"There Are No More Matches In Your Area"
Host Jack Inslee
Lily Womble has got main character energy, and she’s on a mission to bring it out in everyone else, too, particularly in our dating lives. “Dating is a microcosm of wellbeing,” she believes. When she held a workshop on the subject at the LINE DC, we had her sit down for a roundtable discussion with our podcast host Jack Inslee (in a relationship), Maya Oren, brand manager (in a relationship), and Dante Cunningham, head of security (recently single and trying to date again). Welcome to the first episode of Hear, HERE, the LINE’s podcast featuring the most resonant stories from in and around our creative communities.
Lily Womble was a matchmaker in New York who’d set up 499 dates. But only a small percentage of her clients were finding love, and she herself was trapped in a toxic relationship. “When you put yourself in a box and you have to crawl out in order to survive, that’s when you learn the most about yourself,” she recalls. After she found the courage to leave the relationship, she asked herself, “How do I never settle again?” and set out to find answers. None came: Her parents were getting a divorce, and her friends merely offered to “play” on her dating apps. “I need to create my own solution,” she thought. “I need to come into my own best answer.” And she did.
Digging into the work of discovering what lay beneath her patterns, she asked hard questions: How do I examine these stories with compassion? How do I move through them and into a new belief, create a new neural pathway that supports my worthiness? How do I create a tactical strategy from that reflective work that uses a dating app as just a tool? And then, in person, how do I put myself out there with courage? From the answers to these questions, her whole approach changed, and she founded Date Brazen to teach others what she’d learned.
In their roundtable chat, Jack gets to the heart of it: The apps. “They can certainly take a toll on your mental health and wellbeing. Do you suggest using them?”
In the 25-minute episode, Lily gives her answer, reminds us what dating apps are actually designed to do, gives detailed strategies on how to navigate those apps, and even assigns Dante — and hetero men everywhere — some homework. Listen below and follow along on Spotify.
Photos by Birch Thomas.
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