How to Talk to People - How To Build a Happy Life: The Complexities of Human Love

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Dating apps show us what we want—a relationship—without always accurately reflecting the experience of it. Our expectation that tech will create anything more than opportunities for social connectedness may overlook the hard work of coexisting with another human being.   A conversation with University of Kansas social psychologist Omri Gillath helps us parse the divide between what tech promises and how it satisfies our emotional needs. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.  Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.  Music by Flix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), John Utah (“A Walk on the Mile”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose

if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Arthur, the real reason I don't use dating apps is because I don't want to go about my love life in the same way I do playing wordle or some game on my phone. It's just, it's weird to me. You don't want to use the same technology that you would for goofing around while waiting for the bus that you do to find your actual life partner because it seems so incredibly important to you. Why would you reduce the selection of, or at least the initial selection of somebody who might turn into your life partner to, the same technology that comes when you're just doom scrolling through Instagram.

Is that what you're saying? It's just, it just seems too trivial. I almost feel like I'm cheating to get to a human being, someone who I know is going to inevitably be far more complicated and emotional. And the act of finding the person seems so diametrically opposed to what the experience of being what that person would actually be like. And I think that's my reasoning. And I know that's not everyone's,

and I can't speak for everyone under the age of 30, who maybe shares some degree of that sentiment. But that's how it is for me. This is How to Build a Happy Life. I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, and contributing writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic. Many of my students have told me

that there's kind of an irony about dating these days. they can get anything they want as consumers at the drop of a hat. Look, you want a hippopotamus delivered to your house? You can practically get it from Amazon Prime, but a lot of the same people who are amazed at that will confess that their dating lives are pretty dry. They'll often say they don't know how to date in the right way that can be actually successful.

They don't know what the right procedure actually is or they're afraid of what will happen if they put their heart on the line. What explains this incredible irony? Where there's easier access to people all over the world, but at the same time, people are either less prepared or more afraid to engage in love behaviors. Today, we want to explore whether romance facilitated by technology has delivered on its promises. Now, what it means to actually put the work into love, I'll be straightforward about my perspective here. And hear me out. I believe a lot of emotional dissatisfaction in modern dating can be explained by research.

There's data showing technology-mediated relationships fall secondary to in-person interaction. Other research suggests that romantic love can blossom when people explore their differences, something I fear dating apps often discourage. It concerns me that many of these apps favor selecting romantic partners based on similar traits rather than complementary traits. Now look, I recognize that technology can create opportunities to connect and that there is research showing the success of online connections after they jump off the screen. But I also want to examine the potential hazards of the limitless nature of tech, reducing human

beings to options and perhaps even encouraging a certain degree of socially sanctioned game playing. I know when if you talk about it with your students, when I talk about it with my undergrads, right? So I teach classes about human sexuality and about intimate relationships and stuff. And I ask them, you know, do they use Tinder? And some of them do. And I ask, you know, what do you use them for? And people are using Tinder to find love, not to find hookups, which is interesting to me, right? My name is Omri Gilat.

I'm a professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas. I sat down with Omri Galat to identify the satisfaction. faction gap between what tech promises and what it often delivers. The fact that it's easy and accessible doesn't mean that it's what people need. So they're going to be a gap between what the industry and the technology is going to provide us and what we actually need and between, you know, people are doing for money and what people are doing for, you know, the greater good. The trends, the social cultural trends are out there showing that, you know, less people

are getting married, less people have. the kids, less people are having sex, which is, you know, kind of weird because you have this of options, right? You can go on Tinder and just swipe and get your next, you know, hookup. But despite all that less and less people are finding themselves in, in a relationship. And one thing that I've actually seen, David, that I've looked at says that people are less likely to get married, but they're also less likely to cohabitate. And as you suggested, less likely to have intimate physical relationships. We're not substituting one kind of relationship for another. We're substituting no relationship for relationship, and that's what we really need to

dig into, right? Right. And you might say, you know what? Well, maybe people find their, you know, a relationship somewhere else. You know, the world is like a small village now. You can, you can have people, friends all over the world. This is not what we're seeing. There's so many people now that are lonely, that are looking for love, can't find it. When they find it, they can stick with it. And it's definitely something that we're trying to understand and figure out the understanding. underlying mechanism of that and kind of trying to figure out what happened. Now, let's talk a little bit about some of the big differences to make this vivid for our listeners. In your work, you talk about how when you discuss your feelings with somebody in person

versus when you discuss your feelings with somebody on social media and it has opposite effects on the establishment of relationship, talk to me about that. Yeah, so what we find, this is work that I did was a former grad student, Juan Lee. when you're when you're self-disclosing and you talk about your fears, your dreams, your fantasies, your secrets, all of these things to people face to face, right, in person, it usually increases intimacy, increases satisfaction, help you build the relationship. People are actually over time getting closer. However, if you do the same thing online, right, on things like, you know,

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, what have you, it has the opposite effect, right? And basically, you know, people and by people we're talking about you as a person and your partner having lower level of intimacy, lower level of satisfaction, you kind of feel like you're left out, right? We can sit together in the same room and you can tell me something or you can emailing to me and the effect is going to be very, very different, right? Now, you remember in that famous, famous paper by Arthur Aaron, where he was actually trying to induce feelings of romantic love between strangers and he would bring it, he brought in the experiments, a wonderful experiment.

strangers into the room, they sit across the table from each other. They start by answering 36 questions that are escalating in intimacy. So the first one is something stupid like, if you could have dinner with anybody you want, who would it be? And this is a nice breaker. But by question 30 is when was the last time you cried, which is the classic kind of question of self-disclosure that you're talking about. Yeah.

I think, again, technology can be very helpful, can help you with, for example, filter, right, up to the first date. But after the first day, it's got to be in person. It's got to be face to face. You've got to be able to smell the other person, see their body language. We have, for example, research on flirting. It's so much easier to do flaring face-to-face and do it via the computer. And I think that we're happy to rely on technology.

We're happy to even use it as replacement. So, you know, one of the things that we see in our studies is that people are now are using chatbots as replacements for friends and relationships. Have you ever heard about Replica? No, what's that? That's a chatbot that was built by a group of programmers. Their friend was killed in a car accident. They wanted to replace him.

So they took all of his social media information and created a chat bot and kind of kept on talking with their friend via the bot. And now they give it to anyone. Anyone can use it and build their own replacement. for a friend, a dead friend, or an ex-lover, or what have you. And, you know, one of the things that you've got to wonder is, is it really helpful? Is it really something that A, you can trust, B, you can benefit from, and see what happens to your information?

Who gets all of your secrets that you're so heavily sharing with this app? Right. And again, from our research, when you are dropping these things on a bot or when you're communicating, you know, like that online, you're not enjoying the same benefits that we see face to face with a real person. Amri, it sounds awful. I mean, we've all experienced deaths in our families and, you know, the loss of people and people who have broken our hearts. And it seems like it would compound the pain to have a fake version of the person. There's a reason that people don't want that, right? There is this human element. It's like the essence of life is love. It's what it means to be

alive and that's what we've i feel like we're losing especially when we're we're trying to match ourselves up to other people in actual love relationships using these anti-human means so yes so think about the movie here right where scarlet johansen is is kind of like you know this amazing version of alexa and the guy's falling in love with her and she really finds out that she's actually having relationships as all of these other guys in the same time you know we're in my research now we're doing some research on AI and trying to understand these chat bolts and understand what happens when, for example, they would do the art and study and go through these 36 questions with an AI rather than the person. What would happen then? We're kind of wondering, is that going to increase

intimacy or is that going to make you look creepy and people would not want to engage and so? Yeah, it creeps me out just to talk about it. You know, particularly when AI starts to pass the touring test and you can fall in love with it technically, I mean, is tech going to kill love dead? Maybe it already did, but, you know, it's, so I mean, to take a horrible kind of like example, right, think about the atom bomb. It can be very good uses to it, right? We can create a lot of energy, clean energy on all that, but it can also obviously create

the bombs. And this is why the reason why I talk about the atom, but you can talk about AI because that's another example that people are scared about and kind of like, oh, my God, the robot's going to kill us. And I think, you know, technology on its own is not better. are good. I think technology can be amazing if you're, for example, highly anxious or if you suffer from social anxiety and stuff like that. So they're good sides for sure. It's great, right? We can talk, you know, there are thousands of miles between us. We can still talk and have this interview because

of technology. But at the same time, if all of your relationships are online and all of your relationships are mediated via computers, then you're missing on a big part of what it means to be human and human content. Look, when you and I were in our 20s and what do we want? We wanted love. And you would see somebody who you found really attractive and you'd go talk to that person. You know, a lot of my students will say, if you do that in a restaurant or a bar, they're

going to think you're some sort of a weirdo. Tell me what I can tell my kids and students that they can do so that they can meet somebody in person. What's the solution? To give up social media. So that's one step. I mean, there's so much research about the damage that social media can do to you. So in one of the studies that we did, we asked people to look at pictures of potential mates.

And they either looked at 10 pictures or 100 pictures with the text underneath or without it. And, you know, the more Tinder-like environment where they had 100 pictures and without text caused them to look more in a kind of one-dimensional objectifying mode. So you're losing a lot, you know, opportunities to meet someone else who is amazing just because you're using this technology. So some of our other studies are about doing these novel activities, you know, together, right? So, you know, like tie diving or, you know, I just recently started doing some triathlon. So I get to meet a bunch of amazing people and do things that we all love to do. And this is what I tell my kids to do, right?

It's, you know, just try to kind of go back to basic, be out there. in the real world, enjoy the sunshine, do activities with friends, you know, find groups of people that you enjoy, you know, do some sports, you know, together. So this is really interesting. So the admonishment that we should get off social media or young people should get off social media is different than how to meet people. The key thing I think that you're telling us now is that go do a thing that somebody else is doing and in doing that third thing together. That's a very Aristotelian piece of advice, isn't it? I mean, he talked about perfect friendships come from a love of a useless third thing. I'll talk to young people who are traditionally religious, for example,

and I'll say, where are you trying to meet somebody? Like online, I say, well, how about church? How about your synagogue? How about looking for a young person who actually shares that thing, which is not useless, by the way, but which is a third love, a third Aristotelian love. So that's what you're talking about. Get out there, do more stuff, find other people who have the same kind of interests as you. And that's a lot less threatening than walking up to somebody in a bar at 1 o'clock in the morning going, hey, you want to have coffee? Which, you know, kind of creeps me out too. Okay, back to Ulrich-Gilat in a second.

But first, a quick time out. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very, different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this

year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. I want to offer up a sort of a new framework to think about tech and dating apps and their role in facilitating romantic connections. This is oddly a sort of business school approach to problem solving. But hear me out.

There are two kinds of problems in life. complicated problems and complex problems. They sound like the same thing. They aren't. Complicated problems in life are problems that are hard to solve. But once you solve them, you can replicate the solution over and over. Like making a toaster. You can get one at Walmart for 20 bucks,

and it will be your toaster for the next 20 years. It's unbelievable. It's human genius. That's a complicated problem. Well, all the really interesting problems in life, all the things we really care about, are not about good toast. They're about human love. These are what we call complex problems. A complex problem is like your relationship with your cat. Your cat is complex.

It wants kibble and a scratch and warmth and to go out from time to time, but you never know what it's going to do. And that's because you can't really simulate the cat. So relationships fall into this category, the category of complex problems. And that's why relationships are so hard to figure out, and that's why they're so interesting to us. Here's the problem with tech, in a nutshell, in my opinion. We want cats, but technology just gives us toasters again and again and again. Tech tends to take complex problems like human love and treated as if it were a complicated

problem of trying to solve a bunch of math. And it just doesn't work that way. Okay, so let's say now that somebody's had some success and is actually dating somebody. Fantastic, right? What's the goal in the first few years? One of the things that I have found is a lot of people think, you know, they've seen a lot of Disney movies and they have sort of destiny beliefs and they believe in soulmates. And what they want is the passion from the very beginning to continue till the very end. And what actually the data say is that you should be pursuing companionate love over passionate love. In other words, best friends, that's the goal, as opposed to just the passion, the white hot passion at the very beginning because the neurochemical cascade of falling in love

cannot be maintained. You'd go insane. And this gets us to really a huge area where you've been the major contributor in social psychology, which is attachment styles. So tell me, what's the goal when somebody is now paired up? what kind of attachment should be the ambition that gives the greatest likelihood of a successful, happy, and enduring relationship? Right.

So, you know, often the beginning is around passion. Often people are very attracted to someone else, right? They don't look at you and say, oh, you have an amazing attachment style. I definitely want you as the father of my kids or something. They see someone and they find him attractive or her attractive and they want to hook up and they want to have sex. And as you said, these are the honeymoon kind of phase of the relationship. but after that, it's more about finding someone who can understand you, who can support you.

I would say, even if you drop the romantic love, the goal is to feel secure, the goal is to feel loved and appreciated and, you know, to know that you have someone in your corner that would be there no matter what. There are some couples who are staying very highly, passionately in love, you know, madly in love forever, right? It can happen. But for most of us, passion and sex. would go down and attachment and caregiving would go up. This is what we see in many of the studies. And that's kind of like just a normative way of relationships to evolve. However, you know, again,

with insecure people, everything is a bit more difficult. There are three styles, right? There is a secure style, which the majority of people are. Then there are people who are avoidant who don't want to be committed, don't want to be, you know, worried about other people, depending on them, getting too close and stuff like that. And then there are anxious people. These are people that are all the time worried about, preoccupied about being rejected and abandoned and people never love them as much as they love the other people and so on. So, you know, when you're insecure, either avoiding or anxious, everything is harder. The best scenario that can happen is that you find someone who's secure is providing insecurity and can help you shift over the lifespan to becoming more secure than you were at the beginning. You make it sound simple, but of course it isn't.

And I think one of the key points that you're making along the way here is that you've got to do the work. I mean, you actually have to take the risk and do the work. The idea of simplifying procedures on the basis of apps and tech make it easier than it actually really is. And that's probably in and of itself doing a disservice because it says that finding the most important thing in your life is as simple as wiping right. And it isn't like that at all. And that actually isn't even helpful for the beginning of real. relationship. Right, right. And relationships, you know, involve always involved work. And, you know, people have this

very strong sense of fomo, right? There's always something else that we might be fitting out, maybe a better partner and more, you know, attractive partner or richer partner or a more sexy partner, what have you, right? If you live your life with that sense, you're always going to chase the next big thing instead of being happy with what you have and actually enjoying it. So this is tough advice. that you're a tough prescription that you're giving young people today,

which is honesty, vulnerability, and authenticity. I mean, and so basically, if you're in love with somebody, you should say, I'm in love with you. And that's which is authentic, which is super vulnerable. If you're in love, say you're in love and take a risk. Be an entrepreneur in the startup of your own love life. Is that what you're saying? What he said, yes, absolutely.

Everything that you said is perfect. in a way, from the moment that we are born, right, if you think about it from a attachment perspective, and we have this unconditional love from a mother. Nothing is better than that. We need that. We need someone, and often this someone is our romantic partner. I used to have an English teacher back in high school who said, you know, it's better to fall in love and fail them to never fall in love. And I totally agree with it.

I think that, you know, you've got to put yourself out there again and again. And the worst thing that people can do is hide behind. again, all these screens. And then they find out that, you know, having this one-dimensional, a un-dimensional life is not fulfilling and is depressing. And it's something that you got to be aware of.

You've got to be prepared to deal with the consequences. Make yourself vulnerable. Put yourself out there. You know, experience the real world firsthand. And be ready to put real work into it. I get it. I mean, you don't like the selection of a life partner to be reduced to more or less the same technology as video gaming or shopping for socks on Amazon. Right.

They get it. They get it. And you want to start off in a more profound way. Now, of course, I'm not going to speak for everybody, but I would suspect that most people would say, no, I don't want to reduce love to shopping either. But I got to meet somebody someplace and hope that it turns into love. So can you, I don't know. The shopping analogy resonates because dating apps really feel to me the same way when you go into the grocery store and you have one item you need to get, like peanut butter. And you're like, okay, I just got to get in and get out. That's what I want. It's very clear to me. That's the thing I need. But as I'm shopping, I get more and more distracted by all the options. And I come out of the store with everything else but the peanut butter.

Yeah, I mean, the research is pretty clear that dating apps, they do induce the paradox of choice, which means that you're very likely to imagine a future where you're regretful of a choice that you made. And so you keep shopping in the current moment, therefore never really landing on somebody and ruling out a lot of choices that might be really, really good. Right. On the other hand, you wouldn't say, the only way I'm going to get peanut butter is I'm going to spontaneously stumble across it and it's going to be the love of my life. I mean, you got to find some way to get the peanut butter, too. Thank you to our how-to listeners who make this show what it is. We asked, when was the last time you confessed romantic feelings for someone? And here's what you said.

My husband of many years passed away unexpectedly almost four years ago now. And so I have found myself in the dating pool after about 20 years of being out of it. In that time, I have confessed my romantic feelings several times. Actually, just last week, I had reconnected with somebody I dated shortly after my husband died, and it wasn't a fit timing-wise. And then we reconnected again a couple months ago. And so about a week and a half ago, we had a conversation in which we were,

we said, oh, well, maybe things are getting a little too serious. Are we able to do the things we need to do? After we agreed that it would be good for us to each take some space, I felt so sad. And as I investigated my sadness, I realized that I had fallen in love with him and that I needed to tell him this. And so I did.

I told him. And he felt feels the same way. My name is Sean and I live in British Columbia, Canada. What a wonderful example of how humans are different than machines. I mean, it takes risk. It takes actual human interaction. action, which is what Sean is talking about. She had to interrogate her feelings about why she felt so sad.

There's no algorithm that's going to tell her that. She had to muster up the courage to go tell the man that she's falling in love with him. That's uniquely, weirdly human. We're cats, not toasters. Sean makes that point. One last note, I hope Sean and that man get together. Because happiness is love. That's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life.

This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Babe. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered. Don't he and his team fear that these same powers could work? one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different

goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to. to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.