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Episode 273: Why is that guy into the promiscuous woman, Is my Bf just a jerk, Low emotional stability partner
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we're going solo jen is on the road headed back to the east coast with their dogs moving so this is uh all good we get a we get an easy easy one for the two of us we don't have to worry about all that you know woke stuff and we're no fun splaining no toxic masculinity alarm i don't know what we're gonna do that's it that's it exactly all right all good and most importantly we don't need to do any of that small talk stuff either no god small talk that's insane forget it let's get right down to the engineering of whatever the problem is that's it just all problem solving no feelings for god's sakes we don't need any feelings in it no none of that oh my all right well tell me let's let's see what we got what's going on all right okay so uh dear doctors uh why do men sometimes pair bond or fall in love with obviously promiscuous women promiscuous reputation clubbing partying often always scantily clad people will often warn them that the woman isn't a good choice for a pair bond but they are blinded by love and charge ahead only to be cheated on or be constantly fighting over her promiscuous signals during the relationship isn't that a bad thing for their survival and reproduction because their time energy and resources will be invested in children who aren't theirs wouldn't the best action in this situation be short-term mating maybe the reason is that the chance that she'll give him a few promiscuous children outweighs investing in children who aren't his maybe i'm having a hard time understanding because i'm a young woman i would love to hear your thoughts um wonderful question it's great to it's great to listen to people as they grapple with observations that that are uh puzzling to them uh or that they're they're trying to get their hands around the evolutionary dynamics so you know this is a uh i kind of can can smile and realize that you know when i was in graduate school in the 1980s uh this question wasn't anywhere on the table um actually it was but not in any psychology department don simons had written the evolution of human sexuality in 1979 uh but david bess was a young professor at harvard sort of grinding his way through uh trying to figure things out and so a lot of the the discussions we can now have these uh easily and well couldn't have been had and weren't being had by anybody so this is a very fine question um now the first thing that i would the first observation that we're going to have is that this is a rare event so uh it is it is not typical for for females to be flamboyantly uh promiscuous in their behavior uh and it's not uh typical for such females to have uh sort of decent guys uh that are consistently following them and trying to bring them to earth and then not giving up on it so there's been a you know a thousand a thousand guys have fallen in love with strippers in fact a thousand guys have maybe fallen in love with the same stripper but the truth is is that those those relationships don't last very long for exactly the reason that this young woman is describing that the guy figures out he runs the cost-benefit analysis and he can see that it's a mess and he gets out so she's looking at a question that she's probably never even observed in her life um or she's maybe observed at once or it looks like she's observed it once but she hasn't actually observed it she may have observed it in her brother but it was actually a three month or a five month or a six month dallas where her where her cousin was or her brother or her friend or somebody was chasing down some stripper or stripper type female and the and they couldn't let it go and couldn't let it go and there's all kinds of turmoil etc and they wouldn't let it go and they were crushed by it and god knows you know uh you know suicidal or threatening or murderous or whatever okay but the bottom line is did it go on two years nope very unlucky okay so the uh so the the question begins with um stating a hypothetical and and that hypothetical obviously has real real live incidences that that we could have a listing of them however as a statistical pos uh probability of human mating relationships this is very uncommon okay so these things aren't lasting very long now the um and why would they be attractive at all and the answer would be that that obviously when someone quote falls in love what is that well what love is is just an emotion and all an emotion or any feeling is is just a an analog signaling device telling you about the survival of reproductive value or gene survival value of a situation and so if a guy is falling in love with some girl it's because he's calculating that as high gene survival value and so the so obviously that's because that individual is seen as very high mate value and when we say very high mate value what do we mean by that we mean better than their alternatives okay so back in tom sawyer amy amy lawrence was apparently tom sawyer's sweet or that he was interested in her up to the time that becky thatcher came into the uh the schoolhouse [Laughter] that amy lawrence was toast okay and becky thatcher was what it was all about and so the uh so what we're looking at is uh quote love falling in love with the stripper this is this is simply that the stripper has uh stripper s female has very high mate value uh for objectively identifiable physical and psychological characteristics um so then then we have why is that well obviously because they've got characteristics that are going to be super useful in these heterosexual competitive game of the next iteration of the genes which is the next generation so that creates a motivation in the male to try to have sex with her and to try to dominate a reproductive machinery enough that it's that it's uh his etc etc and in order to convince her that he is the best deal he quote falls in love which is going to create a bunch of signaling processes which tell her that he is going to bring a tremendous amount of extraneous time and energy directed towards her welfare in order to make up for the discrepancy between him and his competitors who may be more sexually attractive okay that's what love is is hey i don't just think that you're sexy uh but and i don't just have my looks uh what my look score is i also i'm gonna bring a bunch of resources to the table as well so and in fact i'm going to bring him indefinitely forever and ever and ever and ever [Laughter] okay so so he's going to see whether or not that sells and if it if it doesn't sell then he's probably going to be all pissed off then out of shape and bitterly disappointed but he's going to leave he's going to quit so who sticks around some guy whose nervous system keeps telling him that it's still the best deal that he's got okay that she's just too fancy she's got too much secret sauce and he's got a chance to get to those eggs and he's you know even if he has to fight off competitors uh in any way possible uh he's going to do whatever it is he can to do this this is going to be a rare set of circumstances so uh but if we we can look at this on a continuum all the way from the completely wild crazy sexual attractiveness seeking kamikaze situation that she's uh that she's describing all the way to something much more benign and real which is some guy looking at two females one a little sexier and more cool and another one a little more plain a little more stable who's really into him why does he uh you know sort of turn a cool shoulder to bachelorette number two and we can very clearly see why okay so these are these are questions all of the matter of degree and it all is coming down to uh instincts that are put into the system to run these unconscious calculations of uh gene survival cost benefit and so that is that is why every creature is doing everything that they're doing and that is why this dilemma is is so the person basically has it figured out right we don't have to count little heads of specific children just think of generalized probabilities across populations and and look at this as a statistical issue do we ever see this characteristic the answer is yes we do we see males going for females who have a higher probability of sleeping behind their back uh and extracting resources from them while you know during the process but they have a chance that they could impr impregnate those females and therefore and the differential in other words they're calculating the the probability that it's theirs and the amount of energy and time and pursuing whatever probability they have to get to those eggs against the the probability that they could be with eggs that are of lesser reproductive value but a much more higher probability that that they would be their own okay so you can imagine that calculus it's like well which lottery ticket do you want the one where you know it it costs you know ten dollars and you could win 12 uh and the odds are really are you know 50 50 that you could do that it's like not too bad as a bet or do you want to spend uh 10 and have a one in a million chance of winning half a million dollars oh it's kind of interesting it's like well maybe i'll take a a one in a million chance on half a million because i'm really not that interested in a you know 50 50 chance on winning 12 you know a couple bucks so that that is the dilemma that nature attempts to solve and attempts to build neural circuits and neurotransmitter concentrations and just the right proportion in order to run those computations as accurately as possible in order to result in maximum gene survival value we see that most men are actually fairly conservative they want somebody a little fancier and a little sexier than they are but they don't want it too far because because of this you know fidelity issue so we we actually see that human beings are running those computations and that those computations are you know they may not quite may not quite work that way in other words men would reach as high as they could but they're going to get constrained by uh competitive market process so they're not really interested in um uh they're only interested in being in a situation where the female is as sexually attractive as possible but it's also indicating that she would be very interested in being with you okay so that's the that's the uh and with you gen basically exclusively so that that is the computational process uh by which the the male nervous system wants to invest its time and energy and if it doesn't look something like that they're generally not interested okay so there are going to be exceptions to that and people will take risks on on fancy lottery tickets they'll throw some money at them but they just generally don't make it their retirement strategy gene retirement says you know be smart invest wisely don't take too many chances okay so uh that doesn't mean that once in a while we don't take a shot at a stock and hope for you know tr go for a big win they do but but it's not typical high reward is high risk right yeah that's exactly right okay all right that's good all right thank you dr lyle yeah so yeah this explains why well yeah yeah yeah don't reveal anything nathan okay go ahead all right dear doctors what pair bond behavior do highly testosteronized men show my boyfriend of one year remembers my new details about me pays for all of our dates sends me food when he's not with me has bought me a new laptop a new iphone tiffany's jewelry flowers every month teddy bears but he's not very verbally or physically affectionate he has never initiated sexual activities with me either although i can tell he enjoys it when we do he's very jealous and possessive insulting other men's abilities although they are just as educated and successful as he is and intentions with me and always telling me to dress more modestly in addition to not being verbally as in compliments sweet talking baby names etc and physically affectionate he's easily irritated with me curses and yells at me when he's angry and dismisses my thoughts and opinions he has proposed to me with a twenty thousand dollar engagement ring but i'm hesitant to get more invested in this relationship but i'm extremely confused about how he feels about me if this is pair-bonded behavior of a highly testosteronized male maybe i'm more compatible with a man who's closer to the middle of the bell curve your thoughts would be greatly appreciated oh my goodness this is really something this is quite quite a letter um let's let's begin with an an interesting and in interesting uh a little bit of a misunderstanding that you're having and that is that all of these kinds of things are going to be derivative of testosterone so they are not okay your your personality is is male's personality is a great deal more complicated than just how much testosterone it has so the uh not that testosterone isn't a a very useful explanatory um uh proximal mechanism by which uh by which disagreeable you know genetics works their magic and and differentiates uh human personalities this is truth okay but it's not the only it's not the only variable in the drawer so this person is a pain in the ass and i would be taking a big step back and asking yourself instead of worrying about how he feels about you i'd be worrying about how it is that you feel about him so it's a very interesting question that you're confused and worried about how he feels about you well for god's sakes um careful that's not the most important question on the chessboard here the most important question is how do you feel about him and it's probably complicated there's a lot of different feelings about him the let me let me give you a few things that that bother me curses then yells at me when he's angry i have never cursed at a female in my life i'm 62. okay i'm not without testosterone uh i'm i'm not without a backbone and assertiveness right never yelled at a female no i've never yelled at a female raised my voice a few times [Laughter] almost never like i i i'm thinking about i believe there's only been one relationship the best one uh that i ever raised my voice um on on a number of occasions um but uh but not you know probably less than less than 10 times okay and raise my voice about the way i'm raising it here like this is about it hey like listen i'm telling you like that's it that's not yelling uh that's that's that's warning that that uh i'm really irritated in that i think you're out of line and this is the same as as alan uh goldhamer said to the clerk god knows when it was we had a lot of adventures in our youth and alan said uh lady said you don't have to yell at me and he said oh i'm not yelling ma'am you'll know when i'm yelling yeah so uh no i've never yelled at anybody and i have never dismissed anybody's thoughts or opinions uh forget it so anybody that's uh yelling cursing and dismissing your thoughts and opinions wow wow in in capital letters now so your quote i'm extremely confused about how he feels about me well who the hell cares what he feels about you okay he's he's a he's a bundle of you know sort of he's his own picasso okay he he's his own creation he you know he's his own unique genetic creation on this earth and so he's highly testosteronized and we can see it in his insulting of competitors and his high possessiveness and all of these kinds of things including the yelling and cursing at you all of it in his possessiveness all this can serve to make you feel like wow he finds me really valuable wow he finds me really valuable this can be very flattering to the female and make her feel like whoa what a safe place to be because i'm super valuable and super important and therefore this guy's totally in a parabon strategy with me and therefore you know he's aiming all the resources towards me and my children and our children that can feel like yeah this is a hell of a spot to be and all that disagreeableness as he yells at you you realize this guy's tough as freaking nails and he's gonna make sure that we don't starve okay all understandable potentially attract attractive characteristics now but this is not good so uh i would tell you uh i would tell this individual hey get up get a phone console with jen hawk for god's sakes before you think about you know accepting anybody's engagement ring this is um this is we're moving way too fast here don't get married to anything like this in any situation that remotely resembles this you don't get married folks you discover if you are and this young lady is not married now not if you're confused about how he feels that he yells and screams and curses you he's super possessive it's like whoa you you you're not looking at this thing like wow i am on super solid ground i know this person inside out i know where i stand i am really happy i'm consistently happy it's gone on for two or three years we are married we are lifetime partners there is no doubt about this and hey we can go through a ceremony that's fine and i'd like to but we're married already yeah you should be married before you ever think about getting married so that's how i would look at the situation but that's a this is a very good conversation for jen you've heard from dad and dad says no it's bad okay so now talk to mom and see if see if mom you know agrees with dad or if mom says well you know look at this look at that think about this think about that here's what you could do to get some more information etc etc i don't like the sniff of it at all okay i think you're i think you're being held in place by some cues could be his muscles and his assertiveness and his drive and etc and so there could there could be you know a number of attractive characteristics as well as feeling like you're super important that could be jangling that female brain saying well maybe this is maybe this is as good this is what i would this where maybe this is where i should be it's like yeah i'm telling you no anybody put you down put your opinions down dismisses your thoughts and opinions yells at you curses you doesn't look good okay looks looks like you could do better and so don't get lazy with your life okay if you you know if you have a situation that feels mediocre feels so so but it would be nice and convenient and the parents like him and it looks like he's going to be a junior partner in the law firm soon and everything looks good like you're gonna be able to have a nice easy ride and his parents have some money and you know they have a nice place out on the hamptons it's like careful life is long okay almost nobody in america starves not unless they've got unbelievable problems okay so you're not gonna starve to death take it slow who gives a rat's ass about a twenty thousand dollar ring you know you're you're better off with a 20 ring from the right person okay at the time when it makes sense so that's what i have to say and let's uh i would i would now at that point i would defer to to jen uh to talk to mom thank you dad all right that's wonderful thank you all right our next question dear doctors could you please speak on what it is like to have a romantic relationship with a person with low emotional stability would people that are labeled or diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder be just high on this personality trait for some context i've started dating a man who describes himself as having low emotional stability although he is very sweet and loving i do wonder how high the cost will be to maintain this relationship i'm very emotionally stable and as such i'd like to know what to expect oh well i've never heard of anybody describe themselves as low emotional stability maybe it's a fellow caller yeah it must be a cult member um and so one thing i know about cult members is that a lot of times they're very inaccurate uh that their descriptions themselves don't line up to any reality on the big five so i was just talking to someone today who said that they have a child who uh an adult child who's you know probably 85th percentile and disagreeable by the time i got here in the story i said no correction 99th percentile okay so um it's important that that you don't necessarily know uh from somebody's self-report where it is that they really stand and you should second of all understand that you don't have a grid on which to say well you know if you're 75th percentile unstable that's over the line but if you're 65th you're going to be okay now the truth of the matter is you rhematic relationships are are not something that you can do by the numbers because you don't even know what the numbers are inside of you that are uh what are your ranges or latitudes of acceptance there's no way to know so um you could say oh well isn't that true let's suppose we have iq tests the problem is is that intelligence is more complicated than a linear number on an iq test it's it's not the same thing so there there are people that i know that i could spend a great many hours of my life with talking to them because they're really interesting and intelligent but they don't score as high on an iq test they may be eight or ten points short of somebody that i find a total bore okay so it isn't it isn't as simple as that and so the same thing is true with a person's mate value that's even more complicated so all i can tell you is you there's no shortcut for simply experiencing the individual now the uh now let's suppose that we're in this relationship and we see signs of some emotional instability they get like upset or they get really excited you know they've got more dynamic uh uh personality than you do when it comes to that the uh what does that mean what's the downside okay the uh and the the answer is well you can't gauge it until you um until if the person is sufficiently appealing then we're going to spend time with them and we're going to be drawn to them until until we get enough data that they get ruled out that's all it's just a it's just a matter of finding out you know uh you know what the story is behind them and it will reveal itself now sometimes you could get tricky and fancy and increase the statistical likelihood of some things revealing themselves by putting people under some stress okay so you know i don't know what we could do have a have a plan to visit san francisco for example that's hell on earth and load up a bunch of expensive things in the trunk and sit on the freeway okay but lots of us we did something like we said okay we're gonna go to san francisco and we're gonna go to san francisco and we're gonna do like i don't know we're gonna you know forget your math yeah we're gonna forget our mask and we're gonna go do these five you know five or six things in two days three days we're gonna fly in there and we're gonna do this this this this okay so it's stressful and now we get to see does the person just flip out okay just start screaming in the parking lot because there's a ticket on the window even though they paid the bill and it turns out they got screwed over it's like what i mean what we're getting to is that life ultimately reveals the cost of people's inherent personality characteristics and uh the cost benefit of each characteristic and so the uh if a person's the instability has uh some some potentials for being expensive on the downside when they are either depressed or potentially angry or you know over you know essentially overwhelmed or something by the way borderlines are are probably that what that probably is most consistently is simply unstable and disagreeable that's kind of what a borderline is borderline isn't just unstable borderline has an angry uh quality to it that that we have to add that into the soup before we start finding people diagnose people as borderlines remember that those diagnoses are all fundamentally wrong we can use those words but we have to understand they're descriptive these are not types these are just combinations of genes and the best the best description we have of those combinations is the big five plus iq so a borderline is is a disagreeable unstable person almost always a female okay for various reasons that i believe that they're that that the characteristics involved there most often are assigned to females females are if you think about the biggest mistake that females can make would be to get sexual very very quickly with males in a situation thinking that the male is is selling a pair bond strategy when they're not so you can imagine a very typical scenario that would befall a female that is unstable and disagreeable would be for her to bite on uh the cues of a male who's very interested in her and believe that those cues that he is selling either lightly or heavily that they are parabon cues and jump all over those and get all excited and get sexual very quickly and then it turns out the male suddenly isn't very interested in them and he pulls away and now the the the female who has been so duped uh is now infuriated because essentially access to her eggs has been taken under false pretenses as far as she's concerned so now she is rejected and angry and rageful and now we have a bunny in a pot okay so that's the that's the classic we don't see that kind of characteristics out of males because males don't care if they get duped by females into short-term sexual gratification that's a male doesn't have that as a problem like well i thought you i thought you were you know really into me you for who i was as a person that you cared okay so therefore we don't have this dynamic we're currently taking place in male psychology and so therefore almost no males are ever diagnosed as borderlines okay so the uh so the where does this where do males get diagnosed they get diagnosed as narcissistic personality disorders because they're very disagreeable and the more unstable they are the more you see the rage [Music] and so you know that they would call that in psychotherapy circles borderline rage if it's a female they don't call it a narcissistic rage it's a narcissistic rage if it's a guy okay because the narcissism in general is evidence of the disagreeableness uh where you feel like you've been you're being cheated and mistreated and therefore you're in a rage and instead of crying uncontrollably like a borderline might i.e as a female might because she feels powerless in a situation uh the male may feel like no i'm going to threaten you and get aggressive and violent in order to intimidate you into giving me the resources that i deserve so i.e uh that's a narcissist the uh and we go we move the dial on one other characteristic on the conscientiousness dimension and we lower it significantly then we're going to get a sociopath okay and so you're going to that that's what we're going to call that somebody who is very disagreeable and very low conscientious in other words i deserve it and i'm going to take it okay and in fact if you're not going to give it to me i'm going to trick you i'm going to deceive you so that i get it anyway and i don't really care what happens to you because i don't have any empathy for you because you know i'm sufficiently disagreeable and i think that you're nothing other than an obstacle to giving me what i deserve so that's the sort of short course in quote personality characteristics the um but on any event this uh this guy's quote sweet and loving great wonderful if you like him you're attracted to him it's all pleasant don't don't worry about the fact that he calls himself low stability uh we don't know what on earth that means so the uh or that he's an unstable personality let let the evidence take you there uh life gives us enough challenges enough exhaustion enough frustration that we'll we'll see evidence and you let your right brain figure out whether or not that person's emotional uh dynamics are within tolerance limits for you or not if they are not we don't have to desperately try to figure this out early the evidence will you know i always tell people that are in early romances you're going to learn a lot you'll know a lot more in 30 days from now and if they're pretty you're pretty excited after 30 days i'm like you know what you're gonna know an awful lot more in 90 days and you're like well isn't there any way around it what cues can i find what signs can i find hey just follow your own right brain and uh as the as you continue to find yourself interested in interacting with the person because the person is the best available deal that you've got and they feel like the deal with pursuing great that's called the excitement and pleasantness of just of discovery of a possible relationship we just let that go wherever it's going to go and then when it starts going sideways it goes sideways and if it does it does there wasn't anything to stop it it was an inevitable process of discovery of those two individuals of who they are relationships are uh and have an of an inevitability to to what it is that they become and so we don't need to be in a rush to find those things out uh very often what happens is we find out and then we don't do something about it when it's wrong that's a mistake many of us the older older generation many of us will know that you know what i spent way too many years in the wrong place i did that once you know in in my uh young life i was i was 13 years in a relationship that should have been you know two two months that was a big mistake uh uh but i learned lessons from that and i got uh better and smarter at gritting my teeth when after two months if something wasn't right then i gritted my teeth and got out of it when i needed when it needed to be gotten out of so i didn't do that the first time and that that took up a lot of time you know those years were not wasted uh that was a outstanding human being on the other side of this thing two young people that didn't know which end is up in terms of how life goes and we explored and we learned and we matured and we got smarter uh and and then ultimately you know it was it was evident that the relationship was what it was and it was not going to improve and so it needed to end and thank goodness uh that it did so uh on the other side of this don't worry about mr sweden loving who's an awfully nice guy who says that he he's emotionally unstable all you need to know is that if you're not very happy and you're kind of you know unnerved and you've seen things that bother you then you know and if it's not if the cost benefit doesn't look like it's worth it you need to grit your teeth you know and summon the will if it's difficult for you to get the hell out okay and there's you know many people that i talk to or are making those decisions relatively late in life 40s 50s 60s and uh and many of those people uh will will will tell you the older generation will tell you boy you know you should wish i would have done this 20 years ago it's like yeah that's right so the uh the the key isn't to worry about uh too much about whether you're getting into something wrong the key is to understand that if you get in and it's not right to figure your way out of it and to know don't don't waste a bunch of life you're wasting yours and you're wasting theirs all right gosh thank you so much dr lyle this is like our first episode back from the new years yeah i think that's right this is a new year's episode get the hell out of it [Laughter] that's it it's a new year's resolution new year right that's right yeah folks you know at my age there's 100 000 hours left maybe and if you're if you're 40 maybe it's 200 000 hours left but whatever it is for god's sakes don't don't waste the precious hours uh any anything that's mediocre uh not not unless you have to for some unbelievably oppressive bizarre reason so don't do it you know you got one life to live and give yourself the best chance to to find the best set of possible circumstances for you wonderful wonderful all right dr lao what you want to do one more question nope oh okay no that's good all right we're going to uh we're perfect yeah we'll leave that here and then we'll let uh we'll let jen hawk he probably got some relationship questions left we got to get jen in here on some of this oh yeah yeah we've got some yeah we've got some good ones so okay all right dr lyle well thank you so much thanks for joining us for this first episode of 2022 as dr hawk pointed out it's just 20 just a sequel of 2020 unfortunately we'll find out anxiously awaiting certain certain court cases but um yeah we will we'll find out all good all right all right nathan thank you very much and uh we'll see you next time with jen perfect sounds good dr lyle have a wonderful week and we'll we'll talk to you next time gotcha good you
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