Ep #357: Ready to Date Again? Try the Burned Haystack Dating Method with Jennie Young

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 357: Ready to Date Again? Try the Burned Haystack Dating Method.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Maybe you are ready to date. If so, this episode is definitely for you. Maybe you are not ready to date, but you think you someday might want to date. I highly recommend you listen to this episode because I think you will feel better after you do it. You will feel a sense of confidence knowing that someone has a method that you can use that will make dating feel safer, less overwhelming, give you a little bit more structure. And I would love that for you. And listen, maybe you never want to date again ever, and you don’t ever want to be in another relationship. Please don’t hear me say that dating is a requirement to loving your life again. It is 100% not a requirement, okay? But if you are ready to date again, if you’re thinking that at some point you might want to date again, then this episode is for you.

Let me tell you a little bit about my guest. Her name is Jennie Young. She has a PhD. She’s the creator of the Burned Haystack Dating Method, and she’s a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She publishes work in humor, feminism, applied rhetoric, dating dynamics, and education, and her writing can be seen in McSweeney’s, Ms. Magazine, The Independent, HuffPost, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. Also the author of a textbook that applies critical discourse analysis to contemporary high school culture. Jennie focuses on public scholarship, making academic content accessible for everyone, and her book, “Burn the Haystack,” is available for pre-order right now, as you are listening to this episode, and available for full purchase, as in you can actually get a physical copy of it on April 7th. I think after this episode, you are definitely going to want to order this book.

Before I have Jennie introduce herself, I want to tell you why I wanted her on the podcast. I’m very picky when it comes to who I allow to talk to you. I take my responsibility with you very seriously, and Jennie is someone whose work has benefited me tremendously in the last couple of months, few months really. I’ve told you on the podcast that I am dating again. I have found someone who is absolutely amazing, and had it not been for Jennie’s Burned Haystack Dating Method, which I just happened to come across on social media, I don’t know that I would have connected with him. And I think I would still be wading through the ick. And I would have been so less able to sort through the stuff that’s out there, the junk that’s out there.

So what I love about what Jennie teaches is that it sounds highly technical. If you listen to me read her intro, it’s full of big words. It sounds like it’s going to be a heavy lift. It is not. It is extremely accessible. It is so helpful in that it puts women in the driver’s seat. It helps them see, “Oh, okay, this is what I’m looking out for. This is what red flags actually look like.” And if you can spot the red flags, you can block the men that you see. And through the process of eliminating the ick and the bad ones, the good ones will rise to the top, the cream will rise. And Jennie’s method is just brilliant for that.

So I hope you really enjoy this episode with Jennie Young. I hope honestly that you will go out and buy her book. There’s nothing in it for me if you buy her book, but this is a woman who gives a lot of her time to help women. And she’s not doing it for money. I would love to see us just blow up her book orders and support her as much as possible because she’s really doing a lot to help women and I hope that you’re one of the women that she helps. So, with that, let’s get into my interview with Jennie Young.

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Krist: All right, welcome, Jennie, to the podcast. I’ve been counting down the days to have you on the podcast. Like, that’s how excited I am about that. And I don’t usually say that about guests. So welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast.

Jennie: Thank you. I’m very grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Krista: I think my listeners have a lot to learn from you, so I’m hoping we can cram a lot in into this episode and then maybe if we feel so inclined, we’ll do another one.

Jennie: Sounds good.

Krista: I will have you start by just telling people who you are, what you do, how you came to the work that you do.

Jennie: Okay. So my name is Jennie Young. I’m a professor of writing and rhetoric at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. And a few years ago, I downloaded a dating app for the first time as a person who’d been divorced for several years, and was horrified by all the things everyone is horrified by on the dating apps. And I decided that I wanted to use my academic expertise to try to make the situation better. Specifically, I wanted to make it better for women. And so I really only work with women. I guess I’ll leave it at that for now, and then we’ll as we talk, we can roll out more specifics.

Krista: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so since I haven’t really talked much to my listeners about you from my perspective, I want to tell them about you, and you’ll hear it too, and then we can go from there. So, the reason I really wanted to have Jennie on the podcast is because, I mean, there’s so many reasons, but the main one is that myself included, and so many of the women that I work with, are scared of dating apps, are worried about dating, just find it overwhelming. And give you just a little bit of background.

So last fall, I had come out of a five-year relationship. So my husband’s been gone about 10 years, not quite 10 years. I got into a relationship, lasted about five years. Last spring, blew up. Boy, do I wish I had Burned Haystack before, so I could have looked at his profile because we met in online dating, and I just really wonder what were the patterns that would have been there that I didn’t screen grab so I could see it now. But a great relationship for me to get out of. We’ll just say that.

And so in the fall, I decided, “You know, I think I might at some point want to date again soon.” And I happened to get the shingles, super fun. What I’ve learned about that, though, is that when you go through something kind of traumatic, sometimes when your body feels safe again, that’s when you let down, and that’s when you get sick. So that’s what happened. I got the shingles, and I’m not wanting to move at all, sitting on my couch. And somehow, I had this memory of crossing your work somewhere. And I don’t even know where, as the internet often does, right? It gives us things that we don’t even know how it happened.

So I was like, “I think I’ll watch some of her stuff.” And so I consumed pretty much everything I could find on Instagram, everything I could find on TikTok. I found your Facebook group, and I was just consuming all the things and thinking, “Oh my gosh, she is on to something.” And I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll just create a dating profile just to practice. I’m not really ready to date, but I’ll just get on there and I’ll just practice blocking to burn because that sounds terrifying,” which we can talk about. And holy cow, if I haven’t already found the most amazing needle, really.

Jennie: Congratulations.

Krista: Yes, so I’m just such a, from a lived experience, right? I’m just such a fan of what you teach and the value in it. And I think all women need it. And so I’m just absolutely delighted for people to have it. I think one of the things that helped me so much was letting it be okay to block. And so I definitely want to talk about that today, why that’s valuable. And I know that’s probably the reason that his profile came up is because I had burned them all down. I had no one left. And so the day he created a profile, poof, he popped up. Okay. So where do we even want to start?

Jennie: Do you want to start with block to burn? So that’s rule number four of Burned Haystack. There’s 10 rules and they’re all very detailed in the book. So like there’s a manual for this and everything’s there. But since you just referenced block to burn, so maybe we should talk about the metaphor. So the notion of Burned Haystack is rooted in the cliche, everyone’s looking for their needle in the haystack. And for too long, myself included, women were sitting there picking through every piece of hay, right, hoping it would be a needle or trying to find the needle or whatever. And the reality is probably 95% of what’s in that haystack, you don’t want to date anyway. So it’s much more efficient to burn the haystack to the ground, because needles don’t burn, metal doesn’t burn, and then you just found the needles. And it sounds like that’s what happened with you in finding your needle. So we flipped the modality. Instead of looking through the dating app like, “I’m going to find a person,” you just focus on ruling men out. Rule them out, rule them out, rule them out, burn the haystack.

And that it kind of works on both a psychological level and a logistical level. So logistically, it does what it did for you, which it kind of forces the algorithms to show you new people instead of just recycling matches, which is what all the dating apps do if you don’t actually block. So all of the apps have various options. You can swipe left, you can choose the X, or you can block, or you can report. And they’re sort of engineered to make people think that blocking is only for really bad situations. If someone’s being abusive or aggressive or scary or something like that, that’s when it’s okay to block. But we use blocking just to control the algorithm. So there might be a perfectly lovely human being that I know right away is not going to work for me for whatever reason, I would just block him. And then I don’t have to waste my time seeing him again.

I think socially and psychologically, women have been programmed to see potential, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, to justify ourselves if we don’t want to move forward with someone. What we say in Burned Haystack is you don’t have to do any of that. And moreover, you shouldn’t. It’s not safe. You don’t owe anybody an explanation. You can just disappear at any time without a single word, and you should, because if you try to explain why you don’t want to move forward, you’re probably going to be on the receiving end of a lot of unpleasant behavior. I’m not talking about ghosting. If you have a date to meet someone in person and you change your mind, which is totally fine, I do think you should tell them and then block them. So we use blocking for efficiency, but also for psychological and physical and mental safety.

Krista: Yeah. And so the more you block, then the more you’re training the algorithm to show you better fit options, people with…

Jennie: I mean, theoretically. None of the apps will reveal how their algorithms work. So anybody who claims to know that they’ve cracked the dating app algorithms, that’s not real. It’s a little bit mysterious. The one thing we know is that blocking men prevents them from coming up again. And the apps, they don’t want to send you nothing, right? That’s not good for them. And I’ve heard so many stories like yours where women will say, “I burned it down to nothing. I had no matches. And then three days later, I met my needle,” which probably wouldn’t have happened had she not done the blocking or had she changed her filters, because the apps are always saying, “Oh, maybe you want to loosen up this filter or something.” And they so do. Yeah.

Krista: The potential for wasting time, having conversations with people who you, “Oh, just give them a chance. Oh, you’re being a little too picky. Oh, keep your options open. Don’t be so sold on knowing what you want,” can really just blur your vision. So can you talk about, I know you divide the rhetorical patterns into really concerning, potentially abusive, absolute red flags, and then some that are maybe a little less concerning or a little more contextual. Can you talk about the ones that are the most concerning?

Jennie: I would say we go over 33 different rhetorical patterns in the books. So these are these are like the 33 that I see over and over and over again. I would say most concerning are disciplinary directive. So anytime a man is, you know, laying down the law or telling women how they have to be or look or anything like that. Conditional decency, anything that gives the energy of, “I’ll treat you decently if you do ABC.”

Krista: “If you show me respect, then I’ll show you respect.”

Jennie: Right. Yeah, if you’re kind to me, I’ll be kind to you. Right. Yeah. “Were you at the Capitol on January 6th?” I think those guys are dangerous. So the men who are going on and on about the vaccine is going to do whatever it’s going to do, or I remember the language and one said, “I’m ready to defend my loved ones from outside forces.” And this is like a guy who lived in the suburbs. Like these sort of delusional ideas and intersections with like a fascination with like weapons, military kind of stuff. That pattern sets me off.

We have one called cult leader language, which frequently intersects with, “Were you at the Capitol on January 6th?” Is this a threat? is another pattern. The guys who all their prompts that, granted the dating apps wrote, but they selected them, sound like, “You should not go out with me if,” or, “Don’t be mad at me if,” and they’re sort of like setting the stage for all these things they’re definitely going to do. So I would say those are some of the most dangerous.

Krista: Okay. Can we talk more about disciplinary directive? One of the things that I found so valuable is just this idea because my brain wants to pay attention to the actual words they are using, is to not worry so much about the words and look for the patterns. So can you give some examples of what that means?

Jennie: Sure. The clearest example I have, and it keeps like proving itself to be true, is the use of “let’s,” like L-E-T apostrophe S. Like, “If you like what you see here, let’s grab a drink,” or, “Let’s exchange numbers.” Or even, these things can sound very innocuous. Like, “You have such a beautiful smile. I love everything in your profile. Shoot me your number and we’ll go from there.” That’s disciplinary directive. And are those words problematic? Not necessarily. But a man who has any kind of human sensitivity for what it’s like to be a woman in the dating sphere, specifically on the dating apps, would say something like, “I’d love to exchange numbers if you’re open to that. If not, more than happy to keep communicating on the app.” Like that’s the other way to approach that, or just not to suggest it at all so early. So very low key grammatical directiveness that doesn’t sound problematic in terms of content, over time, these guys keep turning out to be at some level of abusiveness.

Krista: And when you say over time, talk to us about how you know that.

Jennie: So I, one thing that’s been happening a lot recently is someone will send me a profile and say, “Do you see anything here in this?” without any information. And this has happened both publicly, like in my Facebook group, and also private, just through email or whatever. And I’ll say, “Well, I see disciplinary directive, I see a little bit of I’m the prize, I see some weaponized spirituality.” And then they write back and say, “Wow, I was married to this guy for 15 years and he became horrifically physically and sexually abusive.”

Krista: Wow. So you have no context. You see what they send you, you look at the way that they said it, and then you can see the pattern. I think this morning when I checked your Facebook group had something like 258,000 women in it. First of all, I’ll say it is the most well-run Facebook group I have ever seen.

Jennie: Thank you.

Krista: When I was considering joining, I thought this is going to be a train wreck. There’s no way you can have that many people in there and keep it so well-run.

Jennie: It would be. If I let it.

Krista: Yeah. Yeah, it must be like a labor of love, but it’s really helpful to get in there and see people post things for you to give your opinion on what you see and then to kind of let that be an opportunity for other people to practice spotting the patterns that they see, and then also to hear the, you know, sometimes the follow-up of, “Yeah, I thought this might be an issue, but I decided to try it anyway. Circling back to tell you, definitely was an issue. Wish I would have paid attention.”

Jennie: I’m glad you said that because I forgot one of the most indicative of abuse rhetorical patterns, which is test and apologize. Those guys who throw out, usually something sexual really early on before they get a response, they apologize like, “Oh my gosh, I just lost my head. I’m so sorry. I’m not like that.” What they’re doing is testing boundaries from the word go. And all abuse is rooted in boundary violations, regardless of what kind of abuse it is. There’s a boundary violation. And so what starts out as these very low-key boundary violations over time gets much worse.

And we had, there’s a journalist in my group, and I don’t know her personally, but I’d read her writing, and she sent me a series of, we’re connected in other ways. So she contacted me and was like, “I met this guy, he’s amazing. It’s chemistry like I’ve never felt before. There was one low-key test and apologize.” She’s like, “And I know,” she goes, “I can hear your voice inside my head. I got to give him a chance.” And I was like, “Okay.” I’m like, “I wouldn’t.” But like, I also totally get that because I’ve made all the same mistakes in my own life and suffered the consequences. And she did give him another chance and it got really bad. And she ended up writing and publishing an article about that. I think the title is something like “Dating the Test and Apologize.” And she traces this pattern of how it started out looking fairly innocuous, but grammatically it did fit into that pattern, and then she called it before she ended up wasting months or years of her life with this guy or getting seriously hurt. But the red flags multiplied quickly.

Krista: Yeah. And sometimes it seems like the test and apologize can be, they almost presented as though it was an accident. Like, “Oh, I meant to text this to my friend. Sorry, I accidentally sent it to you. Let me just see what you do.”

Jennie: Right. Yes, that happens a lot, exactly the way you just said it too.

Krista: So, test and apologize, disciplinary directive, conditional decency, “Were you at the capitol?” Those are cult leader language, some of the most problematic ones. What are the ones that are maybe not so obvious, but still we want to be looking out for? And I know we can’t cover all 33.

Jennie: Bored toddler is another pattern. Like if you’re at work and don’t respond to them immediately, they’re like, “Hey, you must be really busy today.” You know, sort of these like passive aggressive like pleas for constant attention. We have what we call receptacles for randomness, and I’m wondering if you’ve encountered this. Yes, you’re already laughing because you have. These guys that you meet them and you know nothing about them, I mean, at all. You’ve never even spoken, and two hours in they’re like, “Hey, so just got back from Costco. I bought some whatever, you know, whatever it is they bought, granola bars, and I’m going to fix my plumbing when I get home.” And you’re like, why would I care? Like, why would you assume that I care? I don’t think that’s necessarily toxic. I just think it’s annoying and inappropriate and maybe sort of conveys a misunderstanding of how interesting they are.

Krista: Maybe a little bit of cluelessness. What about, because I do think a lot of widows relate to this, this whole missing piece of the puzzle kind of idea. I think a lot of my clients see themselves as like, “Oh, I had this great life and then I lost this really important thing and my life is great other than that.” So there is this feeling like there is a missing piece. What about when it shows up in a man’s dating profile?

Jennie: Yeah. You’re raising an interesting question because I think I would be more forgiving of a man who was widowed if that pattern was coming through in a way that made it seem like there was a real cause and effect relationship there, right? Like he really did build this beautiful life and then through no fault or action of his own, he’s now missing a partner. I don’t feel like that’s the majority of how that manifests with men. When I think about like the number of times that I encountered it, they were almost always divorced. In fact, I dated a few widowers and I never saw that pattern in their profiles at all. It was always with either divorced or never married men where they seem to sort of view women as like an accessory.

Krista: Yeah. So how might that look in a profile that you would want to be wary of?

Jennie: They tend to say things like, “I’ve built a successful business, I have three homes and a boat, I have great friends, my kids are doing well. I’m just missing that special lady.” Or a lot of them do say, “Looking for the final piece of the puzzle,” which is why we named that pattern that. I think some of them are getting wise to the fact that’s now a cliche, but the like structure and the rhetoric surrounding that construct still very much screams missing piece of the puzzle, last piece of the puzzle.

Krista: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I’ve seen that one a lot. Also, the middle-aged white Buddhist.

Jennie: I get so much hate mail about that. With people who misunderstand it because I’m not critiquing people who are committed to Buddhism. I’m critiquing these men that listen to a couple dude-bro podcasts and are now suddenly self-determined spiritual gurus who like to tell women how they can achieve greater peace, or more frequently, how these women can create peace for them.

Krista: Right. Yes. What about some problematic words that you see used repeatedly that maybe have a meaning that women don’t necessarily understand?

Jennie: Yeah, really, really be wary of loyal, humble, humility, respectful. These words are now all coded for “trad wife” pattern. And even if they’re not necessarily subject to the whole discourse of #tradwife, they are almost certainly subscribing to a model in which men are like the leaders and the governors of the household and women are expected to submit to them.

Krista: Yeah. Yeah, “humble” is the one that bothers me the most, I think.

Jennie: It bothers me a lot too. We were talking about that this morning in the Facebook group.

Krista: Or even like, “Who knows how to not take herself so seriously?”

Jennie: Yes. All humans should be taken seriously. Right? We have full lives.

Krista: Indeed. Okay, let’s talk about prompt selection. So I’d like to get your opinion on just how to think through what prompts men are choosing on these apps, and then also how to think about what prompts maybe we want to choose or avoid when we’re creating our own profiles.

Jennie: So I do include in the book a list of prompts that if men choose them at all, I think it’s probably already over. And I always say like 99%. If they pick, “The way to win me over is,” that’s one of their favorite ones. And then they design their AI girlfriend or whatever who they think will materialize because they put it on Hinge.

Krista: What that doesn’t work? Build it and they will come.

Jennie: No, there’s definitely some confusion. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I’m very wary of, “The way to win me over is.” For a really crafty writer who’s also super funny, is it possible a guy could take one of my forbidden prompts and make it work? It is totally possible. I’ve never seen it, but I would make room for the fact that it might be possible. But most of the time, “The way to win me over,” I would nix anything that’s sort of like, “I’m the prize,” vibe coming through is a problem. So in terms of like what prompts do we choose? I’ve, in recent months, become a real fan of women crafting prompts, not choosing the pre-selected ones, and definitely don’t ever fall for any of those prompts that are like, “My most vulnerable point is.” No, that’s a disaster. Don’t share your most vulnerable points with strange men on the internet. And it’s bananas to me that the apps encourage this, but they do.

I started intentionally crafting prompts that were designed to get me certain rhetorical information. Like one of the ones I used when I met my needle, I had two that worked really well. One of them was, “If you could change one thing about America right now, what would it be?” And I was trying to determine their political affiliation, but I didn’t want to say anything about mine, because then they’ll just lie, because conservative American men are having a very hard time on the dating apps right now, even with conservative women, which is interesting. So their answer to that, 100% of the time gave it away. They would say things like, “I want to get the Pledge of Allegiance back in the schools,” which is still there. Like, so that’s uninformed, but also like strong conservative vibes. And many of them said, “change up our current administration.” So that was telling.

The other one, and this was the one that my current partner ended up answering and I liked the way he answered it. I said, “If AI really does usher in the apocalypse, what special skills would you bring to the situation?” And I was doing that to root out the guys that would go straight to sex, which for the record was the majority of them. Like, I read a lot of answers to that I did not want to read. But I also read some good ones including the guy I’m currently partnered with. He’s a math teacher and a middle school math teacher. His response was, “I guess I’ll have to say algebra. We won’t need it the way we don’t need it now, but someday someone might want it and I’ll be there.” And I thought that was funny and showed like a kind of self-deprecating sense of humor and we just started talking from there.

Krista: Beautiful. So anything that exposes fears, we want to avoid. Anything that gives someone leverage over us, we want to avoid. And then there are creative ways to kind of elicit the information that we would like to have.

Jennie: Yes. I’ve kind of flipped like years ago, before the US was, you know, like pre-COVID, pre-Trump, whatever. I would be like, real, real clear, like I’d bill myself as a liberal feminist academic thinking that’ll get rid of most of the guys I wouldn’t want to date. That’s not true anymore. A lot of men just go through and swipe right on everyone. Their odds aren’t good because they outnumber women on most apps. So in order to like cast their net wide, and also they don’t care, right? Depending on what they’re looking for, they’re not necessarily concerned about finding someone who shares their value systems. They’re looking for other things.

Krista: I think it’s really hard when that is not your approach to even imagine that is someone else’s approach. It’s hard to put yourself in that place.

Jennie: And I can see how, especially for women who are widowed and who were married to good men, you would have a different perspective, right? Because the whole world has changed, right? In that last, whatever it is, 10, 15, 20 years, in a way that would be very blindsiding, I assume. I don’t know that firsthand, but that would be my assumption.

Krista: Yeah, absolutely, it’s fair. And I think put on top of that just this, “Oh, what is even online dating?” I mean, a lot of, you know, a lot of women, this is their first time considering online dating. And not to say that your material cannot be used for in person, right? It’s not just about dating profiles. It really is, if you see these red flags at any point, we are eliminating, right? Whether it’s on a profile, it’s in a chat, it’s later in text, it’s in person, in conversation. It’s these are the things to watch out for, and you don’t have to look for the words that they say as much as you have to understand the patterns that they use.

Jennie: Exactly. And those patterns are disqualifying regardless of what else is going on. So like it doesn’t matter if there’s great chemistry, it doesn’t matter if he’s super successful, it doesn’t matter if he’s really good-looking. Those things don’t trump the patterns. We use something and I go into this in detail in the book, and I’m convinced it’s a superpower in dating, the concept of thin slicing, which it was made popular in, I think it was Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink.” It existed before he talked about it, but that’s kind of what brought this concept to the public eye.

So, basically, you can take a very thin slice of experience with someone and accurately extrapolate it out to larger conclusions that tend to be also accurate. So the most, and this is a little bit crass, but it’s the best way to demonstrate it. If I said to you, “I met this guy and he’s so great. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted. He’s so funny. He’s so smart. We have so much fun together. He did push me one time during a fight, but that was it. It’s the only time it happened.” Okay, that’s the thin slice. And that’s going to get worse because that’s who he is. So it doesn’t matter that he’s doing all these other things, the abuse is going to bloom.

Krista: I would say what was interesting to me is that even believing you in that, I still found it hard to block in the beginning.

Jennie: Yeah, you have to exercise that muscle a little bit.

Krista: Yeah, there’s like this, “Oof, what if that’s a good one and I’m just misreading it? What if I’m not, I’m being not generous enough, too picky,” all of these like kind of conditioned fear-based things.

Jennie: But part of the reason you think that is because we’ve all been bombarded with those messages, right? Not only you’re overthinking, you’re too picky, you’re too demanding, you’re expecting too much, but also this whole notion of you can’t have a scarcity mindset. You must develop a mindset of abundance because that’s going to cause you to deprive yourself of all these wonderful things. I go into that discourse in the book in detail and why it exists and whom it’s serving. And it’s not women on the dating apps.

Krista: Yeah, I mean, I get the idea that we, and I teach this, right? Choose the way that you think about it on purpose. But we’re not doing that so that we can gaslight ourselves or learn to like hugging a cactus. Like, we’re doing that because what we want matters and we shouldn’t stop until we are finding it, not to tolerate something that is less than what we deserve. And that’s how I see it being used.

Jennie: Yeah. And I think another thing I end up talking with women a lot about is I do think there are times it makes sense to re-evaluate what you think you want or need, but those things should not be related to how someone treats you or how they make you feel. So I know a lot of women will say, “I have an advanced degree. I don’t even want to date anybody who has less than a Master’s degree.” I personally think that’s a mistake, especially in America, because in America, educational level is much more correlated with family socioeconomic level than it is with intelligence. And a lot of times even earning potential.

I understand, like for some people, it’s just like it’s an absolute deal breaker. They’re not willing to re-evaluate it. That’s what I would re-evaluate. Geographic distance I would re-evaluate just because the world is changed, we’re all much more virtual. If you’re of a certain age, you might be within a few years of someone being able to relocate. But those are kind of hard metrics that aren’t tied to someone’s character in the way that the rhetorical patterns reveal characters. So yeah, like I don’t think you should re-evaluate blocking to burn the disciplinary directive guy.

Krista: Yeah. And for widows, sometimes what can get in the way and this definitely happened to me is the idea that not everybody’s going to be your late person, which, yes, that’s true, because there’s only one of them and…

Jennie: Right.

Krista: And also that’s not about you now aren’t going to be treated as well.

Jennie: You might be treated really well in a different way.

Krista: So we talked about what it might look like in writing. What about what it looks like in terms of images, pictures?

Jennie: Images are super important, but not necessarily in the way people think. So whether he appears to be really good-looking or not, I don’t think should be a factor. Or you should try not to make it a factor early on, because people frequently show up looking much different for better or for worse. So making a decision either way, like in favor of or ruling out purely based on physical attractiveness, I think is a mistake because you really can’t tell. Not everybody’s good with angles. People change even within a few months’ time.

What you do want to look for is like what I would call rhetorical artefacts or material rhetoric. If his main profile picture is his motorcycle, don’t be deceived about how important that motorcycle is in his life. If you’re a motorcycle fanatic, that might be great. But if you don’t want to be a motorcycle mama, that might be a problem, right? If he has a Confederate flag behind his face, that’s not a mistake. If he’s wearing a t-shirt that has any number of things on it right now, that is also meaningful.

Krista: Particular angles, right?

Jennie: Yeah, if they’re doing this thing, right, where they’re glaring down at women menacingly or shooting the photo from, this is not PC, but from blow job angle, which far too many of them do.

Krista: It’s yes, it’s true. That’s an automatic block to burn.

Jennie: Even if he’s just clueless, you can’t date somebody that clueless.

Krista: What about the fish pick? The fish. And I live in Kansas, by the way. So lots of fish pics here.

Jennie: Yeah. I wish they would stop doing the fish pic, but that said, I don’t necessarily find it offensive. The fish itself never really bothers me just because fishing is a thing. But my deeper level concern is, do they not realize like that this is literally an internet punchline? And if they haven’t figured that out, like what else are they missing? Now, if they have a fish pic and there’s like some self-deprecating joke that’s actually funny and sort of suggests they understand there’s a potential problem here, maybe, I don’t know. I wouldn’t rule someone out just for a fish pic, but I know a lot of women do.

Krista: Yeah. It might be a cautionary tale.

Jennie: I would definitely rule someone out for like holding up the dead deer by its antlers in their profile picture. I just think that’s more that’s aggressive, I think, in a way that fishing is not.

Krista: I also have seen a lot of pillow pictures.

Jennie: Oh, pillow pics are an automatic block to burn.

Krista: Okay, what is that? What is the meaning behind the pillow pic in your…

Jennie: There’s a humor, the chapters are peppered with humor content in between and one of them is about pillow pics. You know, I just don’t think there’s any connotation there that you want to date if you’re looking for a long-term monogamous partner. If you’re looking for hookups, then have at it, but that’s not like – Burned Haystack is specifically designed for women who are looking for long-term monogamy.

Krista: Right. Yes, okay. I don’t know what your opinion is on this, but I’m curious. A lot of women wonder whether they should put “widow” or at what point they should disclose that they are a widow because on one hand, they want to be honest and they want to see if this person can show their true colors if that’s not a safe experience for them or see how they respond. But what do you think about when to disclose that piece of information?

Jennie: I don’t give a mandate about this because I don’t have the relevant personal experience. If I were widowed, I would not put that in my profile. Personally, I wouldn’t, just because of the amount of scam activity it will attract. And a lot of that’s bot and AI driven. It’s not even people. So I would either just put single, because single is still true. I wouldn’t put divorced, because if that’s not true, like I don’t think you ever want to be overtly dishonest in a dating app. I think you can cloak information. So like, I would never put that I’m a professor because I’m too easy to find that way. I live in an area that’s not population dense and you can find me by my first name. But I would put teacher, I would put writer, something like that, which are also true.

I do think I would disclose it either at the first in-person date or if it did turn into what seemed like a really promising, productive back and forth either in text or on the phone or Zoom chat, I might disclose it then. I wouldn’t want to go into any detail at that point about, you know, my past romantic history. But I think I probably would pretty early on be transparent about the fact that I was widowed.

Krista: Yeah, I do think you have to protect yourself. And also, it’s really good to see how people respond. Yeah. So many dating coaches out there, and I’m sure there’s some really good ones, and also there’s, yeah, also there’s some really maybe not so great ones. What is some of the advice that you hear dating coaches offering that just kind of rubs you the wrong way?

Jennie: Anything that sounds like, it’s the title of that book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” or something to that effect, or how to get the guy, and the message is you have to be like a guy. Because any of that presumes that the male approach to romance is the correct one, which is patriarchal. And that if women want to, you know, score or land a man, the key to doing that is to completely self-negate to the point that you’re performing as a man. I don’t like that at all. And that’s sort of, like that’s been critiqued enough. It’s becoming less of a problem. But what I see a lot, especially like internet dating coaches, is like, “How to revive a conversation that’s dying.” Don’t do that. Let it die. Block to burn and move on. Like it’s already over. If you’re having to like engage in that level of like mental rhetorical gymnastics to get this grown man to keep interacting with you in a basic conversational way, that’s already a reason to rule him out.

Krista: Yeah, you are signing up for emotional labor ad nauseam.

Jennie: Absolutely. Or just a lot of boredom, honestly.

Krista: Is there anything that you would have expected me to ask you that I didn’t?

Jennie: Oh, that’s a good question. No, not necessarily. I’m so glad that you didn’t ask me to recap the whole method and the rules and everything, because I get that a lot and I think, “No, no, that’s out there so many other times with so many other people and it’s going to be in the book. Let’s have actual conversations.” So I love that we were like able to immediately go deep and get into sort of the like rhetorical nuance because I feel like that’s where this method can help. Not in that it provides for every possible contingency, but what I’m trying to do is arm women with a set of rhetorical skills that renders us rhetorically flexible so that we’re ready to engage in that nuance really intuitively and accurately. So I love that we went right to these like deeper topics. Thank you.

Krista: Oh, my pleasure. Like I said, I’ve been excited to talk to you. So that gave me another question. Sometimes what I am seeing is women familiarize themselves with the rules that they kind of want to be paying attention to and then they worry about following those rules themselves. Like, what if I’m telling someone how I want them to be? Can you talk about what it’s like to use that to screen people out versus applying those same concepts to ourselves and our own profiles or conversations?

Jennie: Sure. Yeah. I’m going to answer that in two different ways because I do maintain a set of double standards for women and men proudly and transparently. Like I think it’s completely fine for women to insist on a first and last name before meeting in person. I don’t think that’s okay for men to do. And that’s pretty easily substantiated by the fact that something upwards of 95% of violent crimes are committed by men. It’s just strictly a safety issue. Like it’s never been an even playing field. It would be delusional to pretend that it is in those kinds of factors.

I don’t think it’s a good idea for women to use their dating app profile to say, “I need this and this and this. I expect this and this and this,” not because they don’t have a right to do that, but because you’re then just handing someone the playbook of how to appeal to you. And any guy can follow basic instructions long enough to do some damage. That the only useful information about men is like raw data. It’s what they do and what they provide and how they interact and what they say in the absence of coaching. That’s the only thing that means anything. So like laying down the law with men is a problem, but it’s a problem for different reasons. It’s a problem because it just simply doesn’t work. It lets them waste your time.

What about, because I think you’re given a lot of flack sometimes for the idea of mocking these behaviors. Can you talk about why you do that, what that even means and why you do it?

Jennie: Sure, yeah. Thank you for asking me that. I don’t think anybody’s asked me that before. So I’ve been a humor writer for a lot longer than I’ve been a dating influencer. I hate that word, but we’ll use it just for economy. So satire is actually rooted in a lot of political activism, especially when it’s coming from women. There was a time when women could say things through satire that they could not say and be taken seriously, right? That’s why a lot of early women novelists were writing and publishing satire. So number one, I see satire, I see humor as a political tool. I also think that so much toxic patriarchal behavior has been socially permitted to become bigger than it should be. I think we need to minimize it, trivialize it, mock it. And I think we need to render this kind of behavior what it should be, which I think is a punchline.

Krista: Yes. Otherwise, it’s just so normalized.

Jennie: That’s the other thing, right? It satire is really good at un-normalizing problematic behavior that’s been normalized because it can like shine it in a different light.

Krista: Yeah, and I think it’s kind of nice when it, you know, it stops the scroll and people go, “Ooh, oof.” You know, uncomfortable with that.

Jennie: Oh, yeah. Yeah, now I realize how creepy it is.

Krista: Yeah, amazing. Okay. So how can people familiarize themselves with your work? When does your book come out? How can they buy it? Tell us all the things.

Jennie: Okay, so the book is on pre-order now, anywhere you buy books. Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble. You can go to JennieYoung.com. There’s links to purchase the book from there or you can just Google search it. Our Facebook group is Burned Haystack Dating Method. There are a number of fake Burned Haystack groups out there on Facebook. None of those are affiliated with me in any way and they’re getting everything wrong. And they’re also letting men in, which is problematic. So you can join the group. Just look for the really big one. That’s the real one. And I’m on Instagram at @wordcasescenario. So like “worst case scenario,” but W-O-R-D. @wordcasescenario. And I’m on Substack. Burned Haystack on Substack.

Krista: Yes. And that’s all, none of it’s paywalled, right? On Substack? I would totally support it being paywalled, by the way, some of it. Like I feel, I’m like, I feel a little protective of you, which is odd because I don’t even know you, but I’m like, “This woman needs to be making money from this.” I mean, I know you want to keep it accessible and I appreciate that, but also it’s so valuable.

Jennie: I do. I adopted like, and believe me, many people, including the strategy team I hired, told me you need to monetize your substack. I’ve adopted my own socialist approach to substack. Like you can pay, it’s an option. And so I assume people who are in a position to pay and want to pay will pay and that will subsidize women who can’t. It’s fine. It’s like whatever I make, I make.

Krista: Personally, I am so grateful that you were willing to go on this, you know, journey of figuring it out for yourself and documenting it so the rest of us could learn from you. You’re incredibly generous with what you teach and the amount of time you spend helping women. I’m thrilled that the book is coming out, that people will be able to hold it in their hands.

Jennie: I am too. And I forgot you had asked for the date, April 7th. I’m going to do a virtual event from my hotel room the night before in New York City. There’s information for that on my website. It’s free to register, but you do have to provide proof of pre-order. I want it to be like one more time where it’s just like us in a Zoom room before it gets open to the world because it’s been, it is still a private group and the community feels like small and supportive as you know, right? Like we’ve crafted that sort of a vibe. And so I want that like one more time the night before it releases. So that’ll be April 6th. And yeah, you can join that from the website.

Krista: And pre-orders really do help, right?

Jennie: Pre-orders are everything, I found out. I didn’t know that. But yeah, bestseller status is pretty much determined on pre-order. So if there is something you want to do to help the mission and you feel like you’ve gotten $30 out of Burned Haystack, I would so appreciate the pre-orders.

Krista: Yeah. Yeah, and you can always, even if you are in a relationship and you’re not interested in dating, you can always buy it and gift it.

Jennie: There’s also a whole chapter on applying it beyond dating too. So there’s…

Krista: Oh, and that, I can really see the applications, even though I have not read that chapter, I can really see how in an employment setting or friendships or yeah, a myriad of settings.

Jennie: Family, a lot about family, applying it in family.

Krista: Any last things that you just really want to drive home or you really want listeners to take away before we close?

Jennie: I think if I have a chance to speak to that, I would just want to thank anyone who’s been part of the community because as much as, like it is my labor of love, I’m obsessed with it in a way I’ve never been obsessed with anything, but there are a lot of women in my platforms also performing a lot of emotional labor, uncompensated, just because they want to help others. And I think that’s, you know, so admirable and also so valuable. Like it’s not just that it’s nice. They’re doing work in the world and I want them to know I see that work and I appreciate it.

Krista: Mm, I hadn’t thought about that, but I just even being in your Facebook group can see the truth in that.

Jennie: It’s a very generous group. Yeah.

Krista: Well, and listen, I mean, if we aren’t going to take care of each other as women, then we’re screwed.

Jennie: Right. Yeah. So we got to do that.

Krista: We got to do that. Well, thanks so much for being willing to come on the podcast. I hope you will come back.

Jennie: Oh, I would love to. I would love to come back. This has been great. Thank you.

Krista: Let’s plan that. All right, take care of yourself and all the best on your book launch.

Jennie: Okay. Thank you so much.

Krista: Bye, Jennie.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.