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Table of Contents
- Dating And Safety
- Dating Apps Dehumanizing People
- Advice On Online Dating
- Charly’s Fire
- Being Your True Self
- Red Flags
How To Protect Heart, Soul And Self In Online Dating: An Interview With Charly Lester
How To Practice Self-Care And Self-Protection In The World Of Online Dating
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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating® and the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that is fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. In this podcast, I am so excited to be interviewing Charly Lester. Let me tell you a little bit about Charly. She is one of the world’s leading dating industry experts. She’s a serial entrepreneur and she currently runs a successful marketing consultancy business for dating apps and tech startups. She launched her first business at age 30, which was The Dating Awards. Most famously, she cofounded Lumen, which is the dating app for over 50s, which has been the fastest-growing dating app in the world in 2019, and she was profiled in Forbes in 2018 and she is currently preparing to launch her fifth business, Peaches & Poppies, which is a plus-size activewear brand inspired by her own struggles to find triathlon-specific clothing which accommodates her curves. I adore this. Charly is the former dating editor for The Guardian and the global head of dating for Time Out. She’s been on BBC News Night representing the online dating industry. In 2015, she was an expert advisor to Lord Sugar in the final of The Apprentice, and she’s a regular guest on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. She’s also an ambassador for the charity Survivors Manchester, which supports male survivors of rape and sexual assault. She cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 2016 and completed her first Ironman in 2018 in aid of this charity. In her spare time, she enjoys Ironman Triathlons and played for team Romania in the Roller Derby World Cup, and recently completed the Marathon des Sables, six marathons in five days across the Sahara Desert. She is the dating industry expert for RealMe, which is a company that has developed solutions to make dating apps safer. There are just worlds of things that we’re going to be talking about together, but one of the biggest and most central ones is how people can keep themselves safe emotionally, physically, and spiritually in their online dating experience. If you want to know more about Deeper Dating®, and I’ll be telling you all the different ways that you can connect with Charly and her work, and giving you all the links in the transcript. If you want to know more about the Deeper Dating® path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you’ll get free gifts. You’ll learn a lot more about the ideas we speak about, and you’ll get a complete transcript of every episode including this one. I also just want to say that everything I share on this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, if you like what Charly has to say, if you have any questions, it would just be a tremendous thank you if you subscribed, left me a review or just went to the Ask Me section of DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and share any thoughts, feedback or questions about what you hear in this episode. Thank you so much and we are going to jump in right now.—
Charly, it’s so great to have you here. Thank you for having me. I originally just was so impressed by the quality of your dating advice, which is non-gimmicky and heartfelt and practical, and the combination of the kind of humanitarian aspect of your work that kind of just so integrates in, as well as your sense of adventure. All of the things that are wonderful and kind of part of the dating experience. I would just like to start out by having you talk about this current passion of yours, which is the issue, well, current and ongoing, but this passion for creating safety; physical, emotional and spiritual, for people who are doing online dating. I just love to hear any of your thoughts and reflections, and what this means to you. I think I’m probably part of the new wave of dating entrepreneurs in a way because I’ve come at this industry at an age where I was dating still, so if you look at the first people who created online dating sites, a lot of them had been married for like 10, 15 years before online dating came around, and so they never really experienced their products. I think that’s where, you know, I’m in my late 30s and a lot of my sort of fellow entrepreneurs that is in their age, we dated on Tinder, right? We were there the first year that it launched. I worked at Gaydar for a time, and all of my colleagues, they were all on Gaydar. I think it makes a real difference when you’re actually dating on these products because suddenly you understand the world in a different way. My entry point into the dating industry was I wrote a blog. I went on 30 blind dates before I turned 30. Sometimes, we give ourselves different advice from the advice that we would give other people. Click To Tweet As a result of that blog, I was constantly being asked questions by people all around the world about dating, and so I think because I came into this kind of an inverted commerce dating expert role as the dater, and just my expertise comes from having been on thousands of dates rather than an academic qualification or anything like that. I think it does mean that my advice is often more practical and more kind of in the trenches, and I have seen the experience, yes, I’m a straight female in my late 30s, a straight white female in my 30s, but I’ve seen the experiences of so many different people in this dating space because of writing the blog and speaking to so many people. I worked for Gaydar, which is a men’s, a gay dating app but I also worked, you know, obviously at Lumen, which is for over 50s. I’ve worked with demographics that I don’t belong to, which I think is really important because actually the best thing you can do, I believe as a founder of a product for the people, is listen to your users. With Lumen, I had a profile in-app where literally, people could message me any time of day and it said, “I’m the cofounder of Lumen.” It went straight to my phone. It wasn’t my community operations team pretending to be me. It was literally me answering questions at 11:00 at night on my phone to someone who said, “Hey, can you help me improve my dating profile? I’ve just messaged this guy and he’s not messaging me back. What would you recommend?” I think when you start talking to people and you start recognizing the problems that people face time and again, and I’m sure we’ll talk about Lumen in more detail later, but the whole reason I launched Lumen was because that was the question for like four years that I kept being asked, “My mom’s just got divorced. Which dating apps should she use?” I never had an answer. For me, a good skill in an entrepreneur is if you keep seeing the same problem in multiple places, and you can come up with a solution for it, that’s a suggestion that maybe that solution is needed. That definitely, within the dating space, I’ve seen it time and time again where something is being asked for and no one is catering for it.Dating And Safety
I deeply agree with that and that was kind of how I began in this entire journey. I was a single gay man who adopted a child and I had no time, and I thought, “What would be the most healing and effective way for me to meet people?” Also, I was an incredibly unskilled dater and I really had to be a student of what I was doing wrong to begin to change that, so I love that. I love that in the trenches kind of approach and caring about kind of the pain that you saw, and the missing pieces that you saw again and again. I would like to hear from you kind of just around this issue of safety; physical safety and emotional safety. Kind of, what are the things that stand out for you in the over 50 community, in any community at all? What are the key things that stand out for you? I think in terms of practical safety, I think the key thing, always, is to remember that you’re talking to strangers, and that applies even up on your third date, right? This is a third date. You’ve probably spent 4 or 5 hours in that person’s company. I always liken it to a fellow traveler on a train journey. I mean, you wouldn’t give that person your wallet and your address and your car keys, right? You hear these stories of people’s cars being stolen on a second date. I was like, “It’s because you handed your car keys to a stranger.” The reality is because we let our heart take over from our head. I think from a practical safety perspective, it’s remembering in those early stages, to try to listen to your head and to almost be like your brutal best friend. When you’re rushing ahead with things, think about it from the perspective of if your friend was telling you this story, what advice would you give him or her? I think sometimes we give ourselves different advice to the advice that we would give other people. I think that that’s really important. I think from an emotional perspective, I think the problem and I say this is someone who’s worked for multiple dating apps. I think one of the problems of dating apps, a by-product of dating apps is that people have become products, right? We can see people in the same way that we can view apartments, right, on an app on our phone. If I’m online shopping or if I’m looking for an apartment, then I click a load of things that I want and I can specify exactly what I want, right? “I need three bedrooms. I need a garage for my car.” Well, real life isn’t like that and people are not products, but the way that we see dating apps and the filters we see on dating apps, we start to dehumanize people. I think that that’s the problem with online dating, is to step away. We forget there are people in our pocket. We just see these cards that are the faces and the ages and the names, and we suddenly start forgetting there’s a real human being on the other side. I can remember really early on when I was writing my blog. I matched with a guy in the early days of Tinder, and we never went on the date, and part of it was from the way that he behaved with me. I met him six months later and he was a really lovely guy and I actually called him up on it. I said, “You are so nice. Why were you like this?” He admitted it himself. He said, “I know. I was chatting so many women. I forgot you were a real person and I just didn’t treat you how I would.” He was such a good friend, honestly, and I think that what’s quite startling is people behave completely differently to how they would in real life, and so you’re only seeing this one side of their personality. The gamification, the way that the app is designed to be a bit like a game to keep us on there, well it brings out that side of that person, and it’s not their whole self but it’s just what we see of them. I think the key is partly to remember there is a game aspect to this, that this is not total real life. It’s a great way to introduce you to people but it’s not the be-all and end-all.Being Your True Self
I looked at myself and I actually, because on these dates, I would evaluate the date. Not the guy, but I would give the date that we went on marks out of ten, and on that write up I gave myself 2 out of 10 because I knew that I hadn’t brought my A-game to that date, and it wasn’t fair on the other person. I think that, you know, if you are feeling like your mental health is starting to get a bit sapped or just feeling a bit drained by it all, then take a step away because for me, I think the whole point of dating and the whole point of finding someone is by being your true self, right? I always say this, my advice when it comes to dating profiles is, “Don’t use filters. Don’t lie about anything because you’re not going to attract the right person, but you still need to be your proper self to attract the right person too. If you’re a rundown, knackered is a very English term, tired version of yourself. If you’re a rundown knackered version of yourself, then you’re not actually going to attract the right people for you. Because you’re going to attract people who maybe feed off that energy, and actually it could be quite disruptive to go at it when you’re feeling 25% or 50% because I feel like the type of people you’re going to attract is going to be a completely different type of person. I think that being quite self-aware, I think could be quite important in this and not just feeling like, “Oh, my God. I’ve been single for so long. I have to carry on at this even if I’m not enjoying it because when it comes down to it, this is your life, right? This is a part of your life and it should be enjoyable. You are spending time that you could be spending seeing your friends, doing other stuff, going on these dates. If you’re not enjoying it, just take some time out. That’s really great advice, and there are so many pieces to what you said. One is a kind of curation of self, that we don’t get to forget ourselves when we’re doing online dating. It’s really, really part of the experience. There’s been research and I’d love there to be more research on this, but this is something I have really found to be true. That when we get into what I call swipe circuitry, which is that gamification headspace, not only do we not notice the deeper qualities in somebody, but we actually are drawn more to our “scratch the itch“ type. Research shows that the “scratch the itch“ type is not always the best type. That’s why, in all the work that I do, I say, there’s one key question that we need to ask. Does my soul feel safe with this person? Is there a sense of deep safety? The same with ourselves as well. I love the different things that you’re saying, and that you could take a break. When you are not feeling in a centered, good place, you are not obligated to go out there and try to like gather more numbers. There’s a curation and a self-care, which I think is just wonderful. I think that’s a really good point.Red Flags
I think one of the key red flags for me is if something happens that you feel like you can’t tell your friends about, you know, like someone treats you in a way. That if you told your friends, they would tell you, “Don’t see this person again.” I think the minute you get into that territory, then you need to take a step back. If you can’t tell your best friends about the dating experience for some reason, then there’s something wrong, right? Again, that kind of goes back to being your own best friend. I love that. That is fabulous. That’s for everyone to remember because we kind of allow ourselves to compromise things that really matter to us, and when we do it and we don’t want to talk about it, then we’re engaging in acts that have a little bit of shame, and that is going to draw us to people who are prone to taking advantage of that. That’s a great point. Charly, can I ask you to introduce your friend here? I have two dogs. One under the chair and one on my lap. This is Hugo. You can just see him there behind the microphone, and then under my chair, Dudley is asleep. I have two sausage dogs.Dating Apps Dehumanizing People
Thank you so much for the introduction. I would love to hear your thoughts about kind of there’s a lot of research now that shows that being on dating apps, especially certain dating apps, Grindr is a really bad one for this. I think it’s like one of the worst, but being on dating apps, especially swipe dating apps can increase depression and anxiety for a lot of people because of the dehumanization that occurs. The key to practical safety in online dating always is to remember that you're talking to strangers. Click To Tweet This is actually particularly true in some ways for people of color, and there’s been powerful, powerful documentation of that. Could you just talk about how people can protect themselves emotionally in that way, from the kind of anxiety and depression that come from just being treated in dehumanizing ways? Yeah. I think this is a tricky part of dating, right, because we’re all being put into boxes. The way that the algorithms work is we get put into boxes. I am definitely feeling it as a 37-year-old female, right? Someone, I had a conversation just this week where someone was saying, “The power has changed when you were a 27-year-old female. You had power over men as a straight female.” Now, I’m in a zone where I clearly, if I want to have kids, it needs to happen soon. The guys know that the power is in their court, and so it is interesting and it affects lots of people in lots of different ways. As you mentioned, people of color, particularly women of color, really suffer from this, particularly dark-skinned black women are treated appallingly on dating apps because of fetishism, and because a lot of the apps allow you to filter based on race even within the black community. I know there’s a lot of racism internally with darker skin and these concepts, basically these awful concepts, that society has put on us that everyone needs to be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired bikini model. There’s a lot to unpick in society and there’s a lot then manifests itself when you start to give people boxes that they can take and say, “When people start thinking they have a choice and people start deconstructing people to a list of age, hair color, skin color, eye color, in a way that you wouldn’t actually do if you met someone at the bar, right. If I walk up to you in a bar, you can’t tell how old I am within probably a fifteen-year age gap. I wouldn’t be. I know I can’t age people within at least ten years, right? I don’t walk around with an age label on my head, and one of the things to remember, if you are feeling like you are being marginalized on these apps is you are not being rejected. The reality is you’re just not being seen because of the way these filters work, people aren’t even seeing you. I saw that firsthand when I turned from 29 to 30 on dating apps because suddenly, I had the exact same photos, right, because they were all about six months old. It was all that had changed. It’s literally within a day, I had ticked over a decade and suddenly, I wasn’t appearing in filters anymore. People had filtered me out. Quite often, men my own age filtered me out. I really noticed literally overnight, the drop in attention that I was getting. You can’t take it personally because what’s actually happening is you are ticking a box that someone else hasn’t ticked. They’re not looking at your picture and saying, “No, I don’t want her because she’s too old or she’s too ugly or he’s too camp or whatever you’re worrying about.” It’s not even got that far. It will be that they haven’t even seen you in the first place. It’s remembering that I think, and then I think it’s also really remembering that these tools should, all these tools should be is a form of introduction. They are not telling you your worth by any stretch. This is not a tool to measure your attractiveness to the opposite sex, for example. Dating apps are not a replacement for real-life interaction. They are just an opportunity to cast your net a bit wider, and maybe meet people who you wouldn’t meet in your neighborhood or in your bar or at work. I think it’s making sure that you frame it correctly in your head, because I think if you try and see it as a replacement for society or some value of your worth and you’re counting your own worth on how many matches you’re getting in a night, no one wins from that kind of thinking and you see that. There are definitely people, and this is one of the things that really angers me about people’s use of dating apps. I love dating apps. I don’t like the way people use dating apps. One of the things that really upsets me is when people who are not single-use dating apps to, “Let’s see how many people like me.” For example, and I’ve heard married couples doing this, right, where both partners go on an app, like as many people as they can, and then they compete to see who gets the most reciprocal likes. They have no intention of communicating with those people, and they’re just leading people on. You see it a lot, right? There’s nothing that dating apps can do. The dating apps can’t ask, “I need proof that you’re single.” What are you going to do? “Please prove that you didn’t have a marriage license.” It’s really tricky and you have to trust people. I think that it’s just worth remembering that people, we know this not just from dating. We know this from the whole online world. People are not their best selves when they’re behind a screen, and they think they can get away with something that they can’t get away with in real life. It’s just remembering that, right? That’s a really wonderful filter right there. If someone, even in that dehumanizing environment, still is human, still is kind, still is connected, extra brownie points for them because that’s really a sign, because you’re walking up a down escalator in order to do that. That’s a real mark in your favor. In developing our app, I did a lot of research and learn just such amazing things like for example, some huge percentage of college men never have an intention when they’re on dating apps to even hook up. They don’t even want to talk. They just want to see how many people, it’s like a boredom relief and a kind of self-confidence booster. There is literally no intention to even hook up or even speak. That’s like a shocking thing. I think that dating apps have been built brilliantly to generate matches, but terribly to create an environment of intimacy, and I think that has to change. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that too, like what can dating app creators do to create more humanity, to create more humanization? I’d love to hear any of your thoughts, dreams and reflections of what could be. I think it’s quite tricky because the reality is that for a successful dating app, you need numbers, and the way to have numbers is not to restrict your audience too much, right? Anytime you add any form of filter onto that audience, whether it’s sexuality, whether it’s age, whether it’s something more niche like an app for people with a certain type of hobby or religion, you are already filtering down a group that is already filtered because you’re already starting from a point that everyone has to be single, and so the group becomes smaller and smaller.Advice On Online Dating
Yeah. That’s so interesting and that does happen a lot and of course, there are so many people who are older, who are looking for a deeply committed, connected, live-in relationship but these are things that are all true and all really different. What advice would you give women in that situation? Let’s say over 50, very aware of kind of what a buyer’s market is for men, how much immaturity there is out there, but who still have hope that there are great guys who are looking for someone like them. What’s your best advice for those women? What are the three key things that you would want to say to them as they enter the world of online dating? Yes, at first, I would say, be really honest. Be really honest about who you are. Don’t lie about your age. Don’t put filters on your photo. When I was at Lumen, honestly, I can’t tell you the filters that people are trying to put in their photos. We could see it because you have to selfie verify to join the app. We would see what people’s selfies looked like, and sometimes they look 30 years younger in the pictures that they were trying to upload to the app. There’s no point doing that if you want to meet someone in person. Why would you want your first impression in real life to be one of disappointment? Be honest about who you are. Can I just pause here with a question? Somebody is, they really, really look fifteen years younger than their age. They look twenty years younger than their age and they feel like, “I’m going to lower my amount of people that are interested in me because they judge me by the number age, and not how they would see me when they actually see how I look,” and they struggle with that. I know very, very integrity-based people who change their age from that. Tell me what you think about that. I mean, you’re starting on a lie and also a very good friend of mine is Maria Avgitidis who’s one of the leading matchmakers in New York, and every Wednesday, she does Ask the Matchmaker on Instagram where she answers these questions. Someone asked that exact question this week. They were like, “I look seventeen years younger so I’m calling myself this age.” She replied saying, “I’ve just looked at your pictures. You don’t look that age.” I think that’s the tricky thing. People think they look a certain age. I mean, how do you decide what age you actually look? In reality, again, you’re setting yourself up for a really awkward conversation at some point. You’re either going to turn up and they think that immediately they’re like, “That person lied about their age.” Even if you do actually look the age, I mean, why would you want to pretend to be that much younger? If they’re matching with, it depends, doesn’t it? If it’s someone actually your age who then is like, “You’re same age as me. I thought you were fifteen years younger. I will still carry this on.” I mean, one of the reasons the age is important is in terms of social shared jokes and shared cultural references, right? The reason I wouldn’t date someone fifteen years younger than me is most of my cultural references won’t make sense to them, and this is why it blows my mind when people try to date someone who is significantly younger than them, because I kind of think, “You need to be in that shared space.” A big part of partnership is actually just being in the same place in your life and understanding each other’s lives, right? I think that by lying about your age, then it’s going to get very confusing if you all having to try and pretend that you’re fifteen years younger when you don’t understand half of the references. Good point. I mean, I think that there are intergenerational relationships that work wonderfully, and it’s a spice for people that they’re like entering a new land of the other person’s culture, but I think the point that you’re making, it’s almost like a metaphor for a mistake people make in dating which is, “I’m going to be what I think you want,“ and then ultimately you’re going to have to see that that’s not who I am. That’s my interpretation of what you wanted. I’ve wasted a lot of time finding someone who’s not looking for someone like me.Charly’s Fire
It’s so essential. My dear friend, Hara Marano who’s the editor–at-large of Psychology Today says there are three Cs when it comes to making a choice about the relationship. The first is character, the second is character, and the third is character, and I really agree with that. Charly, you’ve shared so many wonderful things, and I have one other question for you. You are obviously someone who gets on fire about different things. You’re obviously so passionate about different subjects. You’re an entrepreneur and you’re an athlete and you’re visionary and you’re a humanitarian. What these days is kind of like giving you the most fire? What’s the thing that you’re kind of most excited about in your life, your work life, your personal life? What’s the most exciting to you now? It’s quite a big question, isn’t it. What am I most excited about at the moment? I’m a massive feminist. I’m a huge feminist. Anyone that’s watching the video of this recording, I have a big picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg behind me who I just think is the world’s most incredible woman, and there are lots of Brits who have never heard of her. Literally, her entire story, I find so inspirational. I think for me, the thing that’s getting me most excited is really seeing equality in action. I think we are getting to a point. I mean, we’re still not there and this isn’t just women. This is the whole LGBTQ community. It does feel like in the last five years, we’re really starting to see steps have been formed in terms of equality, and particularly racial equality in the last year with everything that’s happened in the States. I feel like there are conversations happening that weren’t happening even twelve months ago, and I think that it’s awful the situations that have happened to get us to this situation where we’re actually talking about things. What I like is that these topics are repeatedly coming up first and foremost. I don’t know if anyone follows soccer. I’m not a football fan. Obviously, Britain is huge for its football but the British team, the English team have been taking a knee in the tournament, and you’ve got some of our politicians refusing to watch the football because they’re so offended by it. I mean, they are racist. I’m sorry. You’re a racist if you’re that offended by someone taking a knee, but it’s really interesting because the main demographic that watch that sport in the UK are not educated. They’re not people who will have these conversations about racial equality. They’re not people who this would have been a topic on the agenda for, but they see their idols taking a knee and I can’t stand football, but actually something like that, I just think is so powerful because these are not people who listened to scholars or politicians. They don’t tune into radio broadcasts talking about these topics but they’re tuning into the football. They’re coming away and talking about race. At the moment, obviously, this is where we’re recording in two days’ time during the European final. The team that has got to that final, I think 8 out of the 11 would not be on the team if it weren’t for immigration and that’s a huge deal. As they say in Hamilton, “Immigrants, we get the job done.” I say that as a half Romanian Brit and I love that. I love that people are saying, “Look, all these racist people in my country who were voted for Brexit in the last five years are suddenly going, “Hang on. Actually, we need Europeans in this country because we wouldn’t have a football team without them.” That’s what I’m passionate about actually is working out, how do you inform people who are not as well-educated, who are not as well-informed? Because I feel like we live in an age where and we’ve seen this with the elections on both sides of the Atlantic where the uneducated and the misinformed can be really used as tools by nasty higher powers. Actually, finding ways to communicate with them on Cambridge Analytica or on Facebook, and finding ways to show them simple messages, that for me is really powerful. Taking the knee at sports events is a way to do that. That’s wonderful. You know, for me, it’s just been such a painful polarization to witness in my country, and hearing this perspective of people’s having their eyes opened who wouldn’t have otherwise, that’s very reassuring to me and I haven’t thought of it in that way. Thank you for that. It’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we live in our own bubbles. I imagine you live in a very similar liberal bubble to the one that I live in where our social media becomes an echo chamber because you’re only hearing stuff that you believe, too. We saw this really happen 4 or 5 years ago with the Brexit vote, where everyone that was voting to stay in the EU just thought that would be a landslide vote because that’s all we had heard and seen, and then suddenly on the day, it was 48% of the country believed the same as I did and 52 did not. Even if those 52 didn’t necessarily know what they were voting for, it was heartbreaking. It really was and I think that was the first time that a lot of my generation, in particular, really realized, “Hang on, we’re living in this echo chamber.” Particularly, I live in London. I live in the capital city. We’re in this very liberal bubble and the rest of the country does not believe the same as we do, and I think that’s been a real eye-opener.Watch the episode here:
Important Links:
- Charly Lester
- Deeper Dating®
- DeeperDating®.com
- The Dating Awards
- Lumen
- Survivors Manchester
- RealMe
- DeeperDatingPodcast.com
- Maria Avgitidis
- Hara Marano
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- @CharlyLester – Twitter
- @Charly.Lester – Instagram
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