This one's just me, no guest — the first in a new monthly series where I crawl back through my own messy dating history and report what I found. Consider this me stepping out from behind the host chair and onto the stage, banana hammocks and all.

We're going back to the summer of 2005, my first field hockey preseason at Oberlin — a tiny, gloriously weird liberal arts school in Ohio where the cool kids were sad art boys and the soccer team had just come back from Brazil with a luggage full of bad decisions. Enter Mr. Ken Doll: 6'3", Calvin Klein face, pre-med major, artist parents, a Soho loft, and absolutely zero intention of ever dating me. Naturally, I was obsessed.

I get into the full arc — the shirtless pickup soccer game that broke my brain, the talent show I will never psychologically recover from, the art history class plot twist, the formal where my witchy intuition called it, and the run-in two years later on Astor Place that sent me straight to a bar for a shot and an IPA. Plus the thing I actually learned underneath all of it: that the butterflies weren't butterflies, the chemistry was chaos, and if someone isn't choosing you, that's the whole answer.

Spoiler: I lived. And Mr. Ken Doll has officially become an afterthought.

Find me on Substack at necterine.substack.com and on Instagram and TikTok @_necterine. If this one made you text nobody and feel something, do me a favor and rate and review the show — it genuinely helps more cuties find their way here.

This week Holly is joined by Alex Jacobs — NYC-based tutor, musician, the friend-of-her-best-friend she somehow went to Oberlin with for four years without ever meeting, and a certified, gold-medal, dating-app savant. Alex spent his 20s in New York in a string of serial monogamous relationships, drumming in indie bands, and at one point touring the country in a pop duo with a girl he matched with on Tinder. Then at 33 he was properly single for the first time in his life, went on 75 first dates, did actual research into the apps, and met his current girlfriend — on Tinder — by gaming the algorithm in ways he is now generously sharing with the rest of us.

In this episode: the band era and Saturn return collapsing at once, the worst dates of his life (including the tiptoe-maxing incident), his dad's pre-internet pickup strategy, and the full dating app optimization framework. Photos, prompts, swiping, parameters, why you should never pay, the bottom-age-range hack — all of it.

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Natasha Hunt Lee — musician, events princess behind Stargirls, and LA lifer — pulls up to spill one of the most unhinged dating arcs we've had on the show. We get into growing up in LA with parents who'd never been alone for more than three months in their lives, the cousin's-best-friend-turned-decade-long-relationship she eventually had to blow up, the 6AM DJ ambush at a Hollywood Hills house party that made her believe in God right before he detonated her, and the therapist who broke her brain with one sentence and somehow rebuilt it. Plus: fat kid syndrome, the optical violence of growing up in LA, why she'd rather be cheated on than ghosted, and the line we're stealing forever — if you're confused, it's a no.

This one is for anyone who's ever intellectualized their way out of feeling something, called chaos chemistry, or had to learn the hard way that avoidance and over-giving are the same animal in different outfits.

About Natasha:

Natasha Hunt Lee is a musician and the events princess behind Stargirls.

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Holly met Mick Silver about two years ago when he was on a panel at the very first Necterine event — fresh out of grad school, dropping the kind of insights that made Holly walk away thinking, I need to keep talking to this person. Two years later, here we are.

Mick is a therapist in LA who specializes in working with men, which means he has a front-row seat to what's actually going on underneath the male loneliness epidemic — and spoiler: it's not that men don't know how to talk to women. It's that they don't know how to talk to themselves. In this episode, they get into why so many men have turned their coping mechanisms into entire lifestyles, why "I just go with the flow" is almost always a trauma response in a flat-brim hat, and why anger keeps showing up as the only emotion men are culturally allowed to feel.

Mick breaks down attachment styles, the conflict-allergic dating culture we're all swimming in, and why ghosting after a vulnerable moment usually has nothing to do with the person who got ghosted. They get into the friend group red flag and what it tells you about how a man sees women, why male friendships often happen sideways — in cars, on walks, mid-Formula One race — and what's actually being protected when men say they have commitment issues. Plus: dating in your 30s and why it's better, actually; why "there's no one left out there" is a lie you've told yourself to avoid your own apartment; and what it means to stop abandoning yourself before expecting anyone else to show up.

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Rate and review After Thot on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - it helps more than you think :)

Holly met Kate Van Horn during a psychic training over COVID — which tells you basically everything you need to know about the kind of friendship this is. For months they sent voice notes back and forth all day, and Holly had a front-row seat to Kate's full dating thot era: the rotation of guys, the dates that went sideways, the almost-its, and the specific kind of chaos that comes with being completely ready for something real while still figuring out what that even means.

In this episode, they finally get to put it all on record. Kate's long-term relationship history before Holly knew her — moving in with someone within two months of reconnecting, leaving without looking back, landing in LA and immediately complicating things with a roommate. The men who were great on paper and emotionally unavailable in practice. The anxious attachment spiral she could see clearly and couldn't stop anyway. And then Kam: her college friend-with-benefits who she turned down repeatedly for years, who she finally ran into in Arizona — and whose DMs she slid into first.

They get into what actually felt different about Kam, why calm and steady kept getting misread as boring, and what it means to be in a marriage that's real and not perfect. Plus: what Holly's best friend's parents had to do with it, the Halloween costume origin story, and why Kate still has every text she and Kam ever sent from college on a found laptop.

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Rate and review After Thot on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - it actually helps more than you think

Hannah Ehrlich has spent the last decade helping people find love — building frameworks, coaching clients, matching strangers, and asking the hard questions most people avoid on a first date. And like the rest of us, she's still been in the situationships, still made excuses for the avoidants, still had to learn it the hard way. She's on the other side now. She looks annoyingly good there.

This week Holly and Hannah get into all of it: dating across four cities, why knowing exactly what you want doesn't stop you from making excuses for the wrong person, what it actually feels like when the right one shows up, and why your attachment style might be a lot more flexible than you think.

Spoiler: she lived. Let's get into it.

About Hannah Ehrlich

Hannah Ehrlich is the founder of Coupled, a relationship coaching and matchmaking community built around the idea that finding the right person starts with knowing yourself. She also works in the VC and founder world, where she thinks about how the muscle you use to find the right partner — in business and in life — isn't actually that different. She's dated in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA, which means she has opinions.

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Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Cate Pileggi, joins Holly to explain why that irresistible spark might just be your nervous system recognizing a familiar wound. They get into attachment styles, trauma bonds, why your "type" is probably not a type at all, and what healthy attraction actually feels like. Uncomfortable? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.

About Cate Cate Pileggi is a licensed marriage and family therapist in the greater Los Angeles area. She's trauma informed and EMDR trained and specializes in relationship struggles, painful childhoods, narcissistic abuse, religious trauma and insecure attachment. She works with individuals and couples who want to find a greater sense of peace, connection and joy.

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Lexie Lombard has been single for most of her 20s — by choice. Spencer Bland came to LA for a slutty era and accidentally fell in love by week three. Together with Holly, they get into divorced dating, cool girl performance, losing parents, and why your dog is actually your best wingman.

About Lexie - Lexie Lombard is one of YouTube's early leading creators and host of the Lexie podcast, who has spent the past 15 years growing a loyal audience online through sharing her life with honesty and curiosity.

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Lexie Podcast

About Spencer - Spencer Bland is an LA-based comedian and writer whose debut album Dinner at Four debuted at number one on both Apple and Amazon Music.

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No Gods No Chains Podcast

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Charlotte Chimes has lived enough romantic lifetimes to fill a TV show — which, actually, she's currently writing. She's also one of Holly's best friends, which means this conversation goes places most podcast guests wouldn't dare. They get into all of it: the chaos, the patterns you can't see until you're out, and what it actually feels like when your nervous system finally exhales. She made it to the other side. So did her jaw. Barely.

About Charlotte Charlotte Chimes is an Australian actress, writer and producer known for her role as Nicolette Stone on Neighbours and starring opposite Leighton Meester in the CW comedy Good Cop, Bad Cop.

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Mentioned in this episode Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton — if you haven't read it, fix that.

Charlotte's affirmation (you're going to want to write this down): "I am adored without asking, chosen without chasing, kept without conditions. I attract the man who is clear, ready and obsessed with showing up right. Being spoiled is my resting state. I am the woman who sticks in his brain. I am the woman he builds a world for."

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Ever convinced yourself that the butterflies were chemistry — and not, turns out, just anxiety in a trench coat? Yeah. This podcast is for you.

After Thot is where dating, love, attachment, and heartbreak finally get the perspective they deserve. Host Holly Sloofman — founder of Necterine and longtime student of her own messy thot era — sits down each week with therapists, comedians, creators, and real humans who've done the work for honest, unfiltered conversations about the patterns we keep repeating, the healing we didn't know we needed, and what it actually looks like to choose better.

The situationship you thought was going to kill you? The relationship that had you grinding your jaw in your sleep? The ex whose name you literally cannot remember anymore?

Total afterthought.

This is not a podcast about finding the one. It's about understanding yourself well enough to stop going after the wrong ones.

New episodes every Wednesday.