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Episode 252: Periodic State of the Unions, Pair bonds, Disingenuous friend
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dr lyle dr hawk how are you both doing this evening all good well yeah yeah how's it going with you nate uh it's good i i dr lyle i've always skipped the small talk and get straight to the questions again jesus that is well done no comment no comment well we gotta ask well uh how are your dogs jen let's check in with the chicken oh my god oh no let's not all right the dogs are fine it's meaningless knowing that you don't love oh man oh well this is this is kind of like trying to do chit chat with alan you know what i mean when alan when alan gives you a little chit chat line you know this is like totally bonus oh my goodness all right well yeah i am curious how's your weather up there in seattle oh it's it's it's brightened up it's been pretty miserable but it's gotten better in the last couple of days warm enough to have dinner outside and you know go on walks around the around the water and it's not quite as brutal and the the relentless rain has let up a little bit so this is my recollection of what happens around this time of year and then you get slammed again and then it finally brightens up a little bit yeah i was all excited to uh this is this is the perfect time to go up to the university of washington has all these glorious cherry trees and uh and so i was looking online to see you know wednesday when's the best weekend to go and the website is is very much it says you know for the second year in a row the university of washington is officially recommending that everybody enjoy our beautiful cherry trees virtually don't don't come walk around and breathe in the nice fresh air and get some time outside in the sun and um you know yeah it's it's pretty even in the busiest years with the busiest weekends it's never shoulder to shoulder you know you've got little crowds around certain trees but i don't think it would be anything that they couldn't manage so i was a little disappointed to see that for sure no brother i'd go anyway were they gonna walk you off the place yeah yeah i mean well it's a huge campus i mean it's sort of there's a concentration of of the most cherished you know the fanciest oldest trees that people cross continents and oceans to come see every year yeah um but uh but there's beautiful you know cherry blossoms all over the campus so i don't have to go necessarily to the quad and um join in the masses i can just enjoy the campus in general so i i plan to do that and stay properly socially distanced from all in the process because god's sakes i was at the grocery store the other day and i saw there was like three or four atms all next to each other and they had those you know the x's where you're supposed to stand six feet away from each other but the atms are like horizontally they're close together so i mean i was just thinking can you imagine how many more people would have died of covet if kovan knew how to travel horizontally i mean it's just really [Laughter] good thing it doesn't know yeah that's well well said nathan i i thank goodness oh my god i saw something something on uh twitter that you know one of the so-called technological innovations has been um these sort of qr codes on menus you see these if you go out to restaurants where you know now you know you're no longer handed a filthy contaminated physical menu here you're asked to scan the menu and watch it on your uh you know on your phone on your own filthy contaminated phone right which everybody's phones are completely disgusting we know we know this um but at least it's your own filth you know mostly um but there were there were some observations um about how you know how this is this is the kind of technology that is more difficult for seniors to you know learn quickly it's sort of like disproportionately difficult and so how many uh wait staff are hovering closely over seniors trying to you know just order whatever they want off the menu and having much more proximity to them than they otherwise would have if they just had the big filthy plastic menu so sure these sort of unintended consequences that are impossible to track in a meaningful sort of way across the population but interesting to think about i'm gonna go see the cherry trees you're gonna be responsible about it but that's that's at the threshold of my kind of you know i i i think that preventing outdoor activities gets into the realm of a little absurd totally absurd just that there's like no there's not a single shred of evidence that covet has ever been hopped outdoors in an outdoor situation type situation from person to person obviously if you're two feet away from screaming at a football game that's a different story but just in general outdoors i mean it's ludicrous so oh well almost done in case people didn't know you can go look at the little the little curves on the uh world ometer website and you can see that cobit is now tailing off to a very small percentage of of what it you know was even two months ago what two months ago was uh covets peak in the us of a major third wave which was the was the big one and so uh we're now down to something on the order of i think maybe below 20 of that i think the the peak was 300 000 a day we're now looking at about 50 000 cases a day and and dropping you know pretty quickly so almost done almost done everybody the uh california they're they're seeing about a thousand cases a day which means there's probably five thousand a day so that means you know in the next week they'll be probably 25 to 35 real thousand cases as it's tailing off so with 35 or 40 million people that your odds of getting coveted if you're out out and about generally in california is in the next week is about 1 000. so we're almost there almost almost ready to get reasonable well it's about time it's about time you got it all right well let's see what we got nathan all right cool all right now i'm ready all right dear dr hawk and dr lyle it's interesting this question actually has dr hawk first as i guess apparently should be so you know some of the other ones are just dear doctors but yeah dear dr hawk dear dr lyle is it possible to have a personality that is not a good fit for a long-term committed relationship yes no go ahead yeah i mean really we yeah pretty much yes the answer is yes we we let we we just love to hear ourselves talk so we'll spend you know another 45 minutes explaining why but if you're just interested in the answer the answer is yes yeah i hit the buzzer first all right let's hear it nathan all right 200 points dr lyle okay so i'm not sure if i'm too high maintenance i'm moderately agreeable moderately conscientious very open to new experience moderately extroverted and moderately unstable my last relationship of three and a half years he left me because he said i was not stable and that we were not moving forward and in my current relationship of two years i have felt driven to bend over backwards to spend time with my mate even when it meant not getting enough sleep or exercise or not maintaining a balanced lifestyle when i'm in the midst of the relationship i sense that things feel off balance and yet i feel driven and like i have little control of my time and my choices but my partners tend to be sweet caring stable and on the needier side ultimately i fear that if i don't make time for my partner at the expense of my true desires and needs then he will get mad and leave in my current relationship i have finally started saying what is true for me for example i don't want to sleep over because i don't sleep well because my partner snores but i anticipate the relationship will not endure if i continue to take care of myself and say what is true for me in this way i also doubt my ability to actually and consistently stick with myself and say what i need i've been in therapy with the same therapist for the past seven years during these two relationships my therapist thinks my problem is that i do not put myself on the map or follow my compass in most areas of my life and she continues to tell me to practice thinking about and speaking in new ways that express my true desires this has felt impossible to me i feel like i'm stupid and it is as if i can't comprehend the advice she's giving me it makes sense intellectually but i can't do anything with her advice how do i get out of this cycle of denying my needs in order to be with a partner is it possible i'm simply not agile enough to balance the demands of adult life and the demands of a romantic partnership how might my how might i make better choices in order to work with my personality thank you for all the wisdom and insights you share on your podcast and on your website it's truly i know eye opening and life enhancing yeah this will be entertaining you know nothing like having a having a nice a nice big fastball thrown right down the middle of the plate for jen hawk it just it's just great to watch all right yeah i have fun with it well i'll just chime in as i feel like it go ahead jed this is this is doug's way of just you know handing it over to me so he can go hang out with his cats i think this is what's going on here yeah so i mean there's a lot of detail um describing your particularity in this question and a first blush when i hear this particular type of detail you you are you know you're describing yourself as moderately agreeable um and you're hitting the limits of your agreeableness when it comes to quote unquote setting these boundaries in this relationship so of course every therapist you're ever going to go to is all about these these ridiculous phrases following your inner compass putting yourself on the map setting these boundaries um when really you you have some kind of unusual needs that are uh you know you you're happy equilibrium in a romantic relationship is not very typical for the species that doesn't make it abnormal the the abnormal is normal as robert ployman tells us it just means that these are kind of your this is where you're comfy this is what you need you you need to sleep on your own you can't you can't sleep next to somebody who snores you have this high need for independence you have um all of these other things that are sort of not very typical they're not the the rom-com standard of what most people expect and most people in the middle of the bell curve want from a relationship so this is just a question of you coming to terms with the fact that you know you're you're at some kind of intersection in all of your relationships with these sort of unusual ish needs or at least you know needs to a certain degree that are unusual for the population um and you know a relationship that can accommodate those or not so if you're somebody who is wired to you need a lot of time alone you want to have your own space you're feeling very independent i'm very sympathetic to all those things i am that way myself and i have run into situations and relationships where i've had somebody who's wanted a lot more of that togetherness um in a way that makes me feel kind of what you're describing where you're not able to uh have have a balanced life in the same kind of way i've never forfeited sleep or her or some of these other things that you're talking about but maybe i'm a little more disagreeable than you are but i've definitely been in a situation where i have felt like i'm in a relationship where somebody wants things from me wants certain kinds of behaviors that i'm just not really constitutionally suited to provide but that's a moving target based on who you're in a relationship with as well so if you're um if you're with somebody who who can work with you in an active negotiation about what it looks like for both of you to experience a good equilibrium in the relationship and to be able to find that balance and have time alone have time together spend that time in ways that's satisfying to both of you that kind of thing gets a lot easier than with you and then if you're with somebody who is more disagreeable um more demanding of of lots of things that you don't want to give and that can turn into a much lousier back and forth so so i would say i mean it's it's hard to kind of tell how you're feeling about your current partner just in general i'm not not getting a lot of sense from the question um about that this is sounds more like you feel you you can't spend your time in the way that you want to spend your time and i you know what your therapist is trying to get at with putting yourself on the map and following your own inner compass is and that you were having difficulty doing is that you're perceiving that it's just too high cost in this relationship to assert those things um and so you're you're hitting that limit of your agreeableness you feel if you actually tell your partner hey you're snoring a lot and i don't want to be in this room with you i need to sleep on my own that that essentially raises your cost in the context of the relationship and you you don't want to do that because you don't want to lose the relationship so these are things that you just have to do you have to you have to come into this interaction with you know an honest market rate of what it costs to be in a relationship with you otherwise it's not going to be sustainable in the long term so this is one of these places where i'm a big fan of uh goes by different names but but i love calling it the state of the union like a weekly or a monthly check-in about this kind of stuff where you have a designated space in time and container for conflict in the relationship where it gets de-personalized and you can actually bring these things up and and it's not an attack on the other person you're not going after their character you're or you know you're being very careful not to make sweeping statements and hold the other person responsible for your happiness you're just saying this x is not working for me how can we solve this problem together it's you and me together against this issue it's not me against you and by designating specific time for that conversation that can uh be much more productive than just letting it build up and stewing on it like it sounds like you you were in a habit of doing so that's my that's my take on it as somebody who's been in sort of a similar situation before but i'm sure doug can now that he's back from his cats can weigh in as well yeah i just i just like watching you know mike quay our pitch you guys don't know who that is i don't know who that is somebody knows okay the uh unbelievable every psychotherapist and budding psychotherapist in the world should listen to that that set you know five or seven minutes it's just freaking brilliant it's unbelievable i've never heard anything like that from a psychotherapist in my life that good um it's very so it's just this is what it is this is just this this is the situation it's i don't know anybody just go go try to hit quail good luck to you this is uh i i would what jen is uh uh she's laid out like i think every detail in this thing the um i have a simplistic a couple of simplistic points that that don't add much it's more for a knuckle dragger way of looking at it a knuckle dragger way of looking at it is her she had it she had i forget what you just called it you know you're gonna do the state of the union we're gonna look at this thing all this freaking beautiful detail i call it a buffer zone approach and a buffer zone approach is if you're you know if you're not willing to take less than 20 an hour for the job then you tell them hey i'm not willing to take less than 22. okay so you try to like put a barrier out there a little bit that gives you a little buffer zone and so when they when they push into it if we feel that there's going to be conflict which the person obviously feels that there are conflicts that's what you do so i mean that that's one way that you can i know this is it's slightly non-golden play slightly manipulative but it for depending upon who you are it may be a way for you to jerry rig a relationship in a way that works so if you really want to be you know going to yoga class three times a week you explain that you have yoga class four times a week and it's really something that's important to you that way when you sacrifice one you've already sacrificed this is spoken like a man who's been negotiating professionally with alan goldhamer for decades on learn learn the hard way all right the other uh thing that i would say is uh that uh another part of this is that that life kind of really works like this so we can try the buffer zone but it's you know it's got limited utility because the truth of the matter is is that first of all some conflict and relationships is just fine people p people don't flip out over conflict the question is how big is the conflict and so it's just an overall cb that's involved and jen's just talked about obviously the best way to manage this conflict is to have a de-personalized recurrent process if that's something that you know individuals need based on who those people are as personalities and therefore how much conflict seems to inherently arise out of that relationship the um the i'm a conflict of voider so the state of the union gets foisted on me somebody has to foist it it there has to and the thing is like this is like this is like eating healthy food it never you never want to do it you know you never it never feels like quote unquote the right thing to do the the you know the vegan donut feels like the right thing to do but this is this is the way that you beat your genes when you have this agreeable conflict avoidance or particularly like the the the relationship between your agreeableness and how unusual your personality characteristics are matters so if you if you've got like these high cost personality characteristics um you're it artificially drives up how conflict avoidant you are about them because they are disproportionately weighed out in the balance of the relationship you do not want that person paying full cost for those things because you recognize from experience that they are unusual and expensive so um you have to force yourself in that sort of circumstance into um this kind of yeah this this impersonal um little clinical session where the two of you just kind of hash out what's going on um and and have this real commitment to problem solving is the spirit of that yeah uh yeah if you find the magic ten percent i mean would you expect that there would be less need for state of the unions once a month or you know on a regular basis less but not it does not it does not entirely go away so this kind of scenario that this person's describing is very um you know you you can be very uh and in fact almost almost you know there's a little bit of a paradox where if you're very over rewarded you're trying to limit your cost even more because you're you know there's some there's some inflection point where you're um over rewarded to the point that you start walking on eggshells a little bit um and so you're you're even less likely to um you know present yourself at full cost within the within the relationship because you're feeling like it's kind of a kind of a marginal deal for them and you're really really worried about losing it so if you truly have a magic 10 percent you're feeling very valued and and very much valuing them it makes it easier but i think they're going to be uh sticking points in every relationship that are that are running into the same kind of um personality issues and this this particular variant of agreeableness um you know i i have been i've been in beautiful magical 10 over-rewarded relationships and i still it's very difficult for me to put myself on the map as as this person i i'm assuming this is a female asking this question that's probably my egocentric bias i don't think we were we were necessarily told that um but uh but yeah it's it's you know it's like my dogs you know motown is scared of fireworks he's gonna he's gonna freak out and bark at fireworks he can be in a nice quiet house where he never hears fireworks but uh and when he hears a loud noise and it scares him it doesn't mean that that tendency it's it's in there it's dormant it's always there it's just waiting to be triggered in a particular way and i think any long-term relationship over time is going to bring all of that kind of stuff up it's going to push you to the boundaries of your discomfort in some way interesting interesting okay yeah i would say the other knuckle dragger comment that i would make would be kind of the following which is that you do the best you can but if the conflict is too much it starts to drive unhappiness and if the unhappiness is too much then you're gonna have to try another partner so you know it's it's it's not necessarily solvable in other words your your uh you could have a lot of positives in a relationship and you could have essentially for all intents and purposes the best tools for resolving the conflicts but if the conflicts are sufficiently great then what's going to happen is it will drive unhappiness and that and happiness will then you'll just have to you just have to face it and you're gonna have to try somebody that's uh just as agreeable but maybe not quite as clingy okay as the person described so the um yeah not not not easy that that person is a is a problematic looking piece of a jigsaw puzzle not that easy to find to fit on the other side yeah that's and then and that's just like you know you need to you know you don't want to be like overly disney princess romantic about it either because this is this is a situation where there is room for improvement in communication through um the exposure therapy of going through this process that's very uncomfortable so um you know speaking again as somebody who has been in this situation where it serves my interests really well to to you know assert myself more than is comfortable for me um and i think a lot of people have that experience i have gotten better at that over time with practice with iterative experiences where you realize particularly in a magical 10 relationship that you can do that and it's okay that you can do that you can get through that conversation and the two of you can can work through something that feels at the beginning completely unworkable or like it's going to be so high cost that you're going to send the other person screaming and you can and you can get through it and you have that experience and it becomes a data point in your inference of how costly it will be to do the next time and so it gets a little easier the next time um and so that you you're not changing your personality you're just getting better at a skill that doesn't come very easily to you so you can move some degree of of that range um particularly in a in a good mutually over-rewarded relationship um but that's yeah that's about the best that you can ask for yeah one last little point that comes up and that is that it's useful when you're having those discussions to keep in mind that the right strategy is to have uh temporary agreements experiments uh because if people feel like that they're trying to settle agreements of long-term uh a long-term contract then they get way more difficult to negotiate with okay so the the so in other words the notion is hey let's try this for the next you know three or four weeks and let's just see how it feels so that's uh that's a that's it's an important point to keep in mind when any of these kind of negotiations are going down yeah that's a really good point as as the person with the liabilities too it's important to keep that in mind that you're you're not asking for for anything forever you're just asking hey can we try this and see if it works and you you don't feel that you know i'm rejecting you because i need to spend more time alone or you know i i don't feel like i can't get as much sleep as i need to need to get because you're you need too much togetherness whatever it is you're just you're you're making that whole negotiation much simpler by putting a timeline on it yeah wonderful i like this concept of the union i i may remain skeptical for a monthly state of the union but that's not because you're wrong but because i just haven't tried it that often it's um it's i always think of my one of my very favorite simpsons episodes of all time which is when homer homer realizes that he can work from home if he's able to make some workman's compensation claim and he realizes for this and so he's very he he can't believe his luck and so he proceeds to gain a great deal of weight and he um there's many very hilarious scenes throughout this whole episode that are just probably probably it's going to be cancelled and sent down the memory hole anytime now because it's so offensive but um the the whole episode culminates with uh he's working from home and his one job is to press one key on the computer to um it's like it's like this it's like this homage to energy conservation all he has to do is press this one key to like vent the poisonous gas out of the reactor at the nuclear plant where he works and even this is like too much work for him so he rigs up this thing where there's like this this bird this like this plastic bird and water that bobs back and forth and when it bobs it hits the key and then something knocks it over and so the the poisonous gas builds up and he doesn't realize this until he's wandered back from the kitchen from getting some sandwich and there's this big very scary text on his computer screen this is uh you know uh and he reads it in his homer you know he's not very literate so he's like venting gas prevents explosion and then he tries to push the button and it's like too built up and he can't do it and the whole episode is just hilarious i highly recommend it if people haven't seen it but i i think of state of the union like that you have to vent the poisonous gas to prevent the explosion and if you're in this situation where there's like a lot of kind of simmering conflict you do not want if you're if you're an agreeable person you need to get ahead of yourself you need to not get yourself in a situation where your resentment has built to the point i think people who are not not very agreeable don't don't have a very good intuitive sense of how far an agreeable person has to be chiseled and pushed before they finally squawk but by the time an agreeable person says hey we need to talk about this like i i'm having an issue they have been they've been building up poisonous gas for quite a long time they're having a really hard time it's really torturing them um and so even if there's nothing particularly unpleasant or conflict-ridden going on in the weekly state of the union or the monthly state of the union then that's fine then you just have breakfast together and and you say you know hey could you do the dishes an extra night a week or whatever you know you just have like very very minimal conversation but it's really necessary to institutionalize it and make it this sort of low-cost ritual to protect the agreeable person yes beautiful god that's beautiful interesting okay okay yeah made as a as a resident disagreeable yeah well here's here's kind of my thoughts on it it's it's uh you know um so i had a couple of friends uh that i don't want to share their identities uh but we were we were actually talking about relationships and we were we were talking about relationships and this idea they didn't call the state of the union but there was we were all talking about the different relationship like romantic relationship we've had and one of the friends uh was saying oh yeah do you guys like check in with your with your partner like every so often just hey this may bother me or this and that and both of us were like no we've never had anything like that with any partners we just if we don't like them or if we like them enough like we'll we'll take it and we'll tolerate it it's no big deal and then if there's something you know that's part of who they are like that's that's exactly who they are and we're not going to try to change them and if it turns out it's really egregious then they're not the right person and that's it and so you know the it would just we we end up talking separately and say and essentially assuming that this state of the union was just a tool for disagreeable people to just chisel away and get more and more what they want every month or every every every so often so that that's just my consternation i mean my disagreement with it it's maybe i may be misunderstanding uh this concept of state of the union but uh but the checking in you know with the partner that's kind of how it perceived it no i think that's i think jen has really put her finger on something that this is a super useful institutionalized process that protects the hyper agreeable and that or the person who may be a little on eggshells because they're feeling a little too over rewarded but they're also feeling the conflicts and they're and they've got some unhappiness so beautiful great stuff jen just beautiful notice j she's she's more sophisticated relationship stuff than i am because i'm like ah it sounds like it's not working get out [Laughter] but no that's all that's all just beautiful great stuff yeah i do have to give we got to give john gottman some credit for that phrase you know i've heard other people call it that i don't know if he invented that but he's definitely the one who introduced state of the union into the lexicon and we've recommended him before and i do i don't understand but i do think he's right he's more yeah he's more good than bad in his work um yeah you know he's got like a bunch of sticky kind of books like the seven secrets to a happy marriage and all this kind of stuff sure that's what sells yeah and and you know he's he's a lot of his analysis is correlation not causation so when he's talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse you know i contempt um stonewalling uh let me try criticism and defensiveness so these are these are things where if he sees that in an interaction with couples he's gonna be like oh no this is this is on a bad path this isn't gonna well of course you know of course that's what's going to happen you're looking at a a patient with a giant tumor and saying hey i think you've got cancer yeah i think you know i think you've got a problem here you're not really making much of a prediction you're just looking at the symptoms so um but a lot of the tools are uh quite useful especially if you start start using them early and often in a relationship before things get really dire yeah i love the the homer homer story perfect that episode is so good there's there's one where um there's one scene where he's like the neighbor kids are looking through the window to just you know gawk at him because they can't believe he's just like he's just hanging around the house and his mumu one of the kids is like poking him with a stick through the window and one of the other one of bart's friend says hey buddy what do you got a fridge too far [Laughter] such a great episode and of course the the whole thing culminates in him saving the day with his his enormous size so it's actually like the yeah the fact that he has created the catastrophe um through his avoidant energy conservation it turns out that the whole thing would have been much more a disaster if if not uh for the fact that he's enormously fat and can save the day in a very specific way so it all works out springfield good springfield is not wiped from that but yeah in a any catalog of many wonderful episodes that one really gets to a lot of the heart of human nature and um it manages to be very sweet and ridiculous at the same time fabulous all right all right our next question sure dear doctors i have a curiosity from real life personal experience i'm a female in my mid-20s as my girlfriends uh we differ physically some prettier than others but we all get approached both for casual mating and pair bonds but i have this one specific girlfriend who seems to be different because she only attracts pair bonds she has never gotten a casual mating approach not that i can ever remember she gets approached by all fine decent good-looking intelligent guys who all really love her she's average looking yet thin long-haired and very intelligent too she gets in a stable monogamous relationship with one stays with him for two three four years saying she really really loves him and then abruptly dumps him moving to the next one she seems to always have another one ready waiting in line the guys get dumped periodically and get sick and depressed she's kind of unaware of the cycle process and she always announces the new relationship by saying i knew it was going to happen i knew it would end i i would get with him i knew in the end i would get with him with each of them she's in her mid-20s too and has already changed many considerations on this i'm more curious about how she can be so lucky to always find good pair bonds as to why she acts like this it's her life maybe she's very open to new experiences but she's average agreeable and on the more on the stable conscientious side and slightly extroverted well maybe i'll just start to react and then jen you can clean it up afterwards after i make a mess of it um first of all um descriptions like this uh are uh i i always have this uh creepy feeling that i'm being walked down a pathway of of essentially bad reporting of the evidence yeah selection well i believe yeah yeah i believe in esp because there was a time when this and that happened and then another time and it couldn't possibly have been the case because i hadn't even been over there yet and then okay it's like yeah well how do i know that any of this is true and so this is i'm immediately suspicious uh when i hear a story so when i when i listen to that the story as it's being told supposedly this person's been through several of these things that are two to four years and yet she's in her mid-20s for god's sakes let's do the math okay this thing falls apart literally before we're through a paragraph as a concept so the uh so what we're really seeing is if she if this young lady's been through how many partners from two to four years that were pair bonders and she's in her mid-20s what i mean how many could it possibly be three five okay so if it's five we're going to have to retell the story because that would take us back to age 15. so uh so anyway uh also uh all these partners supposedly are good looking pleasant etc and by the way how on earth would you ever know if she gets approached for casual meeting or not yeah how can you tell that was the first thing to occur to me yeah yeah yeah you're not there for everybody that ever approaches her and the people that are approaching her they don't know what they're approaching her for so this is all this is all just sort of a whole pile of of assumptions uh as jen would say we got some egocentric bias sitting inside whoever's asking these questions the um i would also say that if she has a bunch of attractive young men treating her really well they're always crazy about her and she winds up being the person who dumps uh and this this happened i don't know three times whatever it is the truth of the matter is she's probably more attractive than you're giving her credit for the uh if she if she has that kind of market power so the uh so anyway i can't i can't possibly comment on this because uh further because the truth is is we're talking about a young person in her 20s that's been through three four five moderately long-term relationships since age 18 i mean how long could they be and so the uh she may very well play play a common female strategy i.e have a man on plan b before you dump the guy that you're with super common female strategy that's nothing new under the sun so she goes from she gets rid of one she gets rid of him easily why because she's already been mentally out of it with him for the last four months and since ever she she met the better prospect that she's been warming up and qualifying for a while and uh and then so when she dumps harry she goes with tom no problem that that's uh that that's no surprise strategy at all so i don't think that we have any mystery here at all we just have someone who uh probably by her the nature of her presentation and advertisement does not advertise that she is looking at casual netting strategy doesn't show a lot of skin doesn't wear a lot of tight clothes doesn't wear a lot of dramatic makeup uh doesn't have her hair very fluffy uh etc not wearing high heels that are very high in other words we have someone that's advertising a conservatism and therefore tr attracts males who are who are essentially their best foot forward uh in in seeking a female is to be selling uh parabon strategy as opposed to casual matting strategy that's why so i don't think there's any you will get to uh to a large extent what it is that you're advertising for and so the obviously this winds up being a dilemma inside the female's head because the female is generally not playing one strategy or the other she's a stone age creature that's splitting the difference and it depends on which time of the month it is what she's playing we know this okay so we've got good evidence that that females certainly in bars uh show more square inches of skin when they're more fertile i.e they're they're hotter to trot for casual mating at those at those junctures and this is unconscious by the way so you can you can test it they don't know where they are on their cycle but then if you actually uh run a correlation coefficient on square inches of skin and where they are on their cycle voila uh we we observe the the uh the casual mating strategy becoming more prominent so anyway have i messed missed anything jen what what are you i'm just thinking about all all those times i was ovulating sitting in bars with fluffy hair [Laughter] it all makes sense my twenties so suddenly it's like this it's like it's like i hear harps playing music it's no no it's more like a kaleidoscope when it clicks in and you can see it all clearly [Laughter] now this is this is totally my response is that you know i i think um within female friendship circles we often think we know our friends better than we really do and we we think we know you know their patterns really really well um and uh we we don't know the secret life of our friends as well as we as well as we think we do a lot of the time so um this strikes me totally is what doug is saying you know she's got them lined up before they appear on the scene when you're getting your first glance at them and so the little speech that she's making about i knew it was gonna happen and i was gonna wind up with this guy in the end um it's because she's been you know she she has been having uh for lack of a better or more precise term an emotional affair if not a physical affair um with that new candidate for some time so i don't know where this pool of guys is coming from if everybody's in college or if this is a like a shared work pool or um if she's picking them up online or wherever she's grabbing them they are not just coming on the scene um to arrive as a fully formed parabond out of nowhere she's been curating that that relationship for a while and you don't you don't know about it because she's not going to go public about it until she's sure um and uh until she's she's ready to do this serial monogamy thing which is very very very typical um and uh yeah you you just you're you're having a perception of a pattern that is probably not as much of a pattern as you think it is as doug is saying and um and girls are really good at hiding their secrets even from their best friends so so yeah i i would say no huge mystery here either and oh yeah and to the point with casual mating um i yeah i mean is this is this sort of a question of you're all at bars together and everybody's getting hit on but she's not or are you just observing that she uh does not report casual mating interactions um because you know she might get some interest but she's sufficiently cool um to any of that interest that it doesn't look like a casual mating interaction to anybody who's paying attention and if she's not presenting herself with all of that fluffy hair and all of those square inches of skin then you're you're just not getting the cues to even notice it when it does happen so you know i'm sure she has guys strike up conversations with her on buses and in lines at movies and all of the the sort of things that are casual mating strategies but don't look like something that you would necessarily see in a movie it's just a guy doing a quick little market test um so i would be surprised if she's you know has the high mate value that we know that she does from this the serial monogamy um if she doesn't have those kinds of experience but it's probably effectively invisible to you grand all right okay our next question dear doctors i'm seven years out of graduate school since then my friends have my friends from school have naturally taken different career paths one friend has become a life and wellness coach primarily through social media she enjoys what she does makes a livable living and creates value in her clients lives yet when our friends group occasionally mentions this friend everyone seems to disapprove of what she's doing business-wise in fact all of us have unfollowed her on social media because we can't stand to watch her content she gives advice on nutrition makes motivational videos and sells coaching sessions to women and for some reason it all comes off as disingenuous scammy and distorted i have no intention of changing her or her business what i'm curious about is why do we feel disgust whenever she comes up in conversation there's no issue whenever she and i hang out in person we always have a good time but why am i so turned off by her internet presence and the way she makes money could it be that i think she's claiming unearned status or could it be that i see the online coach version of her as deceiving and therefore a threat to the village well what do you what comes to mind for you jen yeah i think there's uh you know in this kind of case you're just you're picking up on the hypocrisy um and there there is you know i don't know that it's necessarily a threat to the village that you're you're seeing the difference between how she's she's presenting herself to one group and um you know at odds with how she presents herself elsewhere um it's not necessarily threatening but it is zero sum with your potential status so i guess we could we could call it threatening if we wanted to but it's it's competitive it's she's she's misrepresenting her value um and there's only so much value to go around in in the village and even if you're not necessarily in exactly the same space you're in principle you you are competing for the the the esteem of the same general population certainly the same mates um you know the same as far as your nervous system is concerned the the same pantheon of people who are paying attention in the village community so you're you're irritated because she's getting away with something and she's stealing some status that doesn't belong to her and you feel this kind of urge to to make people aware of the fact that this is not truthful and that she's chiseling away your potential esteem your potential value your potential spoils um and that she wouldn't have been able to get away with this in the stone age there wasn't a there wasn't an ability to cultivate an online persona that was at completely at odds with what people knew was true about you so we live in this crazy modern environment where we can occupy this facade space all the time and um you know torture other people online with it everybody who thinks that instagram personalities are real i mean i i talk to people all the time who are kind of just can't help but make that inference um and this is just not the case in the stone age at all i mean everybody knows exactly who you are they know exactly what you're about they know exactly what talents you have they they're not gonna buy any kind of um exaggerated story of your authority or your ability to perform miracles in the village they know better and even if you could get away with it for some short period of time the truth is going to come out pretty quickly so i think you're feeling that urge that you would have to you know ring the bell and inform the people of the of the lies that are taking place and you you can't do that in the modern environment without causing a lot of uh social problems and interpersonal difficulties uh and it it's it's irritating i i have been in this situation i i had a friendship end over it because i was with this incr i had this incredibly hypocritical roommate who was just his grandstanding social media presence about you know just took every opportunity to get to to sort of appropriate this very um lecturing tone about how everyone needed to uh you know get in line with certain political beliefs and they they it was it was very important that we all come together and we all do this and let's do we must we must we need and i was watching her you know mostly hang around the house in a pair of pajamas with monkeys on them eating potato chips most of the time i was like it made me crazy to look at that kind of hypocrisy and it sounds like you're in a very similar situation and that was that was completely what was bothering me in that case and like she is getting away with [ __ ] that she should not be getting away with and somebody needs to inform um everybody in the community so they they don't give her more stoneage currency than she is owed um so i think that's basically what's going on but doug dug chime in yeah so yeah the questioner is sort of uh sort of avoiding the the heart of what jen is explaining which is that it it it's your it's hitting your own stress about the that this woman is nudging ahead of the pack and that's your pack that she's nudging her way ahead of and so the um if you're angry you're angry almost always about unfairness to you okay it can be about unfairness to other people that's true but usually it's unfairness to you so when it comes to this little college group it's unfairness to the people in the group that's what they're feeling okay so and unfair how how on earth is this one being unfair well she's she's uh if she's got an online present and she's got a little celebrity well in some pre ins from some perspective she would look fancier than the rest of you who are just working at regular jobs that you know no matter how good the job is with the resume hey you're not like a quote celebrity the uh some of some fashion so that uh there there is a potential inference from such things um of that that essentially gaining any kind of celebrity is essentially a fitness indicator and so uh that that it has hierarchical legitimacy and it has a little bit uh just because it's difficult and it takes some push and it takes something looks brains personality luck um content of some kind in other words something uh is required in order to have some kind of success in any sort of celebrity fashion however there obviously there's slop all over the place and it is in no way a great fitness indicator at all but it's it is above zero as a fitness indicator so if you have a little group of college friends and everybody's quietly working their way in their life in a normal fashion and then one of them is actually seeking celebrity while the other ones are not and is achieving it there there can be that that little clanging anxiety that she's sticking her nose in front of the rest of you as it would uh with respect to fitness indicators and that can feel unfair particularly when you when you recognize all things jen's talking about like there it's either there's some hypocrisy or there's you know there's some salesmanship there's some sleazy you know activities that need to be done in order for her to compete with the other sleazy people you know there's if you ever wondered why everybody has to over promise and under deliver it's because everybody else is over promising and under delivering so you have to over promise more than they do i mean this is this is the the process of what's going on and it goes online with respect to uh coaching type stuff psychobabble type of stuff uh health type of stuff all kinds of uh things you know particularly in in sort of the online world so it would be no surprise that that there would be she's probably an attractive person attractive personable extroverted has a presence in there if she's surviving and and getting uh anybody to buy any of her wears she's got some she's got some uh capability in front of a camera and so that's probably you know pinging uh the circuits of of people who inherently feel essentially uh some degree of competitiveness with her and that's uh i would feel that like i can i can remember i could remember a guy in grad school he was a very good looking guy and he uh how do i feel like there's gonna be a basketball story involved actually there he was a fine basketball player so the uh but he he was uh as as one as one as another fellow student who is very bright mine said you know you know our friend j.a or his initials says you know with his his dissertation was was known to have accounted for more than 100 of the variants which means the the ja was pretty smart but he was not smart okay well he was very personable handsome well spoken and um he was you know sort of the coolest guy in the department and he got a pretty decent little professorial job and a few years later i saw uh the american psychologist uh started doing something for the first time probably in 19 oh i don't know 1992. okay we'd have to go back and look but there was a point right around then when they started having pictures of the people who wrote the articles in the american psychologist american psychologist is in fact the the the flagship journal of psychology in the world so the um even though i mean it thinks so the truth is it should be like the journal of evolutionary psychology is you know better but the point is is that from the standpoint of cachet and really scientific care if in spite of you know probably theoretical obtuseness the american psychologist is the most prestigious journal in the world of psychology and lo and behold i was flipping through there and i see ja's picture and he wrote an article and he got in the american psychologist and i'm thinking uh that's just like irritating to me i know he's not that smart there he is handsome as hell [Laughter] you know he actually wrote he he actually wasn't bad it wasn't actually bad what he wrote but it you know it was nothing earth-shattering he certainly didn't deserve the glory and education that i deserved even then and i hadn't written anything it's the principle of the thing that's totally the principle of event so this is where we stand the principle of the thing is i think we understand the group's frustration yeah totally all right all right i think that concludes all the questions for today um thank you guys for coming on appreciate it yeah absolutely thank you fabulous jen it was a dream listening to you as always you're you're very kind all of our listeners can complete their drinking game for the the unearned compliments but i appreciate it thank you you
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