're blinding revelation, but just, you know, as you go through life, you learn and you grow. Was your mum quite confident woman um um ish i mean my mother was malaysian chinese um so you know grew up very much in the asian cultural um scenario for a woman which is which is very much about you know you get married you have children you know um she was one of 10 brothers and sisters where where the boys got sent to university the girls got sent to teacher training college so she equally you know um was born into the same sort of scenario albeit in a different country that um we all are so for anyone listening to this who doesn't feel like they have confidence what is your advice to them because if they use it there's not one pinnacle moment you are ultimately now for me like oozing easy i'll say that again you are kind of beaming with confidence and I think I know that in a way that is like a wisdom and experience thing but I do think that you have kind of broken through that barrier and you are very inspirational and there must be something that you can like give us and teach us to get people who maybe feel like they're lacking confidence to build some of their own sure no it's it's very simple what I recommend if someone has never done this exercise before is take a long hard look inside yourself and identify what you stand for what you believe in what you value what you're all about and the benefit of doing that by the way is that it makes life so much easier life still throws you all the shit it always will but you know exactly how to respond to that shit in any given moment in a way that is true to you and what you stand for and what you believe in and what you value and honestly that is the secret of human happiness living your life and working your work in a way that is always true to your values but that is also the secret of confidence because then all that matters is that you are being true to yourself and then you don't need to give a damn what anybody else thinks so I think that is incredible advice I also think it's so hard in the noise that we're in in today's society that sometimes we maybe stretch or flex or change our internal values because we think that's what we should be doing so how do we truly like know what our internal values are and how do we get to that rather than just say oh well I think these are good for the checklist and I'm going to kind of align with those values and not actually know if that is truly what we believe yeah I mean basically um you do what I just said which is stop sit take a long hard look inside yourself shut out that noise don't don't listen to any of it pause stop and look inside yourself and I say that because most people have never done that and I guess that's quite confronting right um no no it's simply it's simply something you've never done and so it's just really important you ask yourself those questions because you may be surprised by the answers.

7:20So what would yours be? What's Cindy's values? Oh, I mean, all the obvious ones that all of my work is focused on. You know, integrity, honesty, kindness, equality, authenticity, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I think, you know, I would hope that my values are pretty self-evident from what people see. That's incredible. And do you do check-ins on these? Do you kind of have these moments where you kind of reflect back in moments and kind of say, is this aligning with my values? No, because when you're six to six years old, you've been living this way for so long, you don't need to do that. The ultimate self-trust.

7:57Yeah, but I mean, you know, operating according to my own values is fundamentally ingrained in me at this age. I can't do anything else. I love that. So let's talk about self-promotion, because this also aligns a lot with self-promotion. I think women are not the best at self-promoting how they see themselves I think they put themselves down I think men are much better at self-promotion not all but just generally I think they are how can women be better at self-promoting themselves and actually showing what they have learned and showing what they have achieved because I think we can especially being English I think we're not very good at it so what's your advice for for that sure I mean first of all um just to address what you said you know um I find it enormously ironic that we should have to say to women promote yourselves more because I think it's far more important than we say to men promote yourselves less okay um I would like to see many things gender flipped you know um you know how Now, women are always getting, you know, terrible advice in my view.

9:06So we're constantly told, you know, stop saying sorry. That's the wrong advice. Instead of telling women to stop saying sorry, tell men to start saying sorry a whole lot more. And the world will be a better place. So what I say to women is I want you to bullshit like the men do. and I use that word deliberately because I say to the woman I advise I want you to actively in your head start bullshitting okay and I explain that I recommend that because no matter how much you may think you're bullshitting you will never ever bullshit at the level that men do when you think you're bullshitting all you're doing is you're finally doing yourself justice in the way that you talk about yourself so you describe to be bullshitting how how was a woman going to bullshit is that kind of like inflating the ego oh yep yep um so a woman will go oh my god if i talk about how great my book is how brilliant my business is how successful my revenue figures are i am going to be bullshitting no you're not you are finally talking about the work you're doing in a way that finally does yourself justice okay so it's bullshitting honesty basically it's I recommend to women as I said to bullshit because what a woman thinks is bullshitting is just being straightforward about your achievements why are men better at this than women because from the moment men are born you know they are told that the world belongs to them so they have no problem going on about how brilliant they are do you think that's changing um nope unfortunately because men continue to go on about how brilliant they are you know so no no no I mean you know nothing's changed if anything the world is going backwards what do you think is kind of for you being 66 years of age how hard have you had to push being a woman versus being a man and in advertising and being a founder and building everything that you've done oh you know I I say very straightforwardly if I'd had the choice I would have been born a man my life would have been so much easier you know and it's depressing to me to say that as a woman but the fact of the matter is if I were a man I am I would have been able to do so many more things that I would have liked to have done with a lot more ease than you know all of the challenges I've had as a woman and as a female founder what are the challenges that you've up against?

11:43Talk me through these. Well, I represent the triple whammy of unfundability. I'm female, I'm older, and I'm a sex tech venture. I actually represent the quadruple whammy of unfundability because I'm also a woman of colour. I'm half Malaysian Chinese. But I am white passing, and so I don't tend to cite that as one of the issues. But, you know, first of all only 1.7 percent of all venture capital goes to female founders yeah okay so being a woman is an active disadvantage when it comes getting funded being a woman of color is an even bigger disadvantage you know being a woman who is queer huge disadvantage and being a woman who is older massive disadvantage as well so so obviously it's all intersectional you know But that is depressingly the fact of the matter.

12:39And how have you fought against that? Because you are fighting against it. Oh, all the time. So in my case, I have a very particular challenge trying to raise funding for a sex tech business, Make Love Not Porn. and what is enormously frustrating to me is I know that my potential investors are out there and there are a ton of them and by the way there are a ton of them in every single country in the world no matter how repressed you think that country is in that country are a ton of people with money who are absolutely my potential investors but they are impossible for me to identify by conventional means because they all have one thing in common your willingness to fund what I do at Make Love Not Porn is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey.

13:35It's a function of your personal lens on sex and sexuality that's been shaped by your own experience of it. And I obviously have no way to research and target for that. Not least because sex is the area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people look like they would totally get it. don't. The people who look like complete prudes do. And so my strategy has to be, I put what I'm doing out there all the time, because I have to make synaptic connections that will attract those investors to me. And by the way, if your personal sexual experience was negative, there is no rational business argument on earth that will ever find its way through that.

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15:31If you want to understand your body not just through performance, but through self-awareness, then this is where I'd begin.

15:42I actually just think the general conversation on sex is quite negative. When we're kind of talking about it publicly, I mean, we've done a couple of episodes on here. We had Dr. Laurie Mintz around female orgasms and it totally blew up. It was amazing, like the outpour of women and men that watched that. And then we had a psychosexual therapist on talking about porn as well. And that's why also I wanted you on because I thought, well, it is a conversation that we don't have. I mean, your TED talk is one of the most incredibly eye-opening, wonderful, confident. you just kind of take every public speaking and just throw it in the bed and just shock the audience and I love it because I've been to Ted in Vancouver and I would have loved to have been there when you stood on that stage for four minutes and said the words that came out of your mouth and if no one's listened to Cindy Gallop's talk on porn on Ted please go and watch it it's fucking brilliant I never normally swear on this show but I have to because it's amazing thank you um what gave you back to confidence I think like this is all going to be wrapped up in in intimacy and sex and you know relationships I want to get to all of this but what what was the confidence to stand on that stage in front of Ted which isn't the normal audience I think that would normally expect this type of talk and be so confident with the words that you were putting out there.

17:04I'll tell you what's quite funny about that Sarah is so I've been going to Ted for a very long time I began going when they were in um Monterey in California and before they moved to Long Beach and I went in Long Beach which is where my talk was and then eventually moved to Vancouver and and because I began going to TED you know something like 26 years ago in the days when it was relatively small I gave that talk 17 years ago and that was in the very early days of ted.com and so two interesting things about that the first is as far as i was concerned i was only talking to the people in the room okay because because you know previously for many years ted did not put videos of its talks out into the world then of course it started ted.com which was great by the way because it democratized the spirit of ted but but I never thought for one moment this talk is gonna circulate and live and so as far as I was concerned I was just talking to my fellow testers and then the second and then the second entertaining thing is you know um this is how long ago it was Ted did not rehearse me beforehand so no training well I didn't have to run through my talk with anybody they just let me go on stage and say say whatever I was going to say and they had no idea what I was going to say until I said it so I mean that is indicative of how long ago it was because that would never happen with TED now but um but but you know I was just at at the conference I've been going to for years talking to the audience a lot of whom I knew you know so it was actually you know a pretty relaxing experience for me that was the opposite of what I thought you were about to say when I did a TED I had six months worth of training to go and have to speak to people and you started with 12 and ended up with four of you because lots of you got cut yeah yeah I would love knowing if you're going to get that talk through on that stage right now oh oh absolutely not absolutely not wow okay so I mean that's when you kind of started this make love not porn journey and I think one and I'm sad I'm saying this because it shouldn't be shocking I'm thinking 17 years ago is it more shocking I don't know maybe it's not um but you were kind of like you know I sleep with younger men it was kind of like just this outward statement that came out and it was so I'm sad that it was shocking because it shouldn't be but it was just kind of anything you don't expect someone to stand on stage and say that you said this to me backstage I would not flinch as much it was just the the situation and the environment that you were in what kind of gave you that confidence to stand there and say it just so strongly well um you know I was just saying something that I'd said before and I've been saying publicly ever since Sarah so I you know I basically tell everybody that I am someone who has never ever wanted to be married I have never wanted children very glad I always knew that as opposed to finding out the hard way by actually having them I adore being single I'm not a relationship person I cannot wait to die alone and I date younger men casually and recreationally for sex.

20:15And I am deliberately very public about all of that because we don't have enough role models in our society for women and for men, by the way, that demonstrate you can live your life very differently to the way that you're expected to and still be amazingly happy. And I'm one of the happiest people I know. But we need many more people willing to role model what a very different kind of life looks like because another exercise I really encourage people to do is to, again, take a long, hard look into themselves and ask themselves, what would really make me happy? Because it may not be what your parents want you to do.

20:58It may not be what all your friends around you are doing at the same time. It may not be what popular culture tells you you should be doing. I mean, I couldn't agree with this more. I think the hardest thing that I find with this, and I'd love for you to give me advice and women advice that are listening to this, is you do feel this societal pressure to do life in a way that's kind of mapped out in front of you and how maybe your siblings have done it and all of these things. And I was on my book tour, I'm on my book tour still, but I was speaking up in Wales at a festival and I had two minutes in the morning and I went downstairs just to, I was just staying in a B &B, had some breakfast and the the guy who was looking after the NBA was really really intrigued and by the way I didn't think I was going to say this story live I said this to my team and they were like you should talk about this I can't I can't say this live but I am because you've empowered me um and he came in and he was like oh you know um so what are you doing and I was like I'm a bit I'm on my bit tour and he said oh cool do you have a do you have a partner and I was like um no not right now and i never talk about my relationship so i was just like no no no not right now and he goes oh do you have children and i was like no and he was like oh i really hope that you find someone i really hope that you do find that person jesus h fucking christ and honestly cindy i mean i'm maybe not in the same camp as you as i i want to be single forever like I don't know if I fully relate I really respect it and I have a couple of friends that know they don't want children and you know and I'm I'm not in that camp but I'm also not running off I'm probably in the happiest moment of my life just got Sunday Times bestseller my first ever book I'm like touring around speaking to people about things I mean I was in such a happy moment and it took me from here to here because it was kind of like I'd failed and I think I don't know if I was a man at my age because i'm still young if there was a man at my age saying that it wouldn't have even flinched i kind of i didn't kind of didn't know how to respond i just said i'm really happy right now like at the moment i don't know if i have time for that that's not kind of in my fear of things i need to do you you didn't you didn't owe him any of those answers honestly how do you respond to something like that someone said do you have a partner i go no no and and no further explanations required no need to add not right now you know i mean seriously fuck that shit i'm horrified i am gobsmacked how fucking dare he that's pathetic and and by the way you know he's a product of his cultural upbringing as well you know it's been dinned into him that you know women are for marriage and children you know fuck that shit again that's precisely why we need many more of us living lives out loud showing there are so many different ways to operate you know to design your life to be the one that you want to live and and by the way I very much appreciate the fact that you know I've many women fans I've many male fans as well you know I love that um you know I was just um uh there was some posts on LinkedIn this morning where various men were reposting you know something I'd said going oh my god Cindy Gallagher is amazing you know she's such a role model you know I mean I love the fact that men see me as a role model as well because those are really great right-thinking men who believe they have things to learn from women and an awful lot of men believe they have nothing to learn from women and they are so wrong well they're so wrong what I think also the thing that I'm finding interesting do you think men and I'd also like the men who listen to the show because I do know we have great male listeners on the show um do you think men are attracted to women's confidence or put off by it because my interpretation is that sometimes they love it but when they're in a relationship with that then they don't so I think we're trying to push them to be more confident but then can men handle the woman's confidence um the very important thing here is not to generalize because the wrong kind of man can't handle it you know and by the wrong kind of man I mean the man who has been so inculcated in patriarchal thinking that he has stereotypical gender roles in his head and he cannot deal with anything that threatens his own sense of self.

25:19And, you know, it's so ironic because... So this is something we can absolutely do something about, by the way. So, you know, for the benefit of our listeners, my background is 40 years working in brand building, marketing and advertising, which I always say is a very useful experience of what I do now because I've spent 40 years working in the business of getting people to do things that originally had no intention of doing. very very useful skill um and i i've been talking to my industry advertising for literally decades about the huge opportunity that we have as an industry to reinvent aspirational culture and the reason i make that point to my industry is because we invented aspiration we made people want things but originally advertising made you want material things it made you want the right car the right watch the right house today there is a huge opportunity to reinvent aspirational culture to make people want things that will actually make their lives way better and build stronger relationships between them and the brands who see that opportunity and so I'll give you one example that again I've been talking to my my industry about for decades literally um advertising deals in stereotypes and there's a very practical reason for that because stereotypes are useful creative shorthand.

26:41When you only have 30 seconds to deliver a message, you know, stereotypes are a shortcut. But what that means is that we have perpetuated the stereotype of a relationship or a marriage as heteronormative, where the man is the strong, confident breadwinner, and the woman is the warm, caring, nurturing homemaker. And I've been saying for years, I want us to reinvent aspirational culture around the aspirational relationship role model of today, which is a partnership of equals. Because today, whatever their gender, by the way, both halves of the couple work because of the economy, which requires new forms of negotiation as to who does the housework, who does the childcare, what happens when one half of the couple has a job and the other doesn't, what happens when one half of the couple earns more than the other, and there is a massive opportunity to reinvent aspiration around that to for example represent the men who stay home to look after the children while the woman goes out to work as being enormously aspirational as a fantastic positive masculine role model to make men want to do that as opposed to what happens currently which is both men and women look down on them and and And I think there's a very powerful way in which one can do that using humor as well.

28:08Because there's a wonderful comedian in the U.S. called Ali Wong. I don't know if you watched any of her stand-up comedy specials on Netflix. She's amazing. And so in I think it's Hard Knocked Wife, there's a great line where, you know, she's Asian-American. And her Asian mother gets very worried because, you know, Ali Wong is doing very well. She's now earning more than her husband. and a mother says to her that, you know, if she's earning more than her husband, her husband's going to leave her. And Ali Wong responds, the only kind of man who would leave a wife who makes more than he does is a man who does not like free money.

28:44And I just think that's a brilliantly humorous way of reframing as aspirational. Absolutely. You know, absolutely look for a wife that earns more than you. So I just think there's so much opportunity to reframe all of this in a way that obviously will make men much happier. Well, I do, but do you think men are open to that idea? No, absolutely. You do? Yeah, but I mean, I have a number of couples in my own life where, you know, I've absolutely seen that play out. You know, very old friends where, you know, the wife's career trajectory took her on, you know, a much more bread-winning path, you know, and so the husband absolutely focused on, you know, looking after their home and making life great for her, cooking dinner for her every night when she came home absolutely they're very happy by the way and they've been married for like god almighty decades well i mean i find this interesting because it kind of takes me to one of the questions i think which i had which is why do so many women end up in relationships that don't make them happy because i think that's a big i think a lot of people stay in relationships one because they're scared of being alone feeling that there's no one else out there that they're gonna find um especially for women at a certain age so you end up staying relationships that can make you quite unhappy why do we why do we do that I mean I guess I don't have an explanation for myself but um again simply because you know socio-cultural dynamics have made women think that you know first of all um and again this happens in the moment we're born we are told that our entire life is a search for the one everything tells us that fairy tales you know our parents yeah yeah exactly and what that means by the way is so in your teens 20s you know every social event you go to I'm going to speak heteronormatively because I'm a straight woman will he be there that translates into bloody hours getting glammed up you know makeup outfits you go to that social event this scenario forces you to compete with other women a dynamic that i deplore and in the night you schlep home going oh he wasn't there tonight never mind maybe the one will be at the next one and honestly one of the best days of my life was the point at work because i was a subject this anybody else at some point in my early 30s i went fuck this for a game of soldiers i'm not looking for the one anymore oh my god the relief i could just go to social events to enjoy myself fan bloody tastic and so I really encourage women to get over the idea that true happiness is only to be found in finding the one in love I'm that very rare person who has no desire whatsoever to be in love okay I actively do because because I don't need it and I don't want it I'm really happy the way I am and by the way when you decide you're not interested in being in love it is enormously time and cost efficient and what i mean by that is you know i'm reading a magazine and i enjoy women's magazines and i will come to an article on you know how to find the one or how to improve a relationship i go oh not interested i don't i don't waste time reading it i don't buy books about how to work on your relationship or how to whatever i don't spend money on dating apps it's incredibly time and cost efficient to not want to be in love wow do you ever have that need for like an oxytocin bond with someone you know you don't no absolutely not i'm enormously i'm enormously fond of my own company if you can't see it's like on the floor i need to learn this but but but here's something very important to understand sarah okay so earlier i said i cannot wait to die alone okay and and i absolutely mean that in the sense of I do not want anyone to grow old with.

32:38But the fact of the matter is, I am never going to die alone. Because I'm surrounded by, I have an amazing family that I'm lucky enough to be very close to. I'm surrounded by, you know, the love of my sisters and their spouses and my amazing nieces and nephews and goddaughters and god sons. You know, I have amazing friends. You know, I'm surrounded by love through very, very special friends. and I have quite a few very close friends, not just one or two, I will never die alone. And I think, again, a big mistake people make in thinking about love only as romantic love. Every one of us is surrounded by love and has the opportunity to be surrounded by love that is not romantic love.

33:20And that love is honestly just as wonderful, just as reassuring, just as warm, just as giving, just as fulfilling. No, you do not need to be in love to be fulfilled. I have one small ask while you're watching this show if you're enjoying it please hit subscribe on whichever platform you're listening on this really really helps the show more than you can realize it helps people that have never listened to the show before come across it and see all the incredible episodes that we have with the amazing guests so if it is one small favor today if you're not already a subscriber please do subscribe I mean I do agree with that on so many terms I mean I think I'm pretty aligned in the sense of having an amazing community around me of friends and family and actually that's got more stronger when I haven't been with partners right because you because there's only so much energy you have to go around there's only so much you can give out right and receive externally with your friends because friendships and family are still time that you have to put in to build those bonds there is just one thing that is different though that when you are dating someone it is a different relationship it's a different type of love I guess because it's a more intimate love because you're not intimate with your friends and you're intimate with your family but you have intimacy with a lover or a partner or however we describe the person you're intimate with so how do you um for people that are just trying to listen to this and go oh well yeah I get that but it's different to a partnership love dissect that for me sure well you know the interesting thing Sarah is that there are many many different types of relationship in this world and I feel very strongly that everyone should be free to design the relationship model that works for them which may by the way be different at different stages of your life versus the very limited number of relationship model society says it's okay for us to operate yeah so you know as i said earlier i date younger men casually and recreationally i meet them on cougar dating sites but i have one fundamental criteria i'm very selective about whom I date.

35:21No matter how casual relationship, they have to be a very nice person. I have fantastic radar for very nice people. I only date utterly lovely younger men in an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, affection, liking. And as a result, my so-called casual relationships, ironically, go on a lot longer than most people's so-called committed ones. I've dated younger men off and on by the way sporadically for periods of two three four five ten fifteen years wow okay they may go on to date women their own age they may go on to marry women their own age we like each other we stay friends i'm friends with a ton of them on facebook i connect with a ton of them on linkedin we will meet platonically for coffee or a drink and every so often with some of them the relationships end the marriages end they come back it's very nice wow okay so you just said something very interesting that I need you to help me with you said all of them are very nice and kind how do you filter through and know that that's true and they are nice and kind well here's the interesting thing too because um I'm talking about my approach to casual dating many people who are looking for a soulmate which doesn't exist right The one.

36:40Some people do find their soulmates, actually. I mean, I wouldn't say, you know, I don't believe in the concept of the one. There's only one person. But you can absolutely find someone you can fall in love with and live the rest of your life very happily with. I mean, my parents are an example. They were married for 60 years, you know. So, you know, that feeling obviously does exist for a number of people. but people who are looking for their for a committed relationship could really benefit from taking cues from my approach to casual sex so when when you are looking for a committed relationship must be a very nice person is not usually number one on the checklist on the checklist is must be funny articulate driven must have a job must be earning well must have ambition you know i mean i'm generalizing obviously everyone's but but must be a very nice person i would posit is very rarely the top of that checklist and it should be it absolutely should be because that drives a completely different judgment filter you know and you know think Think about looking at somebody, looking at a man and going, is this man a very nice person versus looking at a man and going, is he eligible in the more conventionally understood ways?

38:06And you will have two completely different mindsets and you will have two completely different lenses. and somebody you deem eligible in the standard checklist can turn out to be a very not nice person but you did not apply that lens when you first assessed them so I guess for anyone that is on the dating scene right now which I think can be overwhelming in this day and era the first question they think is is this person sitting in front of me a nice person I mean whether they're a man or not whether it's a woman or a man and and you assess that through you know how they engage with you you know what your communication is like what your correspondence is like the vibe you get you can absolutely evaluate whether somebody is or is not a very nice person here's another piece of advice um that more people looking for a soulmate would do well to take on board so when someone's in a committed relationship and they they've met somebody wherever and they are you know heading out on that all-important first date IRL you know what they will say about looks okay to their friends and to themselves is all that matters is that he's attractive to me absolutely not what they are thinking when they walk into that bar that coffee shop and see that other person is what would my friends think if I walked into a party with this on my arm they are looking for socially endorsed attractiveness i'm not because when i walk into that first spa and by the way they go through a very rigorous vetting process before they ever get to the first irl date what is that i can come back to that but you know i am genuinely walking in going is this person attracted to me and only me because if he is i'm taking him home and his brains out and i don't need anyone else to endorse my choice so so i strongly recommend people looking for a soulmate um again bring a different lens to apply on attractiveness strip out the social endorsement factor okay it doesn't matter what your friends think you know what do you think when you see this person how do you drown out those signals from everyone else and really trust your inner gut because i think the gut honestly knows and there's been moments where i know something's not right but my brain intellectually overrides it yeah no and i say this in every possible capacity business as well as life always trust your gut your gut is telling you what you need to know your instincts telling you what you need to know always trust your gut so talk me through this vetting process so so basically this is the cindy gallop three-step filter for successful online dating okay and i you know i i only refined this literally decades ago and i've advised many friends on it and and what is guaranteed if you operate this vetting process is you are guaranteed a perfectly pleasant first date okay um so um and this applies um as i said you know i'm i'm i'm meeting i mean i don't meet all the young men i date online i meet some of them irl but um in an online context um whatever the dating website app etc filter number one is photographic okay so this is where either they've reached out to you or you've reached out to them and they have this one photo on their profile it could be that really great photo was taken 10 years ago okay so whether you know um whether it's you reaching out or them reaching out to you what you do is you say very nicely please send me several up-to-date photographs of yourself one of which must be full length now it's absolutely fine to ask this because everybody knows why you are asking that this is online dating etiquette everybody wants to know that the person they're talking to looks like what they say they do okay and also you want to know that you genuinely like the look of them if anybody refuses this request off the list immediately okay and by the way i've i've absolutely past advised friends who disregarded this filter and boy oh boy did they ever regret it when they actually met the person wow okay so you know filter number one is absolutely you need to know they look like what they say they do and you like the look of that person as they are okay so when they pass that filter filter number two is written and and by the way i am very specific in this process because i i prefer to communicate on email okay i'm not going to text i'm not going to whatsapp because this is where you find out whether you have chemistry in writing okay in communication and and incidentally um again speaking as a straight woman this is the filter where you cut the guys some slack because men have no idea how to approach a woman online as much as they have no idea how to approach a woman offline so so maybe a bit of bumbling and you know etc but you know again you decide your criteria i mean this is just me but illiteracy misspelling off the list okay i i know i know we are not going to get on oh gosh you would not go out with me because i'm dyslexic you know well well in that case no no the key thing there is explain that you are dyslexic would you know what i have um my sign up expect creative thinking and creative writing okay well when you explain that that's fine okay great you know okay um but but uh but but this is really just message back and forth enough to see whether you have chemistry within that form of communication yeah then the third filter, and this is really important, and this is again, you know, could be deemed old school, but the third filter is absolutely the phone.

43:47And I'm not talking, you know, WhatsApp call or video call, whatever. I'm talking good old fashioned phone call. You take his number, you do not give him yours, you block it, you know, all the usual precautions, obviously. This is where you find out whether you have phone chemistry. Because first of all, you can tell a lot about somebody from the sound of their voice. And secondly, if you can't maintain a conversation with them on the phone, you sure as hell can't over a drink or a coffee in Starbucks. And again, you've taken their number, they don't have yours, and if you are not getting a good vibe off the conversation, it's absolutely fine to go, listen, it's been great talking to you, I don't feel, you know, we're going to mesh, you know, and we're going to click, you know, goodbye, put the phone down, that's it.

44:33So, however, if you have a lovely conversation on the phone then and only then do you agree to meet IRL and by the way these three steps can all happen in 24 hours okay you know they don't have to be protracted but what I can tell you is that I've been doing this for 20 something years and I have never ever had a bad first date I've absolutely met people with whom I had no chemistry you know didn't progress any further but what this filter ensures is that you will have a perfectly pleasant first encounter as opposed to an awkward embarrassing and uncomfortable one which none of us is any time for no well we don't i also think dating is so timely it's so timely the thing i love about that was your email i mean i think the worst is when people when you're constantly glued to whatsapp and you're expecting immediate responses and all of those no and also and also abbreviated you know communication yeah i'm not for that either but I think actually then you're taking time to sit down and write something to one another.

45:32I love that. Do you have a good opening line that you can share? No, because I don't treat it like that. You engage with each person on their own terms based on how you've been developing whatever chemistry you have between you. And by the way, bear in mind, I'm an older woman dating younger men. you know men in their 20s um you know aren't always up for this some will go i'm not doing all that go fine bye off the list you have filtered yourself out accordingly what have you learned from dating younger men um i'll tell you um let me explain how i started dating young men because because everything in my life and career has happened by accident you know make poor ones a complete accident dating younger men happened by complete accident i did not set out to do this so 20 gosh 24 years ago I was running an ad agency in New York and we were asked to pitch for an online dating brand which was coming out of the UK and want to launch in the US and take on Match which was the market leader at the time and when in in the advertising so this brand asked a number of ad agencies including mine to pitch for its business to do its launch campaign and in the advertising industry when you pitch for a client's account you have to experience the client's product and the entire competitive landscape so we all had to online date and this was 24 years ago and none of us at the agency ever had because it wasn't a thing back then it was very much an emerging sector so the rest of my team and my pitch team were all already you know married dating in relationships so they all went online as fake personas you know they created you know false profiles I was single I thought okay I have to do this for business reasons why not do it for real why not find out what this whole online dating thing is all about so I posted my profile on our client's site a number of sites very honest about everything including my age I got a ton of responses very good for the ego but much to my surprise because I had not thought about this as a dating strategy 75 % of those responses were from younger men and the majority of those were from much younger men and I went wow you know had not thought of this as dating strategy works for me and I've been dating younger men very happily ever since and incidentally we won the business um I like to think that my my my you know personal experience has contributed to our strategy and all of that um uh developed a great campaign which never ran because then match acquired them great outcome for them it's very sad for us we lost a wonderful client the campaign did not run we ended up working match instead they weren't they weren't as nice as our client and we parted amicably a year later um but the result is i am online dating's biggest ambassador i bloody love it i think it's amazing and i especially love it because and this has been the case for me you know i have met people that i would never have met in my normal course of life And I have met and dated younger men from across the entire demographic spectrum.

48:39And I have dated really impressive younger men. You know, I've dated younger men who are the first person in the family ever to go to college. I've dated younger men who are supporting their entire family with their first job and their first paycheck. I've dated, I remember dating one young man who was in the U.S. Army. He was only in his early 20s. he was an intelligence and because of particular language skills he had he was doing an incredibly dangerous job at this incredibly young age you know I've just dated a ton of really impressive younger men that I would never have met all from very different backgrounds in my normal course of life and you know extrapolating out of that what I love is you get to meet people you never would have met otherwise.

49:21Wow how do you not get attached in that moment? I'm not interested in getting attached i mean is there no part of your brain that ever forms a like a no no but by the way i am attached just in a completely different way as i said i have lovely relationships with with um in fact many many of these younger men are still very good friends today um i'm still seeing a number of them today and i met them many many years ago um and and and we we really like each other so again you know there are many more relationships in this world than the ones you see in popular culture and and by the way um what i find very interesting is that my own business attests to that so make love not porn is the only platform where you know people share videos of the sex they have in the real world and so um what we also do is we showcase the way people design their own relationships in the real world and i think that's a very good thing because we have we call our contributors make love not porn stars we have make love not porn stars showing people many different ways of being you know and i'll give you a couple examples at one end of the spectrum okay we have a woman who has has shared some videos on our platform and and our make love not porn stars you know introduce um their videos you know write their own narratives to contextualize them so this one tells us that she and her husband have an agreement once a year um she is permitted to meet up in a motel room with her old high school sweetheart and fuck his brains out now we assume this agreement is reciprocal and we don't know because those are the videos she shares on make love not porn you know the husband isn't sharing anything we haven't heard from him but I think that's a very interesting um demonstration for anybody who might be thinking about opening up their relationship or their marriage because it's kind of baby steps okay it is known quantity okay your old high school boyfriend from your past so long over you know um it's once a year so it's like the hall pass you know for this one occasion and and so for any anyone going you know we want to kind of explore this you know a bit nervous about it how about starting in this very circumscribed way and seeing how you get on now obviously at make love not porn we you know our make love not porn stars span span the full spectrum you know we have polyamorous make love porn stars we have throuples but again what you're seeing is the real world version you are seeing the negotiation the respect the empathy the sensitivity the setting of boundaries and you know those are all things that need to be role modeled in in the real world we're not just showing you what great amazing real world consensual communicative sex born of love intimacy and human connection looks like we're also showing you how people in the real world, you know, operate with each other in a really wonderful way.

52:31And I think that's enormously important. I mean, we have a ton of threesome videos. And so we have a wonderful couple of Make Love and Paul Sons. They're a married couple. And they've shared some videos where they decided to have their first ever threesome with another man, the husband and wife and another man, because the husband was bi-curious and wanted to explore that. So they've shared these videos. And in one of these videos, they explain in the narrative that, you know, everything was going great. And then something triggered the husband because he had been sexually abused in his youth.

53:15And so something triggered him. And so they all stopped. And they all kind of, you know, took account of that and worked through it. And that's fantastic. this is the real world and that's going to happen and the fact that people are able to see on our platform that this is this is what can happen and this is how you work through it with empathy and sensitivity and respect is enormously important well you think because it's not glorified is it because otherwise all these things can look so like everyone's doing it and it's all fine and no one has any fears yeah no no no i mean with us you see the negotiation the boundary setting you know etc etc you see how this this shit really works in the real world so why did you start make love not porn and what was the moment when you left your advertising agency and you were like actually this is what i want to do um there wasn't you know so so again like i said everything in my life and career happened happened by accident you know so make love not porn came about because because you know as i said i date younger men they tend to be in their 20s and 18 19 years ago long before anybody else identified this I began realizing through my direct personal experience having sex with younger men that I was encountering what happens when two things converge and I stress the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing I was experiencing what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society's equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex.

54:47It's when those two factors converge that porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way. So I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed. I went, whoa, I know where that behavior is coming from. I thought, gosh, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because 18 years ago, no one was talking about this. No one was writing about it. This is me in isolation as a naturally action-oriented person going, I'm going to do something about this. So 17 years ago, at the time, purely as a little side venture, I put up on No Money, a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that in its original version was kind of a public service announcement.

55:30Porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world. I launched at ted became the only ted speaker to utter the words come on my face on the ted stage several times um the talk went viral as a result of course and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny clunky website that i had never anticipated thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world young and old men and female straight and gay pouring their hearts out telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they'd never told anyone before and I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue and so I felt I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that would make it much more far-reaching helpful and effective and so that is when I turned into a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously and I turned it into the world's first and only user-generated importantly 100 % human curated social sex video sharing platform so if porn is the hollywood blockbuster movie make love not porn is the badly needed documentary we are a unique window onto the funny messy loving wonderful sex we'll have in the real world we are literally sex education through real world demonstration so how then for women i'm thinking about women listening to this okay who have maybe been in that situation where you were saying am i the only one experiencing this how can women be more confident with speaking about this in a relationship because I think men maybe are I don't know men maybe also aren't maybe men are terrified but how can we have better communication and how can women brings me back to the original feel more confident in this and talking about this that's precisely why I built make love not porn so the answer is go to makelovenotporn.com sign up join us and watch our videos with your partner together we are social sex um i brought every dynamic in social media to this one area of universal human experience that no other social network platform allows and so our videos are designed to inspire communications breakthroughs for couples um and i cannot tell you the number of people you know in the 14 years we operated as a business who've written to us saying thank you you saved my marriage you saved my relationship one one couple said you know watching when we watch your videos it feels as natural and normal to talk about what we see in them as if we're watching something on tv or netflix and from there it's just one step further to talking about our own sex life in a way that means it is now so much better and and i'll tell you what's also interesting um a woman wrote to us last year and she said oh my god the best ten dollars a month i've ever spent you know which is our lowest subscription level she said my husband and i've been married for 20 years and sex had dwindled to a few times a year.

58:28She said, we discovered Make Love Not Poor. We've had sex eight times in the first month. You know, love the videos, love to Make Love Not Poor and stars. Here's the interesting part. She said, it's not just the sex. We now feel closer, more intimate, more connected and more in love than at any previous point in our marriage. And she literally ended an email with, thank you for saving my marriage. That's what we can do. But I'm thinking of people here that are too scared to even go on that platform or have that conversation well I don't know I just think these are the questions that might be coming up right because I think it's it's incredible for the people that are right I'm now downloading we'll put this in the show notes by the way so you can all go on and have a look but to the confidence there's a lot of people that are and I think this isn't just women I think that men have this too that are scared to bring this up with their partner because they live in shame and there might be a whole host of reasons in English culture also we're very kind of like shut down and stigmatized around this thing so how do you give confidence to even kind of approach these conversations and not fill that yep no no i mean again you know because people written to us as i said you know for many many years we just go and and and they tell us that this is what happened you know one husband said you know i said to my wife um he'd come across an article about us he said i said to her look there's this really interesting platform called make love not porn here's what the you know article says about it and she went okay let's check it out you know and And so all you do is you go, you know, came across this really interesting idea, heard this woman talking on a podcast about it.

59:57You know, why don't we check it out together? And you will find, you know, certainly in our experience, very few people decline to do that. You know? Really? And also, it's worth bearing in mind at Make Love Not Porn, it's not just what we do, it's the way that we do it. We are socializing, normalizing and destigmatizing sex. every single thing about our platform is consciously intentionally designed to normalize all of this so to give you one seemingly trivial example when we were designing and building make love not porn my lead user experience designer brilliant woman uni chase she said to me everything on the internet to do with sex is dark and black we're going to be white and so at make love when we have a white background because we are bringing sex out of the shadows and into the sunlight wow i love that clever branding well I do think it's something I mean it was interesting when we've had Laurie Mince on we've done 400 episodes it was the first time we kind of had an episode around female orgasms we've had a lot of relationships I think you go online and oh my gosh it's so overwhelming right now if you open Instagram or TikTok the amount of information and advice that is just thrown at you I think we're all in just this confusion now or in relationship advice like am I dating x y and z is this person x y and z are they right what's the green flags what's the yellow flag what's the red flags there is so much consumption online now about what we should be doing how do how does one like filter through that how does one know like we're going back to the beginning of trusting your gut how does one know if they're trusting their gut or trusting the information and rhetoric that they're being fed honestly you know um i have to go back to basics decide what matters to you you know um ignore that tidal wave of information and by the way what i also recommend is stay away from people and places and things that make you feel bad about yourself and that includes your instagram feed okay so so shut out all that noise and just you know take some time with yourself and go what really matters to me and that's a judgment i'm going to operate and how do you not then self-abandoned when you're in a relationship because you absolutely have the opposite of that you have this like strong understanding of exactly who you are you don't want a relationship that you don't you're so clear in your path what happens for one that feels very clear and then there's a lot of people get into a relationship and lose that clarity what advice do you have for for not losing that attachment to oneself and staying like cindy gallop does and whatever their values are again it's enormously simple stay away from people places and things make you feel bad about yourself if you're being made to feel bad about yourself get the fuck out it's that simple you feel bad about yourself get the fuck out of that relationship i mean that's the best advice ever but why don't we do it it's that simple it really is that simple it's simple but we don't some a lot of us don't do it we stay well time to start doing it i think we should just repress that on repeat when we're in it.

1:03:05So, Cindy, what is next for you? Desperately trying to raise funding to be able to keep Make Love Not Porn and Make Love Not Porn Academy, our sex education extension, alive. And I literally put it like that because I've fought a battle every single day for the past 17 years, not even to grow Make Love Not Porn, just to keep it going, because every piece of business infrastructure, any other tech startup gets to take for granted, I can't because the small print always says no adult content I can't get funded I can't get banked I'm banned from advertising and so I am always looking for those investors who get it philanthropic donors who get it because we have a non-profit vehicle we can take tax deductible donations grants etc you know right now I desperately need to find funding to be able to keep going the only thing holding us back is lack of access to funding to money to capital so that's the single thing I'm focused on because without that um we can't keep going that actually brings me to a really interesting topic right now that you said this when we sat down and you said such a small amount of funding goes to women I'm going to separate this into two questions actually because I'm thinking about this on the spot what we don't talk about money as much as men women have a different relationship I think in their social circles and and asking for money a small subset don't who's learned to kind of really fight but generally I think we're worse at talking about money than men why is that again um it's it's all cultural you know we are brought up um we are brought up to think nice skills don't talk about money men are brought up to to think get out there and make money well just because I'm just thinking about the funding the funding schemes and venture capital funding and all of that it's such a small percentage and there are so many amazing women founders out there that just get completely looked over.

1:05:00And by the way, we female founders have no problem asking for money. We're asked for money all the fucking time. It is not because we're not asking for money that we are not getting funded. Exactly. How do we break this gap? The challenge is, again, it's so simple, but it's one of those simple things like getting out of a relationship that people seem to find extraordinarily hard to do. The answer is simply start writing checks. Write us checks. That's the way you solve it. Write us checks. That's it. Do you think they don't write us checks because they don't believe in women founders, that they can actually be successful?