Review: How to Not Die Alone

A dating advice bestseller for people who don't need any.

I used to joke that women only ever get three pieces of dating advice:

1. Don’t be ugly.

2. Don’t be insecure.

3. Don’t try to marry the fuckboi.

The first is delivered in private, or in glossy beauty magazines whose covers strongly imply that any man who reads them is gay. Popular dating advice books generally limit themselves to the latter two. One could think of other advice books could offer unrelated to insecurity and fuckbois. For example: that they could figure out what men want from them and do more of that. But books generally don’t, for two reasons.

First: telling women they need to fix themselves and/or to pay more attention to men goes against the spirit of our time. This sort of advice would feel entitled coming from a man and a break of solidarity coming from a woman; maybe an enby would get to it some day.

Second: telling women they’re fucking up and need to change goes against rule #2: don’t be insecure. And since that’s the main piece of dating advice women get, you’d be stupid to go against it.

In my search for more substantial dating advice, a few friends recommended How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love by Logan Ury. H2NDA, for short, is a bestseller that promises to “…help you overcome your blind spots that are holding you back from finding love.” That’s my promise as well! We’re off to a promising start.

This first sequence of posts is titled Not Like Other Books. I felt it was important before anything else to explain why Second Person isn’t a collection of Science™-based instructional advice listicles. How to Not Die Alone is a collection of Science™-based instructional advice listicles.

Almost every chapter of H2NDA follows the same pattern:

1. A story of some individual’s dating struggle, usually one of Ury’s friends or coaching clients — or herself.

2. An explanation of some bias from the psychology literature that caused the struggle: status quo bias, Monet effect, present bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.

3. A summary of the N=40 scientific study that proves this bias is universal to all people in all contexts.

4. A numbered list of instructions: four romanticizer intensifiers, six steps to overcome hesitation, seven simple steps to block your ex, etc.

5. A happy ending in which the character who opened the chapter overcomes their bias and finds love.

There are two main ingredients in H2NDA: the science and the advice. Let’s start with the science.

But until now no one has applied behavioral science to help people find love. (page 3)

…an internal team of behavioral scientists changed the environment in which snacks were presented. They stopped offering M&Ms in giant clear bins… (page 105)

Research by behavioral scientists Amar Cheema and Dilip Soman […] They found that the participants whose cookies were separated by colored paper ate fewer cookies and took longer to consume them. (page 199)

Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar and Stanford professor Mark Lepper demonstrated this in a now-famous study. They entered a gourmet grocery store and set up a table of free gourmet jam samples. (page 115)

In Love is Love, Science is Fake I explained that most published results in behavioral science are p-hacked fakes, and that this is only the second biggest problem with the field. The biggest problem is in the translation from what matters in your life to what is measured in social psych labs. This translation is so broken that the field is simply incapable of finding results that are both surprising to a normal person and are in any way relevant to their life.

It almost feels like Ury is in on the joke here, quoting endless studies about school exams and lottery winners and secret messages in newspapers and a dozen varieties of dessert. And yes, most of them are fake: the “now-famous” jam study is part of a literature on choice overload that was found to have “a mean effect size of virtually zero” in a broad meta-analysis. What’s important is that they have no bearing on the reader’s dating struggles. There are a few studies in the book that are more dating-adjacent than candy-adjacent, but they aren’t any more reliable or relevant.

The science is laughable. What about the advice? The advice, of course, is perfectly respectable.

Here are some highlights from each chapter of the book:

1. Understand which behavior tendencies are holding you back in dating.

2. Prepare for dating to take hard work, especially after the relationship is established.

3. Instead of chasing perfection, set a clear standard and commit to the next person who meets it.

4. Start dating before you feel 100% ready; it’s a skill you learn only by doing.

5. Look for securely attached people.

6. Instead of superficial qualities, look for partners with traits that contribute to long-term relationships like reliability and good decision-making.

7. Your dating profile should have black-and-white photos and loose filters.

8. Go to events you’ll enjoy and meet new people at.

9. Pay attention to how you feel on a date, not to whether the partner meets your checklist.

10. “Ditch the spark and go after the slow burn.”

11. Don’t ghost. Go on the second date.

12. Make intentional decisions about escalating the relationship.

13. “Ask yourself: if my partner were a piece of clothing in my closet, what would they be?”

14. Set up an accountability system to ensure you follow through on breaking up when you decide to.

15. Journal to focus on what you learned after a breakup.

16. Reflect on the past, present, and future of the relationship before tying the knot.

17. Take charge of your relationship with a contract and weekly check-ins.

We may notice three things.

One: little of this advice is novel or surprising, most of it is good, all of it is intended to be applicable to everyone. Just as we expected.

Two: a lot of this advice falls under “don’t try to marry the fuckboi”, and none of it contradicts “don’t be insecure”. Every single point is either about partner selection or about the mechanics of progressing through the stages of dating. People don’t really feel insecure about these. They feel insecure about how attractive and worthy of love they are, and H2NDA sidesteps these issues. We’ll get back to this point.

Three: obviously none of this sensible advice has anything to do with the senseless “science”. The possible exception is attachment theory, a half-century-old framework that has become a staple of dating books. Every other piece of advice was written first, and then M&M studies were sprinkled in for flavor like M&Ms in trail mix. This advice comes not from science, but from Science™.

These are entirely different entities. Science is the systematic investigation of open questions. Science™ is the institutional authority certifying definitive answers.

H2NDA opens with the establishment of Ury’s credentials and authority. This is the key selling point of the book. In just the first 3 pages, we have (emphasis mine):

here’s the bad news: most studies to date focused primarily on cis heterosexual couples… I wanted to share LGBTQ+ stories and dating experiences

I studied psychology at Harvard and have spent years researching human behavior and relationships

I didn’t want to be just another love guru, offering unscientific advice. I thought, What if I take the behavioral science tools I honed at Google…

After completing this manuscript I took a job as the Director of Relationship Science at the dating app Hinge

The name “Harvard” appears 17 times in the book, once per chapter, even though none of the personal stories take place there. The main thing Ury impresses upon you is that she has the right school, the right jobs, the right politics, and a whole lot of Science™.

Ury’s background isn’t the reason she wrote the book, it’s the reason you bought the book. The “surprising science” has all been available on Wikipedia’s laundry list of cognitive biases for a decade. The advice in it you could get from any number of blogs and Reddit posts. The prose is unremarkable. The dad jokes are… ok, I’m really not one to talk. But the reason Simon & Schuster chose Ury to package it all under an Esther Perel blurb is that she has the right credentials to charge $13.99 for it.

Just Be Uryself

We covered what’s in How to Not Die Alone: cookbook advice and Science™. We know who it’s written by: a collection of impeccable credentials. One question remains: who is it for?

First: it’s for millennials. Chapter 1 starts with “each generation faces its own set of challenges…” The specific generation Ury has in mind watched Disney’s Little Mermaid as a kid, The Notebook as a teenager, and is currently binging Fleabag, 30 Rock and The Office. H2NDA references dozens of cultural touchstones. With the exception of one ancient Sumerian love poem, they are all millennial-specific.

Second: it’s for women. This was my assumption from the start, but there’s plenty of evidence in the book itself to back it up.

How to Not Die Alone takes a clear stance on gender politics. Proclamations like “fuck the patriarchy” and “I am a feminist” are sprinkled throughout. Women filtering dating profiles for height is an unfortunate consequence of “evaluability” bias, but men selecting for thinness is “ughhhhh”.

There are a few other things men do that merit Ury’s explicit judgment, such as telling a woman how much they earn or not replying to black girls on OkCupid. That isn’t in itself proof of gender bias. Here’s how Mate addresses its explicitly male readership:

You have no fucking idea what you’re doing.

A lot of men dismiss personal style […] men who think this way are penis pilots destined for failure and loneliness.

If your answer isn’t […] then you should close this book, pick it up with both hands, and hit yourself on the head with it. Repeatedly.

The contrast with Mate is that, aside from a few carveouts about shitty men, H2NDA reassures the reader repeatedly that it is not judging them. Every single appearance of the word “fault” in the book is to emphasize that some outcome isn’t the person’s fault.

The fault is always abstract and remote: Disney movies, the Tinder algorithm, the real estate market, the endless list of biases and effects discovered in a secret laboratory deep beneath Cambridge, MA.

It’s striking how assiduously H2NDA avoids shining the torch of scientific inquiry on the reader itself. There’s a chapter on the dichotomy between maximizers, who obsess over making the perfect decision, and satisficers, who set some bar and are content with the first option that exceeds it. In the chapter, Steven the maximizer wouldn’t commit to Gabby for fear of missing out on the “perfect” option. He gets dumped, is informed by Ury that satisficers have happier relationships, reforms his ways, and ends up satisficed with a new girlfriend.

Ury’s diagnosis:

Maximizers trust that careful analysis will ultimately make their life better. But that’s not true.

If a coaching client told me he just got dumped because he wouldn’t commit to the girl he’s dated for four years, I’d have a lot of questions. Is he secretly happy to be single and free again but doesn’t want to admit it? Is he deeply insecure, either about his own decision-making ability or his worth as a husband? Was he sick of Gabby’s shit but too bound by inertia to pull the trigger? Do his choices optimize for his own happiness or for defending his choice to others? What’s his relationship with his mom like?

Here’s what I wouldn’t ask: have you read this study about how “satisficers” are happier with their espresso machines?

Steven is clearly aware that his waffling has landed him in a conflict. This conflict almost certainly involves competing desires and aversions that Steven himself may not be fully aware of. It’s not about a simple calculation to maximize happiness, one that easily resolves once you plug in the term for satisficing.

It’s crazy to posit that Steven only needs to hear the good news of satisficing to flip the switch on his lifelong habit of second-guessing and become decisive and happy with every choice. This isn’t a serious theory of how people change. It’s the one you end up with if your overriding goal is to never blame anyone for anything.

The goal of How to Not Die Alone is not to change the reader, it’s to validate her. Its core assumption is that the reader is already valid. That she will not, cannot, should not fundamentally change. If I had to summarize the book’s message, it would be:

Your problems are common, which means you’re normal. Your problems are a worthy subject of study for the world’s most prestigious researchers, which means you’re important. And the researchers have found that every single problem was caused by things outside your control, which means you’re blameless. You are normal, important, and blameless; there is nothing you need to fix.

Read the list of highlighted advice again. It doesn’t entertain the possibility that the reader is unattractive or off-putting or unethical. There are two and a half chapters on how to break up and zero about him being just not that into you. Every vignette character in the book is hot and wonderful. There’s one guy who’s “very fat”, but even he is entirely cured by one shopping trip and a talking-to about self esteem. The only thing holding back the people in H2NDA is some pesky quirk of behavioral science. After the relevant science is ritually quoted, they each meet their happily-ever-after with no further obstacles.

How to Not Die Alone is written for millennial women who are already highly valued as partners (even if they sometimes won’t admit this, because of self-esteem). It’s for millennial women who just need to stop chasing Brian, the Burning Man fuckboi, and settle down with Scott, the “five-eight redheaded vegan engineer” who has pursued them for years proving his husbandly qualities (he also went to Harvard).

Logan and Scott

The book is written by Logan Ury, for Logan Ury. It sells the reader on the fantasy that she is Logan Ury, a successful and attractive woman who is but a short education in behavioral science away from marital bliss. And Logan Ury went to Harvard — if she tells you that you are that woman then it must be so.

If you actually are Logan Ury, How to Not Die Alone is the perfect book for you. But if you aren’t, perhaps you need different advice.

Just Don’t Be Uryself

Here’s my different advice for women: don’t try to marry the fuckboi, and don’t be insecure. Since chasing fuckbois is probably also a symptom of insecurity, let’s focus on the latter.

Here’s how to actually do it: stop reading books that indulge the fantasy that women are by default great girlfriends and wives. That this fact is not universally acknowledged only because of women’s own insecurity, male obstinacy, or some “cognitive bias”. This is the very fantasy that makes you insecure.

Men will occasionally ignore you, lose interest in you, break up with you. You may want a serious relationship with a guy who just wants to pump and dump, come and go, nut and bolt, nail and bail, slyther in and show you the gryffin door.

If you bought into the fantasy, you’re just left with painful disillusionment when this happens. Worse: you may still hold on to the belief that other women are all that and that you are uniquely unlovable. If your conception of your worth as a romantic partner doesn’t have space for radical improvement, all you can do is be insecure about it.

Space for radical improvement implies that you’re currently very far from who you could be as a girlfriend. That you aren’t all you could be yet is entirely due to your own neglect and ignorance. This means that you can start improving immediately. Here’s a start: think of that guy who wasn’t as into you as you’d hoped. What’s missing from his life that you also failed to bring? Investigate your shortcomings with gleeful curiosity, like a scientist.

Maybe you are a perfect prize already, but then you surely know it without needing the reassurances of Harvard psychologists. You don’t need any advice from me either; I hope you laughed at the jokes in this post as you rolled your eyes.

But if you aren’t, thinking of yourself as a fuckup who’s constantly improving feels much more secure than the opposite. It makes every rejection a positive — an opportunity to learn! And every positive development is a validation of the progress you’ve made, which can only continue, as opposed to being about some default desirability you’re clinging on to.

Even if you’re a millennial, it’s not too late to not be yourself.