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Episode 140: anorexia, paternity testing, selecting for pair bonds on a dating profile
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all right well this week on the podcast we I got a question from a listener and usually we go through the questions in the order they're received unless they've been answered already but this one I got recently so I put it on because it really struck me as someone who's kind of in a tough spot so dr. Lila came to my attention last week that my college-age daughter is anorexic she will be starting counseling tomorrow I also follow chef AG and she suggested that before that to get your advice on how to handle this they're not sure how to proceed or the best way to proceed I found a therapist where disordered eating is her primary area of focus but I don't want to do more harm what say you yeah good I'm glad that that's what she did and so hopefully hmm hopefully were in the hands of someone who is experienced in these in this problem and we'll we'll see how it goes I mean they're these are very very difficult problems there's only there's only one thing that I would advise this this person to do which is to I guess it would be the following I would have a question and then advice and that is that I would want to know a lot of people that so if this if this person has been talking to chef AJ then then this individual is very in in what I'm going to call the hyper health arena and so obviously would super concerned about food and health and how those two are related etc now if the daughter is also of that persuasion then this is important because the therapist may consider that the daughters can concern about food and foods health and what's legal and not legal for her to eat is quote part of her problem which is not true so the so that's a that's a major misconception they invented a name for it orthorexia the so this is so I would recommend this individual to email me if they're if that's what your daughter's orientation is if your daughter's orientation is not that if your daughter is a reasonably conventional eater maybe somewhat help oriented but not that health oriented really it doesn't worry that too much about the specific foods and the relation to health worries more about the calories and so on and so forth and that's sort of her deal then we don't worry about it the the one thing that we don't want is we don't want a bright hyper conscientious which anorexic folks are hyper conscientious person that it also is aware of the issues around healthy healthy food choices we don't want that person battling their therapists and have an have an additional issue of essentially pressure being brought to bear on them that quote their quote orthorexia is quote part of their problem if that's the case then unfortunately the therapist needs to be educated and that therapist could be educated by that parent worst-case scenario the therapist is educated by me okay so but so some space needs to be cleared in that therapist head for the possibility that the therapist doesn't know a damn thing about food and health which they almost certainly don't so I've never met an eating distorted psychotherapist specialist that knew anything about health and food they all think they do and they don't know anything so the and that's a problem because once in a blue min you get one of these anorexic young people that are smart and aware and have been exposed to the right information about food and now they've got a two-front war that they're having to fight they're having to fight anorexia and they're to fight the people arguing with them about about their their position with respect to what's healthy food and what isn't healthy food and what once approach to food should be so the Alan Goldhamer would be diagnosed as orthorexia I would be diagnosed as orthorexia Nate would be up diagnosis orthorexia damn near everybody I hang out with would be diagnosed with this and not a single one of us has any psychological problems with food at all obviously so this is a so that is my only warning if but if the daughter does not have any issues like this in other words if she's not hyper and ridiculously educated and fastidious about these issues if she's reasonably and somewhere near the anywhere near the bell curve with respect to these issues and what we're dealing with the straight anorexia then no problem we leave that therapist alone okay so that's so that person can email me about this issues and that information if if they need sort of further support information fantastic okay all right well we're going to turn to change topics quite a bit now and talk about measuring T testing okay dr. Lyle I'm about to become a father and I feel like I won't get a single night sleep until a DNA test gets done of course I haven't brought it up with though with the mother because I feel like it's a huge nest of Hornets is this a reasonable request to make sure or just a huge signal of distrust it sounds like we're you know hyper conscientiousness on both sides anorexia now testing there's a feeling right there very interesting yeah sort of a question of the ages I would suppose now it certainly is a signal of distrust and it's good I mean we could we could I mean there there's so many questions about obviously the nature of that relationship is history etc etc that would feed to this issue and so questions that I can ask etc but just as a my general strategy of decision making is we never make a big decision when a small decision will do so if this person is about to become a father they can just be have a few sleepless nights let's have the child born and let's let's look at you know let's learn a little bit about Mendelian genetics here blood types I color stuff like this okay so if it turns out that the kids hair color eye color and blood tests are an impossible match for you then then guess what then we got reason to to ask for a DNA test so you'll take you might want to make a small decision here first and look at some sort of the cues of the ages now then then I'd have to think that one through the I might you know I'm not even sure what I would do about that let's let to do that first and let's see how that goes and then after that this person can write to me and we will plot there's a there's there's a way to to have those conversations with that individual and the general strategy that we would use if we have to get go there would be that hey I'm an obsessive nutcase I can't help it I've been all wrapped around the the behavior genetics wacky crap on the beat your genes podcast okay and now it's got to be in my bonnet and I'm really sorry but I just can't shut it off for some reason it's just an open loop just and so anyway hey would would you would you mind terribly if we had a DNA test that's no that's I would do that you know would you do that one on your belly again the general strategy is I'm the nut okay this is because I'm a nut it's not because of any other reason that's how we would do it but first let's look at those eyes okay all right Oh interesting yeah it reminds me of a question we have in the queue but I can I guess it has to do with Jeffrey Miller who apparently is considering writing a book about polyamory since he says you know about five to 15 percent of people today practice open relationships mm-hmm so the question is kind of on that same is that if people want to cheat in their marriage is there is there a way to go about doing that in a good way and the question the listeners asking is pornography the only way to scratch such niche if someone wants to stay married to the partner I would say this that there's there's that's a that's kind of a big an interesting question and you know I would be very interested in anything that Miller would write on this topic he's uh he's a very very bright human who has I'm sure thought a great deal about these about these issues he's been obsessed with sex is an intelligent level as for as long as I've been accessible sex from a practical level it does so he's about as about as deep as they come in this area I would say that once again the will in trying to solve practical issues that we make the smallest possible decisions the what were what we're discussing here is a is a there's a broader principle involved here and that's the principle of identity so if you think about think about what you are more or less who you who you are is your brain now you are not really your toes and we're not the scar on your knee and we're not the you know the haywire little finger that you got broken you know skiing okay that's not you you are your brain and that brain has in it circuits for for feelings and those feelings are our involuntary responses that happen as a result of things that are happening to you so our job in this life is to try to figure out how to activate the feelings we want and to not activate the feelings that we don't want and broad broad classification of those or the moods of happiness for system UD's of unhappiness that's that's you know very sloppy because there's happiness there's pleasure those are two kind of different things but they can certainly co-occur the there's also pain responses you know pain feelings too but what we're really talking about here when we don't you know we're going to get on technical we're just talking about you know good feelings versus bad feelings and swirling around in this is the fact that good feelings result from evolutionarily successful type feedback and evolutionary processes are generally competitive and so as a result evolutionarily positive processes involve conflicts of interests between individuals and so as a result somebody somebody's good feeling is somebody else's not-so-good feeling the not not always you know there's a lot of games that are better nonzero-sum but there are many games that are that are that are zero-sum and there's there's winners and losers and there are if you have a pair bond and let's say in an extremely stereotype goal situation let's suppose we have a female who is pair bonded to a male and is not is not adventurous in in her psychology sexually and she's perfectly happy with this one guy for the whole rest of the ride to that she met at 35 and let's suppose stereotypically that the guy is not quite so happy and so as a result he has the the genes of the typical of the typical male as the machinery that was built by the genes that caused him to have the psychology of what I call wife wife wife chippy which is that that when you do a log linear plot on the testicle size of a primate relative to its body weight you can predict how many how many sex partners that primary mate has and within a short length of time in its life at any one given time of its life during the course of the evolution of that species so if it's a small testicle primate then it's likely to be a pair bonding male who rarely you know has periodic sex with one female and is not under intense sperm competition with other males trying to get as much sperm as it can into as many females as again if you have a species where there is not pair bonding where the male's job is not to make all it is not to to try to display that will care for offspring and invest in offspring the male's job is actually to get as much of its sperm as it can into as many females as it can then it's going to have very big testicles and so the chimpanzee has phenomenally sized tucks testicles and the average chimpanzee male has sex eight times a day for its lifetime the yeah yeah don't get excited Nate you're you've evolved a little bit from the chin not not too far now the on the other side of this of course if if a male was having sex eight times a day then a female is having sex eight times a day and so a chimpanzee troupe is astonishingly carnal and as you would expect and so there's a swirling cauldron of sexuality the sex doesn't take very long it's just a very very rapid process so they don't make a big fuss about the way humans do the bet any rate that that's how that works it's a it's a tremendous sperm competition now where was I in all this so it's going to turn out that humans are somewhere in the middle of this mess so they are clearly not a small testicle pair-bond species they are clearly not a wildly promiscuous sperm competition species you know that were that's a predominant issue they do have aspect of both they're in the middle and so we would expect that if we were to guess the average psychology of the average member of the species and we're talking heading right to the middle of the bell curve on male and female psychology we would expect the female would be quite a bit more conservative sexually than the male and that she would be you know the average female under average circumstances would be pretty okay with this guy that was acceptable and as long as he's protecting and providing and hasn't deteriorated or defrauded her about who it is that he was she's you know he remains acceptable potentially indefinitely the male would not have such apparatus on average smack dab in the middle of the mail bell curve for psychology on this issue you have what I call wife wife wife chippy I actually remember this the data I read this somewhere in a book by editor Wilson and I don't know what book and when the the but the long I can't remember whether it was wife wife chippy or wife wife wife chippy is I my memory says that it's wife wife wife chip it is my terms by the way folks and it's the notion that I believe the average male across the history of the species had 1.3 sex partners at any one point in their life so that what does that mean that means that they were that a steady sex partner and then about once in a while they had a chippy on the side that's now that's not what's happening today because in any one given generation only the most successful men are having that happen and a whole bunch of other men are not having that happen but you don't come from the average male in the course of human evolution you come from the average successful male throughout the course of the history of evolution and so those that's what those people did so sitting inside the head of the average male who the average male cannot pull this off typically but the average male would like to pull it off his psychological machinery is wife wife wife chippy I've had people in my office sweating their marriage vows males and they really love the person that they're with but there also have been experienced enough to know you know these aren't twenty-two years old these are 37 years olds and they've been around the block while they've had some relationships they might have been married before and they're looking at this situation and they're starting to get cold feet and the cold feet guys when I explained this to them I said how would it be of you know two to three times a year you could satisfy that chippy urge and the response is oh my god if I could just have that no problem with the rest of the commitment problem Wow as the wife stares daggers out you know believe me the wife's nowhere in sight this is like this is behind this is like deep I have a special cavern in my office it's three stories down under the granite nobody can hear okay steel door this is this is Maxwell Smart in the cone of silence ha ha ha okay stop the cone of silence this is what it comes down to okay man you know this is exactly what Miller's talking about and and it's not like it's only men we're in the Black Cats and and women being naive obviously there there's these jeans get thrown around the landscape but this is going to be more common inside the male's brain then it's going to be in the females brain so what does this mean this means we have conflicts of interest folks and these conflicts of interest in what what what the world is slowly struggling with and attempting to do excuse me is is to try to get wiser about this and attempting to try to figure out how can we better negotiate these natural conflicts of interest and how can we optimize the moods of happiness for all individuals involved and now in in the book sex at dawn the the author's will can conclude that that there's no reason for the females to be upset about this and that you know that essentially were socialized into thinking that that's sort of cheating and promiscuous behavior is just a negative thing it doesn't have to be at all these people are completely naive I think this was camp members named Chris something and his wife who's running this Chris riot yeah this is ridiculous the this is Chris Chris Ryan being heavily influenced by cultural anthropology I think that's probably as man education does you know apparently can't get it through his thick skull he obviously has been educated in some degree in biological anthropology not very well but he certainly does not deeply grasp and understand evolutionary psychology doesn't understand human evolution so it's very clear that there are jealousy systems that are built into both male and female humans and these are not the result of cultural you know in culturally inculturation that is ridiculous so you can completely insane the if if that were true you would you would theoretically find cultures that were there would be no such thing as romantic love and no such thing as sexual jealousy do you understand that if there's romantic love then there is a bonding around sexual exclusivity and there's a threat to that exclusivity etc that activates jealousy mechanisms you can't consider something extremely important and wanted a lot and then want to just give it away so that that's not how this works so there in this game we cannot just say oh cultural norms have created an artificial conflict of interest no they have not created an artificial conflicts of interest they may have added trouble along financial lines cultural expectations fancy thing called a marriage you know problems with provisioning of children into very you know a huge long time of child provisioning etc there's an awful lot of things that have added a tremendous amount of pressure and essentially had people facing the problem of making a 50-year decision with a chip that was designed to do it for five years so the so there is smart humans are trying to finally face the realities of this problem and they are they're struggling they're struggling with it it's interesting I am Millar saying 5 to 15 that's quite a range of estimates means that somebody's somebody's got a survey and you know one magazine that is saying it's 15% gee I wonder what those magazines are and somebody else has got a survey in another magazine it says 5% and that magazine looks a little different 15% of people practicing open relationships I don't know what those relationships are but let's talk about people that have been like married for 3 years ie not people who have just flaked out on this thing and didn't take it seriously you telling me peers 15% of married couples in the United States or practicing open relationships there's no way in hell that's true not not even close so this is that's wishful thinking on somebody's part no this is down more probably along the lines of 5% maybe and it's pretty rare which tells us that it's not that palatable for humans and it means that the people that are doing this are people that are inherently pretty open somebody's probably disagreeable you know the mean I'm going to push their agenda within the potential conflicts of interest that this would activate inside that relationship the etc now is it a good thing bad thing you know what do we do about this well this gets back to the problem of identity and that is that you're you know you are who you are but here's the deal you're not sure who you are you don't know you know whether or not you might if you ever surfed that you might love surfing you have no idea okay not if you've never done it if you've never played ping-pong you you wouldn't know whether or not you would really like it you might not you might so your life is the process of self-discovery and the way you do self-discovery is you you know take chances be exposed to new things try things out and find out and you you can estimate whether or not you might like something but you can't know for sure you just can't I just had this happen to me by the way my unbelievable not open great friend dr. Alan Goldhamer and I the two of us are unbelievably not open okay so but he had the brilliant idea he said okay let's we just had a little little work break we took to Santa Barbara a few days ago and so we went down there and so I could work on my new book and Alan could answer a thousand emails and so we went down there and the thing that was to do something new and that something new was surfing so we both grew up in Southern California basically on the beach and had never served y tu nerdy not open stood Giggy and we hey we were not the coolest and so we just weren't going to do anything cool like that so I was on the math team okay that's that's oh it all right so he says let's get a let's get a surfing lesson so moneybags Goldammer surfing lesson for what's that he suggested this yeah he did that's cool give him credit okay so we go down there and of course I'm I'm expecting to freeze to death and then I'm going to hate it I'm like I'm not going to let him be more open than me so I'm gonna like yeah sure okay I'm up for it so we go down there and of course who who meets us at the beach the guy in his funky truck is this really cool good-looking you know 35 year old guiding Kevin who absolutely is like right out of central casting for a surfer haha now he he was smarter than the average surfer so he didn't talk like a valley girl he he was actually a UC Santa Barbara graduate and so but he he was a surfer dude and he was very cool and we had we put on wetsuits and I had never put on a wetsuit I went in the water I couldn't believe it it's unbelievably nice I and it was morning it was beautiful out and I fully expected to be freezing to definitely water and then I would hate every minute of it and Al and I looked at each other and said hey this is pretty nice we liked it and believe me we were incredibly incompetent we were exhausted at the end of you know 40 minutes in the water Alan got up on his board pretty good he got it as well I I I lasted I think my longest ride was seven tenths of a second and I was diving into water yeah I could not stay on that board Alan could actually stay on it so the that was it great we're going to do it again identity we had no idea that this would have been part of our identity we just took a shot at it here here late in life and and we discovered something new the the problem of you know opening up a marriage and bring or opening up any any serious pair-bond relationship dealing with the possible problems that would result from this the we have to look at the upside we have to look at the downside there has to be open discussions about this and we have to take our time and run the smallest possible experiments okay notice that I didn't go out into deep water and you know surf the big cur the big Earl okay no we go on the two-foot wedge with somebody that knows what they're doing on a picture-perfect day you know with with the mild breeze that's what we do safe tiny little steps no you know the minimal possible stress and her that's what we do so you know if if someone really wants to do this you you go to a I don't know go to a swingers party where your stay fully clothed and everybody doesn't do you know the agreement is we're doing nothing we're just here to watch okay and heck we might do that six or eight times and never do anything we just we see who can get who can stick their toe in the water and who can't stick their toe and rod or what circumstances people might want etcetera and we find out how much hurt is this causing to the part what is it that they are thinking or feeling you know where are we at and tiny decision by tiny decision we find out where we are okay and then we make the smallest possible decisions that we can make if we got a situation where we've got a life lifetime like partner that says no I can't I can't imagine ever having you do that if you ever had a relationship outside it would bother me so much and I'd obsess about it and I don't know that I could ever forgive you well then you better think about that okay so that that that's one of these deals where where we have to have the philosophical understanding that life is inherently what we're going to call tragic and that doesn't mean it's a tragedy and that doesn't mean it's miserable it means this is the correct view of the nature of existence is that it is tragic and the tragedy is is that there are conflicts of interest which are difficult okay all my you know everybody I meet it's always about back to nature and everything's going to be cool and we're all going to live in harmony you got to be kidding me everything in nature is in conflict okay nature is laden with brutal conflict all over the world its predator prey that's what it is it's eat or be eaten that's what it is so this is you know the fact that human life has some difficult choices and that those choices can be you know that there can be significant consequences on the sides of those choices you know what we can do is we can try to optimize the conflicts of interest as humans as best we can with open discussion tiny tiny little decisions we try to do this as best we can okay and if it turns out that that our identities as a pair of people are such that that we have some very significant sacrifices that have to be made by one party in order for the other party to be okay then it turns out that then you have to horse-trade as much as you can and you have to you know the communication about what those sacrifices mean if the let's suppose the husband has to sacrifice his desire for novelty and variety because the female just cannot possibly handle you know that it's just not something that she could sit with well then we're going to have the horse traded elsewhere okay so there's going to be things that she needs to be she needs to understand that this is a characteristic of hers that he's going to honor but she's going to have to go more than halfway and other things and vice versa okay so that's the best we can do with this and that's that's the nature of life fascinating that went way deeper than I expected and I love it yeah all good me too all right doctor my my thinking maybe maybe next time you go out surfing we get a photographer and help you help add to that your dating dating profile on match.com no I don't think so besides I'm picturing this oh yeah your your your wetsuit half way off so we show your chest and your arms yeah I like looking out in the sunrise yeah Alan like staring you down and you're just like I have a surfboard under your arms yeah yeah seen a lot of Photoshop you got to get somebody that's really good at Photoshop all right let's go all right well we got a caller on hold but I want yeah let's do this one question and then we'll take the caller caller stay on home yeah we'll get to you in just a second okay dr. Lyle and speaking of which dating profiles dr. Lyle I'm looking for a long-term pair bond with an amazing man for listening to your show I have a much better understanding about the evolutionary psychology of the dating world having been a subject of countless casual mating scenarios I have a question about what you would suggest writing in my online dating profile that would weed out the wrong men and attract the right man looking for someone it'll stick around past the 10 pay dates really wants to do life with me and is happy and willing to share resources what can I say in my profile to make this clear to potential partners and only attract men that are truly interested well I don't think this is that difficult it's a very interesting question I don't think it's difficult at all the answer I think that you would dress conservatively in your profile and if you meet the person you'd act conservatively you'd use 10 paid dates obviously you would explain in your profile your vision of the future so you would be looking you know deep into the future about things that interest you in life and how you want your life to look and like let me give you a cheesy example I could really see myself with some partner that I'd just be crazy about into our old age and on a rocking chair somewhere on a nice you know overlooking a beautiful spot yeah what did you just tell everybody okay you read wrong on pair-bond okay so this is this is what we're talking about so or you know I'd really looking for a lifetime partner okay or I'm looking for you don't I mean that's coming out with a sledgehammer but you can you can talk this type of way and it's becomes abundantly clear to anybody looking at this but this is absolutely paraben chick okay so this there's no casual mating indication anywhere in sight another thing is to be honest in your descriptions of who you are on the big five so you know you're how do you do that no I don't know your your your music your interests you know what what you find pleasing in life and one of the things that are that you like to do you're trying to give them a an honest description of kind of who it is that you are on those regards but the most important thing is that in your in your description of what it is that you what your future you could talk about things that you like and what your what you like to do and what you find interesting in the world and things that you've read that we're cool and then we're going to talk about how you know in your future you would like to you're really hoping to find you know the one great person to you have a lifetime adventure talk that way and everybody knows what that means and so no problem then then if they if they're willing to run that gauntlet behind you're nicely bit conservatively displayed photography and that and and those that prose and then you act conservatively when you meet them okay and and then your Holt you're withholding through three four five six dates will trust me if we get that far we're talking about somebody who's very interested and it's interested in a long-term partnership okay so we fish from that pool and we do the best we can that's how you do it fantastic dr. loud do you recommend women going on those like little dinner dates or things like that before things get intimate with multiple men for example you know you got two or three men Matt messaging you on match coms and you want to go out to dinner would you go on a first date with all of them were kind of stick with one go to three or four dates with them see if you like them or not and then Multan I mean there there could be circumstances I suppose that you could have you could be meeting you could have put depends upon how popular the girl is and whether or not you know what what it is the Terr advertisements look like you know this is all this this all has to do with with market share and circumstances and everything else under the Sun it's certainly possible that somebody that was really committed and busy could have three or four dates in a week and for three or four first dates in a week there's no reason Under the Sun can I have three or four four states in a week mmm the now how you get a look at these people and they get a look at you whether it's a half an hour an hour or two hours whatever it is that you're comfortable with the and then you know there's going to be people we would we would think that you're throwing back in the pool even after day one and there's going to be people that aren't interested in you after day one so yeah there's no problem I mean I think it's sort of obvious that that if you if you're still interested by date for date five you're probably not that interested in meeting new people this is a sort of a natural market phenomenon that you know you're not usually juggling too much at once unless what you're juggling isn't very interesting as soon as you get very interested you know your life gets simpler
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