When Sex Is Everywhere but Love Feels Like a Lost Cause feat. Sarah Hepola

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Meghan's guest this time is author, essayist, and friend of the pod Sarah Hepola, who returns to celebrate her long-awaited memoir, The Only Thing There is to Want. Having survived early drafts, financial close-calls, and late-night meltdowns together, Meghan was eager to sit down with Sarah to trace the book's arduous six-year journey to publication and explore its honest take on romantic solitude.

Together, they chart the cultural shift from Gen X dating norms to today's hyper-connected, yet deeply lonely, mating landscape. From the "ambiguous loss" of childlessness to the surprisingly sweet dynamics of older women dating younger men, this episode explores what happens when post-feminist independence meets the messy, unpredictable urge for partnership in midlife.

This conversation covers:

The Craft and Chaos of Memoir: How Sarah navigated a six-year writing ordeal, DoorDash rejections, and major draft overhauls to capture the delicate anatomy of three defining relationships.

Modern Fertility and the "Ambiguous Loss" of Singledom: A frank look at shifting marriage statistics, biological clocks, and how media myths surrounding late-in-life motherhood led a generation astray on IVF.

Hypersexualization, Internet Brain, and New Mating Rules: Why modern dating apps, online gender wars, and changing standards around intimacy have turned modern courtship into a confusing battlefield for both men and women.

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🎙️ About Our Guest

Sarah Hepola is an essayist, journalist, podcaster, and New York Times best-selling author. She wrote the acclaimed memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget as well as The Only Thing There is to Want. Her writing on culture, addiction, relationships, and modern womanhood has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, Texas Monthly, and Slate.