Is There a Science to Finding Love?

27:20So you want them to be really, really good. So you prioritize looks in short-term relationships. In long-term relationships, whether you're a man or a woman, looks come quite a way down the list in terms of long-term priorities. Obviously, it might be the looks that first draw you in, or you might be the slow burn. You might initially have not found that person physically attractive, but there's lots of other things. The top one for men and women is kindness, but there's things like your personality, your values, your creativity, your sense of humor. All of these things are more important than how you look.

27:52But because those apps are based on images, they ultimately become mostly hookup apps because that's the way they're biasing you towards picking a partner. So they're not helpful if actually what you want to do is find love. They handicap your brain. They make it much, much harder. And they make you prevaricate more. They make you not take a decision. And what we've actually found is it becomes a game a little bit and people start to gamify and it's about actually catching the potential mate out rather than necessarily being truthful about who you are. It's about catching them out and playing the game.

28:29And that's a real pity because if you're looking for love, to you, it's more serious than a game. It's not a game. It's actually something that's something that's really important and serious to you. So apps aren't going to go away, but we have to work and find an app uh that that works in concert with the human brain and also an app that encourages people to see it more as an introductory tool so this app is going to introduce you to some people but the dating bit of it has to happen in person right that's a that's a really interesting way to frame it because that i agree with you they're not going anywhere and i think it's easy to point out all the problems with a tool and then just reject it wholesale.

29:14But then the more interesting thing is, okay, how do we use this tool? Knowing what its weaknesses are, try to correct for it with knowledge and try to use it in a way to our advantage. So the first thing you said, which is that you're getting very little data about a person from their profile. Deceptively little. Because that's the crucial thing. If you knew you were only getting a tiny bit of data, then I guess you'd be armed with the ability to respond in the right way. You would say, okay, you know, I don't know if I'm attracted to this person, but I know I'm not getting enough information to know if I'm attracted to this person.

29:54However, I think the way people actually react is they assume they're getting like the whole picture somehow, right? And so they make snap judgments. So the lesson of that would seem to be, if you're serious about meeting someone, you should broaden the scope of people you'd be willing to go on one date with. Even people that you might not be super attracted to based on their profile. That would be one takeaway from that. but then from your second point which is this paradox of choice thing this like swiping becomes an alternative to dating rather than a way of dating right um i guess what what would what would the lesson from that be would be would the lesson be people just need to get self-control or get off the apps altogether or or is there a way to rewire yourself so that you're not doing i mean the self-control thing is difficult i think this is because you know the swiping in itself is kind of addictive.

30:53So it's very, you have to be so self-aware to do that. I mean, you're right. What we need to do is design these apps in concert. You know, I am, in fact, having said I would never work with a dating app, I've actually just started working on a new one with a group of two female founders, which the whole idea behind it is to combat these problems and actually come at it from a neuroscientific human behavioral point of view. That is our first thing. the tech is the back end we're not you know we will say this is what we want to achieve and you tech guys have to find a way to do that rather than here's some really shiny tech we don't really care whether or not it's going to work for people but it's really shiny tech and that's the idea and actually the way we're doing it is we're not based we're not basing initially on visual looks because as you said you need to understand that the visual thing is giving you very little or you give people more information and that's what we're going to try and do and get people to Actually, because I know from my work that long-term compatibility is not based upon that chemical attraction to looks.

31:52Long-term compatibility is on the meeting of minds and finding deep attraction in that mind, finding love within that other mind. And so the way we do it at Love Jack is we have five words which you have to input and you have to change them often to sum up who you are. And they can be silly things like five words of how you're feeling in this moment or what you have for breakfast. or they can be really profound about who you are at your core. And the thing is, what that does is that sparks curiosity. And that's, okay, this person is saying this to me. You're getting more information about who their mind or what their mind is.

32:26Because ultimately, you fall in love with someone's brain, their personality, their values, their creativity, their sense of humor, whatever that is. And the looks are very secondary. So by presenting the words first, you do get to look at an image eventually, but it's down the line. you have to and we restrict the number of people you can swipe through so it's um that's the way we're going to have to work in the future because they're not going away we have a whole generation of people who that's how they think they do it and actually they feed they feel de-skilled so they actually say to me how do you meet someone in real life and actually you need to say to people well the instinct is within you it's not something we were all trained in the instinct is is in with you, it's within you, and your brain is there to help you do it.

33:12So I think we've got a really confused generation at the moment. Yeah, I mean, one thing I hear from all of my, like, fiancé's girlfriends is they wish they were approached more when they go out to places. Now, obviously, there's an other side to that, which is that if you're approached by someone you don't want to be approached by, it can come across as creepy and obviously like unwanted. So there are two sides to that coin. But I do think that young men now are not in the habit of approaching women in real life. And that it's just like it sends a very different signal to a woman if you're willing to approach her in real life than if you're willing to.

33:54Anyone can swipe right on on an app, it means nothing to a woman that you did that for her. It's what we call low cost. Yeah, it's low cost. And that's another problem with the apps is that relationships are supposed to be costly. They're supposed to cost you something to show how important they are to you and show your commitment to them. So you're absolutely right. If you as a, you know, I understand entirely why some young men today are concerned about approaching women. I also have young men come up to me and say, I actually don't know what the rules are about approaching women anymore because I don't want to come across as creepy.

34:24And I don't want to come across as... So it's a really difficult picture out there, I think. But the whole idea is it's supposed to be costly. So it's supposed to be a little bit scary and you commit your time to it because it's so valuable. And the problem with apps is they don't cost you anything. You can swipe through it while sitting on the subway, watching telly. There's no investment there. And that's another problem. That's why people kind of do it so much is it's not costing them anything. And actually, it's supposed to. It's supposed to cost you something to show your commitment. yeah with regard to the creep question uh the i don't know if you know chris williamson he's a podcaster yeah so he had he said what i thought was the most interesting and true thing about this which is the lesson of the kind of feminist era for to young men has been like don't be a creep like don't be like the bad men that that are too aggressive with women yeah and the the guys that have internalized that and really taking taken that seriously are we're generally like not most of the problem to begin with but there is a small slice of guys that are just extremely aggressive extremely overbearing have fully ignored the feminist lessons of the past you know 10 or 20 years and so you know the guys who have internalized the advice are kind of the ones that didn't need and actually don't benefit from it because on the margin, they need to be told to be a little more confident, a little more assertive.

35:59And I don't know what you do with the perpetual problem of quasi-predators that might just be with us forever. But yeah, it's a well-intentioned lesson to project to men, but it really has this dual effect that is not necessarily good for either sex, I think. Absolutely. No, you're absolutely right. Say, do you have this school flashback at the tax? Just tell something and hope that it's right? No, no. Why do tax is my safe space? You mean everything is safe? Yes, exactly. Why do tax is the app that understands you. Regardless of studying, job or travel. That's right. It doesn't feel like tax.

36:43Tax is done? Safe. With Why do tax? Oh, yeah. So I'm curious, have you done any research or looked into arranged marriages? Because I've seen some counterintuitive and interesting data and arguments from people that, like my bias is against arranged marriages, as is any Western individualists. But I have seen some people argue that actually people in other countries kind of do okay with arranged marriages, or they're happier than you would think. Have you looked into that at all? No, arranged marriages actually have a reasonably high success rate. And actually they tend to turn out with most people being no less satisfied, in fact, than those where we've come together ourselves.

37:26I mean, obviously you need to make a difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage. Obviously forced marriages are never acceptable. But in many cultures, arranged marriages are done. And obviously it's the parents, it's the family of the two young people who come together and choose who's going to meet. I think it's not as extreme as it once was in most cultures, which is you may in fact not meet your potential partner until the wedding. Generally, these days, people are allowed to meet. Sometimes it always has to be chaperoned. Other times it can be that they can also meet after a period of being chaperoned separately.

37:59And in many cultures, it's now acceptable for either one of the parties to say, actually, no, this isn't who I want to marry. but actually from a predictor predicting success point of view having your partner or at least being introduced to a partner that has been chosen by your family tends to work quite well because your family know you really well and for them to choose somebody for you in some ways is for example more successful than most dating app algorithms because they know you really really well so personally I don't have an issue with arranged marriage I mean I'm an anthropologist and therefore I study cross-culturally.

38:39I don't have an issue with arranged marriage at all. Also, you need to understand also that these are often in cultures where the idea of being in love before marriage is not one that exists. So they're looking at it from a very different perspective. The idea is you get married, you hopefully like the person in a platonic way, you get along. But actually romantic love is something that would come after marriage and romantic love is something that would grow. And in many marriages, it actually does. So you're looking at it from a Western perspective where everything is based upon experiencing very powerful love for the person.

39:13It's hard for us to grasp that. But if you think that there's a culture where that actually isn't important and you haven't been brought up to think that's important. To think that actually I trust my family and they will find someone who is good for me. And I will like that person before I married them, but I won't love them. That's perfectly normal. And they've also been brought up in families where their parents had arranged marriages. so um it's it's something that works very well within many cultures okay what about polyamory i mean polyamory is like i don't um i don't remember when the idea of polyamory first like really entered the mainstream culture i don't really remember hearing about it as a young kid but what what is polyamory and uh what's your view on it is it do you think um too many people are getting into polyamory or more people should try it?

40:04And how do you view it from a perspective of love? Okay. So polyamory is as ancient as any form of love. It's just, it's not something that's talked about particularly. So polyamory is having multiple loving relationships at one time. So it's not the same as a sexually open relationship where you have sex with lots of people. Polyamory, as it says, it's amory, it's love. So you have multiple romantic love relationships at once. it's more open today I think just simply because a lot of our discussions around love and sexuality are more open and so people have come out into the open and talk about it the percentage of people who practice it is still incredibly small and I will say and I think this is a little bit of confusion that goes along some of my work I don't have an opinion on it I have scientific data on it for those people who are polyamorous that I've worked with it works incredibly well for them.

40:55And, you know, it's a personal choice. And many people I know have views on it in terms of it not being particularly moralistic, of it being sort of condoning infidelity, as it were, of these people being, you know, sexually promiscuous, for example, that tends to be some of the attitude surveys you get to people with polyamory. But polyamorous people, and again, I'm not saying I agree or disagree with them, would argue that actually it's an incredibly ethical way of having a relationship because they are being open about the fact that they are falling in love with more than one person at once.

41:28Whereas people who have affairs are not open about that. So actually people who are monogamous and have affairs are in a way have less morals than people who are polyamorous is their argument because they are actually saying, yes, I have fallen in love with somebody else. I'm being completely open with you about it. It's, you know, there's a lot of communication in the relationship about what the boundaries are, about being open about how you feel about different people um and people who are polyamorous they're they're fascinating in one sense because they they they experience something called compersion and compersion is feeling joy from seeing somebody else you love being loving and being loved by somebody else and that's what polyamorous people experience so they rather than feeling jealous that their partner is loving somebody else they feel compersion they I feel joy that that person has found love somewhere else.

42:18So I don't think it's necessarily any more, it's not something that's a new term. It's a term that's been around for many, many years. We had polyamory in Greek civilization, for example, in the classics. But it is something I think people talk about more and it's less hidden because they feel that they can be more open without being attacked for it. But whether or not I think more people should do it, I genuinely think that when we talk about love, I think, you know, it's very much a personal choice what you do. Personally, I know I couldn't be polyamorous. I am not that kind of person. My levels of jealousy would not cope with it.

42:58But for some people it works very, very well. And that's their choice. Yeah, so my view on it has always been that it seems to me clearly the right decision for a small subset of people that have, I guess I would put it, a psychological disposition appropriate for it, which is much lower jealousy than the average person has. And you said compersion, is that the word? Yes, they feel compersion. Yeah. So it seems to me that psychological profile is rare, not in the sense, you know, not like it's one in every 10 ,000 people, but it's like more than that. But it's, it's, I don't know how, you know, is it in the single digits, in the tens?

43:45Oh, no, it's in the single digits. It's in the single digits, right. So it seems to me that polyamory should be a thing that those people pursue without too much stigma, I think without any stigma really, but I have seen many polyamorous people pushing it as a better way of being in general. I'm talking about influencers online that will basically give you arguments why polyamory is actually a better way to be for humans in general, as opposed to, for instance, gay guys don't say it's better to be gay. They say, I'm gay. I'm built that way. You're built that way. Let's be free. Let's be ourselves.

44:30Let's pursue our happiness. Whereas there is a certain message I've been seeing online, which pushes it as a positive good with arguments, which to me misses the point of what it's good for, which is like, if you have that disposition, it's better for you, but it's a relatively rare disposition. Yeah, and it's a natural disposition. So I don't think it's one of the, in the same way as you say, being gay is a natural disposition. I don't think you can say to people, you need to try this, because this is so much better for you. There is no evidence that it's any better than any other form, you know, monogamy or whatever.

45:02It's an absolutely personal individual choice and you have to have the drive to want to do it. You can't learn the drive to want to do it. So for somebody to say adopt this lifestyle because it's better seems a little bit, well, it's just, it's not real. It's not naturalistic because it's a drive. And if you don't have that drive, then you wouldn't adopt it. So yeah, it's not a lifestyle choice. So it's a choice that you make. Do you watch the show Couples Therapy? I don't, no. No, I don't. It would be really interesting for you to watch it and react to it because I don't know what kind of couple is comfortable having couples therapy in public.

45:43So it pre-selects for a certain type of person. But the couples therapist, Dr. Orna, is brilliant. And she's just a masterfully wise person in terms of getting couples that are having deep conflicts to connect and actually communicate about it. But she does deal with polyamorous couples as well. She has gay couples. She has all kinds of couples. And one thing I noticed about some of the polyamorous couples, and I've noticed this about polyamorous people that I know as well, is that some of them really thrive in it because they're very low jealousy, but there are some that are closer to the normal end of the spectrum in terms of jealousy.

46:27But reframe, you know, if you happen to be in like a polyamorous subculture and say like it's actually not meant for you, but you're experimenting and you're young and whatever, the language of jealousy, because like most people don't understand like what sexual jealousy is in that subculture really gets like retranslated by constantly talking about boundaries and constantly talking about this and and it kind of gets translated and use other words to express what is at bottom the fact that like you actually have a level of possessiveness that you're you haven't accepted about yourself yet and I see some of that sometimes on Dr.

47:10Ornish's show. Yeah, I mean, like all relationships, I think with polyamorous relationships, you're going to get some people who, as you say, thrive in them, some people who find it a little more difficult in the same way, you know, some people thrive in monogamous relationships and some people find them restrictive. So, you know, you're always going to get people who are more suited to a particular way of living. And it's an exploration, particularly as a young person, as to where you fit in that particular spectrum. Okay, so I want to talk about the attachment styles. I've been hearing about attachment styles, you know, for many years.

47:43I've never looked into it. I've never actually quite understood even or taken the time to understand what it means. People talk about having a secure attachment style, an avoidant attachment style. First of all, where do these concepts come from? Who invented this? And is it based on a body of research? What is it? Yeah. So attachment theory is based on a very strong, powerful and quite well grounded set of research. It started with a psychologist in the 1950s known as John Bowlby. It continued on with a psychologist known as Laura Ainsworth. And John Bowlby started by looking at attachment between mothers and children.

48:21And the idea that children remained with their mothers, not because they were the source of food or they were the source of safety, but because of some deep-seated psychological bond, which underpinned that child's development, and particularly their emotional development. And that's where the idea of security came from. But if that was a good and powerful and healthy bond, they had what was known as a secure attachment, which was that child knew that they could rely on that adult, come what may, to protect them, to do what was good for them. And that's known as a secure attachment. And the idea behind attachment theory is if you have a secure attachment as a child what you should be able to do is use that secure attachment as like a safe haven from which you go out into the world as a confident well-developed individual and you cope with all the knocks that are out there safe in the knowledge that you can come back to that that source of secure attachment to put you back together if it all goes wrong or emotionally support you or whatever it might be and that's what a secure attachment is.

49:24And he did a lot of studies confirming that, confirming that particular idea of attachment. And that's been built on since the 50s to add in, you know, romantic relationship attachment. There are some people who work on friendship attachment, though attachments in friendships are less common. And ultimately, in the last 20 years, in the other field that I work in, including father to child attachment. So attachment relationships are absolutely fundamental to children. And as I say, a secure attachment is the gold standard that we would like all children to have so that they are resilient, they're well formed in terms of their development, they have lovely, healthy social brains, and they can go off into the world and be successful, safe in the knowledge that mum or dad or whoever brought them up, whoever they had the attachment to, is there.

50:13But unfortunately, not all children grow up in that particular circumstance. And that's where the idea of the insecure attachment styles comes from um and they are sort of so you've talked about avoidant attachment styles so avoidant attachment styles are children's individuals who avoid forming these forms of relationships and they either avoid them because in the sort of dismissing avoidant um profile they either avoid them because actually they just really don't need them in their lives there are it's a very small percentage of people who are dismissing avoidant or we have the fearful avoidant um profile fearful avoidant people avoid relationships so they don't get hurt because they have very very high fear of abandonment so the way they deal with that is they just don't get attached to anybody um and then we have sort of the anxious attachment style people anxious attachment style people also have a fear of abandonment but the way they deal with it is actually by in in in academic terms maintaining proximity to the person they're attached to.

51:14We would call it in sort of normal parlance, they're clingy. They will cling to the person because the way they will avoid being abandoned is to spend all their time with the person they're attached to. So basically they cannot be abandoned. And so those are sorts of the attachment styles and the attachment styles we see in romantic relationships, but they are very much grounded in your childhood experience of attachment. interesting so um i have many questions about this so are these are these attachment styles stable personality traits that so for instance if i am dismissive avoidant does that mean i'm going to be dismissive like i does that mean not only do i need not need a romantic partner i don't need friends or are there people that are like secure with friends and dismissive avoidant so So it's relationship specific.

52:04So you could be, you know, yeah, insecure with your partner, but secure with your friends, for example. Or you might be insecure with some friends and insecure with other friends. So it's very much relationship specific. Secondly, they can change. So they're not set in stone. And in fact, some people work very hard to change their attachment styles, particularly in adulthood, particularly if it's not helpful in terms of what their goals are. So let's say you are dismissing avoidant, but actually you're not one of the dismissing avoidant people who isn't interested in relationships. Actually, you do want a relationship, but maybe you have a real fear of intimacy and proximity, for example.

52:39So they can do work to change their attachment style. You can move from one profile to the other. Sometimes it's relatively easy. Sometimes it's really, really difficult. And it would take a lot of work to do it, but it is a possibility. so is there is it uh you know if if you have one of these attachment styles um these kind of insecure attachment styles is it always the case that that comes from the a mirrored attachment style to one of or both of your parents or are there people that have secure relationships with their parents but develop insecure relation attachment styles for other reasons?

53:18There are. You are less likely to form an insecure attachment style if you have the secure attachment to both parents because what's happened when you are developing, so your social brain, the bit that controls things like attachment, controls particularly the sort of cognitive aspects of relationship, sort of start of relationship and maintaining relationships grows in the first two years of your life. And if you are brought up by secure, with a secure attachment to your parents, then that area of your brain is in a way bathed in sort of the perfect environment to build a really good social brain.

53:54So you are unlikely to suffer from insecure attachment styles or anxious styles when you are older, but you can do. It might be that you have a series of really bad experiences with romantic relationships. For example, maybe you go out with a series of people who undermine that secure attachment style. And then yes, you can certainly develop an insecure attachment style through experience in your adult life definitely so as i was reading your book on these attachment styles i was trying to locate myself in anything and so i've i'm i'm engaged now and i've always like i've i've always been comfortable in relationships probably more so than i was comfortable single um but i was trying to say okay like when when i was single or in in various relationships, like what made me anxious?

54:46And the reason I think I didn't resonate with the paradigm is because I was never anxious about being abandoned. Like I understood that like it's possible for people to break up with me and that that would be super unpleasant. But it wasn't something that was an active anxiety didn't keep me up at night. My active anxiety was of me choosing the wrong person. In other words, me committing to someone based on reasons at the time. And then it turns out in retrospect, that was a really bad decision because of either how she evolved or how I evolved or how we evolved. And I just end up like super unhappy in the future because of a stupid decision I committed to in the past.

55:28That's like what made me anxious. Okay. So attachment style is measured on a very specific form of anxiety, which is anxiety of abandonment. Obviously, there are many other forms of anxiety in relationships that you can have, including the one you've suggested. so what i would say is if you i mean i i can't do a full attachment interview on you now but but the two the two dimensions on which we assess uh attachment in romantic relationships are fear of abandonment and uh how comfortable you are with proximity so physical intimacy and if you are comfortable with proximity and you have very low sense very low fear of abandonment then you're secure generally um the other anxieties that come in relationships are things we all worry about And that's just you ruminating in your massive brain because we are human on various aspects of a relationship.

56:18But that isn't an indicator of, for example, an insecure attachment style. So I would say off the top of my head, you know, if you can say that you aren't anxious about abandonment, that you're fine with physical, emotional intimacy, then you are probably secure. Right. So another way of saying that is like if you're worried about worrying about being with the wrong person is a normal worry. and a good one because it provokes you to think about, in fact, is this the right person? What qualities define the right person, right? Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Okay, so a few more questions. I learned in your book, I had been taking it for granted that pheromones are a real and important aspect of human attraction and dating.

57:06And I learned from your book that we don't know that for sure. No, and in fact, there's increasing evidence that we don't actually have pheromones or indeed act upon them, I'm afraid. And there is sort of several reasons that pheromones are used in the lesser mammals for, yes, for attraction purposes. So lesser mammals, there is no conscious contemplation during attraction at all. They take in all the sensory information that I talked about at the start in relation to whatever little furry creature you're talking about. And they also use pheromones to attract the opposite sex. There was no evidence that we produce pheromones.

57:47There's been intensive investigation on this. There are lots of techniques we can use to find pheromones. None have been found in humans. Also, the particular connection between the brain and your olfactory equipment, your nose, which we see in other mammals which allows you to assess pheromones to smell and assess pheromones actually isn't connected in humans it's it's basically lost its connection over time and for those of us who study humans this makes sense because to be attracted to a human is the way we do attraction is yes there is a mammalian part of it that sensory intake of information but beyond that most of our attraction is actually based in our conscious brain because you start really thinking about is this person funny um you know uh do we like the same things in person actually does does their voice sound really irritating oh my god my friends will love them hate them whatever these sorts of thoughts go on in your brain so to be attracted as a human is a very is a much more complicated thing than it is to be a mammal and therefore we've really lost But pheromones wouldn't hack it in our world.

58:54Just because you've got a pheromone drawing you towards somebody, it could be as soon as they opened their mouth, they said something absolutely unconscionable and you were like, right, no, that's it. So the thing that really attracts us to each other is our brains. The other thing to say about why we don't have pheromones is we've given up most of the olfactory part of our brain. And that's because we grew a massive social brain. So the bit that we lost, as well as making our brain six times bigger than it should be for a mammal of our size, is we lost a major part of olfactory equipment. So we don't have the olfactory system that most mammals do.

59:25So I'm afraid there's no evidence of pheromones at all. It's interesting. So that must be just a massive case of science journalists getting it wrong or boosting sensational studies. Yeah, it's just completely wrong. It's a really nice idea that we all give off somebody that makes us unbelievable. You give off something that makes us attractive. It's a nice idea. but yes it probably is a case of science journalism or as you say quite awful studies which have been picked up by people who didn't necessarily interpret them correctly and then spread this idea that we have pheromones but we don't. Okay so if that's true then I have two questions.

1:00:03One is I strongly believe in every relationship every serious relationship I've ever been in that I can tell when she is ovulating by smell. Now it's possible I'm self-deceived about that but i feel like i've subjected it to like fairly good analysis and it's like mostly accurate that i can smell like for one in two days there's like a sweeter smell that i can detect it's not an area i'm a specialist in by any stretch of the imagination um i would say that if you can it's not a pheromone you're smelling you're smelling a change in hormonal balance within the body and in certain secretions you can smell it i imagine right but it's not a pheromone So then what is a pheromone?

1:00:48So a pheromone is a smell that is given off, which goes into the air, which has an element of being attractive in some way to the opposite sex. So insects do it. And their pheromones can, for example, match the smell of a particularly favorite flower. So the female, it's usually males who give them off, the female will come across and think, actually, I'm going to a flower. And then, in fact, they'll encounter a male. and he's really hoping that she finds him attractive and then they mate. So quite often in other species, it mimics something in the environment that is attractive to the opposite sex.

1:01:24But there is no evidence that we do that at all. And so the difference between pheromones and hormones would be pheromones would be like individually tailored in some way. Whereas if all women have different hormones when they ovulate, then there'll be one phenomenon that's the same. Basically, if it is, I mean, as I say, it's not my area, what you will be smelling is a slight change in hormonal balances between progesterone and estrogen. And that's probably what you're smelling. So is it, I also learned, I think you said in your book, it's a menstrual synchrony is a myth? Yes, it is. So it actually doesn't happen?

1:02:04It doesn't happen. There was one rather bad study done on a very small population of girls in a boarding school, which did not control for variables at all, particularly. And obviously, it sounds, again, like an amazing phenomenon that everyone starts cycling together. But it's never been replicated, and there's no evidence that it happens. So why do people believe this? Because in my mind, I don't think it's because of a study that people believe this. I think this is just like a widespread myth. Yes, but that study started it. So that study started it. That study was reported and then this became a thing because at the time it wasn't refuted.

1:02:43Because unfortunately, it's like when I look on social media and people put things up saying scientists say, just because scientists says something doesn't mean that it's necessarily true or that it was based on good studies. because as you know having you know studied psychology for example there is good science and there is not so good science and actually what you need to do is you need to interrogate the methods used in this study how big was the population how did you control for variables what statistical analysis did you do can we replicate the findings of this study which is the ultimate test because you should be able to replicate the findings of the study if it's actually a fact and there are many studies out there where that is not true and that has not happened but unfortunately people who write things in the press and now these days on social media don't interrogate studies in that way and therefore they will they will uh report on it as fact as truth um and that means unfortunately some quite bad science gets out there and some myths are built up about certain things okay um so i want to talk a little bit about sex and love addiction this is a phrase i've heard a lot i've heard people that are self-described self sex and love addicts they go to 12-step programs similar to Narcotics Anonymous and have various degrees of success, you know, becoming happier people.

1:04:04Is sex and love addiction a real thing? What do you know about it and what can you say about it to people that are experiencing it? Okay. First thing I'll say is I know very little about sex addiction, if or if not, because I don't study sex. I study love and they're two entirely separate phenomenon. In terms of love addiction, I mean, using the word addiction is interesting because addiction is a very particular physiological and neurological response to something. So when we talk about addiction in terms of like drug addiction or alcohol addiction, it's a very particular neural and physiological response.

1:04:42I'm not aware that love, when people say they have love addiction, that they are presenting in the same neural in physiological way as we would, for example, a drug addiction. So I think the word addiction, if you talk to an addiction specialist, they would probably feel quite uncomfortable using the term addiction in that sense. There are certainly some people who, let's use the word addiction, are addicted to, for example, the start of a relationship. There are certainly some people who are happier when they're in relationships and there are genetic predispositions to that. There's a part of the oxytocin receptor gene, which either makes you more or less motivated to be in long term relationships.

1:05:22People who carry a certain version of it, they are much happier when they're in relationships. And they tend to be the people who stack relationship after relationship after relationship. There are certainly some people who are more susceptible to, yes, the early bits of relationship, because the early bit of relationship has a high level of example of dopamine. and if you're a particularly dopamine seeking character you can find the first bit of a relationship the attraction stage really exciting and they're the kind of people who love that first bit then it gets to start moving into love and companionate love and being underpinned by beta endorphin and then they lose interest and then they will go they will end that relationship and start the first bit again with somebody else you certainly get people who do that pattern you will also get some people who because of their attachment profile um will seek out relationships because as a search for some form of security.

1:06:12And that, again, is generally to do with their upbringing and their psychological profile. So you certainly get some people who crave love, seek love, seek certain bits of the relationship trajectory more than others. And we certainly know that there are some people, for example, who find the end of relationships much more physiologically and psychologically painful than others. So you can see why people would discuss love addiction but I don't think that's what we're talking about. Addiction is a physiological response. Many of these circumstances are more psychological than physiological. Okay.

1:06:49Two more questions for you. One, I've had a lot of conversations about birth control with various women in my life, my family members, my fiance and friends and stuff. And one of the common themes I've heard is that birth control has a variety of effects that are way deeper and more extreme in some ways than women anticipate. and then you know i also went down the reddit rabbit hole of people telling their stories and there are entire reddit threads devoted to a common story where a woman either goes on birth control or off birth control after a long time and suddenly i'm not attracted to my husband of 20 years i'm attracted to a totally different kind of guy which is like jesus a nightmare scenario but um and often there are like very important reasons why they had to go off of birth control or whatever you know this anyway what do we know about birth control and do you agree with like the theme that i've heard that people are much too casual or people are sold it much more casually than than the impact that it can have um that's not something i'm going to comment on because i'm not a specialist in birth control the one thing i will comment on is i would say that again Again, unfortunately, the idea that birth control alters who you're attracted to is, again, based on one very awful study.

1:08:22And I think, again, it got picked up. It was a really big theme on social media about a year ago, and there were a lot of videos about it. And actually, again, there is no evidence that it alters who you're attracted to in any way. Again, it was one study which suggested it, which was not a good piece of science. So I would say at the moment, we have no evidence that that is the case. Okay. Okay, final question. And this is one where I'm certainly hoping the answer goes one way, but I've seen some pretty depressing gallop polls to suggest the opposite. Does having kids make you happier? Oh, do you know what?

1:09:03It really depends, I think. Again, it's not really my area of specialization, whether or not having kids makes you happier. But as a parent, and as somebody who studies fathering, I think it really depends upon where your starting point is. So if you are having kids within a nice, healthy relationship where, you know, you've got it all down, you've got your mutual respect, you've got mutual compassion, the communication is good, you know how to handle conflict, then I would say, yeah, absolutely. They can certainly make relationships happier. The issue comes is when people have children thinking it's going to fix a problem in a relationship.

1:09:41And I can tell you from my own experience, but also having studied thousands and thousands of men who've become fathers, that is not a way to fix a hole in your relationship. Having a child is really hard. It's one of the biggest pressures on a relationship, if not the biggest pressure a relationship will experience. Because you are adding a new person to your little team. And we all know that adding a person to a team is a problem anyway, in terms of everyone having to jiggle around and find their new roles within that team. But this person is completely unpredictable. And you are trying to deal with somebody who is completely unpredictable with no sleep.

1:10:19And it's amazing how many arguments obviously that can cause. And that will cause arguments in the best relationship because it's really hard. So I would say, yeah, obviously, if you have a good relationship, then generally when I've spoken to fathers about this and said, you know, how has it affected your relationship many of them say it's made it stronger you know we have this real shared goal now you know it's wonderful to have something that we're both investing in so massively etc etc etc but at the same time you will also hear people say that you know no you know we did this because we thought that it would make it better and it doesn't so i would say never have a child to patch up a relationship it doesn't work okay well i have to ask um like one or two more questions now because i realize i haven't asked you about your specialty of research on fathers.

1:11:04Yes. Which is, I'm guessing, a kind of more rare specialty because there's a lot of research on mothers, how mothers run with children. Very little. Fathers, I guess, get less love in the research department. And fathers are famously, you know, famous for abandoning their families. Like, this is a frequent theme in life is men abandon their families, men abandon children at a rate that, you know, all of us can go, you know, just like one friend into our contact list to know someone who's abandoned by their father. So it makes sense why there's less of an emphasis, but in some ways that would lead you to want to study that phenomenon more, right?

1:11:43And so I'm curious, like what is it that your research on father's attachment to children revealed that would not be obvious to the lay person? Okay, I suppose the thing that's not obvious to the lay person is that well first of all fathers do have attachment relationships with their children when i began two decades ago people said they didn't but that was simply because no one had looked um so they definitely have attachment relationships the the that attachment relationship is as powerful as that between a mother and a child but it's actually crucially a different sort of attachment so mother's attachments are based on nurture um so that secure base is developed through having a very nurturing relationship with a child Fathers is also based on nurture.

1:12:28Fathers are just are evolved to nurture as much as mums are. But it also has an added dimension, which we call challenge or stimulation. And that's really critical to your child's development. And that's because they use that nurturing base, that secure base they've developed through nurture, to actually kind of push the child's developmental boundaries, to push them mentally and physically. And that's really important in terms of building their resilience, particularly their mental resilience. and really what we say is fathers scaffold the child's entry into the world beyond the family and what we mean by that is that attachment is the foundation for how successful your child will be in the world because fathers underpin some areas of development much more powerfully than mothers do and again this is something we've only learned recently so things like mental resilience absolutely developing mental resilience is an input from the father developing the skills that you need to be a social being.

1:13:22So social language, pro-social skills like sharing, caring, helping, emotional regulation, behavioral inhibition, all of these things are very influenced by the attachment that father has with his child. And I think most people don't realize that. We are sold in our society that fathers are very much a secondary parent. And in fact, that they're dispensable, you don't really need them. And actually, when we look at the evidence that's out there, And it makes sense to me as an evolutionary anthropologist because we are the only ape species and one of 85 % of mammals that have investing fathers.

1:13:54So fathers who, okay, yes, some of them leave, but a lot of them stick around. And that's a rare thing. And that evolved in our line because it's critical to child development. And I think most people don't realize that. And that's why when we look at the outcomes for children who don't have a father figure, it doesn't have to be the biological father, but they don't even have a father figure. so like an uncle or grandfather, whatever it might be, those outcomes are sometimes quite difficult because there are things like increases in antisocial behavior, increases in addiction, increases in mental health issues.

1:14:27And that's often because this developmental input that the father figure should have had wasn't there. One of the big memes you see nowadays is about love languages. Like, what is your love language? Is this a real phenomenon? And what do you know about it? What can you tell me about it, if anything? It is a real phenomenon. They have been found to be psychologically pretty robust in terms of when we look at people's behavior. Most people tend to have one, sometimes two, which reflects how they value love and how they see love and perceive love coming from another person. So they are helpful in that sense.

1:15:02I would say they're not as powerful as people think they are. So what people tend to do is they, with love, they tend to say, right, this, this is the answer to everything. If you just understand the other person's love language, then everything's going to be fine. Or, you know, or your own love language, everything's going to be fine. It's not that powerful. I mean, it's a helpful thing to know, but it's not the be all and end all of everything. And there are many other things which are more important in terms of compatibility than I think love languages are, for example, you know, compatible attachment styles, for example, are quite important.

1:15:32So I would say it's a helpful thing to know. And if you feel like there is a mismatch between you and your partner in terms of how you express love and how you receive love. Maybe it's a good idea to name what your love language is so that you understand that actually when your partner makes you a cup of coffee, that's his act of service and that's his way of showing you love. And then you kind of know that you're supposed to value that. I suppose that is helpful, but they're not as critical as I think some particularly social media posts would say. Okay. And then also there's a lot of social media content that sort of tries to sell you the secret of unlocking the other sex, unlocking attraction in a woman as a man or vice versa.

1:16:19Is there any good research? And if so, do you ever counsel people on like actually how to attract a mate more? Or do you think it's just something we've got instincts to do it and really the more important thing is to just put yourself out there? And so what can you say about sort of like how to attract a mate? Okay, definitely I think you have instincts and you should just put yourself out there and really just stop overthinking it. Because I think the problem is if we all followed all the advice we had on social media, we would never do anything at all. I think in terms of this idea of triggering the protective instinct in a man to be attracted, it's just based on really quite outmoded ideas about gender roles and what you know that like the stereotype of what a man is and a stereotype of what a woman is and the stereotype of what a woman will find attractive in a man so I don't think it's particularly helpful because those stereotypes generally aren't aren't particularly predictive the other thing I would say I think probably where it's come from is our first stage of attraction the unconscious stage of attraction is based upon trying to take in information from that other person through your senses about how likelihood they are to be reproductively successful.

1:17:36And the indicators for reproductive success are different in men and women because they bring different things to the reproductive table. So if we talk about heterosexual couples, men are looking for indicators of things like health and fertility. And women, because men bring in the evolutionary story, protection and provision would look for elements of protection and provision in the male. And I think maybe that's been misread to be like, okay, so the way you make a man be attracted to you is make him feel protective. There is literally no evidence on any of that. I think it's a misinterpretation on understanding how attraction science works.

1:18:11And I think it's based on really unhelpful gender stereotypes as well, actually. People are really individual. And actually the thing, as I said earlier, the thing that's the most attractive to both men and women ultimately if you're looking at long-term love isn't protection and all that kind of thing it's it's who are they in their brain who are they who what's their personality all those kind of things and that's a really individual thing and you have to trust your instinct on that okay and finally one piece of advice for young people out there looking for love obviously besides buying your very good book why we love um what piece of advice do you have i would say two things first If you're looking for a romantic love, change your attitude to the apps.

1:18:56So see them as an introductory tool. Obviously, when my Love Jack app comes out, you sign up to that. But you change them as an introductory tool. And you get in the room with that person as soon as possible. You have this amazing brain that's really good at this. And you are completely handicapping it at the moment. So do it that way. And don't be scared of what we call old-fashioned dating. We didn't all go on a training course. You have the instinct to do it. um secondly i would say there are some people out young people out there who aren't that interested in romantic love and then they sit think in some way that their lives are lacking and actually there is no hierarchy of love romantic love doesn't sit at the top of the pinnacle of achievement of love it's actually a flat spectrum so what you need in your life absolutely you need love in your life but one of the great things about being human is there are so many options for that love you could have friendship love you can have love of your family You can have, you know, love of your community.

1:19:49You can have religious love. You can have love with your pet dog. There are so many different ways of loving. So seek out the love that you have in your life. And it doesn't necessarily have to be romantic if that's not something you want. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time. And people can buy your book, Why We Love. And if they can follow you on Twitter or website, now would be the time to plug it. Yeah. So my website is just animation.com. And I'm on Instagram at DrAnnaMachin. Alright, animation, thanks so much. Thank you.

1:20:46There we go.