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Episode 251: Am I with Mr Right for the wrong reasons
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dear doctors i struggle with something rather common but i'd still would like to hear your take on it from an evolutionary standpoint i'm a 26 year old female and in a two-year relationship with a guy let's call him luke luke is a medical doctor works at the hospital he's rather smart looks wise he's pretty average but neither overweight nor has a funky smell he's a nice guy will provide for me and the family as soon as we have kids which is already on our agenda he respects my wishes to a large extent and eats only plant-based at home though he used to eat meat on on the regular he is caring always there for me even when i'm going a bit crazy sounds perfect right well when i was 20 i met a guy let's call him dave and we became best friends after a year or so we had a short phase where we had sex for him out of convenience for me also because i was crushing very hard on him which led to quite some trouble and our friendship wasn't the same ever since we did hear each other every couple of months but we never got that close again he also moved to another country close by i really fell for him though and all throughout the years i was never able to let go of him he appeared in my dreams so on so forth he's the same age as i am and my partner but restarted college again in the new country he is in now he's in no position to provide while i want to be a stay-at-home mom also he's not into me he never was and i don't think he ever will be we totally vibe but i don't think we would fit together as a couple and i don't know why i can't get this guy out of my head he still makes me shaky after five years and a lot of misbehavior on his side luke on the other side is nice but i never really crushed on him once it was all a rational choice so please tell me how can i let go of this feeling for dave i just don't get it my mind is totally on board with planning my future life with luke and having a family and kids soon but still there's always this nagging voice and this nagging feeling reminding me of dave i also thought about him while i was having sex with luke and i feel really bad about it how do i move on i just want to be happy and feel like i feel like this is standing in my way well this is actually a great question and i appreciate the person's you know uh honesty in asking it and i understand the the sort of uh there's a quiet deep and profound urgency to to this question uh so i'll give my take on it and then jen will come back and and correct me or give a woman's perspective etc and just shine her her light from her own view but i feel pretty strongly about this so um this is a let me let me sort of explain a little bit of something about about the the human uh sort of how the emotion system works so the way the emotion system works is that that uh if you can imagine a line segment a horizontal line segment and on the far right of it we're going to put acute excitement and on the far left of it we're going to put acute dread in misery and right down the middle is neutral and what this is is what i call the continuum of value and so what your mind does is your mind's actually a super complicated parallel processing computer that takes in information from many sources one of them is uh certainly your uh well it's your sensory data is what comes in through five senses it then computes uh it matches up what it is that it's seeing and smelling and tasting and hearing and feeling it matches those up against the data that resides in the genetic code for estimating the biological value of those sensory inputs so when you take a a bit of fruit that looks a little odd and uh and it's shiny and you find out you know that in a textbook that actually has a name so you actually know that it's a fruit and a textbook says it's not poisonous uh what will happen is you bite into it a little bit you'll you'll have you know your sensory system will be estimating the biological value of that you'll be careful about it because it's novel but you will you'll compute it and you know if it tastes kind of sour doesn't taste very good then you won't be very excited about it if it tastes exquisitely positive you'll have a very different reaction so the reactions you have run the gamut from the the dread of feeling like you're you're you're trapped you know under the water with a uh you know suddenly but three sharks are triangulating on you okay on the other hand the other thing is is that you're some guy you you went up to this girl in your history class the you who's smoking hot you're pretty decent looking and you you actually you know manage after class to walk with her chat with a little bit and then you ask her out she says yes okay that's pretty damn excited so these are this is the continuum of value and these values are computed all of them down through the genetic code that requires sensory data and then it also requires memory systems to help modify your understanding so if it turns out that you just heard that there's a 75 sail off at macy's on sweaters and you've been looking for them like that's not in the genetic code to know what macy's is or 75 off is but you can compute it against what is in fact in the genetic code which is the understanding of value and trade and what that all means etc you can compute that now so what i'm getting at is that the um what you feel is the result of very complicated computations um and if there's one thing that is a pretty bizarre thing to be doing in this day and age if you are a competent human if you're a competent enough human to be judged by a 26 year old medical doctor to be wife material then i am assuming that you can chew walk uh chew gum and walk and support yourself and not be a beggar with a bowl in your hand trying to figure out how on earth you're going to survive at which point the question to me comes what on earth are we doing contemplating a relationship that feels this flat now that's from my personal perspective because my personal perspective would say wouldn't we be attempting to find a stimulus that is hitting the nervous system and telling it that it's actually quite it's quite happy and that that stimulus is causing pretty solid reliable high moods of happiness if that's not happening at 26 before you had kids then my crystal ball tells me that if you get married and have a couple of kids with this guy you could just you know kiss off any sexuality interest that you're gonna have for the rest of your life with this guy now that's my guess but that guess uh you know it probably if we computed correlation coefficients on similar women under similar circumstances over time i probably got 80 percent of the variance predicting it my way the uh in terms of the the dingbat that you have a crush on that you still think about well one of the reasons is that you haven't got anybody in front of you that is a that is an excitement competitor and so as a result your nervous system is circling around realizing wait a second there was a moment in time when it felt that excitement of high biological value in a mating situation now that mating situation is ludicrous you gotta got a little ding chip in your head uh because somehow the way this thing ended it didn't end with enough drama and enough clean clear you know absolute rejection in your face enough to uh the guy was friendly enough about it somehow you got out of dodge without you wanting to kill him okay but bottom line is is you don't qualify and that's that you never will so as you speculate it's interesting that you actually don't realize that as you talk about how you quote vibe well together but you would want to be a stay-at-home mom and he blah blah it's like jesus you're fantasizing about a guy who has like zero interest in you okay so that's interesting so we've got a little chip in your head we've got a hanging chad on your ballot uh that you're not like getting it clear but i think one of the reasons that you may be circulating around this is because you're in a situation that that you know although this guy is a very good guy and there's nothing quote objectional about it my dad used to have a phrase about things he would say there's nothing wrong with it but there's nothing right with it either and this sounds like a relationship that's a flat coke and so if we're trying to figure out why you can't let go dave it's because luke isn't exciting enough for you to let go dave and your nervous system is whispering to you across the millennia across the 100 000 years a million your female ancestors that go back to the dawn of pair bonding are telling you hmm pretty big freaking sacrifice for resources chief it's too high okay so pretty much every woman uh maybe not everyone but close has the opportunity to trade sufficiently down in terms of her sexual interest in order to get more resources we call it quote settling okay now there's a time and a place to settle probably like i don't know you got rheumatoid arthritis you're 58 years old you haven't saved any money you know i mean you're on your own i don't know what else you got you got an adult daughter who's a special needs child but you're still taken care of and it turns out there's a friendly old bachelor who's 72 who takes a shine to you that he's not sexually functional but he'd sure like to hang with you and he'd actually like to marry you and you have no interest in the guy at all and he kind of smells but what the hell he's got a lot of money and he's generous and he's pleasant okay we'll think about that 26 wow okay wow now to be fair we're seeing life from my perspective okay i think my my sort of feeling about life and my feeling about romantic passion and my feeling about relationship management i actually think is pretty average for the species maybe i'm overly romantic and i'm a lot more romantic than i think i am but i don't think so okay so your decision and what this sounds like it could be that you on the other hand may be remarkably tame and if you are and this sounds and feels like a pretty good deal but somehow maybe you're going to let go of dave one day after you have a couple of kids and they're looking up at you and you realize this this is your life maybe you're gonna be fine okay but if you're flat about this and you're flat about the sexuality and you really don't find this guy appealing you know i i don't know we'd have to assess you know inside your head and you have to look at this but don't get into something because you're being sort of swept into it and you are addicted to the status that comes with the fact that you'd be marrying a doctor i had a i had a supervisor in grad school who you know obviously became a phd in in clinical psychology and she was a nice looking woman and and uh and she was in her in her 40s and finally got married and she was jewish and her mother was this old jewish tough jewish gal from new york with the new york accent and when she got when she got her doctorate her mother said oh honey you're a doctor that's almost as good as marrying one okay so yeah it's almost as good as marrying one well you can marry one if you want and maybe that's a little [ __ ] nobel prize that's that's got some shine in your eye but careful be very careful be careful with this man's feelings does he really want to does he deserve to spend his life with somebody who feels like he's a flat coke that he doesn't quote smell too bad okay so uh that that's my my dire warning here is careful you're you're designed as a passionate organism uh obviously you've had a weakness delta fiasco with this guy before but that's that's still i see that instead of more of a an open loop that you can't close i see it as a warning about your current circumstances i could be wrong so jen give us give us your take tell me what you think how are you feeling yeah i think this is much less to do with weakness delta um the this dave character um and and much more to do with the estimation of your current circumstances than in the fiance and how he qualifies so i think i think doug is mostly um completely on the right track there i do think two two things one you know you're asking how you can kind of um get over these feelings and close the loop nothing closes the loop as effectively if the loop can be closed uh with with the one who got away in this kind of context because you know most people have kind of a one who got away scenario a weakness delta story very similar to this so nothing will close that loop more rapidly and effectively than uh you know going and seeing him in person and recognizing that he probably doesn't qualify anymore so i i have certainly been in that position i know a lot of people who have they kind of have this built up narrative uh an idea of of the this past toured relationship that they had and 10 years later they go meet the guy for coffee and realize there's just there's there's no there there um and this all just exists in their head and it's you know it's this very exciting fantasy but there's that absolutely closes the loop in a second of course it might not you know might might open the gates of hell and you might recognize that he does still qualify and that that's still a problem but either way it's really good information so if there is a way to connect with him um you know it might work to kind of zoom chat with him you mentioned he's in a different country so this might be logistically fraught with all kinds of peril but i i have definitely kind of been circling around whether uh a blast from the past qualifies and when you see them in person and and kind of remember the you know the the reality of the situation that will close the loop in a hurry for you um a lot of the time so i just wanted to kind of throw that out there um the other is that you know this is all you know i think i think doug probably is fairly typical for the species um but that doesn't mean that you are so you know this is all about your personality and your risk tolerance so if you if you kind of picked um picked luke out of out of the lineup and you made this quote-unquote very rational decision process to want to pair bond with him and you're planning for a certain number of kids by a certain age uh you know you're feeling the pressure of that timeline and there's a certain agenda that you have for your life um and you're not particularly uh you know motivated by great romance great passion great great excitement in this kind of way and if your risk tolerance is is really low because of course that's the that's always the trade like you can you can give up this potentially you know somewhat mediocre trade that you're making um at least mediocre in some ways uh on the off chance not probably not likely with the the guy from the past but the the off chance that there is another great romantic love and and great passionate situation out there for you that can kind of hit all the pair bond circuits in addition to all of the sexually exciting circuits it's certainly possible it does happen but there is a risk that that would never happen um so there's a risk that you know you you give up the sure thing um and you sort of cruise through the wilderness for some amount of time and you miss your window for this for this life that you wanted to create for yourself um and so you're not able to have the kids that you wanted your your your you know you have that situation where you feel regret for letting go of the stable thing to chase the the excitement of the potential butterflies with someone else so this is really just a personal this is about who you are and what you value and what kinds of trade-offs you're willing to make and what kind of risk you're willing to tolerate um but i think we can we can definitely agree that this has very little to do with the um the the dude from the past it's i think he he is a proxy for your uncertainty about your current relationship and and whether we dispatch him with a meeting in person or somehow close that loop in another way he he will like a game of whack-a-mole the the specter of dave from the past will rise again when you're you know 10 years into this marriage and um you know you you meet a guy at work or you know your brother has a friend that he introduces you to and you start to have these kinds of same thoughts that you have about dave um but in this context you're thinking about stepping out of your marriage so the the the dave the the dave problem is really just a um he's just a placeholder for this um the uneven cb that you have on the pair bond and the sort of defection probability that you're going to have for the entire ride most likely so um yeah it's a it's a tough decision it requires a lot of um intense self-reflection on your part yeah uh fabulous jen i had uh somehow i've been intimidated by the idea that the guy was in a foreign country uh but thank god you know that's why we work as a team because uh if he had if he was in kansas i'd say go see him okay so i i quietly been been pushed around by that by that logistical issue the um but i would completely agree by the way i want to vote my concurrence uh i had a i think a 15-year cognitive dissonant crazy situation with a young lady that she had i told her go to florida she was in california go to florida go track this guy down she knew he was married and he had a couple of kids she did it anyway had lunch and it was done it was it was a fine warm beautiful meeting but 15 years of dreaming and scheming and not being able to be invested in any other relationship went up in smoke and the loop was closed at the you know within 20 minutes into a lunch so super just exactly what you're talking about jen that the the reality versus the the construction and memory was two entirely different things yeah you you basically the female nervous system is going to admire admire him much more in retrospect than you are if you're face to face with him um and i i have watched many friends go through this situation i have personally experienced it more than once where you're sort of like got a massive open loop you're completely hung up um and and you know often especially when there's distance involved and the the kind of um you're having this you know semi emotional affair is going on where you know you're having these furtive little conversations in the middle of the night i i had one guy who i was totally the one who got away from him and he was he was only messaging me at like he's living on the east coast and i would get these you know it became a pattern that i would get i would start to get these texts at like 3 a.m uh east coast time and it was on like friday night it was when he came home and he had a few glasses of wine and that was when he started messaging me and feeling like oh yeah i gotta gotta start this up again and i didn't have the full picture so that's a very enticing you're sort of like oh i'm getting all these really positive signals what's going on um and then you know you actually meet the guy for coffee or for lunch and you realize oh you're just you're just a shmo you're just a shmo stuck in an office job like you know like like having having a hard time in your own marriage and i'm a little outlet i'm a little flirtatious outlet for you i'm not an actual uh possibility so that it just it shuts these things it shuts all that distortion down in a second to see what you're really dealing with um so if that's possible highly recommended there you go right wonderful yeah dr hawk dr lyle thank you all right nathan all right that's a that's an emotional big one to see what else we got tonight yeah yeah well it's tough it's really that's it it's like brings up the principle that there's no easy answer yeah you know like she's likely to feel regret either way so there's there's you know and unless we have door number three which is that she you know leaves this this engagement and you know pretty quickly finds the love of her life that hits all of the all of the right circuits um so that's possible that possibility exists but there's some probability associated with it and then there's also some probability associated with the other options and so there's a there's a relatively high risk that okay if you stay in the mediocre marriage you're going to regret never having gone out and looked for something better and if you go out and look for something better and never find it you're going to regret that you didn't stay with the stable guy so you have to be you have to like courageously embrace those probabilities of risk on either side and assess them really honestly with yourself to figure out what path to walk recognizing that that either way that you go there is this there is a potential chance that you lose it all so um yeah yeah it's not there's no pat easy answer to that mm-hmm that's your 26 at 26 yeah you know i i'd have a lot i'd be feeling i'd be talking a lot tamer if you were 37. yeah that's that's very true i wanted to come back to a really important point that you made though which is that um it's also it's also um about luke so let's not forget about luke and his and his you know life happiness and what he deserves in his pair bond um so uh you know i it's easy to kind of get wrapped up with your own seabees and what's best for me um but the the question of is does you know does he deserve someone who's not all in um it's one thing for you to kind of feel like this is the best option for you and maybe he's agreeable and he's you know he's kind of going to go along with it and he's on board and he's over rewarded and so everything's fine but is that really fair to him is that is that something that you want to be responsible for um you know if if you know if you know that it's not everything that you want um are you willing to basically steal his his time and his opportunities in that way that's a really important part of this moral calculation that is huge i have to tell you i just went through this process with a fabulous long-term client and this uh this lady was uh it's been looking a long time and she's in her deep in her 30s and she's you know ambivalent about children and uh but ambivalent meaning doesn't is is truly ambivalent doesn't know if she wants to or doesn't want to and has never had the right situation and uh has uh has had a relationship here in the last year of someone who um is a superb provider and this has actually been a real issue this individual by virtue of their their life uh history and risks that they've taken and sort of their sort of interesting and creative career has not had a lot of financial stability in her life and didn't have it in her childhood and so she doesn't just feel that secure in that arena although she's capable human and so as a result this was a very enticing set of circumstances and um so i got you know sort of quiet sos call very barely tapping on the keys on the sos was you know that's what uh morse code like really calling me almost distracting me with some other little issues but really it was an sos okay and we're we're long-time good friends for for many years and as i'm listening uh and i'm hearing what a wonderful human this is but what a what what about you know what do i think about this and i'm like tell me more about what you mean okay and so this is you know there's now we're digging here and i'm hoping to give our 26 year old lady a little flashlight to look inside of her head which is exactly what you just what you're pushing me and us to do jen and that is i really want to know about the sexual chemistry it's it's duration and in other words it's duration in the relationship and and what it feels like now and how the whole thing feels like uh in terms of just how cozy and friendly and warm and sensual and connected and how complete you feel like you know this is good this is my person i'm willing to stand by this person and i'm super happy with them etc etc i mean let's face it this is a tall order you're asking you're asking the nervous system to make a 50-year decision with a five-year chip but does it feel like it is and in no time by the way it it became quickly apparent that there was great cognitive dissonance and it was the wrong place to be and uh within a week within a week of the initial conversation uh which believed me there was no heavy duty pressure on my part at all all i had to do is ask questions just just a little bit of crystal clear okay and pretty soon it starts tumbling out and then pretty soon it's the the feeling of letting down the other person and how how that you know how you know that they're going to be so upset and that gosh it's such a nice situation and if i ever did want to have kids this would be an unbelievably easy thing and this guy treats me better than anybody that has ever treated me i'm being treated like a queen but at the same time you know what i mean there's this gnawing feeling and if there's one thing that will will help a person get clear it's what jen just mentioned which is important and that is this you know does this guy are are you essentially doing him a favor are you falling on your sword because it's so good for them and they're so happy and they're so proud etc etc and they're so glad to be with you and yet you really don't you're not feeling it in any big way at all but you're a nice person they're a nice person they're a great provider blah blah blah okay well i have to tell you the relief that was felt when she gritted her teeth and made the right decision was profound it was you know kind of uh just disturbing you know to do it and to grind it and it was upsetting upsetting conversation but it was a tense couple three days but at the end it was like you know what thank god that is uh i had a phrase for it that it came up with in our conversation it was something like that's like the most important conversation or the most important communication that ever happens the most important communication that you will ever do or the most difficult communication that you'll ever do is when you have to face up to the fact that somebody that loves you and that you love as a human does not qualify and you have to grit your teeth and pull away and the truth is is that you should be doing it just as much for them as you're doing it for you they don't deserve it uh they don't deserve to uh get fool's gold for their life for their life achievement in the parabon in the in the romance arena can you imagine just in principle like uh in this situation let's everybody just put on our imagination hat and let's imagine that this dynamic remains relatively constant and let's suppose that this young lady is thinking and in her mind and her imagination while she's having sex with her husband every time she's thinking about this other guy that's where her mind goes to maintain her excitement that's what she's thinking it's like if you are the husband and you knew that that's what was going on inside your wife's head is that where you would want to be okay that that doesn't seem square to me the uh so that that seems like that is uh ie my i mean i don't wouldn't bother me if a partner has some fantasy checkerboard that they run all over the place or whatever the heck it is that they do but what we shouldn't have is we shouldn't have a complete disinterest in the partner essentially and our mind is focused on somebody that qualifies that is uh my reaction to such a situation would be whoa don't do me any favors okay don't do me any favors the only place i'm interested in being is a place where i qualify and if i don't qualify don't pretend that i qualify okay in order because it would be convenient that's that's not square that's not optimizing anybody's happiness all right so that's what i have to say about it does that sound about right jen yeah yeah i don't think that's quite what's going on in in the sense that she's um like i i don't think it is a question of the of dave qualifying i i think she recognizes at least within the context of this particular question i mean we're sort of dancing back and forth between the specifics of this question and the general principles but right this specific question it seems clear to me that she's you know she recognizes that there's not a mutual qualification with dave he's just sort of like this lingering open loop so that's part of the reason i'm i'm focused on closing the loop i think that you know if you are if that's you know dominating your sexual fantasies that that you know are taking you out of the moment with with um with luke i you know i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having sort of escapist you know you're you're all over the place i think the female nervous system is more prone to do that um but yes certainly in the case where if it were oh if only i could be with my prince charming who is not this guy that's kind of a that's a different thing than just being sort of lost in a in a fantasy whether it's with an old partner or somebody you have a crush on or whatever i think there's there are degrees of difference there yes but um and i think she's probably more in the more in the this is just an escapist fantasy type camp rather than i'm obsessing about somebody that i really would prefer to be with rather than the person i'm actually with um certainly in that case yeah that would be really really really really bad news but yeah it's um it's i mean yeah this is not i mean we're giving this a lot of time because it's such a complex you know there's so much going on here it matters you know there's so much rigorous self-interrogation required here um which is difficult to do at 26. it's difficult to do without a lot of life experience and there's because she's in the situation she's in i also worry about you know leaving leaving this situation and going out and trying her hand and and getting really excited about what she thinks is some new pair bond and getting played for casual mating and and basically you know getting the um the the the wishbone have you talked about the wishbone on the podcast before i i don't think i have i'm i'm i'm issuing an invitation but at 26 if she's i'm just thinking of her like the fact that she knows she wants children you know she's got to kind of get this figured out in the next five years or so um ideally and if she spends a lot of time um you know after this really if she does leave this relationship and then she gets caught up because she's chasing the excitement of being like kind of by definition if she finds herself really excited and really over rewarded by a new guy who's throwing a bunch of pair bond signals he could keep her he could you know steal a year or two from her and she could find a row of those and pretty soon wake up and she's 32 33 and hasn't had her first kid yet so that is you know a very um plausible scenario for somebody in this situation who's kind of chasing passion rather than stability so i just i'm just to complicate the situation even further i want to be aware of that yeah yeah that one's a uh that that one hmm i have a suspicion and yeah we're taking a tremendous amount of time with this because this is actually one of the great dilemmas of human life so of of the great dilemmas of human life this is in the top ten so the so it makes sense for jen and i to look at this from all angles and um and i think um i think yeah i think we're we are coming down on on slightly different uh angles on this and this is just has to do with who it is that we are and our own life experiences and just and uh male versus female and everything else under the sun the um i can i it actually takes me back to a conversation when harry met sally uh when when uh when they're arguing about uh sexuality and passion or something like this and they're just friends and they're in the they're in the shop and uh and and harry harry's like rolling his eyes and basically says um you know that's because you haven't had good sex or whatever and she says no it's because women are more practical about these things and here you know and harry's like yeah yeah and then so he kind of insults her that she hasn't ever had good sex and then she does the famous fake orgasm scene in the middle of the restaurant you know it's the most priceless then rob reiner gave his mother the best line in the movie which is i'll have what she's having you know so that's oh i didn't know that was rob reiner yeah that's rob reiner's mother he especially gave that line to her so the uh but that's that's where that's where we're seeing and you can see slightly different angles and that's why you know uh this is i i i of course it had to be shakespeare you know to the itself be true um and that is uh this is the self-reflection that's involved here how much do you really like this guy do you find this guy personally attractive irrelevant of his of his uh attractiveness to the world and you know it's how does this feel being in this relationship if you're happy if you have sexual fantasy but you are you know with other with some other guy for a while that's a loose screw in your head for uh but in fact the relationship has been solid and sensual and attract uh has as attraction as it's as its ether then all of that is fine and i then that's a different thing this this uh feels like it might be an sos to me and it feels like it might be uh asking for somebody to ask the hard questions and to put it under the hot uh halogen lamp and say wait a minute what the hell are you doing you're engaged what what is this about okay and to to be careful about let's not get swept up in the pseudo-esteem of quote marrying a doctor careful okay let's not have a mediocre conflicted existence in this area when we're 26 years old and you got plenty of time to go for a gold medal okay so that's what this conversation's about so look we look at it from all angles but at the end of the day it's it's looking yourself in the mirror and thinking hard what am i doing okay am i am i doing this for the right reasons and does this really feel right that's what we need to figure out i've been doing this podcast now for almost five years and you know over the years a number of men have written to me with this exact scenario but from the male's perspective is they just they got into evolutionary psychology because they fear that this might happen or maybe it did happen to them and they're like a few years out of a divorce uh with a couple of kids you know and then the the wife ended up confessing um and so i think at the before when we started the podcast there was not very much evolutionary psychology uh you know for mainstream consumption it was mostly from the casual mating perspective of males uh but i know that that a lot of our listeners were you know were were not on not geared towards that they were actually trying to figure out how to avoid this cert certain this type of situation um so yeah i really appreciate dr hawk uh your perspective dr lyle your perspective um you know for for males um is this guy luke is he missing something is he just kind of willfully ignorant or or do you think um he he you know is he is he just too enamored with a height beautiful question beautiful question uh who knows and she knows because she knows whether or not she's authentically responsive to this guy and therefore giving him authentic uh authentic enthusiastic signals uh and therefore i.e whether or not we've got a love dynamic okay and so uh if if but if if she's bluffing him and it's actually pretty lukewarm i.e no pun intended and um and and the truth of the matter is gold star for that yeah totally by accident i don't have that chip in my head the uh so uh but yeah you you make an interesting point nathan and that is that um uh you know we we don't know what that circumstance is and for all we know he he could be he could be in a little bit of a situation where if he's over rewarded and he can kind of sniff this he's figuring on just uh with these sort of ex the chick excitement of quote marriage you know what i mean which is a chick motive vastly more than a male motive that um that if he can sort of uh ride a tide of the excitement of marrying the doctor uh and all of what that entails uh for for her life that maybe he maybe he gets to win a game that he isn't really authentically winning and and he could be going you know willfully unconscious of that fact and and and essentially hope that the accoutrements and children that are involved in in that process wind up essentially putting a moat around that female and he gets to win uh uh sexier dna than he actually won in in fair competition so that that could absolutely be going on and so uh that that's a great question a lot of i mean a lot of marriages are going to be founded in that sort of mutual pseudo-esteem deception you know so she's she's caught up with the pseudo-esteem of his status in the world and he's caught up with the pseudo-esteem of her attractiveness and you know neither that that that becomes the kind of the the yeah it just becomes the context of like what sustains that dynamic and it's it's not it's not the the life that either doug and i doug or i would recommend or choose for ourselves it's sort of like we you know like what what are you really valuing what are you really um like when you really sit down like the pseudoesteem test is is really sitting and you know asking yourself you know if i were if i were stuck on a desert island would i want to be with this person like if i if i had a month left to live would i want to spend those days with that person just sitting and talking and and connecting with each other like is that is that who i really want to be with or not rather than you know what what is the outside world thinking of them how am i how is my status in the village going up because she's on my arm or because you know i get to i get to say that i'm married to this high status position so um and it's i i don't think it would be unusual at all for for both parties to be somewhat or largely motivated by pseudo-esteem but it's something to be vigilant against um and again to to kind of contrast against your own nature and your own actual priorities just to make sure that you're not falling into a trap if it's a trap that you want to live in because it complements your life goals and um and you don't you don't care about the things that it prevents you from experiencing as much as other people would then it's fine like it can be a benign trap um if if it's sort of you know you're in a a real housewife kind of situation and it's all it's all good um but if that's not aligned with who who you want to be and and the kind of life that you want to have and the kind of relationship that you want to have then it's time for some some really hard thinking about it wonderful and perhaps this may nobody yeah there's nobody like jen hawk oh he's never heard of anything i've never heard anybody in my life talk like jen hawk i've just never heard anybody like it it's unbelievable very nice thank you thank you for the uh thanks thanks for the esteem shout out i appreciate that just making up for the intro he's my camera yeah no all right nathan i think that's enough yeah i think i think it's a it's a great segue to uh for for listeners who want to hear more of dr hawk uh you jen you have a bull program now with the moments with their moments of zen with jen is that right that's on people can find that on jen hawk.com yeah it's called i i changed the title to make it you know sort of more just more general title so it's called the virtual village as in the kind of virtual stone age village so yeah it's kind of a group thing a group coaching slash um weekly q a just community um discussion that happens that yeah it's a it's a monthly thing so if people want to sign up for a month at a time they can find find that on my website wonderful yeah and for people who want to hear more of dr lyle and dr hawk together steamdynamics.com is just a wonderful website with a with a really reasonable either monthly price or a lifetime price and the lifetime lifetime sign up includes your upcoming books so uh go go check out steamdynamics.com uh you guys and uh i know i'm a member there and i've watched a lot of the videos they're really really really in depth and they they kind of cover the fundamentals dr lyle yeah that's where we do on the weeks weeks that the podcast is a when the podcast is a repeat um that means that we're doing a live members only q a over on our website so um if you if you want to hear more of us making asses of ourselves on the airwaves um then you can uh that's that's a way to access something that's only for our members over there on off weeks said well so so doctor dr loud doctor talked just quickly to our okay um yeah we've got something else i know just quickly to the point is is it i'm just kind of realizing why it's so unproductive to bring up any sorts of evolutionary psychology or anything like that with people who are not already there because you're threatening their entire existence essentially and exposing some of that some some of that potential feelings that maybe they don't want anybody else to realize uh on the other end oh totally i mean if you're if you're making choices rooted in pseudo-esteem you you don't want a spotlight shown on that process at all like that's that's very troubling um both to your own understanding of what you're up to and to the kind of artifice and facade that you've built around the whole thing so yeah i mean there's a reason that this is politically incorrect content and people people are not always willing to hear it and to apply it to their own choices in their own lives wonderful all good well dr hoch dr lyle thank you so much for this really in-depth answer really appreciate it and we will look forward to hearing for your answers to the rest of the questions our next show you
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