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Episode 20: Common Relationship Problems and how to solve them
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now doctor while I'd like to call you a revolutionary psychologist but can you just explain a little bit to us about what evolutionary psychology is all about yes evolutionary psychology was a was a phenomenal breakthrough in human self understanding that that took place really obviously it took place in little pieces over time but the big revolution took place in the early 1990s and it was formally introduced to the world by john tooby and leda cosmides and jerome Barco who were scholars the tubing husbandís or UC Santa Barbara and I'm not sure where Jerome Barco is he might be there as well anyway in a work called the adapted mind and just to sort of briefly explain why evolutionary psychology is a total revolution in the way that people are able to now understand themselves is the following that throughout the 20th century the dominant view in psychology in academic psychology there's actually sort of two big dominant forces in psychology in the last hundred years one of them is the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and which was you know has has certainly been considered and then largely rejected by academic psychology just because there's so many problems with it the the major dominant force in academic psychology is is what's called learning theory and learning theory is is effectively and this is a this is something of a caricature but it has a deep accuracy in it is that the concept is that human beings effectively learn to be who it is that they are so they learning theory is very much about the idea that you are shaped by your life experiences by your what they would call your reinforcement history into being who and what you are the evolutionary psychology essentially completely rejects concept is that human beings effectively learned to be who it is that they are so the learning theory is very much about the idea that you are shaped by your life experiences by your what what they would call your reinforcement history into being who and what you are the evolutionary psychology essentially completely rejects these these other views of psychology and says that these folks have completely missed the boat that that you do not learn to be a human and you do not learn to flirt and you do not learn what it is that you find attractive I can remember listening in a seminar to a learning theorist a very highly regarded one of the most highly regarded learning theory academic sex therapists in the world and she was explaining how that that people learn what is sexually attractive and how much learning had to take place for this to happen and at the time I was already had already been introduced to evolutionary psychology so this was in the early 90s and if I'm listening to this I'm realizing this is an example of the old way of thinking and just how utterly mistaken it is and this woman even though she was very bright very capable human being was literally way off course and had had no clue what she was talking about the the truth of the matter is is that the what people find sexually attractive is innate it is built into the genetic code into motivational systems that are designed by nature to optimize survival and reproductive success so so it is not the case that we learn what is attractive we actually are born with the ability to run phenomenal computations on ratios of people's bodies and their their facial configurations and to analyze who is more attractive than whom and be more motivated to try to mate with those people that are more more objectively attractive this is this is now it has been extremely well established by subsequent research but this was obvious to evolutionary psychologists you know in early 1990s and and so evolutionary psychology is the notion that the human mind has been adapted to the problems of survival and reproduction that took place across the natural history particularly in sub-saharan Africa over about a two million year period and so that that's why the human like the things that it likes it likes water it likes the sound of water it likes to look at water it likes to look at trees with a lot of green like silica flowers it likes to have views that it can see down over a landscape looking down on predators and competitors that the human being is loaded with characteristics that come already in the system and this is a completely different view than the view that dominated psychology and until about 1990 so evolutionary psychology was the first true I mean it would say it was really the brainchild of Charles Darwin who was very clearly an evolutionary psychologist but wasn't doing any science behind it and couldn't at that time his ideas became out of fashion and buried and were eventually buried in academia by both Freud and and learning theorists BF Skinner and others and so as a result it would take more than a hundred years I would take until about 1994 Darwin's ideas to to resurface and when they did they came along with sophistication that is now unparalleled in in the social sciences and we now have a framework and an edifice from which theorize about human nature that is just simply far superior to anything that we've seen before evolutionary psychology is correct a young young academic psychologist I think he's at the University of Pennsylvania I can't remember his name he actually had a beautiful quote to describe the the confusion of the critics of evolutionary psychology it went something like this he said the the critics of evolutionary psychology are not like marksmen who can't quite hit the center of the target their confusion is deep and profound they are actually aiming the gun backwards and this is correct they are they are seeing human nature from exactly the opposite from the correct position the correct position is to understand that the mind is very very carefully adapted to have thoughts feelings and behavior that are necessary to optimize its survival and reproduction just as every other organ in the body is been shaped very very carefully to have an architecture that optimizes human survival and reproduction so your kidneys liver spleen you know stomach lungs everything about you he has highly differentiated tissue it was designed to beautifully to optimize your ability to survive the same is true of your mind so your mind is not a lump of silly putty that is shaped by your experience it is instead an extremely sophisticated Swiss watch with all kinds of little bells and whistles in it that were designed to help humans optimize their their behavior by having automated reactions to things that are important yeah and you know what really struck me about this making so much sense is you know I was watching a talk by a medical doctor named Michael Greger and it was he's actually he runs the website nutritionfacts.org which is a just a phenomenal amount of information about nutrition and he had a talk where he was describing why there's such a failure in medicine to correct the leading causes of death and he basically said that the problem is that they're not addressing the cause is they're simply removing this symptoms and then hoping for the best and I've been kind of interested in this for a long time and it seems like like a psychology psychotherapy today is in fact similar to this ideas are not really getting the cause of the problem whereas evolutionary psychology seeks to understand the cause of the issue and that is really just understanding where the organism is coming from with what the mind is actually what's causing the mind to behave in a certain way yes I think that's very accurate I think a good example is and I don't want to people might say well now wait a second how do you how can you say that the learning history of the organism isn't important it is important but it's not it's not what people exactly think that it is and and so the a great example of for example a difference between evolutionary psychology and and learning theory might be the following the there there would be many examples but one of them that comes to mind is a derivative of a learning theory is what's known as cognitive behavioral therapy so cognitive behavioral therapy is a is a very well research in fact it's the best researched set of techniques for trying to help people and so you know I certainly have a considerable amount of respect for the scientists and clinicians that have gone into its development as they've worked very diligently and honestly to try to put together a conceptual framework along with techniques try to help people now the it's evident from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology that you can see some glaring problems with cognitive behavioral therapy so let me give you an example the cognitive behavioral therapists are aware that when people come in to talk to them that people have a remarkable amount you know they're depressed that's the reason they're coming in and they have a lot of seemingly what what the therapists will call self-critical thoughts so the the person will will be frustrated and sort of angry with themselves and so on and so forth and you'll have a lot of negative inferences about themselves and the cognitive therapist looks at this and says well this is what's what we call your internal critic they don't have any idea where this comes from and they don't have any idea why it exists it is called the internal critic and they tell them that what you need to learn to do is to talk back to the internal critic so they'll do things like the person says well I just don't ever get a job and they say well you know that's not quite rational really how do you know that you'll never get a job and so the it seems it seems quite fancy that we're centrally going to argue with the person in and point out where they're being irrational and and so the person is so essentially this uh some good could come out of this but really not not quite for the reasons that the cognitive therapist is thinking so the cognitive therapist is thinking that I am teaching the person to talk back to the internal critic and that the internal critic is you know inherently for some strange reason human beings have this little critical thing that brings us down and makes us depressed and anxious for no good reason and it's this pesky little thing that that human beings just a vanilla well this is a this is a major conceptual misunderstanding of human nature um the there is nothing in in cognitive behavioral theory that understands the fundamentals of human motivation so cognitive therapist sort of knows that people kind of want to feel good and so sometimes they have these sort of self downing thoughts from this little pesky chip in there called the internal critic and you know a way to do is try to talk back to the internal critic like we're arguing with it okay now the truth of the matter is is that people are motivated for to actually compete for deep complicated problem at conflicted domains of competition those domains of competition are mates friends and trade and so ie a job so human beings are not a direct paternal species they don't they don't typically and never did go out there and do it all for themselves they traded within their villages about one person doing something well and another person doing something else well and then they swap in this way and we know that this is true so the anthropologists that think that we were direct returned species are incorrect the truth is is that if you observe small children even if by the age of two you will see that they have spontaneously start to trade you'll not see anything like this in any other species trade is a remarkable characteristic of humans that allows two people to actually swap items that they figure out in their communication that if I like the blue car and you like the red car but I happen to have the red car and you happen at the blue car if we trade those two things we're both better off but nobody did any extra work this this phenomenon has expanded and enabled us to see the society that we did today but back in the Stone Age at a very fundamental level people were already trading and they needed to figure out what other people thought was valuable and see what they could do to get it in order to trade for other things that they personally wanted so how much ability you had in trade was a critical feature of your own ability to survive and reproduce and you might say well what does what he needs survive and reproduce well if you can get better shiny crap necklaces and gold beads and stuff like that that the chicks like then you're much more likely to reproduce than the guy who can't figure out how to get those things and so the you better figure out you know what that guy that makes that jewelry likes and figure out how you're going to get it done so that you can get some of the shiny jewelry to get yourself laid so this is yeah so human beings have been always concerned with how valuable they were to the village and can gauge how valuable they are by trade processes they also can gauge how valuable they are by the by the esteem signals that are given to them by friends and by potential mates so cognitive therapy and learning theory are completely literally bankrupt they don't have a clue why human beings are doing things and not only do they not have a clue they also tend to be upset about the concept of competition and the concept of self calibrating processes and obvious self calibrating processes that go on so for example when we fail at a task it turns out that the reason why we took task on was in order to compete to try to get the attention of maids friends or trading partners so the when we have failed at that competition we didn't do this we weren't oblivious when we wind up in to the competition so I didn't go on the tennis court looking for Pete Sampras and figure and I would beat him you're your self calibrated and you go after goals that you have evidence that you believe that you would have that this would be a useful a potentially effective use of your time and energy in order to compete in this domain or else you wouldn't do it so it turns out that when you fail you are disappointed and it's going to turn out also that you are then calibrating your nervous system calibrates you down and makes you quote feel bad about yourself in the aftermath of this kind of a process now the the reason why that is true is that the system is designed by nature to try to have you set your goals at an appropriate level that you do not leave chips on the table that you are as aggressive as is reasonable in terms of trying to reach as high in the food chain as possible with respect to friends mates a trading partner but also to be willing to adjust your self-confidence down when feedback indicates that you have set your sights too high now the cognitive therapist of the world doesn't really understand that there's a self calibration process doesn't understand how critical it is for you to actually have failure feedback that causes depression so depression is seen as you know the result of a of a cognitive distortion that is is best removed by arguing like an internal critic when in fact depression is almost always a transient state that is the result of a disappointing attempt to invest energy and social risk in attempting to compete for either mates friends or trading partner ie esteem and and that that when we have failed it is useful to actually not only have the failure experience but also pay attention to what features are work in that experience that we did not anticipate so that we can actually discover whether or not there's more information on how to compete more effectively we don't talk back to the internal critic in this way we listen to the fact that actually the internal critic is not a critic it's an audience and what the internal critic critic is is it it's actually a resident program inside of humans to enable them to compete more effectively by observing and critiquing their own performances in competition with other people wonderful yeah and and you have phenomenal amounts of information more information about this on your website this team dynamics orgs all right yes that's correct okay and so that they're more to be done always more to be done so last week we talked about common relationship problems and how to solve them and how to avoid them and we we went over part of an article on WebMD about that in solutions that can save a relationship now just in a couple of minutes let me recap we talked about a relationship problem number one communication and write what were you're basically saying is that communication is absolutely crystal clear it's that a lot of therapists just don't have the guts to really say what it is that people are communicating which is if they're if they're having problems communicating it may not be the communication it's that that two people may just not be right for each other yeah where they may be going through also just let's let's point something else out people can be going through a point of time in their relationship where they are very seriously somebody is running a cost-benefit analysis on this thing and they're pretty are becoming increasingly convinced that they may not want to be there now it may turn out that they change their mind okay so in the same way that you can change your mind which college you want to go to you know after you got four different acceptances and you're going back and forth and you find out your buddy is going to Illinois State so maybe that's where you're going to go so your mind can shift around because they're going to be you know complex algebra that your mind is trying to to figure out now what the best move is but when people are in trouble they aren't in trouble because of poor communication when relationships in trouble there it is never in trouble behind poor communication the what is being communicated is very clear somebody is really considering defection and it is not and the person on the other side is not missing the cues okay so I always love this one like oh my boyfriend just doesn't know how to express love because his mother was you know you know whatever you know I don't know inhibited it's like you got to be kidding me ah drugs when he runs into the chick that he thought about he'll be expressing his love just fine okay he's a human being with its 60,000 word vocabulary right he has an unbelievable ability to articulate what the heck is going on with him about his likes and dislikes and so if he is quote having a hard time expressing his love but you know not that you think that that is the issue yeah this is delusional and therapists will line up around the block and maintain that delusion because they do not like to face the fact that human beings are under competitive pressures and they don't it offends there they're soft sensibilities that that the world has winners and losers and rejection and competition and and so this is yeah we I think I buried this effectively last week but yeah that's that's the one well I remember even at a common would say we even have a comment for one of the listeners who actually work is at an education university in China this is shallow leash that it's really inspiring dr. Lisle that the communication itself the communication problem itself in a relationship is just a lie it's not really the communication so we want to really thank you for listening that's uh yeah yeah so so the the second relationship problem was sex and I think we covered that pretty well as well right yes sex is remember you're an animal that represents an unbroken chain of successful sexual reproduction that goes back a billion years that's a thousand million years okay if you don't think that this isn't high priority to get animals to like it be super motivated and to be good at it you know you're not thinking clearly so when people quote have sex problems in the relationship the of course it is possible for there to be problems and there can be possible for people to be fumble fingers and etc etc there of course there are some things to learn but the truth of the matter is is the vast majority of time when people think that they have sex problems in a relationship what they really have is they've got somebody in that relationship is ambivalent about being there and that is another problem that the therapist doesn't want to face so a friend of mine was telling me you know and of course he's in just the dating market so he's not really in a relationship and he's saying that he uses the Brad Pitt role his potential date doesn't want to sleep with him he asks himself would she say no to Brad Pitt and and many were saying that if she says she says no to Brad Pitt then he's acceptable he's accepting of it if she were to say no that means she's just not that into him there you go very good so yeah all right the problem that we talked about was money amid as we're there there's communication where the the female may want to be provisioning for her child right well whereas the the husband or the male may be thinking that he's got one foot out the door and he may want to save some money for some casual mating strategy later on down the line but but in in essence the money problems you know that's that's another issue yes and and that those are there's some other personality issues you know can weave their way in there and of course we also talked about how communism is a failure as a concept and that is because organisms there's only a few organisms in the world that actually act in a communist ik fashion and those are really like the social insects I don't know some biologists out there might be telling me there's a there's a there's a group of bacteria to do this as well I don't know but but large animals don't do this and so it's and humans do not so humans are are very cognizant of themselves and where their genetic lines are drawn and so they're extremely interested in the fact that their children need to make sure that they eat and the kid next door needs to starve too bad okay so we are we are designed by nature to be extremely self-interested that doesn't mean exclusively that just means extremely and so when we get together with a mate remember that we do not share any DNA with that mate we may have an offspring with the mate and have our DNA's shared in their but we do not personally share any DNA with your mate as a result of that you are two independent organisms and to pile all the resources together and then divide them by two in other words you're all this is a clogging stick error and some people with some personalities can do this well but it's actually in general a mistake you want to have the money divided as independently as is practical for your circumstances and at with both people living at the same fundamental standard of living and so and then from within that framework you want people to have their own independent money as much as you can because people that with their own independent money are all considerably more responsible with their money then when they are a member of a team of two mm-hmm all right so fat are you you ready to complete the rest of us list Kyle yeah see what else we got all right so moving on to the next we've got we've got four more so relationship I'm going to read them and then the problem solving strategy that this Web MD article suggests right so relationship problems struggle over home chores since most park partners work outside the home and often at more than one job it's important to fairly divide the labor at home says Paulette Sherman Kaufman Sherman author of dating from the inside out so her problem-solving strategies are to be organized and clear about your respective jobs in the home she said write down all the jobs and then agree on who does what and then be fair so that no resentment builds and be open to other solutions so if you both hate housework maybe you can spring for a cleaning service or if one of you likes housework the other person can do the laundry in the yard and then you can be creative and take preferences into account as long as it feels fair to both of you very good you know I mean this is all fine I would I don't have any problem with that and I quite frankly I have a little bit of problem with the underlying inference and that is that if you are if you so don't value your mate and your mates esteem for you and the cost-benefit of the relationship being valuable to the point where you can't thoroughly come up with a reasonable strategy for this then don't blame the fact that we're having trouble with the home chores on why this relationship is going south this relationship is going south for reasons other than that okay so if two people are so incompetent or self-interested and so poor at at dealing with the opportunity of a lifetime to have this fabulous exciting person that you're in love with and that you can't like manage to to deal with these issues then nothing can help you now I will I will say one other thing that was said here that that actually makes very good sense in principle and that is that what we don't want to do is you want to actually be trading with your mate as little as possible you don't want to turn your mate into a trading partner you want to keep your mate as much as you can to be your mate okay and so we want to trade as much as possible with third parties so the the mate doesn't need to be your handyman this will need to be your errand boy and doesn't need to be your cleaning girl or necessarily even your cook the truth of the matter is is that there are things that are practical for the couple to do B and there are things that may be very practical for other people to do and as much as is possible I would trade with outside entities so that we keep the trading process between the two people at a minimum that is the best solution for romance Morris incidentally incidentally it's a very generally bad idea for one partner to work for the other partner in a business or for them to be business partners this is of course people will be able to point to sixteen thousand four hundred seventy two examples how this worked beautifully at least that's what they're told and that's what it looks like my dentist dr. Johnson and his wife Mary I mean they get good luck to them okay but the point is is that for every one of those we had a relationship that morphed its way from a romance and wound up being a business partnership complete with the begrudging resentment of you know all of that on there how many owners of a small business are all happy about their employee year employees the answer is they're all frustrated with their employees because they feel like the employees should be doing more for less okay that is exactly what you do not want to people in the small business looking at each other thinking about that in the middle of the romance so the the of course there may be times when it makes sense etc but you should keep in mind that in general that is an extremely bad idea for people in pursuing a romance they should not it almost never should you be business partners hmm okay yeah that makes a lot of sense and then go this actually ties into the perfectly to the next one which is relationship problem number five is not making your relationship rep priority if you want to keep your love like going relationship a focal point and that should not end when you say I do relationships lose their luster so make yours a priority says Karen Sherman author of marriage magic find it keep it and make it last so her problem-solving strategies are do the things you used to do when you were first dating show appreciation complement each other contact each other through the day and show interest in each other plan some date nights schedule time together on the calendar just as you would any other important event in your life and then respect one another say thank you and I appreciate and it lets you know let your partner know that they matter yeah this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about earlier when we're talking about the cognitive therapist and it's an example of someone who absolutely is aiming the gun backwards that this person has no idea what they're talking about so this is this is a an example of of course it would be true that if you to observe two couples in their little houses and one of them is expressing appreciation and they are making time for each other and all that sort of thing and the other one isn't and you would say well look look at how these people do it that's why their romances wives no no no their romance is alive and that's why you're seeing the things you're seeing okay so it's a complete lack of understanding of what is the motivating force behind the behaviors of interests now so let's let's talk about probably the single biggest feature in human life that that causes the death of romance the single biggest feature is children okay so it's going to turn out that the human female is designed by nature to solve the problems of survival and reproduction just like males are so they are designed as a reproduction machine that's what they are that's what the DNA has built them to do so it's going to turn out that when they don't have children they're extremely interested in romance of course they are that they are designed by nature to be very discriminating and trying to choose mates and they're trying to choose mates that will do what put them in idealize position to have the best possible and most likely survival and most flourishing child that's what they're designed to do so that's the guy they're seeking okay now once they have that guy and they have sex with them enough and they wind up with a kid now we want to look inside their heads what is their priority now their priority is they've got their they have now done what they were designed by nature to do and they've reproduced the genetic code so now it's going to turn out that their priorities have now shifted from the romantic process with the male to the parenting process with the child this is this assuming nature okay so it's useful to know that there's going to be a phenomenal white turn it will take place in a situation it's useful to know it's there so it's not about that people aren't expressing their appreciation it's not about but they haven't made time for each other and that they forgot about it the problem was is that in this case the the nature of life has taken an enormous bike at it any possible romantic process that could be continuing to going on with these people as they are now she in particular is fulfilling her biological purpose and her psychology gets transfixed on the goal of reproduction and the goal of reproduction is not sex the goal of reproduction is optimizing that child's competitiveness okay so it's useful to know that that is your program if you're if you're a female and it's useful to know if you're a male but that's the program that resides inside the female okay and as a result that is something that people need to be highly cognizant of and essentially do the following that you're you are designed by nature to give it all to the kid okay that this is this is the end-all be-all of the evolutionary process and this is this is actually a mistake for happiness this is where you don't beat your genes okay so this is where people need to cognitively recognize a consciously recognize that it is a mistake to give every last bit of energy into child-raising okay it should not be about what can we get for Junior what can we do for Junior how is Junior doing we're upset juniors not doing so well in school juniors just fine Junior actually has a massively better and safer and more promising existence than any human being that ever walked the earth ten thousand or million years ago Junior is in unbelievably benign circumstances and there's no need to be wasting any worrying about Junior in his future Junior will figure it out just fine what you will do if you are not careful is you will take you will take your mind can be essentially transfixed on the little tiny relatively meaningless vicissitudes of gingers existence and be worried about buffering junior against every little tiny little bump and bruise of their life and instead take that energy away from the mating dynamic so people should be cognizant of that that's a big trap for romance and it's probably the biggest one that there is I see this quite a lot actually whether it is with friends whether it's with family and whether it's with with with people like romantic partners too it's um that's a really good point okay so next next next relationship problem is conflict yes so New York Bay psychologist Susan Silverman says that occasional conflict is a part of life but if you and your partner feel like you're starring in your own nightmare version of Groundhog Day it's a time to break free of this toxic routine when you make the effort you can lessen the anger and take a calm look at underlying issues so our problem-solving strategies are that you and your partner can learn to argue in a more civil and helpful manner make these strategies part of who you are in this relationship so one realize you're not a victim it's your choice whether you're icked and how you react be honest with yourself or your comments geared towards resolving the conflict or are you looking for justice and payback if you're blaming and hurtful it's best to take a deep breath and change your strategy then change it up if you continue to respond in a way that's brought you pain and unhappiness you can't expect a different result this time just one little shift can make a big difference yeah this is all a fiasco this is someone again that doesn't understand that the nature of the conflict is that the this is as if people don't know how to resolve conflict and that's what the problem is people know how to resolve conflicts quite well okay but there are conflicts that may not be resolvable in relationships and so they are recurring and the recurring dynamics that will drive conflicts and relationships is the difference in people's relative commitment so this is and this is because essentially one partner very often sees themselves as a as the person who is being under rewarded and the other partner fields that feedback if you feel under rewarded in a relationship you feel like you've got one foot edging towards the door you might be locked in by finances and children and in the church but that doesn't mean that your Stone Age brain isn't saying you know what I think I could do like they I could get a better deal and and so as a result you may be pulling back out of the relationship etc and and then we can have things that we're going to call conflicts so we're going to have arguments about things but that's because people are already feeling shortchanged for example and so they're a little quicker to if the entire relationship is essentially a very complicated multi-dimensional cost/benefit relationship between two individuals and one individual feels like they are getting the worst cent of the deal then they will take multiple opportunities in different domains in order to try to even the score okay in other words well if I have to put up with this then at least I'm not going to do that and so now the conflicts are arising potentially much more often and we have a conflicted relationship it isn't their argument style is doing this is that there's an underlying dynamic of cost-benefit analysis that is problematic to this relationship and is giving turbulence to that relationship stability for usually overwhelmingly good reasons these this doesn't happen out of nowhere so our little person here now there are there are some techniques for people who really love each other but are running into a stage where they are well for some reason they've got a big hurt on one part in their camp they're having trouble getting past it and they may go into a short-term exacerbation cycle where there's retaliation and counter retaliation that you can step out of and that is a natural way for people to act that is actually not ideal and you if you go on my website into into one of the audios called flood the circuit I go through an explanation of how it is that we can get ourselves out of that kind of argumentative mess but in general relationships that are conflicted over time are not conflicted because people don't know how to resolve conflict they're conflicted because there's an underlying dynamic of cost-benefit analysis that is that is encouraging one person to send signals that they feel like they're under reward in the relationship and they're thinking about leaving mm-hmm and this is now you know flows beautifully into the last relationship problem which is trust and the author says Trust is a key part of a relationship do you see in certain things that cause you not to trust your partner or do you have unresolved issues that prevent you from trusting others you and your partner can develop trust in each other by following these tips be consistent be on time do what you say we'll do there's a whole list of stuff but to me it reads be more conscientious which from our personality talk they're the really can't be more conscientious than you already are right but this is again an example of the therapist looking at the frosting and not seeing the cake that that people will be conscientious in a relationship behind two major factors number one how conscientious are they are in general genetically and second of all how motivated they are okay so the if you're a flake and you are highly motivated you can be incredibly conscientious and then if you're not very motivated later then you're going to be a flake second of all if you're very conscientious naturally and you're in a relationship that's met a bit too you will of course be superbly conscientious but if you're in a relationship that that does not motivate you you will start to slip in terms of that conscientiousness as your your mind is rebelling against the lousy cost-benefit payoff matrix that you have in the relationship and you'll start to be a flake and if we point to that as something that you should do better we are missing the boat the truth is is that this is you sending a signal that you feel like you're not in the right place and that the deal is not fair for you so Trust is something that to think that people have to be coached and educated into learning to trust is ludicrous and the notion that they have quote unresolved past issues that lead them to be unable to trust is ludicrous the truth of the matter is is that I don't trust a guy with a New Jersey accent and a gun holster in his in his in his uh with a really shiny shoes and slick hair and there's a tooth missing in front like I can tell I can't trust this son of a bitch so I'm saying yeah whereas if if hair you know Harvey the accountant who my best friend tells me is a stand-up guy and he's been perfect for him for thirty years you know I mean tells me that that's who I should go have resolved this problem I look at him and everything about is his office and his personal presentation and his demeanor and his conversation is words with me signals tremendous integrity then I'm going to trust them okay so we trust to the level that the evidence tells us and to say that an individual so scarred by their history that they're having trouble trusting is nonsense they of course some people may be less trusting than others depended upon their history but it will never be so far out of bounds that in the right situation they don't feel that trust starting to develop spontaneously David buss the University of Texas probably the world's leading authority on human mating behavior ran a study of one of God knows probably 150 studies that this guy's run in his career the and it was about relationships that were in trouble and where one party was was saying that they thought the other party was cheating on them now this was fascinating as I remember the sample size was around thirty or forty couples might have been thirty-five couples I'm not remember for sure I read the study 20 years ago the what they found was fascinating they found that in almost every single case when one partner bought that the other partner was cheating and incidentally all of these cases in within the relationship the communication the relationship the partner who was thought to be cheating denied it so the one that was saying I think you're cheating in every case they were being stonewalled okay now it turns out that in every single case the following turns out to be true it turns out to be that the other person either was cheating on them or they were very close to cheating they had somebody lined up and they were absolutely strongly considering it and they had one foot out of that relationship and one foot into a new one okay there wasn't a single case where the individual who thought they were being cheated on was in fact not being cheated on or damn close okay so this was now of course we can throw this out to the to the universal either and we'll come back with sixteen thousand four hundred seventy one exceptions where this wasn't true okay and I'll have a bunch of people saying well was true I had a girlfriend who thought I was cheating and I was on second cetera of course there are exceptions of course we are sometimes in a relationship with a borderline personality disorder the things were cheating on on them all the time then we're not okay but these are absolutely exceptions to the rule the the truth of the matter is is that that people if anything people over trust okay if anything is the case that is the case so less issues are not major obstacles to romance and if it looks like you are having a trust issue that's obstacle to your own acts the odds are overwhelming that has nothing to do with it the odds are that there are good reasons for the anxiety that we're seeing well I think this this sheds a really good light onto this on this topic and with that in mind I have an example for you it's a relationship issue kind of a conflict that came up and I'm going to read it on air and then let's just get your take on it kind of see the practical application of the right of what we've been talking about so this is a male who's writing this he's 35 year old male and his wife is 32 years old they've been married for 12 years two kids age 10 and 8 he says my wife has become a vegetarian it started gradually and she became full-time as of six months ago she did it for health reasons so for some moral reasons because she believes eating animals is wrong and it's also healthier fine I don't have a problem with that and early on she tried to get me to become a vegetarian and eat less meat I tried it I tried her dishes usually various recipes but I hated them and I didn't like the taste of it at all so normally what I do is we each cook our separate meals she cook hers and I cook mine I always cook meat with mine because I love it and I cook fish live regards to the children I always say to let them choose what they want to eat they can eat from my plate or they can eat from hers they more or less usually choose mine but they eat from both although mostly from mine and she always in planes that I eat too much meat I told her too bad I like meat I don't police what she eats and she doesn't have the right to police what I eat she's tried to bring it up many times but I always shut her down because I told her I find it really annoying when she keeps telling me to stop eating what I like to eat it's my life my body I choose what I put my mouth the other thing is about our children she says they should eat the vegetarian stuff more and wants to gradually make them vegetarian like her and I said they're both our children neither of us should make unilateral decisions on what they can or can't eat she can't forbid them from eating something without my approval and I won't forbid them from eating something without her approval nobody stops them from eating vegetarian it's there where whenever they want it they simply choose more often than not to eat what I'm cooking she doesn't like that and I say what should I do I'm not going to tell them no you can't eat this it's only for dad and eat the food while they look hungry Leon and I've already said that I'm not going to switch vegetarian it's not happening and she needs to get that through her head she always complains about the smell or the way my food looks tells me that it's really revolting and it's grossing her out oh well I find her food revolting basically she's become very annoying about the subject because as far as I'm concerned it's settled I'm not giving up my eating habits I'm not shoving pieces of meat in her mouth so she shouldn't be trying to shove her food into my mouth how can I get her to just drop the issue ha this is actually a heck of a case a very interesting case so the few things that that I would pick up the about this now the what we want to look for here is look for what we're going to call the esteem dynamic so whenever we don't understand something about human nature always look for the esteem dynamic in the situation so here we have the wife signaling to the man that he is basically a uneducated sloth stupid and he's disgusting and he's poisoning her children etc and and and poisoning himself so he's by her estimation he is sick he is he is indicating low conscientiousness and low intelligence uh and and she is she's actually disgusted by this and she's signaling that discussed the and she furthermore has a little moral chips running around in her head not only about the animals but particularly about her children the guy on the other hand these two people fundamentally disagree about the facts so he essentially he sounds like he's perfectly thoughtful so he he is not eating the way he's eating because he's some sort of a glutton that doesn't care about his health that is not being signaled here it appear to have a disagreement about the importance of this issue and and so he is he is pushing back pretty hard against the entrance that that she is signaling now I would also say and I course I could be mistaken but I would say it's interesting that he is having this reaction because if he my guess is if he were highly sexually attracted to her then he might be a hell of a more amenable to change in his diet for being far more sympathetic with her position um or it also could be the case that if she is uh if she has been sexually rejecting of him uh in the relationship at this point if that is the case then he might be sated enough at this that he is essentially retaliating and rejecting her the new information that she's bringing to the village and basically saying the hell with you and your information you know I don't I don't see any moral high-ground why I have to accept this and in fact if it makes you miserable but I'm going to go on strike against your your crusade then so much the better because the relationship isn't that worth it to me anyway so this is a lot of anger and I'm not sure what the esteem dynamic is between the two of them in terms of their sexual chemistry and who who is feeling wet with respect to the relationship as far as this goes but I but I will say this I believe that at the analysis of that sexual chemistry and what people are thinking and feeling and etc with respect to that is absolutely key to understanding the argument that we have now there is one chance and it's a legitimate one that what we actually have is a pretty serious fundamental misunderstanding of reality on the part of our female ok and so so it could be that I'm missing the boat that these people were fine in terms of their sexual chemistry they had a standard process where she was he found her beautiful and sexy and she found him admirable as human and their chemistry was fine and they're having sex two three times a week or whatever the ten times a month which is the worldwide average for couples that are actually happy with each other and so or you know something close to that and so the point is is that we didn't have a problem and now we have a problem okay and now this problem can be traced directly to this conflict if this is true then we actually probably have a woman who doesn't understand the facts about health and buy it the truth of the matter is is that that a vegetarian diet is very you know a healthy vegetarian diet can be a very very healthy diet but so can a diet that includes animal food and so but she may not know that because she may have been subjected to and been learning from people that are very trustworthy and wise smart and are trying to to spread important health information of the world but she can actually miss calibrate this information very easily so for example it's very easy for people to read this information for example about advanced heart disease and how useful it can be to go on a vegan diet and it can reverse it and no other diet could do this and they can be thinking that this is very critically important for their children when this is absurd okay the people will develop these pathologies over decades of a pretty-pretty substandard dietary behavior of which animal food in large quantities is only one of the problems and so she can actually be having a lot of anxiety about her children's diet when she's actually misunderstanding what the facts are the facts are that a very healthy diet against a very unhealthy diet in this society is responsible for less than 5% difference in lifespan but if you were to talk to a vegetarian mom who is read a bunch of stuff and considers herself knowledgeable she would be absolutely flabbergasted to find out that that is true and she is thinking that she is feeding the the the the flower bed of cancer and heart disease with every bite of fish that her child may eat and that is not true the human being is a natural omnivore we can get this way out of balance in the modern environment and we do I certainly lean to and support healthy plant-based diets that doesn't mean that diets that include animal foods cannot be very healthy diets they absolutely can be and so did it could be but the source of this marital conflict could be literally on this on the stake that we see in the ground that everybody's twisted up about and it could be that she needs a consultation with somebody like myself who can actually set the record straight so and that can take down her anxiety and then a lot of her frustration with her partner and that we can reestablish right now she may be feeling like he is irresponsible with respect to her children and that makes her feel very anxious and upset with him so I'm not sure what all the details are but that those are some hypotheses in this landscape
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