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Episode 226: Irritated compliance, getting people to listen, break ups, marriage hesitation
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i i see that you have uh some new stuff on your website which is really exciting a lot of news yes website is a steamdynamics.com business the uh well we've been taught we've been talking about this a while and we we finally decided to go to trouble of uh recording some new material and sort of laying down a bunch of fundamentals about evolutionary psychology and esteem processes and uh and also personality so we we you know got it all together and then we got ourselves a web designer and then we almost committed homicide a couple different times it's been a problem it's been a process yes yes so uh so it's like what are we when we two months late jen something like that oh i think you're you're having some magical revisionism i think it's more like four but that's that's all right it's been yeah it's definitely it's it's much much delayed according to our original timeline but that means it's you know we've had time to add more stuff and do more with it than we thought we could and one of the reasons that we're not doing the podcast live anymore is because you know a couple times a month we're doing live q and a's on this new website um a bunch of new stuff there's in in addition to the fundamentals that that doug just mentioned there's there are never before seen lectures on other topics and newsletters and uh book reviews forthcoming and just a ton of different stuff so it's definitely it's a new compendium and landing landing space for everything that we're doing and uh you know i know dr lyle dr hawk you're you're too humble to promote the pricing but it is incredible it's like three dollars a month if you wanted to do it monthly but if you want to do a lifetime membership it's what 99 which is like you know that that's that's less than a session with you guys well and it's 99 for a lifetime which it puts you on the list plus a book for our book yes you'll get an autographed copy of our book when it's released next year for that ninety 99 um which includes international shipping for international listeners i've had that question a few times so so no matter where you are in the world that is that's part of the deal so yeah that's i have we've had a lot of people tell us that it's underpriced but we really really wanted to not um try to skewer people on this we're really genuinely trying to get it out to as many people as possible and just kind of cover our own expenses and so i think we've done that and it's a very exciting time very exciting to hatch it into the world yep so we'll see what happens marvelous and yeah we'll see what happens yeah it's uh it's we're we're uh we're well along on on the book that we're writing and we have uh i'm i'm looking i'm most looking forward to the next you know paragraph that jen writes because it's always better than i could right so we are uh we're on our way and we're gonna keep chiseling away and next year we'll have something hopefully uh really exciting for folks all right nathan well let's let's go on let's get to the show and get some questions fantastic all right our first question has to do with coronavirus uh which just seems like just so long ago compared to everything else but i guess we'll just take it so uh dear doctors i'm a hyper conscientious nut case i consider myself the 95th percentile for conscientiousness but i don't relate at all to dr lyle's statement that hyperconscientious nut cases are more likely to be over the top with wearing masks washing hands etc for fear of the covid infection covenanting infection in fact i suspected that the risk of the virus had been exaggerated from very early on suspicions that were fed by following john ionatus's work i think i may have channeled my high conscientiousness into reading every article on the virus that i could get my hands on to ensure that my understanding was accurate i'm also 90th percentile for agreeableness and normally avoid doing anything that might avoid that might upset others but i find myself getting so irritated with other people's compliance with ridiculous and non-evidence-based social distancing rules which has like staying six feet away which has zero evidence of efficacy that i now make sarcastic comments in public whenever i see people wearing masks or dutifully standing on crosses in supermarket cues frankly i now hold most people in utter contempt for continuing to fear the virus which is quite foreign to me as i've always felt very compassionate towards the human condition in all of its foibles what is happening to me is this some sort of situational disagreeableness or is there another explanation and how do the other big variables play into this i'm 90th percentile openness i'm mid-range extroversion and and stability which maybe could be modifying factors [Laughter] well how about it jen drock i think we have a lot of listeners who fit this kind of uh personality uh archetype to some degree i've heard versions of this from a lot of people um and it's i mean there are a couple of different things here that definitely you're um you're not as agreeable as you think you are it's it's situational disagreeableness for sure but see the disagreeableness can only manifest to the capacity that it is it's permitted by the nervous system so it was always there it just never never had the right context before and now it's found that context so um i i yeah i just i know a lot of people who can relate to this and your high conscientiousness is um this is a lot of people will kind of lump themselves in with a certain percentile unconscientiousness because it's what the test tells them that they are it's what they've self-identified as but i really find i always go back to jordan peterson's um disaggregation of conscientiousness in particular to better understand it because i think it's really helpful which is that it's it's both um what we what we always call on this show conscientiousness is encompassing several different personality traits it's a big bucket for a lot of different things and so you can be super conscientious in some ways and not really in others and peterson in particular breaks it down into industriousness and orderliness so when you think about those two things they're quite different and i i usually when i take a personality test i'm very um rate is very highly conscientious but i'm much more industrious than i am orderly i'm not particularly orderly like every my house is a mess and my car is a mess and my notes are a mess um but i'm quite industrious so if there's if there's a new uh topic that i want to learn about or there's um a pressing deadline that i need to finish or there's a pile of work that i need to do i'm very conscientious when it comes to that so i think you're when you're you're observing that you're not behaving like the typical conscientious person we've been painting that with a very broad brush the the hyper conscientiousness cases would be the the people most embracing the recommendations of distancing and masquerading and everything that's that's much more an orderliness kind of characteristic than an industrious one so you're seeing the manifestation of just a different flavor of conscientiousness is a large part of what's going on for you um and then i think yeah the uh the situational disagreeableness which is um you're you're in a little bit of a perceived position of power you're you're feeling a little superior to the the people that you're you're watching as the sheeple who are not as well read and don't have the same amount of information that you perceive perceive that you do which is contributing to that level of of contempt that you're feeling filtered through the little skittles of disagreeableness that exist in your personality um and as you are rightly pointing out in the question you're not that you're not super high on stability so you're more subject to being blown around by this if you're mid-range and you're high very high in openness which is also driving your irritation that you're being your movement and um exploration of the world is being constrained in ways that it shouldn't be so i don't think anything unusual is happening to you at all it's just your personality interacting with a very unusual environment and i think a lot of people are in that boat yeah yeah the uh i would probably if i put myself in this person's shoes there's maybe one other little chip that's being activated and um or one one other little concept and that is that when you know more than they know and they're all following somebody else like a bunch of lemmings then it's irritating because you are not getting enough status so you're feeling the status deficiency like look i'm not only smarter than you but i'm smarter than the people that you're following so this is like ridiculous okay and so that that's that's another little anger it's you you sit there feeling mild you know moderately insulted by the fact that the that your your uh greater uh abilities are not being recognized so yeah that's beautiful that's a uh yeah so they're good well yeah i i tend to feel these kinds of kinds of things a lot i definitely relate to the comment about standing on the squares at the supermarket that's the thing that gets me like i can roll with the rest of it and it's it's you know i'm totally fine and i'm not that irritated but standing perfectly flush with the little masking tape square at the supermarket to be exactly six feet behind the person it's it that that does i i definitely uh exert my little my tiny rebellion by stepping just outside the designated square silent protesting that's right that's the range of my disagreeableness now doctor dr lyle dr hawk would you expect or how if we changed the parameter or added a parameter of someone being uh single i.e they're competing for mates and so they're like they're losing time by by having to close their face off and having you know they can't really do as do the competition that they used to uh would you expect that they might be more irritated than someone who's married and happy or with the soul mate and and they're they're they're not as concerned with that competitive that competitive aspect mm-hmm could be sure could be true yeah sure that uh any number of little uh details like that could add up you know i've had an entertaining thing watching because two two people close to me i don't know what this is but it seems like anybody anywhere near my circle it's got a screw loose so hey general general no jen will know who i'm referring to so two two people close to me are ocd and and one of them is completely ocd about covet and there's there's no sort of talking the ocd anxiety out of her and wearing the mask around you know if i run into her she wants to know if i've been wearing my mask this is all and then then i've got another one uh our other friend uh larry that we will sometimes mention by name he he is he's ambivalent because he's got this uh independent disagreeable streak at the same time he's also ocd about germs so this guy is totally bouncing he's a ping pong ball about all the kova dishes and so he in one minute he's worried that the world's not getting clean enough and actually he's irritated that he's being constrained so that's been it's been an entertaining thing for me to watch but this does not necessarily have to fall along um uh political lines or anything else that just sheer personality issues are are the uh this is the rorschach test for a lot of that and that's what we're seeing mm-hmm yeah just wonder well maybe uh maybe we'll we will see how long it lasts and uh and whether the second wave requires us to do yeah even more well we might have to consult somebody that knows tremendous about about infectious disease yeah i know do we know anybody like that i know we had someone on recently that everybody freaking loved we've got him on call we do well we might we might at some point let me go get my broccoli let's see what happens [Laughter] we might want to do a do could we could we use a five minute covered update about what we should be thinking and feeling right now or what do we feel like well i'm let me see i'm i just got some broccoli here um and uh i'm rubbing it i don't know i don't know i was told it would do something but uh all right let's go on to another question all right our next question uh dear doug jen and nate i am finishing up a phd in philosophy at cambridge university in the uk i researched moral exemplarity and am writing a lecture series in which i hope to include an evolutionary psychological perspective dr lyle has spoken in the past about how the way to bring people over to a whole foods plant-based diet way of life is to evince humility in the way you present the benefits like seems to be working for me this got me wondering about how people in the so-called stone age village would tolerate exemplars in their midst how do esteem dynamics operate between a perceived exemplar and their spectators is posturing like a peyronian skeptic the most effective way to get people to listen to and follow your example um complicated question filled with words that i don't know by some phd candidate at cambridge and philosophy so this is all great i'm actually glad to hear uh that someone who's made this a steady is interested in evolutionary psychology since i believe that evolutionary psychology is the is the royal road to questions and philosophy so i believe that probably very few philosophers are aware of that or know that some of them do but i think that that this person is probably in the minority and is at the cutting edge now of of what will be 21st century philosophy the uh now uh the a way to think about social problems is to be careful that we know exactly where we're trying to head this is what we call begin with the end in mind so um i i give an example of this um when i worked in the prisons prisoners would be called up for parole and this is a big deal because they might only get one shot every three years or five years and and they'd be called up for parole and what would happen in parole hearings is that uh if the person had a very very good record uh remember before before people get scandalized anybody would ever get out on parole remember that that a lot of people uh are not even eligible for parole so there are people that are eligible for parole and if they have a bad record there's no way they're getting out if they have an exemplary record in the prison they're supposed to be considered for parole appropriately and so the uh what will happen at these parole hearings very typically is the the people that are that they send the hardest cases that there are most disagreeable people imaginable to to be the people in charge of these pearl hill hearings in other words they may look nice and they may have decent social skills but their attitude is you know no deal no dice there are reasons why that that's true that are beyond this discus discussion the uh however uh what's gonna happen is is that they will know that somewhere in the brains of these uh parole uh reviewers they will know that it that a man it's almost always a man since that's almost everybody that's incarcerated they will know that the man you know very has an extremely strong case for being granted parole and yet they're going to deny it and they're going to deny it about 99 of the time and so what they do in order to live with themselves is they bait the prisoner into losing their cool and they will insult them and they will question them and then if the prisoner gets a little emotional they'll point out that they're getting emotional and therefore do they really think they're ready and don't they have more to work on in other words uh you would have to be some some you know swami to be able to sit in there and not lose your cool the uh now so what i tell what i told the prisoners was you have to be very very clear about what you're trying to accomplish you have to either decide that you're going to use this as an opportunity to vent your spleen when they get nasty you're going to get nasty back and knowing that you're not going to get out because they're already signaling that you're not going to get out and just go ahead and don't let them roll over you and that will feel momentarily satisfying although you'll have great cognitive dissonance because you'll know that you're just digging your own grave for another three or five years the other thing to do and what people do is they try to hold on to it and try to hold on to it and then they become demoralized they try to be as civil as possible and then they just kind of give up in great frustration and they're beaten uh they clearly lost their cool and they go back to the to the prison yard just utterly demoralized and angry and just can't believe what happened what i explained to the prisoners was there's door number three door number three is to understand that that that is absolutely stacked against you and it is not your job to vent your spleen one bit because it's not going to do us any good that the only key to the door is to keep focused on the prize and to know exactly what we're headed for you cannot have two goals at once in other words feel a little bit better by standing up for yourself and not getting rolled over in the meeting if you do that you absolutely concede the biggest prize which is a possibility of getting out okay i would explain that you don't know that they're not going to grant you parole even though they're they're insulting you and saying they won't you don't know that it's not a test about how you're going to handle it so in this way we get very very clear that that this time when we may run into people that are completely disagreeable and are not going to go our way this is an opportunity to practice our techniques and perfect our performance we're going to get the reviews we're going to get the transcripts we're going to find out what they said then we're going to see exactly what we said okay and no matter how bad it gets your job is to play this game as well as you can possibly play it and we're playing with exactly one goal in mind and that goal in mind is we're trying to get out of prison okay if you let one percent of the other goal leak into your strategy you're in trouble so this is why one sometimes the most important thing you do in this world when you're under any complex problem at all the most important thing is to figure out what is it that i want the most and almost all the time in fact the nature of life in general is that your goals are inherently conflicted the brain in fact was designed by nature as a conflict resolution device what it is is it's a mechanism for analyzing alternative values and threats and trying to come up with the best possible solution to the problem in a moment's notice so it has design features it has little integrated circuits in there that that's what it's designed to do if you're confused okay it's because the the costs and benefits on either sides of the equations are pretty close it's hard to know what the right decision is do you go left or you go to the right hard to know the um in certain cases we can know that we're going to get confused in the middle of a fight but we actually have to keep our heads straight and we have to know exactly where it is that we're going this questioner has actually um confused two different directions about what uh uh what i'm trying to accomplish with the advice that i give people i am not even close to being interested in convincing anybody else in the world to eat a healthy diet not interested i'm interested in helping you figure out how you're going to do it in the face of a bunch of social pressure that's what i'm interested in if you already want to do it i know that there's more people in this world that want to do it well and can't do it because the obstacles i i got plenty to do just working with those people forget about the idea of trying to convince any new person that this is a good idea there's plenty of people that already know that it's a good idea that it's extremely tough for them to execute so my strategies are completely directed at you who's wanting to make the changes and already know what you should be doing so i couldn't care less about what anybody thinks about it what i want is i want to dial down all the pressure all the the the esteem disturbances that are taking place there that's what the humility is all about that's what the same strategy is about this this person says events this person is using words i don't even know yeah i'm trying to display i know the word display i'm trying to display humility because if i display humility then i'm not going to get the pushback okay now so their goal in theory as they're thinking this through is to say well wait a second what if i'm trying to convince other people that's a totally different goal that is a completely different fork in the road okay now so now we're going to look at the question from there so now you know how how did they deal with people you know who you know if i'm if i'm displaying in other words if my behavior is superior in some way but i'm signaling humility that's not going to bother people that's not going to hardly bother them at all and so how did the stone age deal with people that were extraordinary in their sort of moral excellence in in many ways the answer is they were very well liked because they are signaling the humility and they're having behavioral excellence which means that they're not causing a bunch of disturbance that they are resulting in a minimum of conflict in that village so that's not going to be a problem here's the problem not too far away from that is the individual who's saying i'm right you're wrong and i'm better that's that's different that's not actually signaling humility and minding your own business and just doing a good job and not bugging anybody no that's trying to rub people's nose in it to try to convince them that they should follow your path that's a whole different operation and in that operation what we're going to find is that those signals no matter how subtle those signals carry with them an issue that's problematic in the stone edge which is that the status pi in the stone age is a zero-sum game so if i'm above then you're below and now we have a conflict of interest because this is costing you mating chips because i'm signaling my superiority so how would you get people to change uh to to a new direction the answer is probably the very best way to do it is through humility that's probably the best way to do it with an open mind with questioning do not take any credit for the fact that you're trying something new and it seems to be working for you you're not sure it's going to work but who knows and then what would happen if you took that stance and you were careful with other people's esteem processes what's going to take place is they will follow you when they see that you have success that's how it works so instead what we have is we have most people following into an extremely understandable trap uh when it comes to diet health lifestyle etc which is that oh i just found out that this is a good idea there was a charismatic speaker and leader that tells me this is right i believe them and now i got to go tell my whole village and insist that i'm right and that i've got the new information they've got to give me a bunch of status well when you do that you can expect to get way worse results than you think you deserve and that's because of the esteem processes that are being activated there so yeah excellent question and the answer is the most important part of the answer is figure out what is the most important value to you and you must reverse engineer the your behavior in order to match the most important goal that you seek and that's uh that's how i look at that problem dr lyle thank you so much that uh yeah i i'm reminded of dr hawk's quote a couple a couple shows ago where she said this is not the enterprise you should be engaged in in reference to a caller a female caller was trying to trick trick potential mates into thinking she was younger but i've taken that uh and it's just great thank you dr lyle our next question dear doctors uh do you have any advice on the gentlest way to break up with someone i entered into a secret long-distance relationship with another woman close to seven years ago when i was 23 and she was 30. we both haven't told our families about a relationship because we are related we are cousins once removed and our families are very close i also haven't come out to my family about this and she's had trouble with her parents in the past because of her sexuality i was a lot more open and naive at the time and didn't really think about the future viability of the relationship and just went with the flow it was fun and loving however as i'm nearing 30 i'm thinking of the prospects of having children and a male partner that i can introduce to my family and friends i also find myself not attracted to her as i once was she's living and working in an environment that is not conducive to health and she's become more overweight and sickly throughout the years i feel terribly shallow in telling in saying that because she's a wonderful person who i still care for and i worry about how she will take it when i finally do find the nerve to break up with her any insights would be greatly appreciated and thank you all for your amazing work your turn yeah well i can i can jump in on this one unless you have anything to throw out there doug um yeah i mean this is a really hard situation this is um there's there's nothing really even though it's an unusual relationship and unusual circumstances there's there's nothing uh specific about advice about how to break up with this person that is unique to your situation that's really different from the advice that we would give anyone who's in a difficult breakup where they don't want to hurt the other person and it's just that your cost-benefit analysis and the relationship has changed over time which it almost always does so you know we we have that wonderful cheerful phrase that marriage is a is a lifetime decision with a five-year warranty or a five-year chip um and that's what you've experienced here is that you sort of got into this um didn't didn't marry the person um but you know sort of got into it with your youthful naivete thinking that it was it would be forever because no reason not to think that it wouldn't be and everything was great at the beginning and then slowly over time you've just your your interests are not aligned like they once were you're not attracted like you once were um it's a lot of secrets to keep it's a it's a lot of stress in this relationship that is an affordable cost benefit analysis when it's exciting and new but not so much when it's not um and so you've had this very organic decay function on this on this relationship which is not not unique to the fact that it is um you know among cousins once removed and um you know a queer relationship like those are just characteristics of it that make it sort of so it's there's nothing specific to the fact that it's that this is a sort of inter-family relationship or that it's a queer relationship it's just a relationship that's run its course and so it's it's it's never a pleasant thing to be the one who wants to end that relationship and it's um it's you you obviously don't want to hurt her you still love her a lot um and value a lot about her so this just goes back to all of the the kind of core techniques that we have and there's nothing magical about them there's no special sauce in them these are these are things that are tropes in the culture which are that you're you're gonna you're gonna flood the circuits as much as possible we have advice about how to do this on the website um specific videos and audio about how to do this essentially you know really letting her know everything that you value about her and doing so in a very specific way that is not just not just vague compliments but really naming specific things that you appreciate her about her and value um and all of all of the things that are important to you in this relationship and and then just you know very as gently as possible standing in your truth in the relationship and and telling her that this is where you are and not trying to manipulate it and saying that you've you you're in a different place and you know the the sort of some version of it's it's me not you um there's really no other way to do this it's just never going to be an easy road to walk and we do we do have a couple of little videos about our audios about how to some scripts that you can adopt to try to make it a little easier but the main the main thing to keep in mind is that you you know that the sort of notion that you don't want to do this because you don't want to hurt the other person is um a confusion like you're you are not preventing her from being hurt by staying in the relationship you were you were preventing her from finding the person that she's supposed to be with who would would be in a mutually over rewarding satisfying relationship so not only are you not doing her any favors by staying in a relationship that you don't want to be in and obviously you know short-circuiting your own happiness in the process and the own the kind of relationship that you you know that you want which is not this um but you are preventing her from from experiencing the the end of this relationship and going out and and finding somebody who really will be the best possible match for her so that's the that's the perspective just to keep in mind throughout the whole thing that you you have to do her the kindness of allowing her to hate you a little bit um and you have to be you have to be courageous enough and brave enough to be hated in as as part of that trade to allow both of you to find the relationships that you both uh deserve and want dr hawk thank you so much yeah beautiful good yeah that's done right i guess anything else to add to that but yeah no no and their their pain is their pain is way shorter than you think the um you know as a clinical psychologist i you know for 35 years i've been watching these recurrent dramas in human nature and uh the we expect it uh we have an egocentric bias that the loss of us is going to be this crushing you know all the scaffolding of their existence is gonna crumble the truth of the matter is is that they already lost this a long time ago and they already know it and they're just dreading waiting for the other shoe to drop and so it's it's a it's in in ways it's the most important and liberating relief when they have to deal with it they have a couple of bad weekends and they start to move on and their life gets better so their life probably is a lot better in six weeks than it is that one that they're in they have to go through some pain to get there but it's it's a move for the positive it's the reduction of distortion uh which is a a very technical way of looking at it but the truth is is that the reduction of distortion in your body tissues or in your thinking this is the way that life improves is through essentially just the integration of the truth wow now one thing that i i've uh you know when i was younger what i would when i get broken up with um i would want to know what was the reason right i mean dumped right dumped yes dumped thanks a lot thanks for bringing it up i'm traumatized now forever all right i'm sorry so when i would get dumped uh i would i would be wondering like why tell me the reason and and it was uh you know the the the brain would say well so i can try to improve the display better essentially for next time right and then when i was doing the breaking up when i was a when i was younger it was like i was like well i don't like being not told the reason i don't like being you know told the diplomatic thing oh just not me it's you and so i would just tell girls the truth and and i didn't realize and as i grew older i was realizing you can't do that that's that's that's not the way to do it so what wha what's what's what's the deal there what was my distortion i i've never figured it out well what did you do what did you do for a living before you became a doc electrical engineer yeah i don't think we kind of need to dissect that tonight uh the truth of the matter is when someone is being rejected and they're hurt and they're losing uh that's the last time to give them feedback okay if there's any feedback ever to be given it's by some other party you know very gently saying well that you considered this and considered that you know the uh but no the the truth of the matter is is that your your subjective reasons why someone did no longer qualified are uh they may be unique to you which point this is worthless or they may not be unique to you which is then the other person has other avenues to get that information including their own brain and um and everyone knows that there's a few parameters that you have to excel as best you can to qualify that's just how it is so yeah there's no the rule is don't get specific about anything it in in essence there's plenty of truth in the issue is it's me not you in other words whatever it is about me that happens to be about me that happens to make it so that you aren't the right person for me is really my problem it's not your problem okay and that that is why there's truth and sitting right there on that on that strategy and it's the it's the appropriate strategy to use and and just to clarify it only happened like twice before i was like oh no this is the wrong strategy well this is not a good thing and women women will ask you know they'll get really insistent about it like no just tell me i really want to know like tell me and so the engineer mind you and then you tell them you're like well okay if you're if you really want to know you've asked me four times so i guess it means you're serious so i must have it right like don't don't do it even if they hold you up at gunpoint dr hawk and say tell me at that point you appeal this is outside intervention yes that's when you tell them you know what the truth of the matter is you're just too young and too pretty oh come on for god's sake i love that i love that thank you where's my toxic masculinity barf emoji alarm all right let's uh let's roll it [Music] before i get in any deeper yeah all right our final question uh dear doctors i am a 30 year old male and i honestly don't feel a very strong connection to my family i grew up in a fairly toxic environment of alcoholism and the whole experience has left me jaded towards the mainstream view of family would it make sense that different individuals would have different cbs when it comes to hamilton's rule secondly i have a very sweet girlfriend but i recently told her i was hesitant about the idea of marriage because it seems like too big of a risk and not essential to have a meaningful relationship with someone her response to this and the feelings about family has been to suggest i go to therapy to deal with my childhood issues how do i tell her that that would be a waste of time [Laughter] well let's uh jen please feel free to assist me in this as if i if if i get if i get if it gets a little stern um the uh we can we can first of all understand the the young ladies perspective because this sounds like probably a very good relationship in a serious relationship and and it sounds like they're they're of child bearing years and so this is on this uh young lady's agenda potentially and so you know this is this is the guy that she wants to go down this direction with so this is she's i'm guessing here and i'm reading tea leaves a little bit but she's all in on this guy now he's looking at the situation and he's running the cost benefit just like she is and he also has a little bit of a history of seeing that that that family life just because it's family life doesn't somehow make it a good life so she's he's clear about this in possibly a way that she's not quite so clear so we don't know quite what's running through her head she may simply have a vision that really good guy love this guy like to sleep with this guy wouldn't it be neat to have a couple of kids and a house and ie play out the domestic bliss strategy so this is no surprise that this is where she would be and if she had a happen to have a bunch of agreeable pleasant parents and siblings and had a wonderful family upbringing then she's thinking why on earth wouldn't we do this this is exactly what i want to do okay she's naive of course she doesn't she doesn't understand that we're talking about uh making a 50-year decision with a five-year chip and so the we can look at the vast majority of marriage partners 10 or 15 years later and it is not a domestic bliss that they thought it was going to be and that doesn't mean it's terrible it just means it might be mediocre or okay or so so but people can be craving their freedom and wishing that they weren't uh roped into all the obligations uh and uh and responsibilities that that entails and this guy can sniff it now in terms of individual differences in running cbs on basically it's not just hamiltonian you know this isn't just relatedness coefficients this is just the whole enterprise it's it's all about this um so it's all about the marriage the long-term marriage the the giving up of casual meeting strategy the giving up uh uh on not just casual meeting strategy but the possibility of meeting a better mate five years from now or eight years from now and now you have a set of circumstances where that that becomes just exorbitantly expensive in in many respects and it really isn't going to be done so this guy uh the questions that i ask people like this i have to say they wind up getting specific in other words how old are you how old is the young lady how long have you been going together how happy are you in the relationship and for how long have you been happy in the relationship okay these are all critical parametric questions uh that that speak to the intelligence of you know and the intelligence of how quickly we would move towards marriage and what we would the hoops that the relationship would need to jump through before we would reasonably consider it it could also be the case that that the sort of tepid feeling he has about the idea may also be related to his his own cb about this relationship itself and that his own analysis of this as he looks back through his nervous system and looks at his family etc and his quote lack of connection but really this is a a red herring and a possible smoke screen for what the truth is which is what is to see beyond this specific relationship with this specific young lady okay so i can't answer the question uh in any other way that then to tell you that in order to give you better advice i would have to ask and answer these 20 questions i'd have to get i'd have to understand what's going in to this entire package what what i would uh explain to her is that um if you if you wanted to i think the truth is is that usually the the way out of a mess is to get accurate this is not a relationship we're trying to dump and try to throw up some some octopus ink so that they can't see why etcetera the question we just answered a few minutes ago this is a different issue this is two young people trying to play the game of life as intelligently as possible optimize their happiness in the face of their evolutionary designs which were not designed to make this work long term so if you're going to do this you want to go in eyes wide open and be is is on the same team and is educated about how it is to to deal with this so i would actually make a deal with her and that is that i'm happy to go to you know five sessions of counseling if you're willing to read the evolution of desire okay so the evolution of desire is probably the most outstanding uh work in mating research and theory that there is david buss being the author and so that that book will open eyes wide open as to what the actual evolutionary underpinnings of the problem is that you're attempting to face so yeah you're happy to to use your insurance money and pay the copay god forbid don't pay cash for any psychologist so you're glad to do that and you will sort of talk through your issues and see whether or not the therapist can do that that's worth five hours of your time and another five hours of the hassle of getting there and getting home it's worth ten hours to invest in this relationship if she's worth it uh in order to see whether you can leverage and bargain with her about whether or not she's willing to spend that same five hours with david buss and this isn't to precipitate an argument it's to precipitate an attitude of hey let's talk about what we're up against here okay and and she she right now is not in a position to hear any discussion because she's not nearly educated she's completely naive about her own psychology and psychology and your psychology and how it all works she is a believer in the domestic bliss strategy which can happen if lightning strikes it's not that it's impossible it's just that where this relationship is right now between these two personalities we're not there and the question is you know what can we learn about each other to help us plot a course to find out if we can get there so we begin by getting both parties educated in what is that we're really looking at so that's one way to do it jen i'm happy to ask for help what else do you see and what else what else comes to mind um yeah i it's an interesting suggestion to have her read the evolution of desire because if she is sweet and naive as she's being kind of painted in this um in this question i i have a little bit of concern that that's gonna throw her for an enormous loop um and you know sort of all of the all of the uh it raises a lot of questions because i don't think that the issues are necessarily um she's not worried about cheating right now but she might be after she reads the evolution of desire um but so yeah as you're describing that i'm thinking okay well this is this is maybe not a great idea because she's gonna flip out it's gonna cause a lot of unnecessary conflict but on the other hand that's just moving that it's advancing that conflict in in the relationship up to the point where it's coming up i mean it's this is you were essentially crystal clearing things that haven't had an opportunity to crystal clear themselves yet which is what you would want to do before you would get married anyway so um so yes no harm i mean you you the overarching idea being that you don't want to be trying to stage manage each other in a relationship if it if it is a committed relationship that she wants to turn into a marriage and um you're resistant to for the family reasons and everything else but no reason not to just get it out all out on the table so um and you may discover the other thing that came to mind when you were giving your answer was um you know it the if you found a good cognitive behavioral therapist um who could help you think through some of the some of the distortion if you did if you did genuinely have some really crappy experiences as a child that have um you know left you with this impression of family life always being a um an illusion and a terrible trial um it could be helpful you you may wander your way in those sessions into thinking about things in a new way and discovering some distortions in your own thinking that could be it could surprise you with some benefits and lead to new discussions with her that you haven't had an opportunity to have yet so um if if there's goodwill and everybody is you know coming from the right place on this and really wants to go into an adult relationship that's very open and everything's on the table then i throw everything you've got at it no no reason to avoid it i i have another suggestion i actually have another suggestion and i i sort of had this in the back of my mind but i didn't say it because i've actually walked this road a number of times where i've had people call me and so the uh and i i'm i'm able to uh educate a disturbed spouse or partner in a way that is it's of course threatening but it can be gentle and educational and we bounce our way through human natural history as we explain the the the human you know essentially the human adventure and how it is that people had to become the way they are today in order to solve the adaptive problems of our ancient history and so and how it is that that men and women are are have different sexual psychologies that can absolutely work together but they are uh in often ways at cross purposes and they're they're in evolutionary conflict to some degree they're also in evolutionary cooperation obviously and so by what i attempt to do and what i can explain i can do it better in person because i can watch facial expressions and know when i've stepped on a toe too hard but this person could use myself or jen which gen would be preferable as a as a person for the the partner to actually get some information and get to get some education here the uh because the the the culture is steeled against and actually wants to stick its head in the ground like a bunch of ostriches and does not want to face this information and so ie you need to go to the therapist and work out your childhood issues that's why you don't want to commit like how classic is that right so everything is wrong with that the childhood issues are not having anything to do with the lack of commitment and the lack of commitment you know has mostly to do with the the cb that this young man is running on this woman that's the truth and that doesn't mean that he doesn't love her and that she's not the best thing he might ever see and he's the best she's the best thing he's seen up to date and he's really enjoying uh her her uh intersection of life with her and he loves her okay that doesn't mean he doesn't have cognitive dissonance about the idea of making a 50-year decision with a five-year chip and that doesn't mean he's jaded it means he's a male with possibly a legitimate casual mating structures in there that still fire up and let them know it's there because he's not a monogamous pair bonding female okay and so the truth of the matter is is that she is like the vast majority of people born confused living confused and will die confused and will never understand how it is that this works and so instead much better to you know find some intelligent assets uh like us or anybody like us or any readings the mating mind evolution of desire etc where a person can actually learn you know look at videos of david buss uh very articulate guy the uh there are the individual needs some uh essentially what do you call that when you've been brainwashed what do you do deconditioning programming d programming that's what i was looking for yeah the uh the young lady has uh needs to be deprogrammed a little bit and uh in doing so they they might be able to face a future just with their eyes open instead of in in you know quiet subterranean conflict and frustration all of that said the the i have childhood childhood issues so i can't commit to you is an excellent strategy for our previous question yeah how to break i've i've used it myself many times this is like what is it like these card games that you know what's the answer you pick up a card and it answers the question in some funny way yeah that's what it is yeah this is that this is precisely yeah this is precisely the card we use for that situation it fits perfectly totally so dr hawk i have a question for you uh which is um what would you how would you expect a female to respond if if this particular gentleman said that he's totally fine doing the marriage the commitment all that stuff except for signing the government contract um which which it seems from his question that's where he's he says is too big of a risk how do you and how do you expect her to respond to something like this well i i don't think i'm the right person to answer for on behalf of the the the fairer sex because i myself i'm so i'm so open that i would be delighted by that proposition i'd be like hell yeah let's just have the party um and i know that a lot of women feel that way um but a lot of women do not so it's really difficult to give just a general answer as far as you know how women would feel um because i i do think that those norms have changed fairly recently where a lot of women feel like i do where they they want the they want the display of the commitment to the village you know they want to have the the ceremony and the party and the registries um but they the the actual government paperwork is much less important to them but um for some women it's extremely important um and for some uh you know sometimes there's some legitimacy to that for whatever reason so um but yeah i mean it's worth if that if that were a way to if that is really his risk analysis and he's willing to kind of commit to her and have the party and just not um legally bind himself and she would be okay with that certainly worth having that conversation and exploring whether that's a possibility that could work for both of them because that solves a lot of problems at once and you are self-described as more open too so maybe that oh totally we see the personalities and pandora yeah and they're i mean uh not pendants prenuptial contracts contracts in pandemics yeah i think openness openness i mean this is we've talked about this before how they're you know i have many good friends that are in many non-traditional relationships of all types and you just kind of don't know until you have whatever equilibrium bubbles up from that from the kind of core relationship at the center of that to find out whether it's some sort of there's some openness there's some polyamory there's some uh you know roommates that you sleep with sometimes there's all kinds of i have i have a lot of different friends who are in all kinds of different arrangements um and um and so if that's something that she's open to and that he would be interested in um get that out on the table early certainly before you you legally marry someone
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