"Dating is the only thing... that gets harder with practice." This is how Faith Hill, writer for The Atlantic, summarized modern romantic pursuits in the August 2024 article, "Should I Quit Dating?" This week, Mallory and Diana chat with their friend Haymitch St. Stephen about this article and another one from The Cut, entitled, "How Much Work Should Dating Be?" Listen in to hear how we approach dating at this point in our lives, and how to value yourself and stay close to your values even as...

We told you we wanted to talk about sex on this podcast, and this is where we wanted to start -- with a talk about not having sex. We had a conversation with with Fr. Patrick Briscoe, a Catholic Dominican Friar, and Sara Perla, a single Catholic woman, about the purpose of celibacy for Catholics and how they support a large group of adults committed to it. Catholics take as doctrine Jesus’ statement that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage” and thus t...

In this episode we brought on political scientist and philosopher Ryan Davis to talk about his muse and favorite teaching resource: the one and only Taylor Swift. Ryan believes that Taylor's discography, more than a catalog account of her romantic failures, is an evolving exploration about what it means to be good. Though she may have hoped her life would follow the trajectory of the song "love story", instead she's allowed her romantic disappointments to turn her into a philosopher. Ea...

This wild, funny, and revelatory episode felt like an off-road excursion from Ted Talks in India to the vortexes of Sedona, Arizona and places in between. The topic is interfaith marriage: we sat down with McArthur and Ved Krishna to understand how a Latter-day Saint woman living in Washington DC and an Indian man living in rural India ended up marrying each other. We hit all the questions you'd expect on this topic: how did they get the courage and confidence to enter an unconventional...

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Actress Chloe Sevigny said, "I think aging is really one of the worst things of all time." In this episode, we chat with our guest Lisa Valentine Clark about the inevitable loss, grief, and change that aging brings. We know though, that the joy of the gospel comes from being anchored in our present reality. How do we stay anchored in reality, and anchored in joy, as we live in a culture that celebrates youth and fears aging? Lisa is an actre...

What do you see when you peel back the curtain of a dating app? What does the app assume about love, and how you find it? We sat down with Michael Patterson, the president of the Mutual Dating App, to ask how the app envisions the arc from swiping to commitment. Michael was Mutual's first employee, so he has watched the app grow, learn, and improve over time. Though he's seen thousands of couples find love and get married, he's also heard countless complaints about dating apps, from swiping f...

Unmarried people are less religious than married people on almost every measure, according to Pew's Religious Landscape Survey and further findings from researcher Ryan Burge and an analysis by MIssion . In this episode, we lay out the data and play with one possible explanation: that religion, particularly for Latter-day Saints, is so tightly bundled with family life that singles struggle to see a compelling future there. Latter-day Saint singles are expected to wait until the next life, whe...

Today we're taking up a topic that will likely be familiar to all of you who have spent more time dating than you thought you would: am I too picky? We invited our friend, Benjamin Harrison--whom both of us have gone on dates with--to join us in the conversation. We discuss some of the reasons, both silly and serious, that none of us pursued second dates with each other. Were we being too picky? The question tends towards circuitous thinking; the answer is often opaque, and the resulting conf...

This week, we're sharing a conversation we had with Tim and Aubrey Chaves from Faith matters about why we wanted to launch this podcast, The Soloists. It was fun being interviewed by a married couple with kids; we focused the question on how married people sometimes--with the best of intentions--miss the mark when talking to singles in the Church.We discuss how being single can be an isolating experience, especially in a culture that often views marriage as the ultimate milestone. We share de...

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to the Soloists! We're here to talk about connection and beauty in this lonely world of ours, using the existentially-chaotic experience of being single Mormons as our launch point. This week, we do a deep dive on the Latter-day Saint singles ward. Love them or hate them, the LDS singles ward might be the most elaborate experiment with singles-exclusive religious community that is out there, anywhere. Since the LDS Church recently raised the age limit for single...