Today’s conversation is about detours, the awkwardness of not meeting cultural milestones, and the discovery that there are multiple paths towards fulfillment.When Joseph Smith traveled to Salem in 1836, he hoped to find opportunities that could ease the Church’s debts. He never found the money. But the revelation recorded in Doctrine & Covenants 111 reframed the apparent failure: “Concern not yourselves about your debts, for I will give you power to pay them. Concern not yourselves about your property, for there are more treasures than one for you in this city.” The treasure wasn’t what Joseph expected — not coins in the ground, but the richness of people, conversions, and unseen futures.

In this episode of The Soloists, Diana and Mallory talk with Emily Snyder — an educator, speaker, and former collaborator with business thinker Clayton Christensen — about what it means to live by that same principle: that even when life withholds the thing you longed for, there are always other treasures to enjoy. Emily shares how she has built a life full of discovery and learning, from setting annual goals that helped her feel joy on her birthdays instead of dread, and adopting an expansive understanding of her role in the world.

Most recently, one such detour led to marriage long past the time of life when Emily felt that she needed marriage to be happy. While speaking at the BYU Women’s Conference, she received a text asking if she was open to set ups. She agreed — and today she shares her life with a man who, in his spare time, teaches others how to firewalk. Emily sees her life as full of treasure — unlooked-for, sometimes illogical, but always worth appreciating.

“Community” is the buzzword of our era. It’s hailed as the antidote to loneliness, polarization, and rootlessness — the magic cure that’s supposed to ground us in the here and now, and provide us deep belonging. But because every organization from Trader Joe’s to the Catholic Church calls their audience a “community”, the word itself is stretched so thin it’s almost meaningless.

Relatedly, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between what we say about community and what we actually do. If we say we want tight-knit community but don’t show up to build it, where’s the evidence that we really want it?

In today’s episode, Diana speaks with writer Michael Perrone about why we avoid the very thing we claim to need. On his Substack Build the Village, Michael explores the architecture of human community and human flourishing, with a special focus on men. In a recent post, he argues that community requires something closer to religious conversion than verbal commitment — we need to submit to a regimen that reshapes our hearts to want it. Without that effort, we drift back into the default individualism of modern American culture, where progress looks like “an ever-expanding personal dashboard with customizable settings.”

So what would it take to actually choose community, and to shape our desires around it? Michael shares five points for consideration. Listen and let us know what you think!

This week, we teamed up with Rebbie Brassfield from Mormons in Media to talk about Hulu’s new reality dating show, Are You My First? The premise gave us the perfect chance to explore what dating dynamics look like when singles don’t have—and have never had—sex.

To set the stage, think of your typical raunchy reality dating show—say Love Island—where a couple dozen singles are thrown together, competing in absurd, often sexually charged challenges for the chance to score a date and maybe hook up. Everyone’s scrambling for a “connection,” or they risk getting sent home. Are You My First? looks a lot like that, except all the contestants lack sexual experience for very different reasons. Some have religious commitments to chastity (we get into the Mormon contestants in particular), some face health or psychological challenges that affect intimacy, and some just haven’t found the right person or the right time.

And here’s the twist: on a show that normalizes inexperience, these contestants often come across as surprisingly raw and genuine. They don’t have the same forced, hyper-confident performance you see on other shows. As Mallory put it, “They’re all underdogs”—and who doesn’t want to cheer for the underdog? But that doesn’t mean they’re all innocent. Some bounce from crush to crush without noticing their own contradictions. Others wrestle with self-trust and vulnerability. A few seem almost incapable of attaching at all.

In countless ways, the dynamics felt familiar—eerily like an LDS singles ward. Sometimes it was subtle, like how people pursued the contestants who looked like they “fit” the future they imagined, rather than the ones they actually felt at ease with.

We had a lot of fun with this one. What did you think? We’d love to hear.