Oh, what's going on, everybody? I was checking my texts as we did the intro. Usually, I

time it at a certain part of the song and for the first time.

Kind of taxigone on there. Uh oh. I just haven't been checking my phone. He is not answering.

The text is a lady. The particular person is a lady. It's not here nor there. Anyway, it's

thanks for listening guys. Thanks for tuning in. Happy Monday. We have an exciting show

for you. I'm joined by my friend and talented writer, LA Times reporter Amy Kaufman.

Woo. Author. Thanks for having me. And among others, Twitter, Twitter snarker, Twitter snarker

and bachelor critiquer critiquer. How's that? But I love the batch. I know you do. Yeah.

Anyways, you're you're going to join us and help us and some fan dating questions. Amy,

I thought would be great not only for her intelligence and work at LA Times, but you

are out there dating like the rest of us. And you are also vocal on Twitter about some

of your own dating challenges. Oh, you've observed. Yeah. I follow you. It's true.

And so, yeah, it's always nice to have someone who's in the weeds and at the front line,

like the rest of us are. I have you found that like whenever I share a

bad dating story and there are a lot, I never get more response. That's always like what

people relate to. Like they just, oh, people love it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've said

this before like dating is hard. It's by definition, the hard part about dating is that

it's meant to be hard. You know, our concepts of love, and we kind of talk about this in

the episode today is that we love is meant to be special. Most things that are special

aren't easy. And if because if they were easy, everyone would have them, so to speak.

But it's kind of like this weird contradiction because we want everyone's deserving of love,

et cetera, et cetera. But we have this in our head that we have these standards and expectations.

...