The Soloists

Provo, Utah is widely known for its hyper-earnest dating culture. What happens when you bring that to reality TV? We talk to a 2nd season winner of Provo's Most Eligible, Scott Anderson, about his experience on the show and the questions he’s haunted by years down the road. What motivates people to go on reality shows? What is it like trying to grow close to someone on camera? Towards the end, we...

Today, we’re sharing a conversation that we recorded with Dan Wotherspoon for his podcast, Latter-day Faith. Dan is a very talented interviewer and drew out perhaps the tenderest conversation we've had yet. He asked how our faith has transformed as romantic disappointments and the slow slipping away of time have made our lives look different than what we expected. We talk about courage — facing ou...

This isn’t just an episode on dating, though we spend substantial time there. What we’re really straining at is a glimpse of love — a word that can feel as flaccid and overused as a discarded tissue — as a particular, substantive force that we can cultivate in our relationships. Borrowing from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart , our guests Venerable Tien Nguyen...

We’ve been looking forward to a conversation on “chosen families” for a long time. The concept is especially meaningful to those whose relational support doesn’t take the shape of a traditional family, but who experience deep intimacy, growth, and loyalty within other “relation-shapes.” Historically, this has included LGBTQ individuals as well as the unmarried. As one listener recently said to us,...

Subscribe to our new Substack !It’s just us this week—Mallory and Diana—for an introspective end-of-year conversation. We ask ourselves Where did the Soloists come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? and how we’ve changed since coming together to work on this project. We also share love from listeners: emails, DMs, and reviews that crack open what it means to live courageously with major pa...

This week, we’re joined by Candice Gutierrez, Dusty Hulet, and Cheryl Johnson to talk about The Art of Gathering , and how to plan parties that can genuinely change people’s lives. Candice says parties are about interpersonal alchemy; people come in feeling one way and leave feeling another way, and the way you design the event shapes this transformation. Cheryl believes gatherings can be a lifeli...

Send us a text This week we teamed up with our beloved friend Rebbie Brassfield who runs the up-and-coming Mormons in Media Instagram (now a podcast!). As we enter another kind of "mormon moment" as the world fixates on Latter-day Saint lifestyle influencers, Rebbie leads the public in watching closely all the references to Mormonism in media, tracking where representation is going, and...

Send us a text This week, we sat down to talk with our friend and writer Kristine Haglund about the envying lives we don't have, and particularly people whose family situations look simpler or more functional than our own. Kristine has had a longstanding, studied fascination with Mormon mommy bloggers, the forerunners to today's Mormon lifestyle influencers--sometimes called "trad w...

Send us a text "Dating is the only thing... that gets harder with practice." This is how Faith Hill, writer for The Atlantic , summarized modern romantic pursuits in the August 2024 article, "Should I Quit Dating?" This week, Mallory and Diana chat with their friend Haymitch St. Stephen about this article and another one from The Cut, entitled, "How Much Work Should Dating...

Send us a text We told you we wanted to talk about sex on this podcast, and this is where we wanted to start -- with a talk about not having sex.  We had a conversation with with Fr. Patrick Briscoe, a Catholic Dominican Friar, and Sara Perla, a single Catholic woman, about the purpose of celibacy for Catholics and how they support a large group of adults committed to it. Catholics take as doctrin...

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

Send us a text This wild, funny, and revelatory episode felt like  an off-road excursion from Ted Talks in India to the vortexes of Sedona, Arizona and places in between. The topic is interfaith marriage: we sat down with McArthur and Ved Krishna to understand how a Latter-day Saint woman living in Washington DC and an Indian man living in rural India ended up marrying each other. We hit all the q...

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

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

Send us a text Unmarried people are less religious than married people on almost every measure, according to Pew's Religious Landscape Survey and further findings from researcher Ryan Burge and an analysis by MIssion . In this episode, we lay out the data and play with one possible explanation: that religion, particularly for Latter-day Saints, is so tightly bundled with family life that sing...

Send us a text Today we're taking up a topic that will likely be familiar to all of you who have spent more time dating than you thought you would: am I too picky? We invited our friend, Benjamin Harrison--whom both of us have gone on dates with--to join us in the conversation. We discuss some of the reasons, both silly and serious, that none of us pursued second dates with each other. Were w...

Send us a text This week, we're sharing a conversation we had with Tim and Aubrey Chaves from Faith matters about why we wanted to launch this podcast, The Soloists. It was fun being interviewed by a married couple with kids; we focused the question on how married people sometimes--with the best of intentions--miss the mark when talking to singles in the Church. We discuss how being single ca...

Send us a text Welcome to the Soloists! We're here to talk about connection and beauty in this lonely world of ours, using the existentially-chaotic experience of being single Mormons as our launch point. This week, we do a deep dive on the Latter-day Saint singles ward. Love them or hate them, the LDS singles ward might be the most elaborate experiment with singles-exclusive religious commun...