SLO MO REWIND: Dr. Jed Diamond on the 5 Stages of Lasting Love

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34My guest today is someone I truly look up to and respect. Dr. Jed Diamond is the founder and director of Men Alive. Men Alive is a health program that helps men and the women who love them to live fully, love deeply, and make a positive difference to the world. Jed is one of the world's leading experts in the field of gender-specific medicine, men's health, and trauma recovery. His training program on the five stages of love has been taken by men and women throughout the world. Jed has written more than 16 books, including many international bestsellers. I think the most well-known of those would be Male Monopause, Surviving Male Monopause, The Warrior's Journey Home, Healing Men, Healing the Planet, and very famous and yet really, really informative, the Irritable Male Syndrome.

1:31His most recent book is the acclaimed 12 Rules for Good Men, which truly is one that I want to discuss deeply, not only because of its content, but also because of how Jed's journey took him from a place where he needed those rules to a place where he can teach them to the rest of the world. I know for sure that you're going I enjoy this conversation very much. Man or woman, I think Jed will have something to add to the way you think about our relationships. So let's begin with Dr. Jed Diamond. I wanted to talk to you about so many things. You wrote 12 books. Well, actually 16 now. Oh my God. Yeah.

2:1812 was a while ago. All right. So I want to know how you do that. Because my intention is hopefully to write 11 books. I don't know why I chose the number 11. 11's a good number. I think so too. I wrote four already. I mean, 3.9, one book is missing 40 pages, but I'm not as efficient. I mean, how often did you write books? Well, I started in 1980 and this is part of my, a little bit part of my story. My father was a writer and mostly a playwright and poet, went into a mental hospital when I was five years old. And I really grew up both with a fear of ending up like my father. When that was viewed as the worst thing in the world, you could go crazy, end up in a mental hospital.

3:10But everything I learned from my mother, who I then raised me, was that she saw the connection in her mind between him being a creative person and a writer and not being able to make a living and getting depressed and ending up in a mental hospital. So I followed her lead early on in that I suppressed all my creative energies and went to medical school. I was going to be a doctor, a real kind of scientific doctor, and then dropped out of medical school. And really, after that, started to find my creative voice. And my first book, it's called Inside Out, Becoming My Own Man, which was kind of my own putting my life together as it was up till that point.

4:04And I found out I like to write. and you know what one thing leads to another and the first book led to a second book and then eventually 16 books later but what is your style I mean what do you do do you write every day is that like a or do you wait for inspiration how do you do it I write every day every day every day and I don't write books every day but I write every day and I I've made a commitment for the last probably 10 years that I write an article every week that I post on my website. Yeah. So that's an ongoing commitment. And then out of what then becomes usually the issues I'm dealing with in my life, that's really, if you look at the books there, all right, so I'm dealing with this now.

5:01So I want to understand it better. And since I write to understand, the writing becomes part of my therapy, part of my healing, part of my exploration. And then, as you know, there's a difference between writing an article, a small piece, and the commitment to write a book, which for me is a couple-a-year process, and then all the things that go into publishing, getting it out, promoting, and getting people to know about it. so that has to be kind of a collaboration of the stars the energies the feel of uh because i've written in different way i have my own publishing company so i can publish my own books i get requests from publishers at this stage to do books so when you know the last book i did was uh you know this this book 12 rules for good men that really tried to look at what part of why I'm inspired by your work is that I think there's some unique things that men are called on to do in the world that I think many men are not doing.

6:22And because of all the ways in which our lives are channeled in other ways, my wife inspired this book. She said, you know, with all the negative energy about men and the Me Too movement, and her view was, as mine, that in many ways, men have a lot of societal restrictions that put us in a man box or certain armoring that keeps us from both being who we are and being able to express who we are. So this, she said, we really need a book for men that really is more prescriptive than many of my other books that says, here's what, at least what I think would be helpful. Here's the 12 rules that I've found over the years to be helpful.

7:11And that what women need to know to be, you know, to understand men better. So that was kind of that energy for what I put out in the world these days. I love that you write not just for men, but openly, I think your books are also very good for the women they love, right? Or the women that love them, right? So the idea, but I have to say in today's world, and I'm probably a sensitive question, that whole concept of gender specific health or gender specific treatment, men and women is a lot more contested and I think a little less defined, if you want. How do you view that? I mean, with most of your work written specifically for men, what does that mean for all others' gender identifications?

7:58Well, it is. It's both an interesting philosophical question and a practical question. It's always been very practical for me, starting with my father's going into the mental hospital when I was five, and my mother's fear of death, my own, hers, and his. So right from the beginning, I had this need to understand what was going on with my father and what had happened to me, because both my mother and myself were worried about, am I going to follow my father's footsteps and go that direction? She didn't worry so much about me following her direction, and I didn't, although I had a lot of similar problems that she had.

8:51So from the beginning, I really felt that I needed to make sense of the world of women and the world of men, and that I also felt that there were differences, just feeling differences, inherent differences, but much more subtle differences than the standard. Men are aggressive and women are soft and gentle. Men are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails was the nursery rhyme when I grew up, where girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice. So I've really been And wanting to understand, I think, from maybe the moment I was conceived when my mother and father was sure I was going to be a girl, and then I came out a boy, and they had girls' names all picked out, no boys' names.

9:46So this has been a very kind of personal journey. And then, you know, the science is really kind of caught up with the genetic science. And things are, I think, very, very fluid, interesting, and engaging to sort out what does it really mean to be male? What does it mean to be female? Are they really binary, you know, male, female? Or are there variations? And all the ways in which we're looking at sex and gender these days, I find, very engaging. Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, look, of all of those different gender identifications, I am talking to that kind of gender specifically, or that kind of identification specifically.

10:28And I am with you, I tend to believe, of course, every identification, by definition, is different, a little different than any other identification. And I'm with you, again, it's not binary at all. There is nothing called a one and a zero, a man and a woman, There is every one of us is a mix, you know, a set of very unique attributes that make them closer to this or to that, but all a completely different flavor. I want to start. I definitely want to go to 12 Roots for Men. It's definitely an amazing book that is needed in our world. But I can't skip some of your earlier work and specifically the irritable male syndrome.

11:07I love the title. I love the concept. and I think it's a big big part of what humanity is doing wrong if you want and of course the five love stages so maybe if we can spend a little bit on each of those and then get to the 12 rules and give it more time the irritable male syndrome basically is spot on how men play those roles if you want that are sometimes aggressive sometimes they're grumpy and so on and so forth which are are really sort of almost preconditioned in us. And you just hit the nail on the head, really, very clearly with that, trying to say, look, this is not what being a man is all about.

11:49We need to start thinking deeply beyond that. Tell us a little bit about that work. Well, I need to actually take a step a little farther back in terms of my own writing and work that I also wrote a book called Male Menopause. came out in actually in 1997, which really was an exploration of a reality that I was seeing in my own life and in the lives of clients that I was working with, which was that clearly women went through a hormonally based change of life where they no longer could have children. And, you know, it was called menopause. And my mother went through it. Women I knew went through it at the time.

12:37My wife was going through it. And yet I saw many similar symptoms in myself and in men that I was working with. And so at the time, there was no literature about this. And I, anytime, as a writer, anytime there's a concept that feels personal, seems like a lot of people are dealing with and there isn't very much out there, I started exploring. And the result was a book that I had initially thought would be, okay, there's what women go through over here on one side, and then men must go through something very different. Whatever it is, it must be different. And yet, as I did the research and explored and did interviews, the differences became closer and closer.

13:26They didn't overlap. Women clearly have a different kind of change than men do. But there was a hormonally based change of life that I thought was true for men that came out as male menopause. And there were major symptoms that were ones that were very well documented and understood, which were usually sexual changes, a loss of sexual desire, a loss of as men got older. But one other that was not dealt with very directly that I found in my studies that I had done, which was male irritability and anger at midlife and older men that had to do with a loss of testosterone, that is lower testosterone, went towards more irritability and anger.

14:17And so that book became an international bestseller and was translated into 15 foreign languages. And I traveled all over the world giving talks about that. But then I started getting letters from men and women saying, you know, my man in my life or myself are finding I'm getting more irritable and angry, but he's not in that age group. He's younger than 40 to 55. what's going on. And that then led to a search for, is there a hormonal component that may be happening at earlier stages? And sure enough, there was a researcher in Scotland, Gerald Lincoln, who had been doing research on sheep and other mammals and trying to see what effect lowering testosterone.

15:10He was actually looking for a male birth control pill and thought that if you lowered testosterone levels, maybe that would be enough to keep reproduction from happening. But that didn't work. But what he found was as you lowered testosterone, that male rams, reindeer, other animals that he studied became more irritable and angry. And he wondered whether this might be true in humans. He had no human research. I had human research that said, I think male mammal humans, when their testosterone gets lower, become irritable and angry. And I went over to Scotland and talked and lectured at his university.

15:57And out of that came the book, The Irritable Male Syndrome, where it started with what happens when men's testosterone is low, but then looked at other factors that were true in humans that were not true in rams, like increasing stress that added to the irritability, that changes in brain chemistry often due to diet and a lowering of serotonin levels in the brain, changing roles that men were going through. And then a more recent one that wasn't in the book, but I found to be increasingly true, was the existential threats that we face in modern times with global climate change, with the pandemic that I think impacts men in a way of, I should be able to fix things, but I can't.

16:48And that adds to the irritability and anger that often are at the core of a lot of the problems that I've come to call irritable male syndrome. So you refer to this as hormonal. Hormonal is really interesting because we don't think of the male biology as being susceptible to hormone changes as we think it is for the female biology. Anything other than testosterone? I mean, what are we talking about here that could actually cause those changes? Well, yes, we know men have hormones as do women and these sex hormones, specifically testosterone, estrogens are present in males and females and fluctuate through time, through the day, through the week, through the month.

17:35And it just hasn't been studied as much in men until my books came out. And then since then, there's been a lot more studies on hormones. And they interact with other things, for instance, that as we put on weight, body weight, particularly around the waist, we increase the levels of estrogen. Fat cells convert testosterone to estrogen. So not only as men deal with aging and put on weight, or their testosterone levels dropping, often if their diet is such that they're putting on pounds around the waist, they're adding not only a decrease in their testosterone because of age, but they're adding to a decrease in their testosterone and an increase in estrogen because the fat cells are converting the testosterone that we have to estrogens, and that isn't good for men.

18:36So there are multiple levels in which testosterone and other hormones impact our emotional well-being as well as our physical well-being. And in that case, Jed, so are you saying that our state, our engagement, our mood and so on can be handled also through things like hormone therapy and diets and so on and so forth? It's not just learnings and habits, which most men will think is our entire world. It's like, you know what, I'm going to set my mind to something and I'm going to do certain things and those certain things are going to get me somewhere. Well, exactly. That's the whole program that I developed that was helpful that included changing our hormone levels.

19:22And that can be through taking supplemental testosterone for some. It can mean losing some weight so that you don't lower your testosterone levels. Actually, another thing we found was that alcohol can also lower testosterone levels. So watching how much alcohol you consume, stress can lower testosterone levels. So there's a number of interrelated things that men didn't know about. One, they didn't even know there was a thing called male menopause. They didn't know until we talked about this syndrome of irritable male syndrome that much of the anger, irritability that seemed to just be part of men being men actually had multiple causes that could be addressed and treated.

20:12That's amazing. So in general, when you talk about men's behaviors in the world, you basically talk about the idea that this behavior is actually creating our world as it is, that it's not just the impact on me as a person or on my family and love life. There is an impact of that exaggeration of male behavior, especially when it's not the you know the balanced male behavior on our life in general on our planet at large is that true well it is true because increasingly we know that we're not separate individual entities just like the cells in our body have multiple ways that every cell interacts with every other cell every organ interacts with every other organ so in a way this idea that we're separate beings, which is a kind of a Western view of life, isn't accurate.

21:11We are nested in a whole series of relationships with other people through time with our ancestors, but also with the environment, with the animal kingdom, with the plant kingdom, with the the biology that lives inside us, the microbiology, the microbes that are part of our lives, so that whatever we do to the environment, we do to ourselves. Whatever is going on inside us is also going on outside. So increasingly, the work that I do recognizes this broad interrelationship at many levels, and that in order to treat illness, in order to treat depression, other problems, we can't just treat what's inside our heads.

22:00And we tend to be very linear in many ways and think that we can solve problems by just getting at that simple thing, whether it's the what's going on inside our mind, we'll take a pill for that, or we'll take a drug for that. And yet, life is so much more interrelated, so much more complicated, so much more interesting, that if we really understand the whole, we can have a more joyful and more integrated and a more helpful life. I definitely see that. Let's talk about love. We'll have to say I listened to some of your talks about the topic. I looked at the book and I have to say it's very eye-opening because you may not know, but I had two romantic lives really, and I had an amazing, amazing marriage that lasted in total more than 25 years, of which I think 21 we were married.

22:55But when you speak about the stages of love, I could actually see clearly through those years how things worked out and how they sometimes didn't work out and how there were moments where if I had been aware of those stages, it would have actually been quite eye-opening in terms of how to handle them. And the five stages, you know, the first stage is very straightforward. I think we all experience that. You meet someone, it's fireworks. Everyone is, you know, you know, it's crazy about the other person, you know, falling in love, that beautiful feeling. But then everyone suffers stage two, which, you know, is the stage where things start to go like, okay, time to commit.

23:33And then everyone goes to stage three, which is, oh, all right. Hello. Is this really working? And I know you sometimes say most of us don't cross stage three, but let's cover the first three stages quickly, stick with stage three, and then talk about four and five, because I think there is so much substance in discussing what most people don't reach, actually. Well, just to, again, share a little bit of my story, I've been married three times, had two marriages and divorces early on in my life. My present wife and I now, our third marriages, We've been together now for 41 years. And what I found in my first two marriages, which I didn't know at the time, was those first two stages, the falling in love and building a life together.

24:20My first wife and I had two children together. And then we were together for about 25 years. We broke up and then I remarried and that didn't work out. And it's hard for anybody who goes through a breakup. It, I think, has its own kind of added stress when you're a marriage and family counselor, like I am, when you're trying to help other people and yet your own marriage isn't working. And so I really said, before I go on with my life and go on with my work, I need to figure this out. And that was then where I went searching for, what is it about marriage and relationship that works and why doesn't it work.

25:08And that's where I came up with this understanding that there is a place where both my two marriages failed, where we became disillusioned with each other. It felt like, who is this person that I married? Why did they change? It used to be so good. And now we're fighting or there's cold silences. We're just not in sync. And the conclusion that we drew was, I must be with the wrong person. Eventually, it's just too painful to be together. And then in our case, we tried again, and it didn't work. What I discovered is that stage three disillusionment, I call it, because that's how it feels for people, rather than it being the indicator that we've made the wrong choice, that this is irreparable, we need to somehow get out of it because we've tried everything, is actually a stage of a relationship that if we understand it, that not always, but in many cases, we can go through it, understand what disillusionment is trying to teach us.

26:17Because in the vernacular, it's we become disillusioned, we think we're with the wrong person. In a deeper understanding, we're letting go of the illusions that we often bring into a marriage, all of us, of the projections on a partner of who we thought they were supposed to be, not who they were. And when we start getting real with each other, we interpret that as, you've let me down, you're not who I thought you were. When a deeper understanding becomes, what were the illusions and what was the tie-in between the illusions that I projected on you and the family trauma, family problems that most of us grew up with to some degree, parents that didn't have the most integrated, joyful relationship that we were influenced by.

27:16And then we're able to do some work in healing stage three that allows us, if we do the work, to go on to stage four and stage five. So I love this so much. I heard you once say that 90 % of our differences in a marriage are really the result of us, not the other person. Yet we project that entirely on the other person. But the question then becomes, but we have to have expectations. I mean, you go into a relationship and you're expecting that person to be, say, kind or cuddly, or I don't know. You have to have those expectations. How can you otherwise look for the person that fits you? Well, that's the dilemma that so many of us, maybe it's part of the human condition.

28:05We, of necessity, look for somebody who can fulfill our partnership needs. I think humans, just like other animals, have an inherent desire to connect and to pair up. No reproduction would happen if that didn't happen. But we also want to be happy. We want to be joyful. We want to have intimacy. We want to have good sex. We want to have a feeling of being cared for, understood, seen, and heard. and we go in hoping that that person will fulfill those needs. Nothing wrong with that. We all have them. We all should have them. Where we need to expand our understanding is that you said 90%. We found that 90 % or more of the problems that we have that we think are problems in the here and now, problem with you and me, turns out to be unhealed problems from the past.

29:10Things that we acquired in our understandings from our parents that we didn't even know we had, that were part of my, like what I learned from my father about being a man, what I learned from my mother about relationships. So it's not that we don't have expectations. We need to find where the roots of the disillusionment are. 90 % of the time they're not in you have a problem or he's got a problem. It's in what is this disillusionment trying to teach me about myself, about what needs to be healed in my own body, mind, and spirit, what needs to be healed from the past in the kind of called adverse childhood experiences or ACEs that we grow up with.

30:03And then how can I, rather than seeing you as the problem, my partner, how can I see us together on a journey to go through this full five stages from falling in love to building a life together and then this valley that it feels like of disillusionment, which for some feels like the beginning of the end, but can actually be the going into the valley of deepening connection that then can bring us out into what I call stage four, which is real lasting love. And stage five, being soul partners and creating our joint offering to the world or our couple calling that I feel that so many of us have if we can develop deep enough relationship to take us through all five stages.

31:00Which takes us to stage four, my favorite stage, actually. So what you say is that when we go through those road bumps in stage three, and we actually realize that we need to reconcile ourselves, not just fix the issues with the other guy or the other lady in our life, then suddenly we get into what real love is. Real love not being what we thought it was in stage one and two, but rather what it is for those who reach stage four. Tell me about stage four. I think it's a beautiful way to describe it. Well, the first word is real. Real, yeah. We get real with ourselves. I mean, let's acknowledge when we fall in love, we project our best foot forward.

31:47We want them to love us. We want them to like us. So we consciously and subconsciously edit what we share. We want to look a little better than we actually are. We don't want them to say, oh, you don't want to. If she knew this about me, she wouldn't be interested. So in stage three, we start allowing the real me to come out. And by the same token, we start being able to see our partner as the flawed but beautiful human being that they are and be able to go deeper with each other rather than, oh my God, not that. And that requires a willingness to trust. It often requires some guidance because most of us never had any real training in the five stages of love.

32:42We didn't often see it with our parents. We didn't often see it with our friends. So it's new territory. So sometimes we need guidance to take us through that, but it gets real. And then the second word is lasting because you can't have a lasting relationship that's based on not really being authentic with ourselves and authentic in our relationships. So once we can commit to a life of being real, being authentic, being willing to hear the deep truth of who you are and being able to know that you will hear me, hold me, care for me, respond to me in a positive way, that provides the grounding, the container for the love that I think we're all looking for that many of us just haven't known how to get.

33:40And it seems like feedback I get from people that have taken the classes that I've done and the book and the other trainings that I do about the five stages of love, it seems to resonate with people. They go, yes, that stage four, getting real, providing for real lasting. And the final thing I say about stage four is that many people have come to believe that in a long lasting relationship, you lose the romance. It's something that you can't have forever. It's part of the early stages. Yeah, you fall in love. It's crazy. You feel so head over heels. But come on, after three kids or whatever, you just can't expect to be in love like that.