After Thot

I met Anastacia almost 4 years ago at .... the dog park (shocker) and I've been obsessed with her ever since. She's a queer, non-monogamous, thotty force who got married young, before her frontal lobe had fully signed off on the decision, and what happened next during the early days of the pandemic is genuinely one of the wildest stories I've ever heard. But this episode isn't really about the wreckage. It's about what she built on the other side of it: the education, the reinvention, the hard-won clarity about what she wants and refuses to settle for. We talk sexual autonomy, the difference between opening a relationship and running from one, and why healing sometimes only happens in the presence of another person. She's messy in the most self-aware, generous way, and I love her for it.Follow Anastacia's chaos and glow-up in real time — and if this one hit, rate and review After Thot, tell a feral friend, and come back on Wednesdays. Find Anastacia:On InstagramFind Necterine:InstagramTikTokSubstack Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

In the 1970s, My mom was a 20-something single, living her best life Manhattan... $400-a-month Upper West Side apartment, Studio 54, house parties instead of dating apps, and a whole lot of waiting by the phone. This week she comes on the show to walk me through what dating looked like before you could swipe, why she treated husband-hunting like a job search, and the one behavior from her era she thinks we've completely lost the plot on. We also run every modern dating term — ghosting, breadcrumbing, roaching, zombieing, love bombing — past a woman who did all of it decades before there were words for it. Plus: the wingman coach who engineered my parents' meet cute, the dating advice she wishes someone had given her at 25, and a car conversation with my dad I'm still not over... Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

This week Holly sits down with Catherine Donnelly — comedian, actor, yogi, and host of Slate It Till You Make It. Catherine has a lot to say about what she learned across a decade of dating in LA: the relationships that taught her what she wanted, the eight-year partnership that slowly dissolved, and the boundaries she refuses to negotiate away now. She's generous about all of it — nobody gets cast as the villain — and clear that every stumble was a stepping stone to being ready for the relationship she's in now.It's funny, a little feral, and it ends on the best breakup advice you'll hear all week.If this one hit, leave us a rate and review — it's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find us.Find CatherineInstagramFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstack Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

Eric was the first person to welcome Holly to the infamous Silver Lake dog park — a fenceless triangle where half the neighborhood shows up with their dogs and a Yeti full of wine every night at 5:30. They've been friends ever since, and Holly was standing right there the day he met the love of his life.Eric is an LA native, a contractor, and an architecture student who built his own backhouse on the property his mom grew up on. He's half Colombian, half white, a surfer, a tinkerer, and the little brother Holly never had.Today they get into his dating history, the dog park meet-cute Holly witnessed firsthand, and some territory she genuinely wasn't prepared for.This episode contains a candid discussion of suicide and loss. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988. Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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. Find AlexInstagramSoundcloudFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstack Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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.Follow her on InstagramFollow StargirlsFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstack Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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.Connect with MickMick's WebsiteMick's InstagramFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstackRate and review After Thot on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - it helps more than you think :) Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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.Find Kate Van HornInstagramTikTokSubstackFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstackRate and review After Thot on Apple Podcasts or Spotify - it actually helps more than you think Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe

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 EhrlichHannah 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.Find Hannah on InstagramLearn more about CoupledFind NecterineInstagramTikTokSubstack Get full access to necterine at necterine.substack.com/subscribe