Laura Sousie here and welcome to speed Dating While Gray.

They're episodes under 15 minutes long, offering bite-sized morsels of your favorite topics.

We'll be dropping them every other week, and I'm thrilled to kick it all off with my conversation with Meredith Goldstein.

She's an advice columnist for the Boston Globe and host of the podcast Love Letters.

You'll hear one of my favorite Love Letters episodes directly after this episode.

So the Love Letter's tagline is where real people tell stories about dating, relationships, and falling in love. If that sounds familiar, it's because Meredith is one of my role models.

I found out about her back in

2018. I'd just been selected for an incubation program to develop my Dating While Gray writing

project into a podcast. And one of our first assignments was to find an aspirational show.

Meredith had only recently launched the Love Letters podcast, but she'd been

writing the advice column for over a decade.

For context, I'm turning 47 this year. So it's amazing the confidence I had at 31 to be like,

I know how to tell people about their 30-year marriages. I did think I had some

expertise. I knew what I didn't know, which I think was important. I was often saying, you know what,

I've never had kids, and I still am not a parent, right? I had grown up in a household with a

divorcing mother and was probably maybe too involved in that journey through discussion. And I was constantly

thinking about who my sister was dating, who my mother was dating, who my friends were dating,

who they weren't dating. And I felt it very comfortable to be a voyeur and not date anybody at all,

really, for most of that time. And I felt like it was really an anthropology project of sorts to see how all these different generations of people in my life were experiencing love.

At the same time, and we've talked about it a little bit on Dating While Gray, it must have been very awkward, difficult, or was it having parents who

were divorcing? Well, it's interesting. As a child of divorce, you have all these judgments

you make of like, here's how they're doing it wrong. Here's how my parents are doing it wrong.

...