Hi, this is Bella Freud. I'm the host of Fashion Neurosis. This week on the show, Esther Perel, is on my couch.

Erotic recovery is part of trauma healing. God, that's interesting. It's not the reward at the end.

Yeah.

That's the difference. And I think we both come together around that construct.

Yeah.

Find fashion neurosis on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black.

I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really

big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge and this is love. A show about the surprising things that love can make us do.

More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We have a fun one today for you. It is almost Valentine's Day, so we're going to talk a little bit about that. And yeah, we've got someone we love. So it's perfect timing. We love Flaje Johnson. And she is joining the show. We're also going to be looking, Sue, at the numbers around high school basketball girls participation, which is dropping, which is tough and

kind of surprising. And we're just going to be throwing stuff at the wall today and trying to

figure that out. But I feel like we have some good theories. But that is alarming at a time when

women's sports is growing so much.

Yeah. How is participation in girls basketball falling? So we're definitely going to take a look at that.

That's really all we have for the intro. It's time to start the show. I'm Megan Rapina.

And I'm Sue Bird. This is a touch more. Let's get into it. All right, first up in the check-in,

like Megan said, we're going to talk a little bit about girls high school basketball. The numbers are down.

It is a little confusing considering the WMBA is booming. So we just wanted to touch on that.

So first, let's look at the facts. The National Federation of State High School Association reports there is a 21% decline in participation across the country since 2000. Now, we want to recognize that these numbers aren't perfect. It's based on self-reporting, but there is another study that shows an even bigger decline, and this decline has been recorded since 2022.

And by the way, there's also a decline among boys participating, which I feel like is going to inform something for me later, albeit a much smaller dip.

Oh.

...