February 10, 2025 • 50 mins
Today’s episode is about love.
Specifically, it’s about finding it in your MID years. Maybe for the second, fourth, first time.
This is a story about Dr Amantha Imber, an organisational psychologist who got divorced a few years ago. When Amantha knew she wanted to re-partner, she went about it with a typical approach to efficiency - going on more than 50 first dates in her first stint of online dating.
Those dates had strict rules and boundaries, time limits and schedules and… they didn’t work. So then, Amantha drew up a brief and cold-called a long list of people in her circle who might know the person she was looking for…. But… well, that didn’t work either.
You can learn more about Amantha and follow her work here.
You can purchase Amantha's book The Health Habit here.
You can also listen to her podcast, How I Work, here.
THE END BITS:
You can listen to our second ever episode was called the Mid Life Dating Pool Has Wee In it, and it was about Catherine Mahoney’s chaotic app-dating world and it was very very funny here.
You can listen to our episode with Divorce & Separation coach, Nikki Parkinson, here.
Mamamia's new podcast BIZ is rewriting the rules of work with no generic advice - just real strategies from women who've actually been there. Listen here.
Share your feedback! Send us a voice message or email us at podcast@mamamia.com.au
Follow us on Instagram @MidbyMamamia or sign up to the MID newsletter, dropping weekly here.
CREDITS:
Host: Holly Wainwright
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Senior Producer: Grace Rouvray
Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on. I'm writing a brief.
It's for my perfect second husband, actually my first husband,
because my current one, Brent, is not really my husband
but my boyfriend. He's been my boyfriend for twenty years
this year. And my boyfriend and I have two children,
(00:35):
a mortgage, a dog, two decades of shared history and
stories and travels and shared friendships and families and illnesses
and deaths and miscarriages and weddings and funerals and money,
worries and work, stress and fights and diagnoses and at
least five different homes and wordle and sundowners and a
great deal of laughter. For now, at least, we are
(00:57):
stuck too and with each other. But if I, like
my guest today, found myself suddenly single again, would I,
like my guest today, get busy with a blank page
in and Excel spreadsheet, devoid of history and the messiness
of familiarity, and ask myself what do I want next?
(01:18):
And if I did, would the universe laugh at me
the way it did twenty years ago when I was
convinced what I wanted was not what was right in
front of me, but a whole list of unchecked boxes.
I'd dated musicians and artists and cliff scaling risk takers,
addicts and travelers and earnest world changes. I had the
(01:38):
words life less ordinary taped on a corkboard somewhere, and
I took those words to mean chaos and drama and
constant movement manifestos. That's not what I got. If the
universe knew anything, it was that I'd had my fill
of all that. But back to the blank sheet of
my imagination. If I was single, with all my mid
(02:01):
wisdom under my arm, like my guest today, would I
devise a strategy, write up some rules, enforce the guardrails
star we are to stop watch, an email chain, a
crowdsourcing plan. I doubt it. I'm not a strategist. I'm
a panther, not a plotter. But if we are here
and the lines must be filled in, I would learn
to click on my Excel cells and I would drag
(02:23):
and drop, and I would write kind, funny, kind, tall, kind, smart, kind, warm, kind, optimistic, kind, creative, kind, calm, kind, hot,
and probably because this was my brief, and only my brief.
(02:47):
I would feed it into a hungry AI assistant and
it would spit out a photo of print, and that
would be really, really annoying and also perfect.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Hello, my name is Holly Wainwright and I am mid midlife,
mid family, mid long relationship. Today's episode is all about love, specifically,
it's about finding it in your mid years, maybe for
the second time, maybe for the fourth, maybe for the first.
(03:22):
We've touched on this before here in mid Our second
ever episode was called the Midlife Dating Pool Has.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We in It?
Speaker 2 (03:28):
And it was about Catherine Mahoney's chaotic app dating world
and it was very, very funny, and you all told
me that you wanted more of those stories. And so
today something very different about dating after a divorce, a
story about a woman who did it in the most
methodical way. I can imagine a woman who knew exactly
what she wanted, and her particular list of needs and
(03:50):
wants weren't necessarily the same as her friends, and the
way she was going to find the partner that she
knew she wanted was probably not going to be the
same either. Doctor Amantha Imber is one of the most efficient,
productive and interesting people I know. She is an organizational psychologist,
and organizational psychologists are amazing. And she is the creator
(04:12):
of the innovation business Inventium, and she hosts the podcast
How I Work. And she is the author of a
few books and the mother to one child. And she
also got divorced a few years ago. Organizational psychologists don't
necessarily date the same way chaotic writers do. It seems
Amantha took an efficient approach when she decided she wanted
(04:35):
a new pun. She decided to balance quantity and quality
on the dating apps, and she went on fifty one
first dates in her first stint of online dating. Those
dates had strict rules and boundaries, time limits and schedules,
and they didn't work. So then Amantha drew up a
brief and cold called a whole lot of people in
(04:55):
her circle who might know the person she was looking for.
But well, that didn't work either, So what did? I'm
going to let her tell you that, Amantha, You're getting married.
Massive congratulations, thanks Holly, thank you. I need to let
the mids in on the fact that I have interviewed
you before a couple of times actually, but the last
(05:16):
time we had a proper chat, I looked today, it
was actually eight years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh my gosh. And that was in Melbourne. Yep, it was.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
And it was in Melbourne, and we were talking about
because you owned your own company, and you were talking
about this wild way of working where people could work
remotely from wherever they wanted to and all these things
that at the time was so mind boggling that I
came back to work and said to everybody, you won't
believe it. Fast forward eight years, and a lot has changed,
(05:49):
but also a lot has changed in your life since then.
Catch me up quickly on what's been going on with
you in the last eight years.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Oh well, look, lots changed at work, and you know,
we've now been doing the four day week for the
last four years, and that's you know, that's a whole
other topic of conversation. But in my person life, the
most significant thing that has happened is that I got
divorced in twenty nineteen and I am getting married in
(06:19):
March twenty twenty five, which is.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Very exciting and I need. That's what we're here to
talk about, because a lot of midlife women are divorced,
dating not dating, deciding if they want any part of
it ever again, and I would love to hear from you,
who's one of the smartest women I know for sure?
Was it soon after your divorce that you were like,
I know, I want to repartner, or did you go
(06:43):
through that period of time where you were like, never again,
I think I want to be single forever.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
I think before the separation and then the divorce happened,
I'd probably been grieving that relationship for a while, and
so I think, you know, in any relationship breakdown, I
think there's always one person that probably knows first. Sometimes
it is mutual, but I think oftentimes and stories I've
heard from my friends that have been said O parated
(07:10):
is that they will have grieved if they were the
one making the decision before the actual relationship ended.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And so I can't remember when exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I knew that I definitely wanted to repartner, but it
would have only been a few months after the breakdown
of the relationship. So I definitely knew that one of
my values is that life is best shared with someone
and that's just me, and I knew that I felt
(07:41):
that way, and so I knew that I wanted to
take finding a new partner really seriously.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And you did. I want to know first of all,
because I imagine correct me if I'm wrong, that you
went to the apps first, and the apps didn't really
exist probably the last time you were single. Certainly the
last time I was single. There was like RSVP online,
and I did play with that a bit, but the
whole dating app revolution hadn't started. How did you find
(08:07):
the apps first?
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Up? Oh wow, Yeah, it's totally different world because I
was with my ex husband for thirteen years, so there
was definitely no apps, but RSVP was definitely a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So when I decided I was ready to date again,
which was a few months after the separation, I think
I tried bumble first and it was.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Man, it's like it's.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
A whole other world. It is so strange. And I
was very reliant on the apps because the two main
years where I was dating before I met Neo my
soon to be husband, was twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
and I live in Melbourne and I was locked down
(08:54):
for a good part of those two years, so apps
was really the main way to meet people.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I can imagine that that was also made it particularly difficult,
because I mean, apart from the fact that you're all
locked in your houses. But it was also that extra
level of how careful is everybody? Do we meet up
under what circumstances? It's not like you're going to bars
and things like that. It was very, very different.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
It certainly was, and I think they needed to be
quite a high level of trust to meet up with
someone face to face, which you know, oftentimes might have
been for like a walk around the park wearing a mask,
which I mean, what a strange way to get to
know someone when you can't even read their facial expressions.
But I think what was good about online dating is
(09:45):
that for me, given like you know, part of my
work is around productivity and using time more wisely, is
that it's also quite efficient in that you can screen
a lot of people a lot more quickly than you
can if you're just reliant on meeting people in real
life or through connections in the workplace, or you know,
other ways that people meet their partners.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So yeah, so the listeners understand you are a psychologist,
you are a productivity expert, you're an academic, you're big
on research, you're big on efficiency. So did you devise
a kind of system for how to weed out the
wheat from the chaff.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
In the dating world, I did.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
What I realized pretty early on is that there is
a huge amount of quantity.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Time is finite.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
I run a business, and so therefore I work something
that resembles full time hours. I've got a daughter that
is with me fifty percent of the time. I've got friends,
I've got family, and so there's a part of time
that I carved out for dating, and I wanted to
use that time really well as opposed to almost have
the dating apps become like social media is for a
(10:51):
lot of people, where you're just kind of mindlessly on
it without too much of an end goal. So I
tried to be very conscientious almost in how I use
the apps.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
You like siphon off time that you're like, I'm going
to look at it between this time and this time.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
I absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
Yeah, yeah, Like I didn't stick to that one hundredent
of the time, but most of the time I was
quite conscious. It's like, okay, if I'm opening up Bumble
or Hinge, and they were my main go tos. I
tried Tinder, which just don't even get me started on
how that's the Yeah, there's no way.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
So they're all quite different.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
They're very different. They're very different.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
I would have a bit of a process where you
connect with someone if you've both I guess liked each other.
And granted things might have changed in terms of the
features of these apps given where now you know, I
think three years that's all that. But then what was
really important for me is rather than just exchanging words,
and I mean, words are important, and we're both writers,
(11:53):
so I think you and I can appreciate the importance
of how someone uses words. But beyond that, I mean,
so like good grammar matters to me, which might sound superficial,
but I think it's important.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I know it does to me too, and I worry
that it makes me a snob, but it's very much.
I think it's just if that's part of your value, like,
if that's part of what you do in your value system,
it's very hard if somebody just it doesn't use grammar
and doesn't and spells everything wrong.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, yes, yes, And then I had to try to
develop other heuristics, like things that would just help me
shortcut decision making, because if you agonize over every single
person that you're looking at on an app, I mean,
it's a never ending task, and so just for the
sake of using my time, well, I thought, I just
need some quick decision making rules that will help me
(12:41):
decide yes I want to know more or no swipe left,
which I think is the direction that you say no
in man, I think I've just repressed all this stuff, Holly.
So I had a thing where I would move to
voice memo quite quickly, because I think you can tell
a lot about someone by their voice and how they
(13:02):
speak and just what energy they bring to a conversation,
and so I would move from text to voie fairly quickly.
And because I think that feature was just being introduced
at the time, it was a little bit unusual, and
so people would often reply by, oh, I didn't even
know that there was a voice recording feature in the app,
And we would exchange a few messages and I would
(13:23):
just get a bit of a feel for them. So
again I could go, Hm, does this feel like someone
that has the kind of energy that I want to
be with?
Speaker 1 (13:30):
And again, I.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Mean, I'm sure that there are lots of people in
the world that are fantastic that probably wouldn't sound great
in a voice memo.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
And yes, I ruled them all.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Out because of this little heuristic that I developed. But
time is finite, and so I had to keep coming
back to that and going, look, I just I need
decision making criteriously and I'm not agonizing some things.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
And then so you went on some dates from the
dating apps, but then you decided to come off the
apps for a while and try a different kind of
dating experiment. Did you not meet anybody good on the
dating apps that first time around?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Look, I reckon all up.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I calculate it probably went on about fifty first dates.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Wow, yeah, Antha, that's loads.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
It's so many over two years, and some of those.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Did you have like rules about the dates too, like
how long they could be, what they were, and that
kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Of course I didn't tell me that. I feel like,
when you.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Go on a date, a lot of people feel an
obligation just to stay for a decent amount of time.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
But for me, I just thought, if we're both.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Sitting there and there's clearly no connection, just call it early.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And so I would.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Typically, I think my shortest dates were about forty five minutes,
because I felt like that was long enough. I mean,
often you can tell in the first five minutes but
I tried not to hang on to those first impressions
as well. It's really easy to form like very quick
impressions when you start a date.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But I would try.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
To just you know, force particularly any judgmental parts of
my brain to just go no, no, remain open. But
I sort of thought, look, after forty five minutes, I'm
just going to call it. And sometimes I was honest
and I just said I just don't feel like there's
a connection here. Other times I just made up a
lie and said that I had to go to, you know,
in my mind, protect the other person's feelings.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
So I did a lot of that.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Some of those first dates turned into second dates and more,
but most did not, And that was fine, because you know,
it takes meeting a lot of people to find the
person that you, you know, feel the disconnection.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Were you ever like, oh, you know, this is exhausting.
What's that movie?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Where is he?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I always Charlotte m sax in the city? Where is he?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Did you?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Did you feel like that?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
My gosh, Holly.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
After so many dates, I would be driving home and
I would call my best friend and I would say,
I've just been on another date. And it didn't work,
and like, am my standards too high?
Speaker 1 (16:04):
I am I expecting too much? Like what am I
doing wrong?
Speaker 4 (16:08):
And oh man, like there were so many low points
in that two years, But I think somewhere inside of
me I felt I did feel truly optimistic, even though
there were lots of low points and lots of nights
just feeling really lonely and discouraged on that drive home
from the date. But I think, you know, I was
definitely holding onto some optimism and hope, which I think
(16:31):
you have to if you're going to deal with the apps,
because the apps can be incredibly depressing.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And you're a pragmatic, practical person, right, And I imagine
that that helps in this situation because if you're meeting
somebody and it's obvious there's no chemistry, hopefully you're not
walking away from it going there's something wrong with me,
because that's not what it's about, right, That's not what
it's about at all. But that can be tough on
the ego after a while if you do internalize it.
(16:58):
So having that pragmatic approach is probably really helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, I think it is helpful.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I think also I ended up like just I did
so much research into how almost like how to be
a data and how to make a good decision. Yeah,
I read a lot of books and one of the
lessons that stuck with me that I tried to implement
but I found it really hard is to always default
to a second date. Whereas for me, I've gone into dating,
going one date and if I'm not enamored, then I'm
(17:27):
calling it. So I changed my approach part of the
way through to go I'm defaulting to a second date
unless there's a massive problem or red flag on the
first date, which I felt just having that rule helped
me keep.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
An open mind.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
But it did get to a point where about two
years of doing this, I just thought.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I'm so over this.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Surely there's got to be a better way of finding people.
And so I my resident email out to a few
close friends and I said, Okay, I want your ideas.
I'm still dating, I'm still single, but I'm taking it
really seriously finding a new partner. Give me some ideas
of like what would you do if you were me?
And you could you avoid the apps but still fine dates.
(18:10):
And I remember someone someone emailed me back and they said, well,
you know, you know, lots of people like you you know,
host a podcast that's very popular, You've got like, you know,
large networks through work. Surely with all those kind of
assets in inverted commas, you could utilize those to find
a date. And I thought that's interesting, and so I
(18:32):
then decided that I would try to crowdsource dates.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So what the approach was, it was quite specific.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
So I put together a list of people who I
would call a little bit more than acquaintances. So they
weren't my inner circle of friends, because my inner circle
of friends they knew I was looking for someone.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
They know me.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
If they knew someone, they would have introduced me.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
So yeah, so I went, I went sort of down
the friendship tears, if you like, to people that knew
me and knew my values and kind of who I
am as a person, but is not someone that would necessarily,
you know, if they knew a person that they thought,
oh they could be great for amoutha, it just wouldn't
be top of mind. So I literally I opened up
Excel and I created a spreadsheet and I wrote down
(19:15):
all these people's names. And the other thing is I
was specifically thinking about who were the most well networked
people of that most people yeah, who knew the most.
And then I put together a one page brief of
what I was looking for.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Okay, I need to know what was on the brief, Amountha.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Well, it had a few sections, so it had just
basic demographics because for age demographics brought age and location
demographics because that was important. I didn't want a long
distance thing and I didn't want to be dating someone
you know it was like twenty years younger or you know,
thirty years older.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, and I decided that that wasn't for me.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
I had thought about what are the most important values
and what are the most important qualities? And I think
that's something I really discounted when I was dating in
my twenties, where I think I sort of focused on.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
You know, more of the superficial things that a lot
of us have focused on in our twenties, like, you know,
are they smarter? Are they funny? And you know they
have a good job? And is the hot all that
sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
But somewhere along the lines, like I think of the
guys that I dated in my twenties and the decisions
I made, kindness didn't really feature.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And so for me, that was france and center.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
I wanted someone who at their core was just a beautiful,
kind person. And I feel that, you know, now in
my forties, I understand how important that is for a relationship.
But for a lot of the dating that I did
in my younger years, it's like I was looking for
qualities that just it didn't matter. And I knew I
also wanted someone that had a real kind of learning
(20:52):
growth kind of mindset.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Because that's how you are. You know, you're you're a searcher.
You're a learner or a researcher. You Yeah, you're constantly curious. Yes,
you wouldn't want to be with someone who was this
is it? This is the way things are closing?
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Not Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
And like I even think about some of the ritual
that Neo, my partner, and I have, and it's like
for a lot of people they would think that, like
these are mad rituals, like what are you doing? But
for us, because we're very similar in our value set,
it just makes sense.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Because I was just asking about that one second. We're
going to get onto Neo in a bit when we
when we find him. But when I love this idea
of ask you when you actually articulate what you want
because I've heard women of all kinds of different ages
talk about this. Jesse Stevens, who's my co host on
out loud, not long before she met her partner Lucas,
(21:43):
she said she'd been disastered and she was only in
her twenties, but she had been disastrously dating. And she
did write a list and a lot of people teased
her about it because they're like, you shouldn't be so
close minded. You know, it's kind of a bit judgmental
to write a list. You know, lightning strikes in all
kind of ways, and just like what you just said,
kindness was top of her list. And then she met
the guy and he was very kind When you wrote
(22:07):
your list, and then you shared that list with your
circle A that feels like quite a vulnerable thing to do,
like kind of showing that to people in your world
like I do. It can even be vulnerable saying I
really would like to meet someone and I haven't. But
also these are the things that mattered to me. Were
you worried about that vulnerability and were you worried about
seeming I don't know, so a twofold question, Well, did
(22:30):
the vulnerability worry you? And do you think there's just
power in getting really clear about what matters to.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
You, yes and yes.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
So I still remember how I felt when I called
these people. Actually had a list of fifty people, and
I thought, I'm just going to start with ten, treated
as an experiment, And I remember every one of those
ten phone calls, and I felt so nervous.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
I felt sick in the stomach.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
It felt like a really big deal to put yourself
out there and say I'm like, unashamedly looking for a
partner and I really want your help. I was so
nervous and what I got on the receiving end and
keeping in mind these people like I knew them, but
I didn't know them well, Like I knew them well
enough for them to be on the list.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Well enough they were going to pick up the phone
or once your email and be like hi a month
in a good tear from you. But then they'd be.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Like, oh, that's what we're talking about today, Yeah, exactly, exactly,
And I remember every one of them was just like
so so honored to be asked and so excited to help.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
And I ran it as like.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
A four week campaign where every week I would send
them like a little nudge, a little question to try
to trigger memories around all the people that they might know.
And then I think I had some kind of an incentive,
not that they needed an incentive, because I think they
just you know, enjoyed the idea of helping that I'd
make it. I think I was going to make a
(23:51):
hundred dollars donation to charity for every.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Date that I went on that they found me.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
And yeah, and the experiment was an utter failure. Not
a single date came out of that experiment.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Why do you think that was.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Well?
Speaker 4 (24:08):
I think it was because they had a very clear
brief and it wasn't an extensive brief. It wasn't a
long brief. I think all up there were nine points
that was it, because I think one of the arts
of making a great brief is making it very succinct
as opposed to a whole shopping list, and that was
really hard. But it was a good process to go through,
I think for myself in going what are the absolute
(24:32):
must haves here? But I also think it is hard
to find someone that is your person. I think it's
harder when it's when you're in your forties because just
i'man Statistically, a lot of people are still married. It's
not like in your twenties, where the majority of people
are probably single or in you know, like not non
(24:55):
life committed relationships. So just statistically, it's really different. And
I think when you're in your forties and beyond, like
you're really clear on who you are and what you
value and what is important and what you won't compromise on.
And I think that for me because I had no
biological clock ticking, I had my beautiful daughter she's now ten.
(25:17):
There's also no sense of urgency as well, and that
changes everything when it comes to dating as a woman.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
That's so interesting because it's true. It's like you this,
to put it in very basic language, you don't need
to settle, like you know what I mean. You don't
need It's not you don't necessarily need a partner for
financial reasons or to have a baby with, or to
buy a house or whatever, because you're well established in
your life, your career. You've got your beautiful daughter, as
(25:46):
you say, so a partner, as you said at the beginning,
you said, I know that life is for me. Life
is better shared. That's your goal. It's not just anyone
will do. It's got to be shared with the right person.
Not that not that we all go around thinking anyone
will do, but a lot of those filters, you know,
they're stronger at this point because you don't need to settle,
(26:08):
right I think.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
So, I think when you're racing against a clock as
a woman, if you do want to have children, then
it just I think sometimes it can lead to more
pragmatic decision making. And I hold no judgment against that
because I totally get that.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I totally get that.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
But my experience was it was very, very different without
any kind of timeline, like, yes, I wanted to find someone,
you know, and sooner would have been better than later.
But equally, it had to be an additive because life
was really good before NEO, and unless it was going
(26:51):
to add something really wonderful to life, then why would
you Because obviously relationships involve sacrifices as well, and so
you know, the additive needs to be strong.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
So we've written this type brief. I'm just imagining your friends.
The reason that you didn't get dates out of that
going through it because the brief was type being like, well,
yes he's smart, but he's not creative, and they're like
crossing it out and then or whatever it was anyway,
then so that didn't work and you went back on hinge.
Now quite quickly you did meet Neo. Do you think
(27:23):
the list exercised, the brief helped you further clarify things
when you did go back into app world?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
It absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
But I also think, I mean, like, look, it was
it was putting pen to paper with what I knew
inside to be true, but with Neo id like, it
wasn't an uming and r ring like oh you know,
I remember like our first phone call that we had,
(27:54):
so we connected, we messaged, we voice memode, and then
we had a phone call. And I used to have
this rule for when we would get to the phone
call part of the dating process, which which i'd strongly
recommend instead of just going straight to a face to
because you can tell a lot in a phone conversation.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I used to have this rule that I wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Let a phone conversation go over an hour because which
sounds like quite an anal strange rule, but the reason
for it is that I'd had experiences where I had
connected with someone on the app, and like I can
think of a couple of instances where we talked for
like two or three hours on the phone, and when
you talk to someone for that long and they're a
(28:35):
stranger and they're normally you know, I feel like when
it's a phone conversation, you sort of let it, let
down some of your guard, and you can talk about
things that are quite vulnerable because there's no visual there's
just voice. And something about that I think brings on
to honesty in a yeah, and an intimacy in the conversation.
And what then I'd done between the phone conversation and
(28:57):
the face to face date in those instances is that
I've just started to.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Project all these qualities onto the person that really I
didn't know. I just talked to them on the phone.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
And then the first date was a real down and
so I thought, I'm just going to limit that first.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Phone conversation to an hour.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
It's like it's long enough to get a really good
feel for someone, but it's not so long that you're
learning all this stuff and then forming like starting all
these assumptions and projections of what this person could possibly be,
because I found that that's really unhelpful going into a date.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
After this short break, we're going to hear about Amantha's
first date with Neo and whether all her hard work
paid off stay with us. So your first conversation with
Neo did it break this rule?
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
It did, But I told him about the rule. I look,
I remember, you know, it was in the evening.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
I think we got to about nine o'clock at night
and I looked at my watch and I said, Neo,
so I've got this rule. And I got to cut
the phone conversation short now and I explained why, and
because he's as nerdy as me, He's like, I totally
get it. And then we just ended up talking I
think for another fifth or twenty minutes, and then I'm like, Okay, we.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Really have to go now. This rule has been broken.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
But I think I just I knew after that phone
conversation that I think this guy's pretty special.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I think this is going to be a good first date.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Tell me about your first date.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
I remember one of the I think like it was
kind of like a bit of a pet peeve where
I feel like I spent a lot of my life,
you know, in charge and in a leadership kind of
role as a business owner, and I really appreciated it
when the person that I was dating would take charge
and take some initiative in terms of what are we
doing for the first date or the second date. And
it's kind of owned some of those decisions because I
(30:46):
will naturally go to that role. But I really like
it when I'm relieved of that role. And I remember
Neo texted me and he said, so, I've been thinking
about what we could do for our first date, and
what do you reckon about going bowling?
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And I thought, oh, that's awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Like he's you know, a bit like quirky and creative,
and he's put some thought into it, and he had
his reasons for suggesting bowling. And then we go for
a drink afterwards. So we went ten pin bowling, and
I remember there was just really fun eighties music blasting
over the speakers, and you know, this like one or
two hour, you know, several games of bowling. It was
(31:24):
just it was fun and it was silly, and it
was lighthearted and it was flirty, and you know that,
like there was a bit of conversation, but there wasn't
pressure on the conversation. And then when we went to
a bar afterwards, it's like we just you know, delvet
in the conversation I think the date ended at like
two in the morning, which I made like my my
(31:45):
bedtimes ten.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
I know you're alive. That's what I know about you.
You're a lark. It's you're an early morning person.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I am so like, I don't do two am, but
on this first date I did.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
So it was pretty obvious straight away that this was
special and different to those other fifty first dates very much,
and so did was it all sort of plain sailing
from there? I mean, we've already put a spoiler at
the beginning of this episode, which is that you are
getting married and Neo is the man you're getting married to.
(32:16):
But I guess what I want to know is, you know,
when you are falling in love in mid you've got
it's very different in a way from when you're young
and you're you know, you haven't got all the experiences
in the wisdom of what can go wrong or how
sometimes things that start beautifully can fall apart, or sometimes
(32:37):
people who charm the pants off you, maybe literally, maybe figuratively,
can then turn out to have some serious red flags
and that can make us all you know, it can
it can complicate things, right because we're wiser and more experienced,
but that also can mean we're more guarded, Like how
was it was it immediate that you could trust him
(32:57):
that things were going to go well? Like how did
it progress?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
There were two things that I think about that I
think served me really well in terms of navigating that.
The first is that I became really good through all
the dating that I did over those two years just keeping.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
An eye on whether words.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Matched actions, because people can say a lot of good
words in dating, but often the actions or the behavior
won't align with those words. And what became really clear,
particularly in those first six months where you're falling in
love but you're also getting to know someone well and
certainly like you know, in the three years that we've
(33:39):
been together, is that the words always matched the actions,
And for me, that was really important.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
The second thing that was really helpful is.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
That I had done maybe I've been, you know, in
and out of therapy for a lot of my life.
I think as a psychologist, even though I'm an organizational
psychologist not a clinical one, I've always just really believed
in the value of therapy, and so, you know, I've
had chunks of my life where I've been very committed
to therapy.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
And during those two.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Years of dating, I was seeing a therapist fortnightly, sometimes weekly,
and a lot of the discussion was around relationships and
dating and experiences that I was having. And what I
came to realize is, you know, and I imagine you've
probably had guests talk about attachment theory, and what I
(34:32):
learned about myself is that I have the tendency to
have like an anxious attachment system like that can get
activated where I'm not sure where I stand. But I
think when you've got that anxious attachment system being activated,
what tends to happen when you're in those early stages
of dating and you're kind of not quite sure where
(34:52):
you stand, You're not quite sure if they feel the
same way. You can confuse that anxiety for lust or
god to be love.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
For butterflies and the yes, Can I just ask you
on that? MEA did an episode of No Filter about
attachment theory with an expert, and we'll put a link
in the show notes. But is the ideal situation that
you and the person you pair with have the same
attachment type or that you have complementary attachment types.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
I would say one thing you don't want is you
don't want someone who who is kind of.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Anxiously attached matching.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
With someone who is an avoidant where they avoid intimacy.
That like, if you look at any unhealthy relationship or
kind of dating situation, there's a high probability that that.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Pattern the problem is going on.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
But the thing is like, based on the person who
you're with, and depending also on what their attachment style is,
that can bring out a different attachment style in you.
So what I felt with Neo and what I think
if I hadn't gone through those two years of therapy,
I would have misinterpreted what was going on is that
(36:05):
I didn't like I felt butterflies, and I felt excited
to see him, but I didn't feel that anxiety that
I in past situations had mistaken for falling in love.
It just felt like I felt really safe, and I
don't think i'd experienced that with anyone that I dated.
(36:26):
I knew exactly where I stood, and what happened with
that experience with this, I guess secure attachment that Neo
offered me, and just this confidence in where we stood
it meant that my anxious attachment system wasn't activated. And
so therefore it's like I was just really present, and
(36:46):
I wasn't making up stories in my mind, and I
wasn't thinking that, oh, because I feel this way, it
must mean that I'm madly in love and.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
This is my person.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Instead, I knew it was coming from I guess, like,
you know, a more secure place.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I've heard you and Neo interviewed, and it's clear that
you are you have a lot of shared passions. You're
both really curious, really interested in experimenting with different ways
of living, different health things, different habits. Tell me a
little bit about how you knew that he was indeed
your person in this healthy way.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Oh gosh, I mean there there were so many things.
I think one thing that we do that was a
monthly ritual. We've sort of we've we've adapted the ritual slightly,
but for the first couple of years of the relationship.
And I think there was some Neo's suggestion, but the
fact that it was Neo's suggestion, but it could have
been mine's suggestion.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I just don't I can't remember tells you a lot.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
It's just like how similar we are in terms of
our mindedness. Is that we decided that we would have
a monthly meeting about our relationship.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
We used to call it a monthly check in. Wow,
we still call it. We still call it our monthly
check in.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
And we devised a series of questions and I can
share some of them with you.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
You know. Yeah, yeah, that would basically.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Be a chance where we actually have time carved out,
and typically it was on a date night. You know,
we would go out to a restaurant or you know,
we've got that space where we're actually talking and reflecting
about us and about how we're behaving towards each other
and about how we're feeling. So you know, some of
the questions like somewhere about you know, acknowledging the positives.
(38:28):
Like one question was what are we appreciating most about
the other person? Which is so simple, but it's really
powerful to actually sit down with your partner once a
month and here, what are they appreciating and also think
about that to them. You know, we also would talk
about what do we need from the other person that
we're not getting, which again, just having that space where
(38:52):
a lot of times that's an uncomfortable conversation to have,
but if you've got this time carved out where like
there is space and the freedom to just go, Okay,
this is the conversation that we're having, and it feels
much more comfortable to bring that up. We also like
reflect and go what have been our best connection moments
in the month just gone, and again being mindful, because
(39:12):
if we're mindful of those, then we can go, how
can we recreate more of those those really powerful moments?
So they're just some examples, and so we did that
pretty religiously for a good two and a half years.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
And that shows obviously your compatibility because there would be
some people you could be dating who you'd say, I
think we should do this, and they'd be like, are
you joking? That would be their worst nightmare. They would
be running out the door. So it's beautiful that you've
found somebody who you know that you found each other
rather in this way. Tell me a little bit too
(39:46):
for the listeners who are dating and they've got kids.
You obviously you have a daughter. She's ten. NEO doesn't
have kids, is that right, correct?
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:53):
But being you and the very mindful person you are,
I know that you were did a lot of researching
the best way to introduce this person who you knew
was going to be around to your daughter. Tell me
what you learned about that and what worked and what didn't.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
I think, so midway through my whole day experience, I
had this conversation with Michael kar Greg, who I guess is,
you know, probably one of the most well known psychologists,
I think as a child psychologist or a clinical psych Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, and his advice really.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Formed I guess some of the principles that I had
around how was I going to integrate this person that
I knew I wanted to be my life partner into
Frankie's world, my daughter. And there are a few things
that he gave advice on. He said, ideally, wait at
least six months before introducing your new partner to your daughter,
(40:49):
and his reasons for that. And actually Nia was the
only person I dated that Frankie did end up meeting,
because obviously, if you go through a divorce, I mean,
that is an enormous amount of change and instability, and
I just wanted to protect her from any more of
that wherever that was in my control. And so I
(41:10):
think I felt like six months was long enough to go. Yeah,
there is a very very high likelihood that this person
will be around for a very very long time. And
so I wanted to be really clear on that before
Frankie and Neo met. Neo and I actually spend a
lot of time like curating what would that first meeting be, Like,
(41:31):
A lot of thought went into that, like, for example,
we wanted it to be on Frankie's home ground, because
it could have been at Neo's place, it could have
been in a neutral place like a cafe or a park,
but we wanted it to be in the place where
Frankie felt safest, and that was at my home.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And then we also wanted kind of a fun activity.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
So it wasn't this like intense, Okay, let's just sit
down and have a big long conversation, you know, over
a meal or something that you know that can be
maybe a bit intense. We thought, what's like a fun
activity that we can all do together, And so we
decided that we'd make pizza together. And so Neo went
to all this trouble to cook pizza dough from scratch
the night for but the yeast was off and the
(42:12):
pizza dove failed, and so he was like stressing about
his pizza dough that has failed.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Ended up going to the.
Speaker 4 (42:17):
Supermarket and border base and then we made pizza together,
and then I think we ended up watching a movie
together that afternoon, So a lot of thought went into
that and just thinking what is going to make this
the best and most positive and most comfortable experience for Frankie.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Were you really nervous because I imagine, I mean without obviously
wanting to pry into Frankie's world at all, but I
imagine for you you're thinking, I really love this guy,
like I can see a future. But if she hates him,
or if she's not comfortable in his presence or if
she's not if this doesn't work, then this changes everything.
So were you really nervous about that meeting too?
Speaker 4 (42:54):
It's funny I was more nervous about telling Frankie that
I'd been dating someone, right, because she didn't know anything
about my dating life. She didn't, you know, Like I
kept that very very separate to my role as a
mom with Frankie. Were other friends of mine had made
different choices, and you know that they might have had
(43:14):
older kids where that actually showed them the apps and
get them a bit involved.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
But Frankie had no idea. And I remember one.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
Night, like I you know, we were sitting in bed talking,
you know, before bedtime, and I remember I was so
nervous and I shared the news with her and I said,
I've you know, I've met Somemon and we've been dating,
and I'd really like you to meet them.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Would you like to meet them? And she like she
was all excited.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
She said, oh, does that mean you're getting married and
I get to go to a wedding?
Speaker 1 (43:43):
And I think she was stabbed at the time.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
Maybe when I say no, it doesn't quite mean that,
but and anyway, so it went from there, and then
I think about a week later we had the meeting.
So I was actually more nervous about that, just telling
her that, like her mom, who she's only ever known
in relation to her dad, is now bringing another man
into this family system. So that was really nerve wracking.
(44:07):
But she was like really good and happy about that.
I actually wasn't nervous about how Frankie and Neo would
get along, because yeah, I just wasn't nervous about that.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
I just I just knew that they.
Speaker 4 (44:21):
Would and I knew like just what a beautiful, kind
of fun person Neo was and just how caring and
thoughtful he was, and I just thought, man, like, you know,
I just think Frankie is you know, just the luckiest
girl to have like this amazing male role model, you know,
in addition to her dad like in her life.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Oh how gorgeous after this break? How did Amantha know
she was ready to get married again? Stay right here,
we'll be back in a minute. We've got to get
to the point at which you have decided to get
married again. So tell me, was this always did you?
(45:06):
After your divorce? Were you did you think I'm not
going to get married again? Or is it something you
were very keen to happen or what? And how did
it come about?
Speaker 4 (45:15):
I would say I just had no attachment to it.
I thought maybe I will, maybe I won't. It wasn't
something I was aspiring to. It wasn't something I was
aiming for. But I remember about two years into our relationship,
you know, we talked about this. We talked a lot
about our views on marriage. Neo felt pretty similarly to me,
and that, you know, he'd been married before, he'd been
(45:36):
married for nineteen years or with his last partner for
nineteen years, and.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, we could both give or take marriage.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
And then I remember we'd been on the Separate Bathrooms
podcast together when I was promoting The Health Habit, my
last book, and they had introduced Neo as my husband,
and we just had like a bit of a laugh
about it. Afterwards, I heard that, I was like, that's
a bit awkward, But because we talked about it so much,
it just wasn't awkward.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
But I can imagine it.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Would have been awkward for us for some people, but anyway,
it just we I remember we went on a walk
a little bit after we'd recorded that podcast episode, and
you know, I said like, like, where are you at,
Like what do you think about getting married? And we
just had this like walking conversation where we talked about
for both of us in a very similar way, our
(46:26):
views on marriage had changed, and we felt that it
was actually something that had started to feel important. And
I think also thinking about Frankie and the security that
she feels, I thought, you know, as a child, when
you've been through a divorce, I think there's something that
(46:46):
maybe feels like there's some stability when there is a marriage.
And you know, again like no judgment on anyone else's choices,
but it just felt right for us, and so we
decided then we sort of said, I think this is
something that we want to do. And I'm about six
months after that conversation, Neo proposed when we were on
(47:07):
a holiday, and so it was kind of it was
absolutely beautiful, but it wasn't a surprise because of that conversation.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Gorgeous and so you're getting married next year? Is this
and what will be different about this wedding?
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Ah, what will be different?
Speaker 4 (47:22):
Look, I mean my first wedding was pretty low key,
but this is it's a small wedding. It's just our
close friends and family, so about fifty people and where
we're doing it.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
In our house.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Oh, how Gorgeous got like.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
A wonderful celebrant who used to be a pop star
in the eighties and she's super fun, perfect and it's
not overstated. It's small, it's intimate, it's meaningful. It's kind
of so happy you want to.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
He looks so happy a Manthia, You're like when you're
talk about it, you're just beaming. It's just gorgeous. It
makes me very happy. But if someone is listening to
this who maybe has been through a relationship breakup and
is thinking I'm never going to meet him, I would
liked it, like you I would, because not everybody does.
There are a lot of women in med who are
like I never want to repartner. I don't want to
(48:09):
look after anybody. I don't want to repeat any of
those things. I'm just going to live that, which is great.
But if you, if like you, you're thinking life is
better shared, what's your best piece of advice for how
to handle that?
Speaker 4 (48:23):
I would say, get really clear on what you're looking
for and what your most what you won't compromise on.
I think the quality of your decisions when you're going
through a dating process where you are making literally thousands
of decisions if you're using the apps, the more clear
you can be on what matters to you, I think,
(48:46):
the better your outcome will be.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
And that's very good advice. Amantha. I love your love story.
I'm so happy for you and Neo. I'm so happy.
I can't wait to see your wedding pictures somewhere, and
thank you also for your wisdom as always, look, I
(49:09):
us love that conversation. Amantha is getting married in March
to Neo, and what I particular love about that is,
you know, Mike gran would have said, every pot has
its lid. If your pot is a little bit different
to other people's pots. That's okay. I love how specific
Amantha was. It's a wonderful story. But if you are
(49:30):
after more dating stories about midlife, then please do listen
to the episode I told you about at the Front
with Catherine Mahoney. It's very funny. But also if you
are in the throes of divorce and you're going through
the horrors of that, that can be incredibly difficult, knock
you around unbelievably. I want you to go and listen
to the episode we did with Nicki Parkinson because it
(49:51):
is raw and uplifting in a way that we don't
hear people talking about divorce very often. As always, I
want to thank you all mids for being here with
us for these big conversations that we're having. Please jump
on and follow us on Instagram. DM me with any
ideas about the show. You'll find me on Instagram too
at Waynewright, Holly, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
(50:12):
Don't forget to give us a rating horror review. It
really helps other people find MID And of course I
want to offer a massive thank you to our team.
The MID team is executive producer. I am A. Brown,
Senior producer Grace Ruvre, and producer Charlie Blackman. And we've
had sound design and production by Jacob Brown. And I'm
your host, Holly Wainwright. And I'll see you back here
(50:33):
next week for more mid
You're listening to a MoMA mea podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on. I'm writing a brief.
It's for my perfect second husband, actually my first husband,
because my current one, Brent, is not really my husband
but my boyfriend. He's been my boyfriend for twenty years
this year. And my boyfriend and I have two children,
(00:35):
a mortgage, a dog, two decades of shared history and
stories and travels and shared friendships and families and illnesses
and deaths and miscarriages and weddings and funerals and money,
worries and work, stress and fights and diagnoses and at
least five different homes and wordle and sundowners and a
great deal of laughter. For now, at least, we are
(00:57):
stuck too and with each other. But if I, like
my guest today, found myself suddenly single again, would I,
like my guest today, get busy with a blank page
in and Excel spreadsheet, devoid of history and the messiness
of familiarity, and ask myself what do I want next?
(01:18):
And if I did, would the universe laugh at me
the way it did twenty years ago when I was
convinced what I wanted was not what was right in
front of me, but a whole list of unchecked boxes.
I'd dated musicians and artists and cliff scaling risk takers,
addicts and travelers and earnest world changes. I had the
(01:38):
words life less ordinary taped on a corkboard somewhere, and
I took those words to mean chaos and drama and
constant movement manifestos. That's not what I got. If the
universe knew anything, it was that I'd had my fill
of all that. But back to the blank sheet of
my imagination. If I was single, with all my mid
(02:01):
wisdom under my arm, like my guest today, would I
devise a strategy, write up some rules, enforce the guardrails
star we are to stop watch, an email chain, a
crowdsourcing plan. I doubt it. I'm not a strategist. I'm
a panther, not a plotter. But if we are here
and the lines must be filled in, I would learn
to click on my Excel cells and I would drag
(02:23):
and drop, and I would write kind, funny, kind, tall, kind, smart, kind, warm, kind, optimistic, kind, creative, kind, calm, kind, hot,
and probably because this was my brief, and only my brief.
(02:47):
I would feed it into a hungry AI assistant and
it would spit out a photo of print, and that
would be really, really annoying and also perfect.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Hello, my name is Holly Wainwright and I am mid midlife,
mid family, mid long relationship. Today's episode is all about love, specifically,
it's about finding it in your mid years, maybe for
the second time, maybe for the fourth, maybe for the first.
(03:22):
We've touched on this before here in mid Our second
ever episode was called the Midlife Dating Pool Has.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
We in It?
Speaker 2 (03:28):
And it was about Catherine Mahoney's chaotic app dating world
and it was very, very funny, and you all told
me that you wanted more of those stories. And so
today something very different about dating after a divorce, a
story about a woman who did it in the most
methodical way. I can imagine a woman who knew exactly
what she wanted, and her particular list of needs and
(03:50):
wants weren't necessarily the same as her friends, and the
way she was going to find the partner that she
knew she wanted was probably not going to be the
same either. Doctor Amantha Imber is one of the most efficient,
productive and interesting people I know. She is an organizational psychologist,
and organizational psychologists are amazing. And she is the creator
(04:12):
of the innovation business Inventium, and she hosts the podcast
How I Work. And she is the author of a
few books and the mother to one child. And she
also got divorced a few years ago. Organizational psychologists don't
necessarily date the same way chaotic writers do. It seems
Amantha took an efficient approach when she decided she wanted
(04:35):
a new pun. She decided to balance quantity and quality
on the dating apps, and she went on fifty one
first dates in her first stint of online dating. Those
dates had strict rules and boundaries, time limits and schedules,
and they didn't work. So then Amantha drew up a
brief and cold called a whole lot of people in
(04:55):
her circle who might know the person she was looking for.
But well, that didn't work either, So what did? I'm
going to let her tell you that, Amantha, You're getting married.
Massive congratulations, thanks Holly, thank you. I need to let
the mids in on the fact that I have interviewed
you before a couple of times actually, but the last
(05:16):
time we had a proper chat, I looked today, it
was actually eight years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh my gosh. And that was in Melbourne. Yep, it was.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
And it was in Melbourne, and we were talking about
because you owned your own company, and you were talking
about this wild way of working where people could work
remotely from wherever they wanted to and all these things
that at the time was so mind boggling that I
came back to work and said to everybody, you won't
believe it. Fast forward eight years, and a lot has changed,
(05:49):
but also a lot has changed in your life since then.
Catch me up quickly on what's been going on with
you in the last eight years.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Oh well, look, lots changed at work, and you know,
we've now been doing the four day week for the
last four years, and that's you know, that's a whole
other topic of conversation. But in my person life, the
most significant thing that has happened is that I got
divorced in twenty nineteen and I am getting married in
(06:19):
March twenty twenty five, which is.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Very exciting and I need. That's what we're here to
talk about, because a lot of midlife women are divorced,
dating not dating, deciding if they want any part of
it ever again, and I would love to hear from you,
who's one of the smartest women I know for sure?
Was it soon after your divorce that you were like,
I know, I want to repartner, or did you go
(06:43):
through that period of time where you were like, never again,
I think I want to be single forever.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
I think before the separation and then the divorce happened,
I'd probably been grieving that relationship for a while, and
so I think, you know, in any relationship breakdown, I
think there's always one person that probably knows first. Sometimes
it is mutual, but I think oftentimes and stories I've
heard from my friends that have been said O parated
(07:10):
is that they will have grieved if they were the
one making the decision before the actual relationship ended.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And so I can't remember when exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I knew that I definitely wanted to repartner, but it
would have only been a few months after the breakdown
of the relationship. So I definitely knew that one of
my values is that life is best shared with someone
and that's just me, and I knew that I felt
(07:41):
that way, and so I knew that I wanted to
take finding a new partner really seriously.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And you did. I want to know first of all,
because I imagine correct me if I'm wrong, that you
went to the apps first, and the apps didn't really
exist probably the last time you were single. Certainly the
last time I was single. There was like RSVP online,
and I did play with that a bit, but the
whole dating app revolution hadn't started. How did you find
(08:07):
the apps first?
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Up? Oh wow, Yeah, it's totally different world because I
was with my ex husband for thirteen years, so there
was definitely no apps, but RSVP was definitely a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So when I decided I was ready to date again,
which was a few months after the separation, I think
I tried bumble first and it was.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Man, it's like it's.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
A whole other world. It is so strange. And I
was very reliant on the apps because the two main
years where I was dating before I met Neo my
soon to be husband, was twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
and I live in Melbourne and I was locked down
(08:54):
for a good part of those two years, so apps
was really the main way to meet people.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I can imagine that that was also made it particularly difficult,
because I mean, apart from the fact that you're all
locked in your houses. But it was also that extra
level of how careful is everybody? Do we meet up
under what circumstances? It's not like you're going to bars
and things like that. It was very, very different.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
It certainly was, and I think they needed to be
quite a high level of trust to meet up with
someone face to face, which you know, oftentimes might have
been for like a walk around the park wearing a mask,
which I mean, what a strange way to get to
know someone when you can't even read their facial expressions.
But I think what was good about online dating is
(09:45):
that for me, given like you know, part of my
work is around productivity and using time more wisely, is
that it's also quite efficient in that you can screen
a lot of people a lot more quickly than you
can if you're just reliant on meeting people in real
life or through connections in the workplace, or you know,
other ways that people meet their partners.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So yeah, so the listeners understand you are a psychologist,
you are a productivity expert, you're an academic, you're big
on research, you're big on efficiency. So did you devise
a kind of system for how to weed out the
wheat from the chaff.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
In the dating world, I did.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
What I realized pretty early on is that there is
a huge amount of quantity.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Time is finite.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
I run a business, and so therefore I work something
that resembles full time hours. I've got a daughter that
is with me fifty percent of the time. I've got friends,
I've got family, and so there's a part of time
that I carved out for dating, and I wanted to
use that time really well as opposed to almost have
the dating apps become like social media is for a
(10:51):
lot of people, where you're just kind of mindlessly on
it without too much of an end goal. So I
tried to be very conscientious almost in how I use
the apps.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
You like siphon off time that you're like, I'm going
to look at it between this time and this time.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
I absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
Yeah, yeah, Like I didn't stick to that one hundredent
of the time, but most of the time I was
quite conscious. It's like, okay, if I'm opening up Bumble
or Hinge, and they were my main go tos. I
tried Tinder, which just don't even get me started on
how that's the Yeah, there's no way.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
So they're all quite different.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
They're very different. They're very different.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
I would have a bit of a process where you
connect with someone if you've both I guess liked each other.
And granted things might have changed in terms of the
features of these apps given where now you know, I
think three years that's all that. But then what was
really important for me is rather than just exchanging words,
and I mean, words are important, and we're both writers,
(11:53):
so I think you and I can appreciate the importance
of how someone uses words. But beyond that, I mean,
so like good grammar matters to me, which might sound superficial,
but I think it's important.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I know it does to me too, and I worry
that it makes me a snob, but it's very much.
I think it's just if that's part of your value, like,
if that's part of what you do in your value system,
it's very hard if somebody just it doesn't use grammar
and doesn't and spells everything wrong.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, yes, yes, And then I had to try to
develop other heuristics, like things that would just help me
shortcut decision making, because if you agonize over every single
person that you're looking at on an app, I mean,
it's a never ending task, and so just for the
sake of using my time, well, I thought, I just
need some quick decision making rules that will help me
(12:41):
decide yes I want to know more or no swipe left,
which I think is the direction that you say no
in man, I think I've just repressed all this stuff, Holly.
So I had a thing where I would move to
voice memo quite quickly, because I think you can tell
a lot about someone by their voice and how they
(13:02):
speak and just what energy they bring to a conversation,
and so I would move from text to voie fairly quickly.
And because I think that feature was just being introduced
at the time, it was a little bit unusual, and
so people would often reply by, oh, I didn't even
know that there was a voice recording feature in the app,
And we would exchange a few messages and I would
(13:23):
just get a bit of a feel for them. So
again I could go, Hm, does this feel like someone
that has the kind of energy that I want to
be with?
Speaker 1 (13:30):
And again, I.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Mean, I'm sure that there are lots of people in
the world that are fantastic that probably wouldn't sound great
in a voice memo.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
And yes, I ruled them all.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Out because of this little heuristic that I developed. But
time is finite, and so I had to keep coming
back to that and going, look, I just I need
decision making criteriously and I'm not agonizing some things.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
And then so you went on some dates from the
dating apps, but then you decided to come off the
apps for a while and try a different kind of
dating experiment. Did you not meet anybody good on the
dating apps that first time around?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Look, I reckon all up.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I calculate it probably went on about fifty first dates.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Wow, yeah, Antha, that's loads.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
It's so many over two years, and some of those.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Did you have like rules about the dates too, like
how long they could be, what they were, and that
kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Of course I didn't tell me that. I feel like,
when you.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Go on a date, a lot of people feel an
obligation just to stay for a decent amount of time.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
But for me, I just thought, if we're both.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Sitting there and there's clearly no connection, just call it early.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And so I would.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Typically, I think my shortest dates were about forty five minutes,
because I felt like that was long enough. I mean,
often you can tell in the first five minutes but
I tried not to hang on to those first impressions
as well. It's really easy to form like very quick
impressions when you start a date.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But I would try.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
To just you know, force particularly any judgmental parts of
my brain to just go no, no, remain open. But
I sort of thought, look, after forty five minutes, I'm
just going to call it. And sometimes I was honest
and I just said I just don't feel like there's
a connection here. Other times I just made up a
lie and said that I had to go to, you know,
in my mind, protect the other person's feelings.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
So I did a lot of that.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Some of those first dates turned into second dates and more,
but most did not, And that was fine, because you know,
it takes meeting a lot of people to find the
person that you, you know, feel the disconnection.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Were you ever like, oh, you know, this is exhausting.
What's that movie?
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Where is he?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I always Charlotte m sax in the city? Where is he?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Did you?
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Did you feel like that?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
My gosh, Holly.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
After so many dates, I would be driving home and
I would call my best friend and I would say,
I've just been on another date. And it didn't work,
and like, am my standards too high?
Speaker 1 (16:04):
I am I expecting too much? Like what am I
doing wrong?
Speaker 4 (16:08):
And oh man, like there were so many low points
in that two years, But I think somewhere inside of
me I felt I did feel truly optimistic, even though
there were lots of low points and lots of nights
just feeling really lonely and discouraged on that drive home
from the date. But I think, you know, I was
definitely holding onto some optimism and hope, which I think
(16:31):
you have to if you're going to deal with the apps,
because the apps can be incredibly depressing.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And you're a pragmatic, practical person, right, And I imagine
that that helps in this situation because if you're meeting
somebody and it's obvious there's no chemistry, hopefully you're not
walking away from it going there's something wrong with me,
because that's not what it's about, right, That's not what
it's about at all. But that can be tough on
the ego after a while if you do internalize it.
(16:58):
So having that pragmatic approach is probably really helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, I think it is helpful.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I think also I ended up like just I did
so much research into how almost like how to be
a data and how to make a good decision. Yeah,
I read a lot of books and one of the
lessons that stuck with me that I tried to implement
but I found it really hard is to always default
to a second date. Whereas for me, I've gone into dating,
going one date and if I'm not enamored, then I'm
(17:27):
calling it. So I changed my approach part of the
way through to go I'm defaulting to a second date
unless there's a massive problem or red flag on the
first date, which I felt just having that rule helped
me keep.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
An open mind.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
But it did get to a point where about two
years of doing this, I just thought.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I'm so over this.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Surely there's got to be a better way of finding people.
And so I my resident email out to a few
close friends and I said, Okay, I want your ideas.
I'm still dating, I'm still single, but I'm taking it
really seriously finding a new partner. Give me some ideas
of like what would you do if you were me?
And you could you avoid the apps but still fine dates.
(18:10):
And I remember someone someone emailed me back and they said, well,
you know, you know, lots of people like you you know,
host a podcast that's very popular, You've got like, you know,
large networks through work. Surely with all those kind of
assets in inverted commas, you could utilize those to find
a date. And I thought that's interesting, and so I
(18:32):
then decided that I would try to crowdsource dates.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So what the approach was, it was quite specific.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
So I put together a list of people who I
would call a little bit more than acquaintances. So they
weren't my inner circle of friends, because my inner circle
of friends they knew I was looking for someone.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
They know me.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
If they knew someone, they would have introduced me.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
So yeah, so I went, I went sort of down
the friendship tears, if you like, to people that knew
me and knew my values and kind of who I
am as a person, but is not someone that would necessarily,
you know, if they knew a person that they thought,
oh they could be great for amoutha, it just wouldn't
be top of mind. So I literally I opened up
Excel and I created a spreadsheet and I wrote down
(19:15):
all these people's names. And the other thing is I
was specifically thinking about who were the most well networked
people of that most people yeah, who knew the most.
And then I put together a one page brief of
what I was looking for.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Okay, I need to know what was on the brief, Amountha.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Well, it had a few sections, so it had just
basic demographics because for age demographics brought age and location
demographics because that was important. I didn't want a long
distance thing and I didn't want to be dating someone
you know it was like twenty years younger or you know,
thirty years older.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, and I decided that that wasn't for me.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
I had thought about what are the most important values
and what are the most important qualities? And I think
that's something I really discounted when I was dating in
my twenties, where I think I sort of focused on.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
You know, more of the superficial things that a lot
of us have focused on in our twenties, like, you know,
are they smarter? Are they funny? And you know they
have a good job? And is the hot all that
sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
But somewhere along the lines, like I think of the
guys that I dated in my twenties and the decisions
I made, kindness didn't really feature.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And so for me, that was france and center.
Speaker 4 (20:30):
I wanted someone who at their core was just a beautiful,
kind person. And I feel that, you know, now in
my forties, I understand how important that is for a relationship.
But for a lot of the dating that I did
in my younger years, it's like I was looking for
qualities that just it didn't matter. And I knew I
also wanted someone that had a real kind of learning
(20:52):
growth kind of mindset.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Because that's how you are. You know, you're you're a searcher.
You're a learner or a researcher. You Yeah, you're constantly curious. Yes,
you wouldn't want to be with someone who was this
is it? This is the way things are closing?
Speaker 4 (21:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Not Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
And like I even think about some of the ritual
that Neo, my partner, and I have, and it's like
for a lot of people they would think that, like
these are mad rituals, like what are you doing? But
for us, because we're very similar in our value set,
it just makes sense.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Because I was just asking about that one second. We're
going to get onto Neo in a bit when we
when we find him. But when I love this idea
of ask you when you actually articulate what you want
because I've heard women of all kinds of different ages
talk about this. Jesse Stevens, who's my co host on
out loud, not long before she met her partner Lucas,
(21:43):
she said she'd been disastered and she was only in
her twenties, but she had been disastrously dating. And she
did write a list and a lot of people teased
her about it because they're like, you shouldn't be so
close minded. You know, it's kind of a bit judgmental
to write a list. You know, lightning strikes in all
kind of ways, and just like what you just said,
kindness was top of her list. And then she met
the guy and he was very kind When you wrote
(22:07):
your list, and then you shared that list with your
circle A that feels like quite a vulnerable thing to do,
like kind of showing that to people in your world
like I do. It can even be vulnerable saying I
really would like to meet someone and I haven't. But
also these are the things that mattered to me. Were
you worried about that vulnerability and were you worried about
seeming I don't know, so a twofold question, Well, did
(22:30):
the vulnerability worry you? And do you think there's just
power in getting really clear about what matters to.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
You, yes and yes.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
So I still remember how I felt when I called
these people. Actually had a list of fifty people, and
I thought, I'm just going to start with ten, treated
as an experiment, And I remember every one of those
ten phone calls, and I felt so nervous.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
I felt sick in the stomach.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
It felt like a really big deal to put yourself
out there and say I'm like, unashamedly looking for a
partner and I really want your help. I was so
nervous and what I got on the receiving end and
keeping in mind these people like I knew them, but
I didn't know them well, Like I knew them well
enough for them to be on the list.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Well enough they were going to pick up the phone
or once your email and be like hi a month
in a good tear from you. But then they'd be.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Like, oh, that's what we're talking about today, Yeah, exactly, exactly,
And I remember every one of them was just like
so so honored to be asked and so excited to help.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
And I ran it as like.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
A four week campaign where every week I would send
them like a little nudge, a little question to try
to trigger memories around all the people that they might know.
And then I think I had some kind of an incentive,
not that they needed an incentive, because I think they
just you know, enjoyed the idea of helping that I'd
make it. I think I was going to make a
(23:51):
hundred dollars donation to charity for every.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Date that I went on that they found me.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
And yeah, and the experiment was an utter failure. Not
a single date came out of that experiment.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Why do you think that was.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Well?
Speaker 4 (24:08):
I think it was because they had a very clear
brief and it wasn't an extensive brief. It wasn't a
long brief. I think all up there were nine points
that was it, because I think one of the arts
of making a great brief is making it very succinct
as opposed to a whole shopping list, and that was
really hard. But it was a good process to go through,
I think for myself in going what are the absolute
(24:32):
must haves here? But I also think it is hard
to find someone that is your person. I think it's
harder when it's when you're in your forties because just
i'man Statistically, a lot of people are still married. It's
not like in your twenties, where the majority of people
are probably single or in you know, like not non
(24:55):
life committed relationships. So just statistically, it's really different. And
I think when you're in your forties and beyond, like
you're really clear on who you are and what you
value and what is important and what you won't compromise on.
And I think that for me because I had no
biological clock ticking, I had my beautiful daughter she's now ten.
(25:17):
There's also no sense of urgency as well, and that
changes everything when it comes to dating as a woman.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
That's so interesting because it's true. It's like you this,
to put it in very basic language, you don't need
to settle, like you know what I mean. You don't
need It's not you don't necessarily need a partner for
financial reasons or to have a baby with, or to
buy a house or whatever, because you're well established in
your life, your career. You've got your beautiful daughter, as
(25:46):
you say, so a partner, as you said at the beginning,
you said, I know that life is for me. Life
is better shared. That's your goal. It's not just anyone
will do. It's got to be shared with the right person.
Not that not that we all go around thinking anyone
will do, but a lot of those filters, you know,
they're stronger at this point because you don't need to settle,
(26:08):
right I think.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
So, I think when you're racing against a clock as
a woman, if you do want to have children, then
it just I think sometimes it can lead to more
pragmatic decision making. And I hold no judgment against that
because I totally get that.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I totally get that.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
But my experience was it was very, very different without
any kind of timeline, like, yes, I wanted to find someone,
you know, and sooner would have been better than later.
But equally, it had to be an additive because life
was really good before NEO, and unless it was going
(26:51):
to add something really wonderful to life, then why would
you Because obviously relationships involve sacrifices as well, and so
you know, the additive needs to be strong.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
So we've written this type brief. I'm just imagining your friends.
The reason that you didn't get dates out of that
going through it because the brief was type being like, well,
yes he's smart, but he's not creative, and they're like
crossing it out and then or whatever it was anyway,
then so that didn't work and you went back on hinge.
Now quite quickly you did meet Neo. Do you think
(27:23):
the list exercised, the brief helped you further clarify things
when you did go back into app world?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
It absolutely did.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
But I also think, I mean, like, look, it was
it was putting pen to paper with what I knew
inside to be true, but with Neo id like, it
wasn't an uming and r ring like oh you know,
I remember like our first phone call that we had,
(27:54):
so we connected, we messaged, we voice memode, and then
we had a phone call. And I used to have
this rule for when we would get to the phone
call part of the dating process, which which i'd strongly
recommend instead of just going straight to a face to
because you can tell a lot in a phone conversation.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I used to have this rule that I wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Let a phone conversation go over an hour because which
sounds like quite an anal strange rule, but the reason
for it is that I'd had experiences where I had
connected with someone on the app, and like I can
think of a couple of instances where we talked for
like two or three hours on the phone, and when
you talk to someone for that long and they're a
(28:35):
stranger and they're normally you know, I feel like when
it's a phone conversation, you sort of let it, let
down some of your guard, and you can talk about
things that are quite vulnerable because there's no visual there's
just voice. And something about that I think brings on
to honesty in a yeah, and an intimacy in the conversation.
And what then I'd done between the phone conversation and
(28:57):
the face to face date in those instances is that
I've just started to.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Project all these qualities onto the person that really I
didn't know. I just talked to them on the phone.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
And then the first date was a real down and
so I thought, I'm just going to limit that first.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Phone conversation to an hour.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
It's like it's long enough to get a really good
feel for someone, but it's not so long that you're
learning all this stuff and then forming like starting all
these assumptions and projections of what this person could possibly be,
because I found that that's really unhelpful going into a date.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
After this short break, we're going to hear about Amantha's
first date with Neo and whether all her hard work
paid off stay with us. So your first conversation with
Neo did it break this rule?
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:47):
It did, But I told him about the rule. I look,
I remember, you know, it was in the evening.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
I think we got to about nine o'clock at night
and I looked at my watch and I said, Neo,
so I've got this rule. And I got to cut
the phone conversation short now and I explained why, and
because he's as nerdy as me, He's like, I totally
get it. And then we just ended up talking I
think for another fifth or twenty minutes, and then I'm like, Okay, we.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Really have to go now. This rule has been broken.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
But I think I just I knew after that phone
conversation that I think this guy's pretty special.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
I think this is going to be a good first date.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Tell me about your first date.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
I remember one of the I think like it was
kind of like a bit of a pet peeve where
I feel like I spent a lot of my life,
you know, in charge and in a leadership kind of
role as a business owner, and I really appreciated it
when the person that I was dating would take charge
and take some initiative in terms of what are we
doing for the first date or the second date. And
it's kind of owned some of those decisions because I
(30:46):
will naturally go to that role. But I really like
it when I'm relieved of that role. And I remember
Neo texted me and he said, so, I've been thinking
about what we could do for our first date, and
what do you reckon about going bowling?
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And I thought, oh, that's awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Like he's you know, a bit like quirky and creative,
and he's put some thought into it, and he had
his reasons for suggesting bowling. And then we go for
a drink afterwards. So we went ten pin bowling, and
I remember there was just really fun eighties music blasting
over the speakers, and you know, this like one or
two hour, you know, several games of bowling. It was
(31:24):
just it was fun and it was silly, and it
was lighthearted and it was flirty, and you know that,
like there was a bit of conversation, but there wasn't
pressure on the conversation. And then when we went to
a bar afterwards, it's like we just you know, delvet
in the conversation I think the date ended at like
two in the morning, which I made like my my
(31:45):
bedtimes ten.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
I know you're alive. That's what I know about you.
You're a lark. It's you're an early morning person.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
I am so like, I don't do two am, but
on this first date I did.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
So it was pretty obvious straight away that this was
special and different to those other fifty first dates very much,
and so did was it all sort of plain sailing
from there? I mean, we've already put a spoiler at
the beginning of this episode, which is that you are
getting married and Neo is the man you're getting married to.
(32:16):
But I guess what I want to know is, you know,
when you are falling in love in mid you've got
it's very different in a way from when you're young
and you're you know, you haven't got all the experiences
in the wisdom of what can go wrong or how
sometimes things that start beautifully can fall apart, or sometimes
(32:37):
people who charm the pants off you, maybe literally, maybe figuratively,
can then turn out to have some serious red flags
and that can make us all you know, it can
it can complicate things, right because we're wiser and more experienced,
but that also can mean we're more guarded, Like how
was it was it immediate that you could trust him
(32:57):
that things were going to go well? Like how did
it progress?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
There were two things that I think about that I
think served me really well in terms of navigating that.
The first is that I became really good through all
the dating that I did over those two years just keeping.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
An eye on whether words.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Matched actions, because people can say a lot of good
words in dating, but often the actions or the behavior
won't align with those words. And what became really clear,
particularly in those first six months where you're falling in
love but you're also getting to know someone well and
certainly like you know, in the three years that we've
(33:39):
been together, is that the words always matched the actions,
And for me, that was really important.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
The second thing that was really helpful is.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
That I had done maybe I've been, you know, in
and out of therapy for a lot of my life.
I think as a psychologist, even though I'm an organizational
psychologist not a clinical one, I've always just really believed
in the value of therapy, and so, you know, I've
had chunks of my life where I've been very committed
to therapy.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
And during those two.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Years of dating, I was seeing a therapist fortnightly, sometimes weekly,
and a lot of the discussion was around relationships and
dating and experiences that I was having. And what I
came to realize is, you know, and I imagine you've
probably had guests talk about attachment theory, and what I
(34:32):
learned about myself is that I have the tendency to
have like an anxious attachment system like that can get
activated where I'm not sure where I stand. But I
think when you've got that anxious attachment system being activated,
what tends to happen when you're in those early stages
of dating and you're kind of not quite sure where
(34:52):
you stand, You're not quite sure if they feel the
same way. You can confuse that anxiety for lust or
god to be love.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
For butterflies and the yes, Can I just ask you
on that? MEA did an episode of No Filter about
attachment theory with an expert, and we'll put a link
in the show notes. But is the ideal situation that
you and the person you pair with have the same
attachment type or that you have complementary attachment types.
Speaker 4 (35:21):
I would say one thing you don't want is you
don't want someone who who is kind of.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Anxiously attached matching.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
With someone who is an avoidant where they avoid intimacy.
That like, if you look at any unhealthy relationship or
kind of dating situation, there's a high probability that that.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Pattern the problem is going on.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
But the thing is like, based on the person who
you're with, and depending also on what their attachment style is,
that can bring out a different attachment style in you.
So what I felt with Neo and what I think
if I hadn't gone through those two years of therapy,
I would have misinterpreted what was going on is that
(36:05):
I didn't like I felt butterflies, and I felt excited
to see him, but I didn't feel that anxiety that
I in past situations had mistaken for falling in love.
It just felt like I felt really safe, and I
don't think i'd experienced that with anyone that I dated.
(36:26):
I knew exactly where I stood, and what happened with
that experience with this, I guess secure attachment that Neo
offered me, and just this confidence in where we stood
it meant that my anxious attachment system wasn't activated. And
so therefore it's like I was just really present, and
(36:46):
I wasn't making up stories in my mind, and I
wasn't thinking that, oh, because I feel this way, it
must mean that I'm madly in love and.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
This is my person.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Instead, I knew it was coming from I guess, like,
you know, a more secure place.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
I've heard you and Neo interviewed, and it's clear that
you are you have a lot of shared passions. You're
both really curious, really interested in experimenting with different ways
of living, different health things, different habits. Tell me a
little bit about how you knew that he was indeed
your person in this healthy way.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
Oh gosh, I mean there there were so many things.
I think one thing that we do that was a
monthly ritual. We've sort of we've we've adapted the ritual slightly,
but for the first couple of years of the relationship.
And I think there was some Neo's suggestion, but the
fact that it was Neo's suggestion, but it could have
been mine's suggestion.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I just don't I can't remember tells you a lot.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
It's just like how similar we are in terms of
our mindedness. Is that we decided that we would have
a monthly meeting about our relationship.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
We used to call it a monthly check in. Wow,
we still call it. We still call it our monthly
check in.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
And we devised a series of questions and I can
share some of them with you.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
You know. Yeah, yeah, that would basically.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Be a chance where we actually have time carved out,
and typically it was on a date night. You know,
we would go out to a restaurant or you know,
we've got that space where we're actually talking and reflecting
about us and about how we're behaving towards each other
and about how we're feeling. So you know, some of
the questions like somewhere about you know, acknowledging the positives.
(38:28):
Like one question was what are we appreciating most about
the other person? Which is so simple, but it's really
powerful to actually sit down with your partner once a
month and here, what are they appreciating and also think
about that to them. You know, we also would talk
about what do we need from the other person that
we're not getting, which again, just having that space where
(38:52):
a lot of times that's an uncomfortable conversation to have,
but if you've got this time carved out where like
there is space and the freedom to just go, Okay,
this is the conversation that we're having, and it feels
much more comfortable to bring that up. We also like
reflect and go what have been our best connection moments
in the month just gone, and again being mindful, because
(39:12):
if we're mindful of those, then we can go, how
can we recreate more of those those really powerful moments?
So they're just some examples, and so we did that
pretty religiously for a good two and a half years.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
And that shows obviously your compatibility because there would be
some people you could be dating who you'd say, I
think we should do this, and they'd be like, are
you joking? That would be their worst nightmare. They would
be running out the door. So it's beautiful that you've
found somebody who you know that you found each other
rather in this way. Tell me a little bit too
(39:46):
for the listeners who are dating and they've got kids.
You obviously you have a daughter. She's ten. NEO doesn't
have kids, is that right, correct?
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:53):
But being you and the very mindful person you are,
I know that you were did a lot of researching
the best way to introduce this person who you knew
was going to be around to your daughter. Tell me
what you learned about that and what worked and what didn't.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
I think, so midway through my whole day experience, I
had this conversation with Michael kar Greg, who I guess is,
you know, probably one of the most well known psychologists,
I think as a child psychologist or a clinical psych Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, and his advice really.
Speaker 4 (40:25):
Formed I guess some of the principles that I had
around how was I going to integrate this person that
I knew I wanted to be my life partner into
Frankie's world, my daughter. And there are a few things
that he gave advice on. He said, ideally, wait at
least six months before introducing your new partner to your daughter,
(40:49):
and his reasons for that. And actually Nia was the
only person I dated that Frankie did end up meeting,
because obviously, if you go through a divorce, I mean,
that is an enormous amount of change and instability, and
I just wanted to protect her from any more of
that wherever that was in my control. And so I
(41:10):
think I felt like six months was long enough to go. Yeah,
there is a very very high likelihood that this person
will be around for a very very long time. And
so I wanted to be really clear on that before
Frankie and Neo met. Neo and I actually spend a
lot of time like curating what would that first meeting be, Like,
(41:31):
A lot of thought went into that, like, for example,
we wanted it to be on Frankie's home ground, because
it could have been at Neo's place, it could have
been in a neutral place like a cafe or a park,
but we wanted it to be in the place where
Frankie felt safest, and that was at my home.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And then we also wanted kind of a fun activity.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
So it wasn't this like intense, Okay, let's just sit
down and have a big long conversation, you know, over
a meal or something that you know that can be
maybe a bit intense. We thought, what's like a fun
activity that we can all do together, And so we
decided that we'd make pizza together. And so Neo went
to all this trouble to cook pizza dough from scratch
the night for but the yeast was off and the
(42:12):
pizza dove failed, and so he was like stressing about
his pizza dough that has failed.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Ended up going to the.
Speaker 4 (42:17):
Supermarket and border base and then we made pizza together,
and then I think we ended up watching a movie
together that afternoon, So a lot of thought went into
that and just thinking what is going to make this
the best and most positive and most comfortable experience for Frankie.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Were you really nervous because I imagine, I mean without obviously
wanting to pry into Frankie's world at all, but I
imagine for you you're thinking, I really love this guy,
like I can see a future. But if she hates him,
or if she's not comfortable in his presence or if
she's not if this doesn't work, then this changes everything.
So were you really nervous about that meeting too?
Speaker 4 (42:54):
It's funny I was more nervous about telling Frankie that
I'd been dating someone, right, because she didn't know anything
about my dating life. She didn't, you know, Like I
kept that very very separate to my role as a
mom with Frankie. Were other friends of mine had made
different choices, and you know that they might have had
(43:14):
older kids where that actually showed them the apps and
get them a bit involved.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
But Frankie had no idea. And I remember one.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
Night, like I you know, we were sitting in bed talking,
you know, before bedtime, and I remember I was so
nervous and I shared the news with her and I said,
I've you know, I've met Somemon and we've been dating,
and I'd really like you to meet them.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Would you like to meet them? And she like she
was all excited.
Speaker 4 (43:37):
She said, oh, does that mean you're getting married and
I get to go to a wedding?
Speaker 1 (43:43):
And I think she was stabbed at the time.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
Maybe when I say no, it doesn't quite mean that,
but and anyway, so it went from there, and then
I think about a week later we had the meeting.
So I was actually more nervous about that, just telling
her that, like her mom, who she's only ever known
in relation to her dad, is now bringing another man
into this family system. So that was really nerve wracking.
(44:07):
But she was like really good and happy about that.
I actually wasn't nervous about how Frankie and Neo would
get along, because yeah, I just wasn't nervous about that.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
I just I just knew that they.
Speaker 4 (44:21):
Would and I knew like just what a beautiful, kind
of fun person Neo was and just how caring and
thoughtful he was, and I just thought, man, like, you know,
I just think Frankie is you know, just the luckiest
girl to have like this amazing male role model, you know,
in addition to her dad like in her life.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Oh how gorgeous after this break? How did Amantha know
she was ready to get married again? Stay right here,
we'll be back in a minute. We've got to get
to the point at which you have decided to get
married again. So tell me, was this always did you?
(45:06):
After your divorce? Were you did you think I'm not
going to get married again? Or is it something you
were very keen to happen or what? And how did
it come about?
Speaker 4 (45:15):
I would say I just had no attachment to it.
I thought maybe I will, maybe I won't. It wasn't
something I was aspiring to. It wasn't something I was
aiming for. But I remember about two years into our relationship,
you know, we talked about this. We talked a lot
about our views on marriage. Neo felt pretty similarly to me,
and that, you know, he'd been married before, he'd been
(45:36):
married for nineteen years or with his last partner for
nineteen years, and.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
You know, we could both give or take marriage.
Speaker 4 (45:44):
And then I remember we'd been on the Separate Bathrooms
podcast together when I was promoting The Health Habit, my
last book, and they had introduced Neo as my husband,
and we just had like a bit of a laugh
about it. Afterwards, I heard that, I was like, that's
a bit awkward, But because we talked about it so much,
it just wasn't awkward.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
But I can imagine it.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Would have been awkward for us for some people, but anyway,
it just we I remember we went on a walk
a little bit after we'd recorded that podcast episode, and
you know, I said like, like, where are you at,
Like what do you think about getting married? And we
just had this like walking conversation where we talked about
for both of us in a very similar way, our
(46:26):
views on marriage had changed, and we felt that it
was actually something that had started to feel important. And
I think also thinking about Frankie and the security that
she feels, I thought, you know, as a child, when
you've been through a divorce, I think there's something that
(46:46):
maybe feels like there's some stability when there is a marriage.
And you know, again like no judgment on anyone else's choices,
but it just felt right for us, and so we
decided then we sort of said, I think this is
something that we want to do. And I'm about six
months after that conversation, Neo proposed when we were on
(47:07):
a holiday, and so it was kind of it was
absolutely beautiful, but it wasn't a surprise because of that conversation.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Gorgeous and so you're getting married next year? Is this
and what will be different about this wedding?
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Ah, what will be different?
Speaker 4 (47:22):
Look, I mean my first wedding was pretty low key,
but this is it's a small wedding. It's just our
close friends and family, so about fifty people and where
we're doing it.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
In our house.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Oh, how Gorgeous got like.
Speaker 4 (47:35):
A wonderful celebrant who used to be a pop star
in the eighties and she's super fun, perfect and it's
not overstated. It's small, it's intimate, it's meaningful. It's kind
of so happy you want to.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
He looks so happy a Manthia, You're like when you're
talk about it, you're just beaming. It's just gorgeous. It
makes me very happy. But if someone is listening to
this who maybe has been through a relationship breakup and
is thinking I'm never going to meet him, I would
liked it, like you I would, because not everybody does.
There are a lot of women in med who are
like I never want to repartner. I don't want to
(48:09):
look after anybody. I don't want to repeat any of
those things. I'm just going to live that, which is great.
But if you, if like you, you're thinking life is
better shared, what's your best piece of advice for how
to handle that?
Speaker 4 (48:23):
I would say, get really clear on what you're looking
for and what your most what you won't compromise on.
I think the quality of your decisions when you're going
through a dating process where you are making literally thousands
of decisions if you're using the apps, the more clear
you can be on what matters to you, I think,
(48:46):
the better your outcome will be.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
And that's very good advice. Amantha. I love your love story.
I'm so happy for you and Neo. I'm so happy.
I can't wait to see your wedding pictures somewhere, and
thank you also for your wisdom as always, look, I
(49:09):
us love that conversation. Amantha is getting married in March
to Neo, and what I particular love about that is,
you know, Mike gran would have said, every pot has
its lid. If your pot is a little bit different
to other people's pots. That's okay. I love how specific
Amantha was. It's a wonderful story. But if you are
(49:30):
after more dating stories about midlife, then please do listen
to the episode I told you about at the Front
with Catherine Mahoney. It's very funny. But also if you
are in the throes of divorce and you're going through
the horrors of that, that can be incredibly difficult, knock
you around unbelievably. I want you to go and listen
to the episode we did with Nicki Parkinson because it
(49:51):
is raw and uplifting in a way that we don't
hear people talking about divorce very often. As always, I
want to thank you all mids for being here with
us for these big conversations that we're having. Please jump
on and follow us on Instagram. DM me with any
ideas about the show. You'll find me on Instagram too
at Waynewright, Holly, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
(50:12):
Don't forget to give us a rating horror review. It
really helps other people find MID And of course I
want to offer a massive thank you to our team.
The MID team is executive producer. I am A. Brown,
Senior producer Grace Ruvre, and producer Charlie Blackman. And we've
had sound design and production by Jacob Brown. And I'm
your host, Holly Wainwright. And I'll see you back here
(50:33):
next week for more mid
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