#926 - Ty Tashiro - How To Find The Love Of Your Life

I hear that I've got you onto creatine and protein powders.

Life-changing. I got to say, I listened to an episode of yours about a year ago with Peter Attia.
And the two of you got me on creatine, got me on protein powder. And I have never, I mean, it's the best shape I've been in decades.
Let's go. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not the same level you guys are at but uh for my modest uh goals it's it's been it's been really tremendous so i appreciate that think about how many better relationship outcomes are downstream from you being a bit more jacked over the last 12 months from me and peter talking shit about good creatine and protein powder is that the world is interconnected tie everything is this big sort of mess look dude I uh I hope that you've had your creatine this morning because I I've fallen in love with your work Dr. Shannon Curry a couple of weeks ago introduced me to you and uh I think your stuff's so great you know that's this real evidence-based science-backed look at relationships attachment love what it is what predicts effectiveness red flags green flags i want to i want to do a real full run through today great looking forward to it awesome okay uh happily ever after how come it's so hard to find oh this is a long story it gets a little depressing i promise promise people I'll have a better story as we go along here.
But, you know, the two things people really want when they sit down and think about it is they want a relationship that's happy. I think that's the more obvious thing.
But they can forget that, hey, we also want something that's going to be stable and last. You don't want to have something that flames out after two or three years.
And so happily ever after actually is a phrase that captures that well. And if you look at the data on that, happily ever after is really elusive for modern love.
So I think a lot of people are familiar with the divorce statistics, but let me break that down with a little bit more detail. So the divorce rate for first marriages is somewhere between 41

and 43%. So it's obviously pretty high.
You would think maybe in a second marriage,

your divorce risk goes down because you learned a couple of things. Actually, not the case.
It

goes up 10% for second marriages. God damn it.
Yeah. It goes up 15% for third marriages.
So

if you kind of average all these numbers together, the divorce risk is about 50%.

Now, also part of that is the happy part. So some couples stay together, but they're really unhappy, chronically unhappy.
And if you use the most modest estimate possible, that's's that's going to be about eight percent of eight to ten percent of couples so now we're up to 63 percent uh so you know or 60 i'm sorry so happily ever after yes is is really hard to find and i think it's harder than ever in the modern dating environment that we have okay that's a very depressing way to begin a conversation about love um yeah look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look look

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look harder than ever in the modern dating environment that we have okay that's a very depressing way to begin a conversation about love um yeah look it it seems to me that i'd be interested to get your thoughts on this too um as fun as reading sex at dawn was i don't think it's accurate it seems to me that humans are sort of serially monogamous or monogamish, something like that, working on between two to seven, 10 year cycles with partners, getting infants to the stage where they're able to remotely fend for themselves. What's your perspective sort of anthropologically here? Yeah, I think that's about right.
It gets confusing with some of this evolutionary psychology theory because it could be true, for example, right? Let's say that we're not designed to be as monogamous as we are in modern society, but we have all these social constraints. We have financial commitments attached to marriage.
We have kids attached to it who are dependent on their parents for longer than ever, maybe in human history. And any reasonable person then who has some degree of willpower is going to be able to fight some of these tendencies or biological pushes to kind of craft the life that they want.
Now, I think the value of something like Sex at Dawn is to say, hey, maybe I have some of these base urges. And when I feel those pop up, I know what those are.
But now let's develop a plan to deal with that so I don't burn down the rest of my life. Dude, the best story around this, David Buss wrote The Evolution of Desire.
And he was telling me this story. This guy reached out to him and said, I wanted to thank you because your book saved my marriage.
David said, it's interesting what happened. He said, well, you know, I've been happily married to my wife for a decade or so, and everything's really great.
And I do love her, but I found myself getting attracted to other women. You know, I'd see an attractive woman walk down the street and I'd think, wow, she's hot.
And I thought that that was an indication that there was something wrong with me or wrong with the relationship or wrong with my partner, or there was an incompatibility. And I read your book and I found out that men, especially, have a reward circuit in the brain when we look at anything remotely sexual, a pair of rocks that kind of look like boobs to us, like, I in um so son of a bitch i'm in um and i realized that oh no this isn't some early indication that there's a problem in my relationship this is just a pretty effective pretty old bit of my biology just making sure that i'm sort of keeping a weather eye on what the surroundings look like.
It says marriage with the wife has continued to tick along perfectly fine. I don't feel guilty.
I don't feel ashamed about this. I feel like that's similar to what you're talking about.
I think that's awesome. Yeah.
I think just having these desires, having these reflexive, maybe a turn of the head or something like that. It's totally natural.
The question is, is, you know, can you be honest with yourself about that? First of all, so you have the insight, the awareness, and then two, do you have a contingency plan so that you're not the whims of your desire? And so one of the really interesting things, for example, about couples who are really satisfied and who stay committed and are resistant to divorce is that they actively, we use this esoteric term, derogate. So they actively disparage attractive alternative options so other people they could hook up with.
And so if you have them look on a computer screen, for example, and a hot woman pops up on the computer screen, men will reflexively avert their eyes for a second to try to not look at it. Now they'll look back eventually because they're guys, but they have this kind of protective mechanism to say, I can't just passively work with this.
I need to actively try to manage my desires so that I can have a happy relationship. I have been thinking about this a lot recently.
The insight, it's far easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. And Brad Wilcox in his book, Get Married, he talks about there are certain high risk environments environments that you can find yourself in if you're in a relationship.
If you really want to be faithful to your partner, you could say, well, you should love them so much that it shouldn't matter if you're in a nightclub drunk at 2.30 in the morning. And you go, yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe it shouldn't.
But in the same way as I don't ever intend on becoming a heroin addict, but if I just left loads of heroin needles around the house and one evening I was bored, I'm like, you know, I might shoot up. Who knows? so uh yeah um avoiding temptation rather than resisting it sort of environment design in that way i guess like this relational environment design too which is hey like i'm just not going to give myself the chance to become enthralled because i understand how um fast acting the lust system can be and it just sort of kicks into high gear and and you don't really know so yeah i very much think um designing your lifestyle and thinking carefully about what you expose yourself to is probably a pretty smart idea.
Yeah, I think you're so right about that, Chris. One of the phrases I hear so often from people who have cheated on their partner, now they're like, whoops, I shouldn't have done that, is they use the phrase, so next thing I know, as if it's this total surprise that they're drunk at the nightclub and now they're making out with somebody yeah and you know one of the things you'll do is you just backtrack with them to this whole host of bad decisions that eventually led to them right being in that moment where they made out with someone or or something else that they shouldn't have why do people have a difficulty in envisioning their romantic future uh well we're not very good with the future in general, right? When we think something good is going to happen, we have this affective forecasting problem is what they call it.
So we think that something good is going to be much better than it's actually going to be emotionally. And then if there's something aversive coming up, we think it's actually going to be much worse than it really is.
And then we get to the experience and sometimes we're disappointed. Like for the positive thing, I call it the prom effect, where you think the prom is going to be this amazing night and all magical.
Most people will tell you their prom is a little bit disappointing, right? And that's because they made it out to be the thing it wasn't going to be. You know, same thing with negative events.
A lot of times if you just, for example, get into your email and do the thing, right? For me personally, I'm like, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. So the same thing applies to relationships where sometimes we put unreasonable emotional expectations on what a relationship will provide us.
And by the same token, if there's something hard to do in a relationship, let's say talk about a tough topic or bring up something uncomfortable, we tend to catastrophize that and think it's going to be much worse than it's really going to be. And so both of these errors in either direction can cause problems with us accurately envisioning the future.
I suppose when you layer on top the hormonal neurochemical cocktail of being in passionate love as well, that accurate prediction of anything pretty much goes out the window. Well, now, yeah.
Now, that's that state, that phase, however long it lasts. Now, that's a total neurological disaster.
Yeah. Now, I'm not a neuroscience expert, but I know enough to make sense of these things.
I remember reading, when I first read those studies about these people in passionate love and they're thinking about their partner. I mean, if you look at the things that are activated, not activated, the kind of takeaway is you're not making cost-benefit analyses.
happy the reason is because you're having a really hard time seeing cost at all those areas are actually deactivated so it's harder to see cost um it's all benefit based and of course when we've been you know in that phase when we're in passionate love yeah we're totally irrational and we make uh anything the partner does seems cute or quirky of course if you fast forward two or three years some of those cute quirky things become super annoying wildly irritating i just love the way that she like slurps her tea and then that's the sound that makes you want to tear your own eardrums out only only a couple of years later that's right. That's right.
So, you know, sometimes I can get quiet. I'm pretty introverted.
And so maybe a woman early in a relationship might think it's mysterious or something like that. It becomes much less mysterious when I'm not having an active conversation when we're supposed to be really engaged with something.
So yeah, you know, it can happen to all of us, but, uh, there's all kinds of mistakes we make and passionate love is that being said, Chris, I think, you know, sometimes people are like, well, so, so maybe I should try to hold it together a little bit more when I'm like, no way, you know, what, what feels as good as passionate love? When do you ever feel that way emotionally, you know, physically? When are you just that euphoric about anything in life? And almost never, right? And so I think it's this really great thing that people should just enjoy. But one of the things I like to do that is say, let's put some guardrails up ahead of time before you're in that state so you can enjoy it.
And you know that you're not going to make bad decisions about getting a dog together or something when you're in passionate love that now traps you in a situation that's not good in the long run. I mean, this is exactly the same as what I just said.
It's easier to avoid bad temptations than it is to resist them. So I think you should be careful who you let yourself fall in love with.
You should see, you know, I mean, even maybe from one week of spending time, I have a friend that went and spent, I think, 10 days, this sort of, you know, whirlwind romance, spent 10 days with this woman. And then at the end, both of them are, and they're happily married now and it's sweet, but you know, you think, God, 10 days, 10 days, you're telling me

that I can go from totally or relatively rational functioning human who can do cost benefit analyses, who can observe red flags, who can plan their future, who can prioritize themselves, make their needs known to a useless blob of like serotonin-less dopamine-fueled sex hunger with one person with and and here's the here's the fucking wild thing with no ability to perceive other mating options that's the other thing that passionate love does which i don't think think many people realize. And again, it's a huge price, cost, risk, maybe that people go through, which is you are essentially unable to see other viable mating options, which means you will stay in a relationship which is mistreating you, which is not good for you.
You will be more scared of leaving one, which is unsatisfactory, no matter how short of a period of time it is, because just the way that your mating mind works, you have shut off other mating options. And that's real functional if you're about to make babies, but it's not so functional if your relationship sucks.
So you're right. It's not just cost-benefit analysis.
It's also you're unable to observe the market, right? You're not having to force yourself to avert your eyes. Your eyes are never straying.
You're just locked onto your partner. That's right.
Yeah, totally immersed, totally absorbed in the experience. And all of our psychology and all of our physiology is pushing us in that direction.
It's really remarkable, right? If you think about it. I say it's kind of like when you have to pee, there's nothing else you can think about except I have to pee.
Oddly enough, being a passionate love can be a little bit of the same blinders on and just totally focused on on one thing. And if it's good and it's healthy, gosh, that's a beautiful thing.
Right. But if it's, let's say, with a narcissist or a psychopath and they're getting their claws into you while you're not in this position to make good, reasonable choices, now it's not so great anymore.
But on this point though, on this passionate love point, if you do have these guardrails up ahead of time for yourself and you find someone and you're just, gosh, you're really into it and you're just absorbed in that experience, just enjoy it. It's great.
It doesn't last for forever. And sometimes people ask, so, hey, Ty, why can't I stay in that heart-pounding, butterfly-in-the-stomach, passionate love feeling for forever? And I tell him, because you would die.
You know, that pounding heart is high blood pressure. And those butterflies know butterflies are burning a hole in your burn a hole in your stomach you know burn an ulcer in there uh from all the cortisol and everything else are they're leaving off so you know if you're just in passionate love for a year or two don't don't worry about it but if you stay that way it's too high of a state of arousal for any human to maintain just do a little little bit more of a primer for the people listening, passionate love system, companionate love system, transition between the two, how people feel, how they interpret and misinterpret that kind of journey.
Yeah. So passionate love is pretty heavily lust-driven.
So you're very sexually interested in a person. You're just starting to get things kicked off sexually or physically with that person.
So, yeah, it's really kind of heavy on the lust side of the equation. Now, when you get to know the person better and you get into a more stable phase of the relationship, now you start to see this companionate love emerge, which is more of just like the, we enjoy hanging out with each other.
Like we're, we're, we're really good friends. I actually just enjoy who this person is beyond the physical aspects.
And now you have the two components in place, you know, being in love. So you can love somebody, you can love your dog, you can love candy, you know, you could love a partner to a certain extent.
But when you say you're in love, the use of that preposition, it's an either or thing. You don't say like, I'm kind of in love with somebody.
It's an either or thing. and researchers have found there's actually only two components necessary for the in love and it's do you have that companion that love that liking right for them the second part is is do you have the lust or the kind of passionate side of things you have those two ingredients um you know it's pretty likely that you'll that you'll fall in love with the person and if you then track that over time as you could imagine the companionate love that's got to be your rock, right?

That's got to be, in athletic terms, that's like playing good defense. You can always rely on that happening.
You can always rely on putting effort into that and that showing up. The passionate love will still be there, and it'll come stronger at certain times, but there's much more turbulence with passionate love and the lust side of things.
So you want to really invest in someone who you can fall in companionate love with primarily, right? You also want the physical component as well. But I would put the companionate before the lust part of it.
That's interesting. How would you distinguish between lust-driving traits and companionate-driving traits, lust-positive traits and companionate-positive traits? Yeah, the lust one's pretty easy.
Hotness, that could probably take you the entire way with the lust part of it.

So if someone's physically attractive, there could be other components to that. So researchers have found, for example, that with women, when they're at peak fertility in their menstrual cycle, they're actually sensitive to men's scent, to their smell.
and so you know women women in peak fertility like the body odor of men who tend to have symmetrical bodies and symmetrical faces, which is oftentimes more attractive and kind of an outward sign of physical fitness or physical health. So all these physical things kind of fall on the lust side of things.
You can also put in that category for women choosing men, a certain degree of social dominance or leadership capability can be very hot as well. They like the power or they like the, there's a reason why lead singers and quarterbacks tend to do pretty well, kind of showing that leadership, showing that dominance.
At the start, at least, women times often can find that lust worthy. Now, a companion to love is going to sound totally boring by comparison, but these are things like stability.
Is the person a kind person? Do they have good values and those sorts of things? And of course, those things are important for a long-term relationship and important for liking the person and trusting a person. But they're a lot less flashy than the components for lust.
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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Have you ever looked at any research around the passionate love phase? What actually causes the degradation of that or what causes that to transition into companionate love? I'm wondering whether somebody that was in an intermittent long distance relationship perhaps, that might extend out because it's an amount of time or something similar.
Maybe contact is more intermittent than you might think. So the familiarity as well also doesn't proceed as quickly.
I'm trying to work out what the mechanism is, the ticking clock that occurs, that transitions you from passionate to companionate love, and whether there are certain ways that people can speed run through that. Not that you necessarily would want to, or ways that people could extend.
Not that you would necessarily want to do that either, but I'm just intrigued. I wish I had a good answer for you that was, hey, we're totally positive how to make this happen.
But one thing I'll say that might be helpful here is that there's a tremendous amount of variability with how long it takes people to transition out of passionate love, actually much more than I would have expected. So some people transition out of passionate love after just a couple months.
Other people will keep it going for a year or two. There's some just outliers, though, who will keep it going for years on end.
Once in a while, anecdotally, I'll meet some of these couples who have been married for a decade, two decades, and they're all over each other. I'm like, get a room kind of situation.
And I'm like, wow, that's really amazing. That's really great.
And who knows why that's the case. So I think someplace where psychology hasn't gotten yet with the research on passionate love is exactly to your question.
So why is it the case that some people transition out more quickly? Why do some people sustain it for longer? One thing I will say that seems to be one of the most promising variables is what we would call expansion of the self. So, you know, you have your own traits and characteristics that are unique to you.
And even though your partner might have some similarities with you, they're of course going to have their unique personality traits and, you know, interests and all kinds of things, life experiences. One of the things that happens in couples that maintain a higher degree of passionate love is they're super curious about the things that are different in their partner.
And they want to learn about it and they want to try to expand their own self, so their own interests and personality, to try to emulate some of those qualities as well. And so what you can imagine is you don't have just two people who are fixed circles coming together.
You have two people expanding who they are, expanding their possibilities into each other. And so they grow individually, but then they also grow together as a couple.
So for couples have been together for a long time, that's one of the best pieces of advice I could give is one, be really interested in your differences, even though they annoy you sometimes. Number two, get some things together as a couple where it's new to both of you and you can both grow, you know, within learning about this thing and make it something of your own yeah i i wonder why i wonder why people who take on some more of their their partner's interests and and stay curious i wonder why that helps to extend i mean it's it's very good uh for keeping relationship longevity because it makes you become sort of more attuned with your partner.
You're almost speaking the same language in one way. How do you know if you're in love with somebody as opposed to just liking them or lusting after them? You know, one of the weird things, Chris, is people just know.
I know it's a really unsatisfying answer epistemologically, but yeah, that's kind of the case.

They're just, you ask married couples, this always cracks me up when I hear a single person ask a happily married couple,

so how did you know that this was the right person for you?

And they always give the same answer, which is you just know, which is totally unhelpful to the person who's single.

But yeah, it is this kind of cliff-like phenomenon, this dichotomous thing, where people just switch into it and they're like, you know what? I'm in love with this person. They might withhold that for a little bit so they don't look bonkers.
But yeah, people just, it's one of those weird things in life where we just know it. Isn't it strange that you don't get to choose who you fall in love with and you kind of don't get to choose necessarily who you fall out of love with? I suppose you can do things that are predictive.
Again, you cannot expose yourself to people that you don't think you should fall in love with. You cannot expose yourself to situations and you can cut off at the knees issues which will cause you in future to fall out of love.
but the actual act of it happening it's like being convinced that two two equals four. It's like, I can't unconvince you of that fact unless I unconvince

you of that fact. And I kind of, it's not your choice to be convinced or unconvinced of something.

And I kind of get the sense that love is a little bit like that.

It is. Yeah.
And gosh, it's really inconvenient sometimes, but on both ends there. But I like

what you said about when it comes to falling in love though though. Yeah, you can try to avoid folks that maybe you know are bad for you, that you tend to go for.
On that same note, though, you can also say, hey, there are qualities in people that I really do enjoy and that I really value. But sometimes, for whatever reason, I don't place emphasis on those when I'm choosing partners.
So yeah, you want to over-select from these pools of people who have these qualities that you know are really good for you, that you don't naturally gravitate towards. But by the same token, yeah, let's avoid people who you know are bad for you.
But for whatever reason, you just have a weak spot for those folks. Why do we like the things that we like in partners? How are we socialized into wanting the things that we do or inheriting the wants that we have? Yeah, there's some universality about that, actually.
So like David Buss, for example, has done some really nice cross-cultural studies where he looks like, what do people want in a mate? And there's some commonality there for long-term partners. You know, we want someone with who's kind.
You know, we want someone who's loyal and can be committed, all these things that would make sense. With short-term mating partners, we tend to not prioritize those things.
We go for the hotness or the excitement. And that's fine as well, if that's your goal and you're clear about it.
I think where we get tripped up sometimes is we want something that's long-term, but we get tempted by the things that are good for the short-term, right? So we go for the hot, exciting person. And as we've talked about, it's really easy now, if you fall into passionate love with this person to all of a sudden be in a rut and next thing you know you're spending a ton of time together you've moved in together you got a dog together and it's like two years down the road and you're like gosh i i don't think i'm actually happy with this person uh and it seems like a blur that you got to that point.
But of course, there were all kinds of decisions that led you up to that situation. Yeah, it really is.
I wonder how many relationships, marriages, families even, were born out of somebody falling backward into a lustful relationship. And before they knew it, they woke up with two kids and a dog and a marriage and a ring on their finger.
And yeah, they never intended to. And yeah, at no point did it feel right to back out.
It felt good and then it felt okay. And then it didn't feel so good, but it was kind of more committed and you were in really deep and then stuff just kept progressing.
And yeah, do you know what the Abilene paradox is? You familiar with this? Please tell me, I don't think I do. It's a really cool idea.
So Abilene paradox, it's a situation where a group makes a decision that's contrary to the desires of the group's members, because each member assumes that the other members approve of it. So it kind of explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together.
So I think kind of Emperor's New Clothes. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks that you want to attend and you attend despite not wanting to because you think that he wants you there.
Or at a business meeting someone suggests an idea that he thinks that the others will like recruiting some spicy influencer as the face of the brand and each other member has misgivings but assumes that the others will consider them bigoted if they don't agree so everyone approves the idea despite nobody liking it and i wonder how many abilene marriages we've got where both partners have kind of fallen backward into this thing. No one really ever thought about it.
Yeah, sure. The passionate love phase was great.
And before you know it, you're in your forties with a couple of kids and you didn't actually ask for this. Sure.
I think a ton, you know, end up that way. So there's the, okay, we just thought each other were hot.
Then, you know, we kind of got together for that reason. Next thing we know, we're married with kids.
I think that happens. But you bring up a good, a really good point there, which is this broader, broader societal context where people think, well, there's just certain things I'm supposed to do in life by a certain age.
and they almost have this checklist-like mentality. Well, I want to meet the person I'm going to be married by at 25.

I want to be married by at 27.

I want to meet the person I'm going to be married by 25. I'll be married by 27.
I want to have kids by 29. And I respect that.
That hasn't been my path, for example. I respect that people have that aspiration.
But I think sometimes people can be so rigid about wanting to check off those boxes. I think you and I have probably both seen this with friends where you just think to yourself, they're just plugging in somebody that's good enough, right? So they can kind of check off the box.
So I was at my best friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago. I gave a very successful best man speech as well, I think, which made him suitably uncomfortable.
And I was walking around outside. And it's the classic thing.
I imagine that bridesmaids get this as well. You know, if you're a groomsman or a best man or whatever, one of the best men, the rest of the wedding, once all of the fawning has been done over the couple, is spent scrutinizing your dating life.
And, you know, they're so, Chris, when? meet you know you really need to say I'm like okay and I mentioned I I said like I really I'm uh I'm glad that I did the things that I did in my life to get myself to this point but I also feel you know I feel yeah I'm I'm ready I'm ready to settle down I'm ready to become a dad i'm excited for the prospect of starting a family and being a little bit less selfish and uh living for something more than just my own uh vapid needs for validation from the world and um they one of the parents gave me a fucking awesome piece of advice this is going to be seared into my mind for the rest of my life so thank you shout out uh zach's mom um she said make sure that you fall in love with the person not the institution and i think what she means by that is you want to get married to the person because you want to get married to the person not because you want to get married yes and uh that's exactly what you're talking about yeah such sage advice. Dude.
Always listen to the mother-in-law. Always listen.
Yes, yeah. Yeah, that's a great piece of advice.
But, you know, like you said, there's a lot of pressure out there. So you can imagine, right? You sound like very secure with where you're at and where you've been.
But if someone's more susceptible to those societal pressures, yeah, it can certainly be tough. So I understand how people can maybe make some suboptimal decisions because of those pressures, but of course the best thing to do is wait for the right person and not the checking off the box for the institution.
And then be able to say the sentence, when you know, you'll just know and be a total black box of advice that's useless to everybody else. Drive the singles crazy.
Correct. Okay, what should you look for in a partner if you want to improve the odds of finding enduring love? So I used to teach a course for undergraduates on the psychology romantic relationships.
And I loved that class. I love my students.
And one of the things we would do is I'd say, take out a piece of paper. I guess they still had paper at this time.
And I said, write down all the things you want in your ideal partner. Pretend I'm like your fairy godfather and I can grant these wishes to you.
And so they would, they'd always ask for more time. They'd write down about 20 to 25 things under paper that they wanted in their ideal partner.
And I think that's great. You know, you should, you should dream big.
And then say, does anybody want to volunteer in their list so I can read it in front of the class? And great. You know, a lot of students would volunteer the list.
And so I'd go through and I'd read in the order that they had put them the traits. So there was 200 students in this class.
I'd have everyone raise their hands. And I'd say, okay, this person wants someone who's tall.
So just by thought experiment, let's say everyone's a guy in here, right? So I say, if you're a guy who's under six feet, put your hand down. Now, you'll lose, out of 100 people, you'll lose 80 people with that.
Because only 20% of men in the U.S. are six foot or taller.
And then she might say something like, I want someone who's wealthy. And I say, so what does that mean to you? Maybe she says, I want someone who makes at least $150,000 a year.
To her, that's what that means. Well, of the remaining 20 guys, you're going to be down to about five now, right? Whatever trait is your third wish, you will end up, I guarantee you, I've done this now dozens, if not hundreds of times, whatever your third wish is will take you down to one person out of a hundred, or we'll take you to a fraction of a person, which is actually much more, much more likely.
So, you know, when we say what's, what's the things to choose in a partner? I think the first place we want to start with is we, we need to really prioritize and be laser focused on the things to choose in a partner, I think the first place we want to start with is we need to really prioritize and be laser focused on the things that are most important to us before we generate our list of 20 to 25 things. Less.
The answer, what traits should you look for in a partner is less, fewer traits. The way I like to phrase that is I say, make the list of your dreams.
So you could make your 20 trait list, let's say. But what nobody does, or I haven't met anybody yet, what nobody does is rank order those traits then.
So what's number one, what's number two, what's number three, so on and so forth. And then the top three traits that you want to partner, I tell people, write that out, print out and put it on your mirror or put it on the back of your phone or put it someplace where you'll just always see it because you need to have that really salient in your mind that these are the things you're actually looking for.
and one of the beautiful things though about psychology is if you take that time to just

do that simple task and you remind yourself fairly consistently, right, about what you want, your selective attention will now direct you towards those things that you want without you even having to think about it. And it'll direct your behaviors towards choosing people like that.
And so it's this thing that doesn't take that long, but has a really high return on investment for that time. So yeah, I tell people, imagine you have a fairy godmother, fairy godmother can give you three wishes for your ideal partner.
What are those things that you want? And so one of the things I did in this, I wrote a book about this. And so it kind of started out the first third talking about, Hey, you get three wishes and here's why.
In the middle part I was interested in, so how do people usually spend their three wishes? Because in a good fairy tale, people always squander, right? Their wishes on things that aren't good. And now we have these really great studies where we can actually watch what people do in things like speed dating or with online dating.
And let me explain why this is important. So if you ask people, if a researcher asks a bunch of people, hey, what do you want in your ideal partner? They'll say what they think is socially desirable.
So they'll say, I want someone who's kind. I want someone with good character, you know, all these things.
Now, if you watch what people actually do

in speed dating or online dating, those aren't the things at the top of their list. You know,

those aren't their three wishes. Two of those three wishes will go to looks and the money.

So for men, it's looks first, socioeconomic status second. For women, socioeconomic status first.
And, you know, so two of your three wishes, you know, now you're just down to one. So two of your three wishes go to looks and money.
Now I wanted to be open-minded about it. So I said, well, maybe that's okay.
You know, maybe it's 20 years down the road and you wake up next to your partner and you say, I am just so glad that they're hot, you know, and 20 years later, that makes me so happy in my marriage. And, you know, so there's data about that as well.
And, you know, what you find is that for physical attractiveness, the return on investment for that is not good. It's around zero.
Early on in a relationship, it's actually decent. And even early in marriage, it can be somewhat beneficial for marital satisfaction, but it quickly fades away.
Yeah. When you say return on investment, you mean how predictive is this of marital satisfaction? That's right.
That's right. So how much return am I getting from your hotness on my marital satisfaction? If you look at money, same kind of thing.
You don't want to be stressed about money. So you don't want to be below the poverty line, for example, or close to the poverty line.
But once you get to a middle-class income, now there's a diminishing return on income for your long-term happiness and stability, so it doesn't really matter that much. I like to tell people, look, if you have a partner who makes $80,000, there's really no difference between the $80,000 and the $800,000 partner.
You have nicer things, for sure, but when it comes to your marital satisfaction and stability, really not that much of a gain at all. So those two things that we usually spend our wishes on, you know, really don't get us what we want.
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Let's just interject there. Isn't it interesting that men still signal off socioeconomic status for women? Oh, for sure.
Yeah, in so many ways, right? And, you know, your watch or your, you know, like quiet luxury is that what they call it uh hoodie or whatever it might be right and you're just saying hey i'm doing pretty well you know over here in new york you'll see these guys obnoxiously reading books on the subway or something and they're not really reading they're just signaling to people hey like i'm But, you you know it's it's just when you ask a guy um how bothered are you about what your wife earns how bothered are you about maybe maybe they would say education level but i think what you're looking at with education level is sort of a proxy for intellectual capacity curiosity stuff like that and yeah sure we can't judge those things immediately so we use rough hewn metrics and from that we sort of infer what what this person is oh my god they've got a they've got a master's they did a double they did a double a double major and blah blah blah blah right um but yeah you just i think a lot of guys i i would be interested to know whether men are very, not ashamed, but are more likely to hide their desire for socioeconomic status in a woman than women would be for men. Because women for men, it's cliche, and there's the fear of being a gold digger.
But men for women, there isn't even an archetype for that. So I just think that's an interesting asymmetry.
You know, it really is. And as much as things have changed over the past couple decades, one finding that remains stubborn is this, is that if the woman out-earns the man in a marriage, it's related to less marital satisfaction and even divorce risk.
So I'm not saying that that's the way things should be,

but if you look at it, yeah, there still is this social role stereotype. I had Brad Wilcox on the show yesterday.
He said that if a woman loses a job, there is no change in the predictive power for divorce. If a man loses his job, 33% increase in divorce.
if a woman

if a man wins

the lottery

no change in likelihood of divorce if a woman wins the lottery it goes up by i think this was norway or finland or something like that hungary maybe where that study came out of um look in in some ways you could say that uh many women for a long time were um financial prisoners of their partners and um you know that liberating them by a big windfall in one form or another or but the bottom line is that women seem to be sensitive to resources in a way that men aren't and that to anybody that's ever studied mating is the least shocking finding that we could say and yet uh if the wrong person got a hold of that particular segment of the podcast um entire swaths of reddit would have a fucking meltdown so yeah yeah yeah no no exactly i mean you know there's just kind of like one of the things i say about relationships for search is it's really easy to kill the messenger sometimes right that's so good i love it you know if i'm giving a talk somewhere i'm like look don't don't send them after me here yeah i'm just saying this is uh so yeah there's certain ways that things are and we can decide what we want to do with those things but but you know a lot of things remain stubborn findings that stick around okay so we've got those two at the top that are typical and interchangeable for men and women um what else on the traits we want that we probably shouldn't want before we get into the traits that we should want so i just read a really interesting study actually a couple days ago and there's this this series of three personality traits they call the dark triad. So it's psychopathy, kind of being antisocial, Machiavellianism, you're really manipulative for your own self-gain, and narcissism, right? Excessive self-love and vanity and a lot of selfishness goes along with that as well.
So you don't want these traits in a partner. Obviously, they don't make for a happy relationship.

One of the things that they looked at was dark triad traits are oddly attractive, more attractive than they should be, right?

Given that we rationally know, hey, being in a relationship with a narcissist is going to lead to me being in tears and a fetal position in the corner, right? We know that intellectually, but why do we feel a draw towards narcissists, for example, or people high in psychopathy for that matter? And there's a couple things here. So one thing that they found in the study was that maybe it's dependent on age.
And so they found for women, you know, women who are older do not want a narcissist. They don't want someone high in psychopathy.
But the young women, they were actually more attracted to the dark triad traits. And one of the reasons for that is that those dark triad traits, as bad as they are in a long-term relationship,

they're pretty good for getting what you want in a short-term situation.

So psychopathy, for example, you have really low impulse control. You're willing to cheat to win, to get what you want.
You tend to be aggressive. If you were in a threatening situation,

those would actually be really great traits to have. If you were trading in really volatile

I'm going to call you. Like if you were in a threatening situation, those would actually be really great traits to have.

If you were trading in really volatile and competitive financial markets, I wouldn't mind if my trader actually had some high psychopathy traits. Those would actually be adaptive.
So that's one of the reasons why early in a relationship, right, those things can be attractive to us. The other curious thing about that that I find interesting is that people high in psychopathy, it's pretty reliable, are better in bed.
So the sexual satisfaction is higher. Well, funny.
Yeah. But, you know, they're low impulse control.
They're kind of aggressive. You know, they have these traits that could manifest as, you know, really exciting sex.
And so it is more satisfying sex now. And that's fine.
And I'm not going to judge that. But now if you're in a companion-love relationship with this person, you're married to this person, now you have to deal with this low-impulse control and this aggressiveness and this cheating and all this other stuff.
And it's not going to be so much fun anymore. Right.
So avoid the psychopath Machiavellian narcissist as best you can. As best you can.
Once again, though, it's one of these things where it's easier set than done. And so it's important to understand that you might have a draw towards these things, that there's something actually kind of like dangerous and exciting about those types of people.
And even early on in a relationship, it can be really fun actually dating someone high in psychopathy or someone who's narcissistic because they're manipulating you. You're getting a lot of attention, right? And they're telling you all these wonderful things and that can feel good.
But yeah, so people really have to be self-aware about it, and then they have to say, hey, I'm going to be on the lookout for these things because there's going to be like a siren's call to gravitate towards some of these traits. Okay, what are some better traits that we should want? Yes, so there are much better decisions to make.
So one of the things that's happened over, you know,

the past decade or so is that a lot of these research studies

they did in the 80s and 90s have matured.

So what they did in these studies is they got people

before they were married and they assessed them

on all kinds of psychological characteristics.

So like attachment style, personality, you know, intelligence, all sorts of things. And then they could track them over the course of 10 or 20 years into the point where they got engaged and they got married and, you know, maybe got divorced or stayed together.
And these studies are a goldmine for seeing which traits actually matter and predicting long-term satisfaction and stability. And, you know, let's take personality as one example of how you can use this.
So there's the big five personality traits. This would be extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
And these are kind of broad brush strokes of who somebody is now if you put those five variables in a predictive model and you say so which of those five traits predicts long-term satisfaction and stability if at all you find really consistent findings which is that neuroticism probably no surprise? People who are moody, prone to anger, kind of negative and pessimistic, they're less satisfied in a relationship, their partner's less satisfied in a relationship, and they're at higher risk for divorce. And if I had to say there's one trait that people should wish for, you know, wish for somebody who's not high in neuroticism, especially uncontrolled neuroticism.
It's just predictive of so many not great things. Okay.
Just briefly on that, how can people tell if someone is, what is the sort of behavior of somebody that is high in neuroticism? Yeah. You kind of feel like you're walking on eggshells all the time after a while, right? So people can mask it for a little bit, but after a while, you just feel yourself being tense all the time and you're picking up on some of that vibe, some of that neurotic vibe that they have.
And maybe because they've been angry or explosive with you in the past, like you're like, oh, we don't want to upset them or anything like that. There's this over-reactivity in them.
You know, I always, sometimes friends, you have to be a pretty good friend of mine, but sometimes friends will ask me to meet their partner and give them my evaluation. You know, I try not to do this that often, but if I really love someone, I'll do it.
And one of the things I'll do is I'll put that person under a certain degree of duress. So I'm like a really, I'm like a pretty nice guy on average, you know, but I might get a little adversarial with that person or I might push them on something.
And one of the things I'm looking for is how do they respond to that stress? Do they respond in an even keeled, reasonable patient kind of way? Or do they get reactive and angry and worked up? And that's, you know, that's one thing that people can look at. Oddly enough, I still love the litmus test of looking at how does the person treat the waitstaff at a restaurant? And I know that's a good common sense thing that people use.
I would encourage them to continue to use it. But yeah, you know, maybe your table's not ready.
Maybe the service isn't great. Can that person hold it together or do you start to see the cracks of their neuroticism? Yeah.
Okay, so again, avoid neuroticism. Avoid neuroticism.
Now, one caveat there is, look, I have some friends who are super neurotic, you know, but they have the maturity and, you know, the consideration of other people to have worked on it a lot. So they know that about themselves and they've worked really hard, you know, either on their own or in therapy to make sure that it's not a problem consistently for other people.
So that's one caveat I put on a neur neuroticism. There's also a degree of depth, right, that you can have from that that people are able to see and empathize in ways, especially if it's been sort of alchemized neuroticism.
Yeah, there's an additional level of depth, which could maybe even be useful. For sure, for sure.
You know, let's say a partner's prone to being depressed, for example. It doesn't make him a bad person.
But do they have a sense of, hey, I want to take a sense of responsibility for this and I want to do the things I can to, you know, live with that as best as I can? You know, then you're probably going to be all right. But if it's this just uncontrolled neuroticism, it'd bring nothing

but pain probably in the long run. So that's one wish.
You know, a second wish is agreeableness.

So people who are empathic and kind and generous, and I think that might sound like common sense to

folks, but let's remember it doesn't make the top three when you watch what people actually do when

they're choosing a partner. Number two, I think like being a nice guy, for example, in our culture gets a really bad rap.

So if people are bringing their partner out to meet their friends for the first time,

kind of the initial public offering of the partner to the friend group,

and the partner goes to the bathroom for a little bit after we've all chatted,

and they say, hey, so what do you think of my new partner? And you say, oh, they're nice. That person would kind of feel insulted, right? That's it.
It's actually one of the best things that you could say about an evaluation of a partner as unsexy and unspectacular as it is. People who high in agreeableness are going to be more trusting of you.
And what that means in a romantic relationship is they're going to trust that they can give freely and generously to the relationship and to you because they think that you will give that back in the long run. And so what happens is when you have that trust, both people give more to the relationship, not worrying about some zero-sum kind of game.
They're more empathic, they're more interested in being empathic, so they can try to understand who you are and how they can support you. They're kind, you know, there's just all kinds of great things.
They're better in bed, so agreeableness associated with better sex and long-term relationships because they're interested in your sexual satisfaction, not just their own.

So choosing someone high in agreeableness, wish number two.

The third wish, if we're talking about personality, would be someone who is not too high in sensation

seeking.

So people who are high in sensation seekingseeking are always looking for their next thrill, right? We kind of stereotypically maybe think of X Games-type people who want to jump out of a plane or jump off a cliff or something like that. And people high in sensation-seeking are great to date at the start because they're really fun.
They're really spontaneous. They're high in what we would call absorption, so they really get into the things that they love.
And so that means that they're really, really into you and really enthusiastic about you. And that all feels wonderful and fun.
But high sensation-seekers also get bored more easily. They're more prone to risky behaviors like substance abuse or infidelity or other things, right, that aren't good for a long term relationship.
And so high sensation seeking, as fun as it is, as sexy as it is at the start, is one of those things you don't want too much of it because a person ends up getting bored with you and then they'll end up doing something to not just end the relationship, but usually blow up the relationship in spectacular fashion. In other news, you might've heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late.
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What would be the presentation of somebody who's high in sensation seeking? I mean, for me, I use the phrase for those folks, I'll be like, they are so fun. Like, they are so fun and they're so random and they're so spontaneous.
And like, I love that in friends. Actually, a lot of my friends are high sensation seekers.
But, you know, you want to have a sense of, is this person really high in sensation seeking? And do they have no, once again, do they have no control over that or self-awareness about that? so you know my friends who are high sensation seekers they're not gonna be reckless about it

like they have a they have a good idea about it, and they're going to try to control it somewhat. Let me give you an example.
So I'm really high in sensation seeking. And when I take personality tests, it's like, good Lord, that's really up there.
And when I did that in graduate school, I kind of looked back on things, and all of a sudden, a lot of things made sense. So when I was a teenager, I thought to myself, I can never do cocaine.
I had this really strong thought about this. It was kind of random.
And I don't judge. I don't like a big moral problem with it.
It's just, I thought I am, I'm too sensation seeking to be able to handle that in any kind of way that would be okay. Uh, I've never had a TV in my life.
Like I just can't, I can't modulate how much I watch TV, for example. So I just don't even have it at all.
So those would be some examples

of some small things. Maybe the other one's not so small, but those would be some small things I've done to just try to have some self-awareness about how impulsive I can be and then try to craft an environment.
So like, hey, let's make it good for me. But also if there's somebody else in my life, let's not make it so my impulsiveness leads to bad consequences for them as well.
Fascinating. Okay.
Just broadening out from personality. I mean, personality is an awful lot.
What else should we be looking for in terms of green flags and red flags, trait-wise, behavior-wise, values-wise, life history, life future, etc.? Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the fortunate things

is there's such a wealth of relationship research now that, you know, we have this whole, we have dozens of things now that we can look at that are predictive of long-term satisfaction and stability. And so let me give an example of another area.
There's attachment, which I think probably a lot of people are familiar with to a certain extent. So attachment is how secure you feel in your relationship with your caregivers, you know, first of all.
And then second of all, people who are like really close friends or romantic partners in adulthood. And so people can be securely attached where they trust that they can rely on other people.
They feel secure about who they are and in a relationship with others. There's people who are avoidance and these folks are emotionally distant.
They don't want to get too close to people. They always feel like they're kind of aloof.
And that's one of the insecure attachments, of course. The other insecure attachment is anxious avoidant.
And, you know, these folks are anxious that the person is going to leave them. They also tend to be kind of push-pull people in relationships where they can be clingy, alternating with being angry at you for things that seem kind of random.
And that's obviously no fun in a relationship as well.

One of the ways I like to describe attachment actually is how they measure it in infancy.

So for infants, they have this thing called the strange situation.

And this woman, Mary Ainsworth, devised this really clever methodology.

So what you have is you have a mom with a,

let's say like a one-year-old, two-year-old,

let's say a two-year-old, two-year-old. Let's say a two-year-old.

And they have a child on their lap.

And in that room, in this laboratory, are a bunch of toys scattered around at measured distances from the middle where the mother and child are at.

A light will go off.

The mother leaves the room in a planned kind of way.

And what happens with most of the kids is they start to cry, right? Which is kind of predictable. They're in a strange place.
Their mom's gone. That's not that interesting.
What is interesting is what happens when the mom comes back. So after a couple of minutes, the mom comes back into the room, sits down in the chair.
securely attached kids will come to their mom,

you know, get on the lap, and will be comforted relatively quickly. What's interesting then is once they're calmed emotionally, which doesn't take that long, they'll get off their mom's lap and they'll start to explore the room.
And so they'll go out and get some toys that are nearby, and they'll look back at their mom and say, hey, isn't this kind of a cool thing? Or they might bring it to their mom. And they'll do this thing where they start going further and further out into the room, exploring further and further away, and not needing to look at their mom to make sure that she's there.
It's because they're secure and they can trust that she'll be there for them. Now, kids who are anxiously attached, when their mom comes back into the room, they're not comforted by her presence.
And so they continue to cry in a really intense kind of way. They'll get on her lap and they'll cling at first, like cling in this really needy looking kind of way.
But that'll alternate then with like pushing away and sometimes even hitting the parent. So they're pissed that the mom left the room, but they're also clingy and can't trust that she'll stay there.
So, right, you get this push pull kind of thing. They're less likely to get off the mom's lap and actually explore the room because they can't trust that their mom's going to be there.
And if they do go explore, they don't explore as far as a securely attached kid.

The avoidantly attached kid,

these,

these,

these kids could care less that the mom has come back into the room.

So,

you know,

maybe they didn't cry in the first place.

They'll stop crying when the mom does come back,

but they're kind of,

if you could hear what they're saying in their mind, it's screw you for leaving i don't care about you and the other interesting thing about the avoidant kids is they will go very far out into the room and get the toys that are really far out there so they'll explore a lot but it's because they kind of don't care if the caregiver is there they've just reached this like like, hey, I can't trust you, so I don't care mentality. You can imagine if this was the interaction pattern hundreds and thousands of times during infancy and during childhood, how kind of concretized that would become, right, in a child's relational style.
And so like at the University of Minnesota, for example, they have this really cool study where they got kids when they were actually in the third trimester, still in their mom's bellies there. And they've now tracked those kids for like 30 or 40 years.
And they've been able to look at, did their early attachment behaviors with their mom, their secure, anxious, or avoidant behaviors, predict how they would

interact with their romantic partners like 30 years later.

And they found, you know, these really robust correlations between if you were a secure

infant, you tended to be pretty even in how you manage conflict and emotions with your

partner.

If you were an anxious kid, you tended to be engaging in that push-pull, clingy, lashing-out kind of behavior. Some people, some of your listeners might have experienced that in a romantic relationship.
And, you know, kids who were avoidant, yeah, tended to have that kind of stonewalling, withdrawing, interactional style. That's not great in a relationship.
So that's another thing, Chris. People can look at someone's attachment style, once again, knowing that it's relatively stable over time.
And it is pretty strongly predictive of long-term marital satisfaction and marital stability. What do you say to the anxious or avoidant people? They go, all right, okay, I'll just be celibate then, will I, Ty? I'm a lost cause.
Yeah, yeah.

Well- do you say to the anxious or avoidant people? They go, all right, okay, I'll just be celibate then. Will I tie? I'm a lost cause.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, one of the good things for folks to know is two thirds of people are securely attached. So that's, you know, good news.
The second thing is this, is there's this guy, Glenn Royceman and Chris Braley, and they've done some of these longitudinal studies as well. And one of the questions they've had is, can people become what they call earned secures? So if you were anxiously attached or avoidantly attached in infancy, for example, can you become securely attached as you get older? And the good news is, yes, that can happen.
It's not the majority of them, but there's a subset of folks, if they work hard at it and get the right people in their lives, then yeah, they can become actually earned secures in adulthood. Now, if you're the person choosing a partner, this is one of the mistakes folks make sometimes, is let's say someone's dating someone who is anxious, ambivalent in their attachment style,

and they're really pretty soundly anxious, ambivalent. One of the things that a lot of us do, even the best of us, is we're overly optimistic about what's going to happen with that person in the long run.
So we'll say, oh, I'm sure they'll change, right? Or even worse, we'll say, I will change, you know, this person's attachment style. And that's not a good bet to make.
So I would say if someone's insecurely attached, hey, no judgment, that's okay. But, you know, learn about it and then do the work you need to do to try to mitigate some of the negative things and move towards a more secure attachment style.
If you're dating someone who's insecurely attached, it's not necessarily the end of the world, but they're not going to change anytime soon if they change at all. And if you're in a dating situation, I would certainly call that a red flag.
Wow. Okay.
Is this why the in-laws matter in your opinion? That's right. Yeah.
So I think people intuitively do this, and there's a good kind of lay wisdom to that, is they want to meet the parents. And they want to say they're kind of looking at how good is the relationship between the parents and the person that they're dating.
I don't know that they're always aware of why they're interested in the quality of that relationship, but part of it is they're actually implicitly looking at these attachment things. Like, if there's a solid relationship there, they think they can transfer that to maybe this person will also have a solid relationship with me in the long run.
And I think, you know, the evidence kind of points toward, yeah, there is some good evidence for that. Now that now conversely if someone has a conflictual relationship with their parents it doesn't guarantee that they're going to have a bad relationship with you but it is a risk factor so it's just once again people want to be careful when they see these red flags they're not necessarily deal breakers on their own but as these things start to to accumulate, that's when it becomes, that's when it becomes a problem.
What about, uh, life history, stuff like that, sort of what the breadcrumbs of how somebody has spent their time up until this point when you've got to know them? Yeah. Uh, super important, you know, best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
So yeah, you want to pay attention to that. I think it's one of the reasons why we ask our partners, hey, can you tell me about your relationship history a little bit? People are getting this kind of ethnographic observation of like, so how did your other things go? Because am I going to suffer the same fate? It's not a bad idea to do that.
One of the things I would distinguish between is sometimes people have freely chosen to make bad decisions repeatedly. Other times people have been dealt bad hands by life, and I think that's a different kind of thing.
And I guess for me, personally, although I'm, like bad decisions, for example, what I'm more interested in is. So what's the, what's the story after that? So if you made a bad decision, kind of almost like a job interview.
So what did you do then about that bad decision or that bad place that you got to? And you're looking for, does this person have insight about their bad decision? And then two, did they develop some coping skills or strategies for one, not only how to fix it, but two, how to avoid making that same mistake in

the future. And while it sounds like common sense that people would do that, I think very few people

do. It's more common that people keep making the same mistakes with little insight rather rather than being the kinds of people who are self-aware and change.
What about similarity in personality? Should you be trying to find someone who's similar to you in that regard? Yeah, it's a good question, and such a good question, in fact, that researchers have devoted a tremendous amount of time and money to investigating this. And if you actually look at a lot of the dating apps, they're based on matching on things like personality.
The match group, actually, it's in the name, right? And there's this intuitive appeal to this idea that, yeah, if I match someone on personality, we're going to have a happier and better relationship. But what they find in these studies, and there's been some meta-analyses of tens of thousands of couples where they've looked at does match, predict long-term satisfaction and stability, it really doesn't.
So matching actually doesn't matter that much when it comes to personality. You can be extroverted, Your partner could be introverted.
Can that create some problems sometimes? Yeah, probably. But does it really matter that much in the long run? You know, it doesn't.
What matters with personality, and I really like to drive this home for folks, what matters with personality is not whether you match your partner. What matters is which partner has the worst traits in the relationship.
So if one of the partners is low in agreeableness, high sensation seeking, and high neuroticism, for example, the other partner has a perfectly healthy personality, what's going to predict in that is not the healthy partner's personality. It's going to be the personality of the partner who has the worst traits.
So my old advisor, one of my old advisors in graduate school, Ellen Burchide, had this great saying that applies to so many relationship situations. And she was at the end of her career when I knew her.
And she's saying this resigned voice, you know what the problem with relationships is time. It takes two people to make it work and only one person to make it not work.
Wow. And that is so, you know, that, that is so true.
So yeah, people don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about matching up personality. You know, think about what's the quality of the traits that each partner has, and that's the more important thing.
You know, one thing I might add to that real quick, if I might, is that with our hypothetical bad trait partner we just talked about with high neuroticism, low agreeableness, high sensation seeking, that's when you really have a problem. So sometimes people will ask me, they'll say, hey, you know, Ty, I'm kind of high in neuroticism.
Does this mean I'm doomed to have bad relationships? And I love that question. And what I say to these folks is the fact that you're asking me that question in the first place gives me a tremendous amount of hope for your relationship future, right? Because one, they're self-aware about it.
Two, they want to do something about it. And three, they're concerned about how is that going to affect somebody else? So they already have the mindset, right, to be on a path to handle that well.
It's all of these things are incremental risk factors. So just being neurotic all on its own is not damning for your relationship future.
But now you're neurotic and you're low in agreeableness. That's actually someone who's like a psychopath or has antisocial personality disorder.
You're high in neuroticism, low in agreeableness, high in sensation seeking. Now you've got like a sociopath on your hands, right? So it's as you stack these bad traits or these risk factors, that's when you have the real problems.
Conversely, I'll say, and just as importantly, as you stack great traits in a relationship, it also has that same multiplicative effect where it's more than the sum of the parts. So if you get someone who's kind, who's emotionally stable, you know, who is really committed to the relationship.
Oh my gosh. You know, two things.
One, they're probably always going to be that way. And two, like it's going to have a multiplicative effect for us.
It's just going to give you so many good things more than you could ever imagine. It's interesting that we don't rise to the level of the best partner.
We fall to the level of worst partner best and worst uh most optimal most suboptimal perhaps uh you mentioned emotional stability there uh david bus must text me once a month reminding me about the importance of emotional stability um i'd love to get your take on it because i know what his is but uh how does that fit into what we've maybe spoken about already uh how does it slightly differ? How would you, how does it present? Yeah, so emotional stability is the term that's the flip side of neuroticism. Okay, so it's very similar to what we've been talking about.
I think in the context of romantic relationships, one of the interesting things that's just come out over the past couple years is that it's not so much what we would call low activation emotions. So things like depression, for example, it's a negative emotion, but the way you feel that in your body, it's not like your heart's racing or you're red in the face or anything like that.
It's just actually an absence of energy, right? What seems to be particularly destructive in romantic relationships are these high activation negative emotions. So rage and anger and those things where you really get hot in the face and your heart rate really, you know, gets up there.
Those seem to be the more destructive parts of neuroticism or, you know, conversely, a lack of emotional stability.

David's got this lovely idea around emotional stability. So after some emotional perturbation

of some kind, some dysregulating event, how long does it take a person to get back to baseline?

You know, if you are late for a flight, is that the rest of the holiday or are they over it by the time that you arrive at the hotel type thing.

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yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a lovely, you know, because all of this stuff, whenever I think about it, I think it's so fascinating. It's so interesting sort of in the abstract.
But when it comes to functionally, what does this look like? How can you tell that, you know, unless you're going to get somebody to go and do a hexaco test or a big five or something um how are you going to how are you going to judge this you know so i think i think that's very important um another question why do you think it is that people are drawn to relationships that are very tough that from the outside look turbulent difficult challenging uh the classic i can fix him meme. What have you come to believe about that? Yeah, could go in reverse there.
So you're not going to fix anybody to tell folks out there. It's a common belief.
People almost seem to have it as sport or hobby, right? Like I'm going to fix, go fix people. It almost just never just never such low odds that that ever ends up, ends up working out.
Why? Uh, cause people are, people are stable, you know, uh, there's these really beautiful studies of personality where they track people for 40 or 50 years from the time they're in their teenage years to the time that they're retired. and if you were neurotic when you were, highly neurotic when you were a teenager, you're like the grumpy person at the retirement home.
It's just like a stable kind of thing. Also, if you were the sweetheart, really nice, always helping people out kind of person in high school, you're doing the same thing.
Do you reckon that's the same for sociosexuality? If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around a load in the retirement home? Well, you know, that is a concern actually with older adults right now. So there's this STD concerns.
One of the places it's most acute in public health is among older adults. Phenomenal.
Yeah.

Phenomenal. Which is amazing.
So yeah, people don't change because traits are, you know, traits are stable. And folks might see these articles every now and then that you can change your personality.
And that is true to an extent. But the number of people who will change their personality, like the rough way to put that is about 20 to 25% of people,

like, for example, who are neurotic,

will... number of people who will change their personality, like the rough way to put that is about 20 to 25% of people, like for example, who are neurotic, will turn themselves into not neurotic people anymore.
The remaining 75 to 80% will show stability over time. And the reason I like to put things that way is if you're in a position of choosing a partner, you know, this is a bet, Really? right? And you're saying, okay, so I have this person who's high in neuroticism.
Do I think that's going to change? 80, 75% chance, yeah, it can be exactly the same way for the rest of my life. 25% chance they change.
That's not a bet I would probably want to make, you know? Yeah. It's interesting when you think about sort of what people are doing when they first find a partner they're kind of i get the sense and you may tell me that uh my belief in personal growth and malleability is misguided and must be subdued but um you're trying to find somebody that is as close to the bullseye of what it is that you're looking for, whilst making the decision rationally, before you get into passionate love, using evidence-based insights from somebody as educated as yourself, trying to find somebody that's close to the bullseye, but also has, I would guess, as strong of a capacity to grow, to work on themselves, to be able to update their beliefs, the way that they operate as possible.
And it seems like those two variables, how close are you? Where's the starting point? And how capable are they of running and maneuvering towards something that is more healthy? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. So you're kind of identifying this trait that sits outside of personality a little bit, right? Which is this, this interest and this, this persistence to grow as a person.
And I think you're, gosh, that's, if people want to put something in our top three, that'd be another great trait to put in their top three. Capacity for growth.
Yeah, it's capacity for growth and that dogged commitment to it. it because it's one thing you and i probably both know people who have some bright idea every other month about oh i'm totally going to change myself in this way yeah usually has the word radical in front of it you know yeah i'm engaged in radical self-disclosure or something yeah yeah yeah radical honesty radical painting yeah and i'm always like uh you know what i'm more interested in is i mean that's cool and that's part of it it's a necessary first step but but then how many people now have the dogged determination to actually make that happen because it's so hard right over the course of really years to you know turn that huge ship around and make it so that you have this better range in your personality you've got to be dead ass committed if you are going to actually do anything i mean yeah you're right i think the way to look at it is these forces personality whether it's infant upbringing, genetic predisposition, time, place, confluence, nature, nurture, whatever it is, whether it's personality, whether it's attachment style, whether it's values, whether it's ideological belief, whether it's all of that stuff.
It is no matter which of those you're playing with, it is a marathon to try and get that to be nudged. And, you know, that's where, you know, the 20% sits, right? For the most part, these are probably, I imagine there's not many people that fluke themselves into lowering the neuroticism.
It's probably, you know listen to podcasts like this one, the insecure, overachieving, personal growth maximizers

who are really sort of trying to better themselves

within the world.

They're thinking very carefully.

They're very reflective.

They're really trying to work on themselves.

But that's a terrifying minority of most people. That's so true.
You know, so maybe for some of your listeners who, you know, maybe are really into fitness, for example. If you think about, I'm always annoyed, like January 2nd in the gym, when you can't get on anything, right? It's this overrun with...
All the creatines taken. That's right.
That's right. All these New Year's resolution people.
I mean, the same exact mindset and outcomes could apply to something like personality. Like, okay, someone's going to have this really bright idea, like they want to get fit or they want to change their neuroticism.
But who's going to be there even in March? Who's going to be there much less in December? And as your listeners know, who are really committed to fitness, it's not even a year, right? It's the course of numerous years and being really disciplined and constantly evolving and learning about new things in nutrition and technique and other things that actually lead to a meaningful change in their body composition and their fitness and their health. Same thing with your mental health and your psychological health.
It's that degree of commitment and obsessiveness to make some sort of long-lasting change. Okay, so I can fix him.
Probably not, darling. Why else are people drawn to relationships that are tough, turbulent, challenging, stuff like that? Yeah.
It gets sloppy research-wise to try to investigate this. I think it's a great question.
It'll be one of the enduring questions we have too long after I'm gone, I'm sure. As you can imagine, it's a little tough to investigate.

The best hypothesis I've run across is the recreation hypothesis.

So personality researchers have been interested

in this kind of curious thing

that people choose suboptimal situations

for a lot of things, right?

Not just dating, for example.

And a lot of times what they find is they choose these suboptimal situations for themselves because it gives them a chance to repair something or to fix something that they weren't able to repair or fix in the past. And of course, this becomes very obvious for romantic relationships.
If someone had something in their family of origin, for example, where let's say it's the stereotype like I never got love from my dad kind of thing, which happens more than it should probably. Right.
Yeah, that's really frustrating. Yeah, that's really hard on folks.
but now to seek out partners who aren't going to be

committed to you, who aren't going to pay attention to you

or be interested in you, you know, I understand why, why folks do that, but like, it's going to be the same outcome probably, which is heartbreak and, and, and disappointment. so I think for folks who you know choose a lot of bad partners kind of one after the other

as much as I'm not a Freudian

and like so tell me about your, tell me about your mother, tell me about your father kind of thing.

This is one area where I think it can be really productive. And you say, hey, what were the frustrated urges I had growing up that just sadly never got met and you know will never probably get met by one person and now right same kind of methodology now how can i set myself up to avoid the temptation of drawing those kinds of people so i can try to fix it why so is it us trying to salvage close a loop fix a sort of a childhood wound is that is that what's going on yeah it's the same thing as if there was a chalk board and you were able to read 80 of the sentence and like some part was erased it would really bug you that you can't figure out what the last part of the sentence is and you'd keep guessing, trying to, you know.
We have this need for completion in our minds just in general as humans, and it's particularly powerful for something like being loved by a parent, for example. And so, yeah, we're just trying to close that loop.
But the problem is, is that if we're choosing that same kind of person who's not loving, who's not attention giving, it's going to end up the same, it's going to end up the same exact way. What are some of the common manifestations of how that would present itself? And then what about if somebody finds the opposite of that and why, why are they less attracted to those two?

Yeah.

I think one of the things I always,

I always like to do is ask friends. Like if you have really honest,

we always have a couple of honest friends who will deliver just like crushing

truths to us.

If we,

if we ask them to,

so useful in romantic relationships,

right?

Cause after they get to know your partner a bit, now they've known you probably as you've dated a few people. And, you know, imagine you ask this truthful friend of yours, what do you think is the bad kind of, what's the bad kind of partner I choose? Right? What does that look like? What characteristics and traits do they have? I bet that friend of yours could tell you exactly and very eloquently who that person is.
And they'll probably have a level of insight, right, and depth about that, that I, for example, as the, you know, I just wouldn't know. And so I think that's one thing that people can do.
And usually when people hear it, they're like, it's one of those insight moments where you can just see it washing over them. Oh, yeah, darn it.
You know, that's exactly what I'm doing. Now you got a shot at trying to break the cycle.
But getting that insight, it's amazing to me, Chris, how hard that is to get it in this regard.

Why is it that we're not drawn? So I understand we have this sense for completion. We go back to the absent parent surrogate now in a partner who doesn't show us love in the way that we wanted or whatever other compensatory mechanism we have,

why is it that the opposite of that, somebody who does show us love, why is it that we're not drawn to the thing that salves the wound as opposed to reopens it? Yeah. Gosh, so let's take a different kind of example here, right? Let's say you had an abusive home environment.
And sometimes, you know, then you'll see these folks now go date abusers one after another in adulthood. And if you're on the outside, you think to yourself, rationally, why would you do that? You know, why would you not run the opposite direction from that? and I think one there's a social psychology theory that's really interesting called self-verification theory.
And at the heart of it, self-verification theory poses this hypothesis that we'd rather be consistent than right. And what they found across a series of studies is there's all kinds of cases where we'd rather just do the things that are consistent with how we see ourselves rather than doing the thing that's right.
So if I see myself as someone who's unworthy and I see myself as someone who's victimized, subconsciously, I will just think that's the way I need to be treated. That's the way I deserve to be treated.
Even though if you asked me rationally, is that a good idea? I'd say, obviously no way that's the way I need to be treated. That's the way I deserve to be treated.
Even though if you asked me rationally, is that a good idea? I'd say, no, yeah. Obviously, no way that that's a good idea.
But people, because we're so often on autopilot, would rather be consistent than right. That's fascinating.
I don't know whether, so I understand consistent than right. It almost seems like consistent than happy, or we would rather prove, because we're proving ourselves right.

I am the sort of person who is inherently unlovable.

I'm the sort of person who people eventually are going to leave

if they get to see the real me.

If I expose myself to somebody too much,

then they're going to use that against me, or they're going to find me totally disgusting or unspeakable or shameful or whatever. Therefore, I'm going to do things which engender that to happen so that I, I have this continuous sense of self because yeah, we would rather have our inner fears proven correct than we would a novel sense of happiness that threatens our own sense of self because, yeah, we would rather have our inner fears proven correct

than we would a novel sense of happiness that threatens our own sense of self-identity. Yeah, exactly right.
So, you know, in some of these studies, they'll get depressives, for example, in the lab, and they'll give the opportunity to get positive feedback or negative feedback, and the depressives will go for the negative feedback, even though the positive feedback is just as accurate or more useful or whatever. Yeah, you know, and it's scary, right? Going back to what we were talking about earlier, I mean, while I think it's venerable and it's desirable to be someone who's oriented towards personal growth and always want to get better, you know, it's's hard and it especially gets hard when as we get closer to who we want to be rather than who we've been there is that point where you're like man this is starting to get this is actually starting to get a little bit scary for me on some level you know and i feel unmoored yeah yeah it's always just totally unfamiliar and all these coping skills and ways of knowing the world i grew up with um i can't latch on to that worldview anymore and now i gotta make the sleep to you know even if it's more adaptive and helpful it's it's still a scary kind of thing and i think so that's why you see so many people relapse back into an old way of being just when they're on the precipice, right? Of transforming themselves into a new way of being.
Have you got any idea with that? I'm sure that there's probably no, it's a very amorphous question, but how long somebody needs to sit in a new self-image worldview set of personality traits to for that to be who they are as opposed to the old version of them are they more likely to relapse into the newer version or the older have you got any idea about longer is better i would imagine yeah yeah yeah yeah no no exactly so i think you, what they'll do is it's usually across the course of years. So they'll say, hey, so for this two-year time span, how is the person's conscientiousness, for example, now for this two-year time span, did it change and did it stay consistent over those two years? Now let's look at the next two-year block.
Did it change? So yeah, that's how long we're talking about. But I think for us as individuals, as we're thinking about this data, one way to think about that process of going from, okay, I was disorganized and kind of a mess, a dumpster fire person for most of my life.
Now I'm becoming more conscientious and put together, for example. that point from A to B, it's realistically what it is, is it's advances, like maybe three steps forward, two steps back kind of thing, right? And so you'll make advances and you slip up.
You'll make advances and you slip up. But when things go the right direction, what happens is it eventually turns into, hey, four steps forward, only two steps back, right? Biceps.
And that's why it's so hard though, because for a lot of people, when they have those two steps back, they just kind of give up and they're like, well, what's the use? But I think that's one of the real distinguishing things about people who actually make a change in their life is that they handle

those setbacks with a certain degree of, you know, centeredness and equanimity. And they say, hey, this is disappointing and this is frustrating, but it doesn't mean that I'm a failure and I'm going to just get back on my horse and give it a try again.
Because that's how growth actually happens for anybody.

Timing and randomness

play a pretty big role in love uh you know i i i saw her across the room and if only i'd not left with my friend who wanted to get a taxi i wouldn't for for that you know one call to not irish goodbye it i decided to be there and we met and so on and so forth. Is there such a thing as optimizing serendipity when it comes to luck and love? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I'm a big believer. Big believer in that.
And you're right. There are these kind of lucky moments where you're like, oh, I can't believe, right, that that's the way this thing played out.
There was my aunt is a real interesting character she's she's great but um there was this nursery we always went to growing up it was huge and this guy owned like a bunch of nurseries actually i think he was had done very well for himself and he's a super nice guy and um we went to that nursery one time with my aunt i think i was in in college at this point. And she got really emotional afterwards.
And I was like, hey, what's, you know, what's going on? She's like, so we dated in college. I was like, no, no way.
You know, you dated the nursery guy? She's like, yeah, yeah. He was super kind, such a great guy.
And she had, you know, broken it off because they were graduating and that whole familiar story. Well, what had happened that day at the nursery is he had come up to her and he said, why did you never respond to my letter? And she said, what letter are you talking about? And he said, after we broke up that summer, I wrote you a letter and I told you how much I loved you and how much I wanted to be with you.
And I begged you to come back. And she would have.
And she never got the letter. Oh, God.
Unless I got lost in the mail. USPS.
Oh, no. Postal service.
So, yeah, luck can play a huge role in things, for better or for worse. But to your question, yes, people can improve their luck just like they can in a lot of other things.
It's actually one of my favorite areas of psychological research is like, yeah, people are lucky sometimes, but there are consistently certain people who are luckier than others.

And as you look at how they live their lives, they just put themselves in more optimal situations more often.

So, for example, in the context of dating, I was talking to a female friend of mine here, maybe about three years ago.

And she was just having a tough time with the online dating and finding a guy she was going to match with. And so I said, well, what do you want? What are your three wishes? And she had one, one is she wants someone who is physically fit, which is fine.
She wants someone who is motivated and she wanted someone, I can't remember what the third, I can't remember what the third one was, but I said, let's just take those first two wishes.

You want someone who's motivated.

You want someone who's physically fit.

I said, you know, what are you doing for physical fitness?

She was going to a yoga studio with a bunch of other women.

And so I said, you know, probably not a lot of.

So I said, how about this?

Can you do Equinox? She said, yeah. I'm'm like i heard the equinox in the lower east side is just loaded with dudes it's just a bunch of sausage fest down there i said not for me but i think that would be great for you so you know she did it and she got a membership and she was in the weight room, you know, three or four times a week.
And she had an abundance of suitors, you know, no time at all. And not only abundance of people, but people she had met in real life, you know, face to face, and also people who she had a lot more in common with and was interested in than the people she'd been meeting online.
Now, were all of these guys great? No. You know, some of them had liabilities or whatever, but it was a lot better, right? Than if she had just kept doing her normal life.
So my point here is this, is, you know, you can make your luck in romantic relationships. And a lot of times it does, it's not that sophisticated.
It's just like, who are the people I want and where are those people hanging out? That's step one

for making yourself more lucky. I mean, me and David Buss have talked about this so much.

That's the single best bit of advice that I can... I mean, I'm also...
I'm 37 and unmarried,

so what the fuck do I know? But abstractly, I can tell you exactly what you should be doing. Do as I say something, something.
You need to inhabit places that have people like the person you want to date in, right? Like that's a, obviously, you're just pre-selection. You have a set of filters when you go to online dating it's crazy that we're having to use online dating as the example for this and this is how you take the app out of the app and you put it into the real world um and you you're really into physical fitness like you're really not into um someone that gets up super early and is going out endurance running.
It's like, well, a run club is probably not the place to find someone. Or, you know, you're not really into going out partying all the time.
It's like, why are you in the nightclub at two in the morning? That's not your vibe. So So yes, that's a phenomenal first one.
What next?

Yeah. I think the second thing to do then is we don't always behave.
I think we sell ourselves short sometimes in how we present to other people. And I think this happens for women more often than it does for men.
And one of the things you'll find with women is they will sometimes minimize themselves in dating situations as to, not all women, but it happens more than maybe we would like. They try to minimize themselves so they don't appear threatening to a guy, which is a real thing out there in the dating market.
And then they get these guys who are just kind of not at the same level that they are at in their level of badassness, right? And a lot of times with friends like this, I'll say, well, you know, how are you, let's talk about how you're presenting yourself and how are you coming into these interactions? A lot of times what you find out is they're minimizing themselves. And it's like, no, you have to be unapologetic about who you are and what you want.
And that doesn't mean being a jerk. It just means I'm going to be totally confident in who I am.
And I understand that certain people will reject me for that. And maybe more people will reject me than if I had been some more vanilla, middle of the road kind of person.
But the long-term payoff for that is tremendous, right? Because now you're, that's a blessing actually, because now you're actually filtering out people who you don't want. So if it's a woman who's minimizing herself, it's like, hey, you be your badass self.
And if some guy gets scared of that, good. Like now you find out after the first or second date, you don't find out two or three months from now.
The alternative is that you have to spend the remainder of your relationship editing yourself. Yes.
Yeah, it's what some people do. Some people spend their whole life editing themselves.
I think that happened particularly with older generations, right? And then bad as well, you've drawn somebody who's not actually the person not actually the person the person who would have fallen in love with the person that you are walked by you because you weren't being the person that you are you were being this other version of you yes yeah yeah no no exactly i mean one place to give you a really physical concrete example of this sometimes you'll see this with women who are tall and you'll, you'll actually see them physically like hunching over. And he's kind of at the, at the bar or dating situations or whatever.
And I just think to myself, like, just, just as easy as it is for me to say from the outside, I guess it'd be mansplaining if I said something about it, but I was just like, yeah, just be you.

And there are that maybe some guys will be intimidated by that, but hey, for the guys who aren't intimidated by that, that's actually a really good sieve to get the kind of guy that you actually want. Yeah, so inhabit places that have people like the partner that you're looking for in.

Be unapologetically yourself that being said you also do need to match that with a degree of ability to grow because being unapologetically yourself like maybe you're a chronic farter like being unapologetically yourself you know we have to have a degree of decorum here we have to understand there are sort of objectively worse and better ways to exist within a relationship and adjusting it's like i i'm a father and i've always been a father and if you don't love me as a father then that's you know that's your problem that you need to get over yeah yeah all right yeah no no no exactly you know i think sometimes too the way that that's a great point chris because sometimes that manifests where people you know let's say for example there they can be mean and i was gonna be my mean self i'm like that's not what i'm that's what i'm saying yeah uh it's like don't embrace your inner asshole no no no you know but someone could say for example at some point maybe a few dates on uh when you're self-disclosing being more vulnerable you could, yeah, sometimes I can have this mean streak and I don't like that about myself if I'm being honest about things. And look, here's some ways it's manifest in the past, but here's what I'm doing about it.
Now you're being genuine and you're being transparent about who you are, which is, I think, a good thing. But you're also just not saying like, hey, you got to deal with my farts and my meanness and all this stuff and be unapologetic in that kind of way.
Anything else on serendipity? I think those would probably be the big, you know, probably be the two biggest things I would recommend for people. But yeah, make your own luck.
It's so hard to find somebody who you hit it off with, right? Yeah. And there's so many people, I don't know, this has been my experience, just even personally, where there's so many people I've met who on paper, it's like, yeah, this person and I should be a good match, but for whatever reason, it's just not in real life.
And so since it is hard to find that, let's say one in a hundred or one in 500 person,

whoever that is,

you do need to create more opportunities.

Numbers game.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah, just expand it

and to find the person that you actually need.

It's interesting this battle that we have

between the sort of bottom-up heart,

how I feel, spark, love, lust, liking, and top-down, what it is that I know about what's good for me, avoiding the wounds in the past. And I think this tension between cognition and intuition is very prevalent when it comes to relationships.
Yeah. The head heart, right? Doing a tug of war with each other.
And the heart usually wins that a lot of times, especially when we're teenagers in our twenties. And that's okay.
That's just part of growing up, right? But that's why I like to tell people, hey, in between your relationships. so after you've gotten over the misery of the heartbreak of something ending yeah it takes some time to be reflective uh get your priorities your wishes in in order and then let's get that solidified in in some kind of way so now when you do fall in love, you're in that passionate love,

the pounding heart, butterflies in the stomach,

you can just enjoy it.

As opposed to seeing it as wanting signs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because especially with people

who have been stung a bunch of times,

and I understand this,

but if you've been hurt a bunch of times,

it's almost now like you're expecting

the good thing,

the good feelings have been paired with the bad thing

where you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And I think if you've used your reasoning and your intelligence to the best of your ability before you've gotten into a relationship, you know, that gives you now this confidence and this trust to say, hey, it's right here on this sheet of paper that I've laminated and made concrete. I know I can trust that.
And now you can just be an emotional and free person in the relationship. Yeah, Alain de Botton's got this interesting insight where he talks about people sometimes change, but rarely in a relationship and never when we ask.

And I think he's sort of pointing at the fact that heartbreak is really one of the only catalysts that cause most people to make changes. And it sort of goes back to the I can fix him meme of maybe he can fix him, but he's probably going to fix him after you break up.
Right. It's his killer, right? You always sometimes see the guy who's in a healthier relationship, not perfect, but healthier relationship, two or three girlfriends down the line.
Then the old girlfriend's like, I did that work to make him somewhat better. I fixed him fixed him yeah it's uh one of the one of the most ruthless things that i ever heard a friend say about a a girl that he actually didn't get into a relationship with he was going to and he sort of bailed out and he said what he said said she'll be amazing after a divorce uh was his insight he was like she's someone needs to step in and refine this rough rock into a diamond and there's a lot of raw materials there but he's like i'm not doing it yeah so yeah yeah good you know it's a good choice it's it's a hard one though right because when um when our heart's telling us one're just kind of wired to think, like, the heart's got to be right in our society.
Watch me dance through this minefield. I'm not going to trip any of the tripwires.
I've got it. That's right.
I've got it on a lot. I'm going to float over it all.
Yeah. Good stats, nerd researcher man.
Don't apply to me. I'm the main character in my life.
Go fuck yourself. Ty, you amazing mate you're this i literally could keep going for hours and hours i want to bring you back i've already said to the guys to bring you back in july let's we haven't even touched on within a relationship developing values the sort of habits behaviors all that sort of stuff there's so much more but uh chris hey i appreciate all that and i really enjoy talking to you and i love the work um that you're doing on your on your podcast like in this world where everything's like 30 seconds or whatever you know um i i actually just honestly do think it's a great value to go in depth with folks and and ask hard questions and and wrestle with things so um I think very well of you as well.
Heck yeah. Well, yeah.
For anyone that wanted 30 seconds, they've got, uh, like one hour, 50 minutes, more, 50 minutes, 51 minutes, 30 seconds more than they anticipated. Uh, where should people go? They want to check out the stuff that you do.
Uh, they could go to tight to shiro.com, uh, which says, again, I'm kind of everywhere. I'm not great on social media.
I'm on Instagram, I guess. But yeah, tytoshiro.com, that should have everything that people need.
Heck yeah. Ty, until we speak again later this summer, I appreciate you, mate.
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found.
Fiction and nonfiction, real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links links to go and buy it and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books.
That's chriswillx.com slash books.