ENCORE Now Is the Time to Escape Your Bad Relationship. Here's How.
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dating is always tough, but during a pandemic it can feel downright impossible. "I'm incredibly lonely, and it's impossible to meet anybody my age right now," our listener Sarah said. Feeling isolated, Sarah has clung to a friends-with-benefit situation with Matthew, her friend and dance partner. But at 36, Sarah knows the relationship isn't meant to last. On this episode of How To!, we bring on Logan Ury, director of relationship science at Hinge, dating coach, and author of How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love, to help Sarah break up with Matthew and move on. And moving on, Logan says, doesn't necessarily mean just dating. What Sarah might really be missing is a community—and so she ought to search for not only a romantic partner but also friends who function as "other significant others."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, it's Charles Duhigg, and this is How To. This week, we're going back to one of my favorite |
| 0:05.2 | episodes. It's an episode that we did right after the pandemic ended, and it's with Sarah, |
| 0:09.8 | who has a dance partner that she really likes. He's a great friend. And one thing led to another, |
| 0:16.3 | and they got physical with each other, and now they're kind of friends with benefits, |
| 0:21.1 | which she is less enthusiastic about, particularly now that the pandemic is over, |
| 0:26.2 | particularly now that she wants to go on with her life. |
| 0:30.0 | And so her question is, how does she break up with this friend without losing the friend? |
| 0:37.6 | So we bring in Logan Erie, the author of How Not to Die Alone, a behavioral economist who works |
| 0:43.0 | at Hinge, one of the online dating sites. |
| 0:45.9 | And Logan has lots of good advice about how to manage these kinds of relationships, these |
| 0:49.7 | ambiguous relationships, when we want one thing and maybe we've somehow gotten into something else and how we |
| 0:55.0 | figure out what we want ourselves and how to find it. |
| 0:58.7 | So find a comfy blanket and head out on a walk and learn how not to die alone. |
| 1:03.7 | One of the reasons why you're worried is because you feel like if we're not sleeping together, |
| 1:10.0 | we probably won't be spending as much time together. |
| 1:13.1 | Is that right? |
| 1:14.8 | Yeah. And I'm scared. I'm never going to find another friendship that makes me so happy. |
| 1:21.2 | Welcome to how to. I'm Charles Duhigg. |
| 1:24.8 | David Epstein is on a well-deserved vacation this week, and so I'm here to explore |
| 1:28.9 | a tough question, one that a number of you might be dealing with now that the world is |
| 1:33.8 | reopening. What do we do with the intense relationships that we developed during the pandemic? |
| 1:40.1 | The thing is, breaking up can be really hard, especially if it's someone you just spent the last year quarantining with. |
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