Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Karl-Anthony Towns met his fiancée Jordan over Uno in LA. He beat her every time, they were strictly friends for two and a half years, and now they're getting married. The foundation was friendship — and that, Towns says, is exactly what makes it work.
Where this was said
At 41:33 · chapter starts 41:32
The energy lifts as Shetty asks about Jordan. Towns grins: they met over Uno in LA, with a mutual friend called Chucky. He beat her every time. He declines to comment on whether she's beaten him since. They were nothing more than friends for two and a half years — no romance, just genuine affection and shared energy. That friendship foundation, Towns argues, is what makes the relationship durable in a world where an NBA player dating a Hollywood figure 'doesn't seem like a recipe that works.' [1] — Karl-Anthony Towns "Karl-Anthony Towns met his fiancée Jordan over Uno in LA. He beat her every time, they were strictly friends for two and a half years, and …" 41:33 She's taught him that boundaries don't have to be aggressive — they can be safe and mutual. He's taught her to bring her inner child back: they have lightsaber fights in the toy aisle at Target and take laps around the store with her in the shopping cart. 'We don't have to act older because we met older,' he says.
Towns and his fiancée Jordan were strictly platonic friends for two and a half years before becoming a couple.
Social media feeds men and women the absolute worst caricatures of each other while stripping away the everyday, imperfect relationships that would calibrate their expectations. Combine that with smaller families and fewer cross-sex friendships, and you get a generation that talks about the opposite sex constantly but almost never to them.
The 'would you rather be alone with a man or a bear' debate went viral not because men are objectively more dangerous than ever, but because an entire fear industrial complex of influencers and safety products had already primed women to feel that way. Once the algorithm identifies you as worried about personal safety, the content and the scrunchie drink-covers never stop.
Women feel less safe not because danger has increased, but because trust in institutions — police, churches, schools — that used to enforce safety norms has collapsed. Young women are far less likely than older women to believe those institutions will handle sexual assault responsibly, leaving them with only individual self-protection as a fallback.
Even self-identified feminist women consistently told Daniel Cox in interviews and surveys that they want men to open doors, pay for dates, and show demonstrable care. The internet noise around 'benevolent sexism' drowns out this widespread, quietly held preference.
In focus groups in Philadelphia and Raleigh, every single hand went up when participants were asked if parents discussed financial stability and education. Zero hands went up for marriage or parenthood. Parents are shaping their children's ambitions with total silence on the experiences that matter most.
American families are smaller than ever, with roughly 1 in 5 children now growing up as only children. Without the daily friction of siblings — shared bedrooms, shared bathrooms, resolving disagreements — young people enter adult relationships without the negotiation muscles relationships require.
Online dating optimises for your existing preferences rather than expanding your horizons. People who meet online give bad first dates almost no second chances; people who meet through mutual friends are far more forgiving. The disembodied, checklist-driven nature of apps removes all the social cues that actually reveal character.
A split-sample survey found that men judge male and female cheating identically harshly, and women judge male cheating the same way men do. The outlier: young women are dramatically less likely to call female infidelity morally wrong, suggesting shared-fate thinking and personal experience of being cheated on are reshaping the moral calculus.
The monk mode trend encourages men to withdraw from social life to work on themselves — but this is precisely backwards. The research is clear: close friendships are the single most powerful predictor of whether a man dates, commits, and becomes his best self. Self-improvement without social reintegration is just sophisticated avoidance.
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