SOLVED with Mark Manson - Romantic Love, Solved

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

We put love on trial — literally. Drew and I squared off in a full debate over whether romantic love is overrated. I made the case that love is basically your brain's con man, a neurochemical hijacking designed to make you delusional about deeply flawed people, and that the most intoxicating relationships are often the most toxic. Drew fought back with the evidence that love is the foundation of social infrastructure, physical health, and long-term happiness. By the end, we came to a gentlemen’s agreement: a framework that explains why we're all chasing the wrong kind of love, and what the right kind actually looks like. Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at https://www.purpose.app Check out our sponsors: • IM8: Transform your daily routine with IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials at https://www.im8health.com/solved • Factor: Head to https://www.factormeals.com/solved202650off and use code solved202650off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor. Chapters 2:21 Round 1: Love is the Brain's Conman 23:33 Round 2: Love as Social Infrastructure 45:33 Round 3: Love and Happiness 1:07:14 Round 4: We're Drawn to People Who Hurt Us Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. Dot app. Welcome back, everybody, to the solved podcast. I am best selling author Mark Manson, and this is my intrepid co-host producer. And today, opponent.

Your adversary. Drew Burney. Here we go. And today, we are putting love on trial. Now, there's a few reasons for this. We just did a massive, solved episode on dating, and we went through all of the different factors that bring people together, why human courtship is so strange and long and complex and socially varied, why people date the wrong people for themselves, why they date the

right people for themselves, what causes attraction. But one of the things that was conspicuously missing from that episode was a deep discussion of romantic love. And that's because we wanted to do this episode and ask the question, is love overrated? You hear all these tropes, all these cliches that love is all you need, that love, all you need is love. Love fixes everything. Love is blind. Love, love, love, love.

Is it true, though? So we're going to do something a little bit different and interesting this episode, everybody. We are putting love on trial. I am going to be the prosecutor, and I'm going to be making the argument that love is completely overrated. And causes, of course, I'm just, I'm just a bucket of fucking glee over here. I'm going to be arguing that love arguably causes more problems than it solves. And then Drew, famous for being a romantic. Resonant romantic.

Yes. Yeah. Is going to be defending love. That's right. We're going to go back and forth. Each of us, we're going to take turns making arguments. And then the other person will have a rebuttal. And then at the end, we will try to come together and find some sort of compromise and decide.

is love overrated or am I just a cold blackhearted soul? Jury's out on that. Stay tuned. More at six. That's another episode, but yeah. Yes. So getting right into it, as the prosecution, I will begin with one damning claim against love. That is that love is our brains con man.

Love is a neurochemical hijacking that is designed. specifically designed to override our better judgment and cause us to become delusional and misrepresent the people that we care about in our minds. In 2005, Helen Fisher, who's somebody that we're going to be talking about quite a bit, excellent researcher, especially around the topic of romantic love, her and her colleagues put people who self-reported being, quote, intensely in love into an fMRI machine and showed them photos of the people that they were obsessed about. And the ventral tegmental area, the brain's dopamine factory, lit up like a slot machine. And when I say slot machine, I literally mean slot machine because it was the same reaction that you see with addicts.

In fact, they even wrote in the paper that the region of the brain fired and lit up in the same way that it lights up when you show cocaine addict cocaine. A little dramatic, but okay. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely felt, I've definitely had some people in my life that felt like cocaine. I get it. Yeah, you know, I'm not going to lie. So there is this addictive quality. Yes. To romantic love. And I think we've all felt it to a certain extent. You know, if you think about times that you've been madly in love with somebody, you obsess over them. You think about them all the time. You like scheme and connive ways to see them again or to get closer to them or like a cocaine addict, you're even willing to blow up your whole fucking life for them. Do a lot of stupid shit. Yes. Yes. You do a lot of stupid shit. Now what's interesting is that, These parts of the brain that were lit up, they were not the emotion centers. They were the motivation system of the brain.

Right. So what it suggests counter to what most people assume is that love is not necessarily a feeling. It's a drive. It's a motivation. It's a primal state like hunger or thirst. So it's not that you feel love for your partner. It is you are hungry for your partner, Drew. Okay.

I mean, okay, this is, yes, this is true. This is true. Your motivational centers, like the ventral tegmental area is it's full of dopamine. Dopamine is, like we've discussed before, it's the wanting, not the liking, it's motivation. It's not the actual reward system. It's the motivation to seek out reward. Okay. Yeah.

Sure. One little point I'll make, right? Okay. Okay. Okay. Before I continue. Before you continue. Yes.

cocaine and love share a lot of like neurological mechanisms. I get that. Is that love's fault or is that cocaine's fault though? Okay. This is what I don't know like, people are like, oh, love is an addiction. Well, it's just like cocaine. It's like, well, cocaine came much, much for longer after love was on the scene. I'll just note that cocaine does not have a great track record with people. Okay. That's fair. So the point of all of this is that because romantic love is more of a drive rather than a feeling, if you look at what psychologically happens to us towards the things that we are driven towards or motivated for is that we backwards rationalize the reasons that we want them. Sure.

Right? And this is true of all things. Like this is if I decide that I want a Rolls-Royce and that's what's going to solve all my problems in my life, I will sit there and backwards rationalize all these explanations and reasons that it should make sense. And it's completely logical that I spend all my money on a Rolls-Royce. we do the same thing with our romantic partners. And again, I think everybody's had this experience at some point where you like, you see, you're obsessed with this person and, you know, maybe there's some questionable behavior going on,

but man, you find plenty of ways to rationalize that behavior to yourself. It turns out that there is evidence for this as well because romantic love deactivates the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which are the two reasons for having critical judgment about people. So literally when you're looking at the person that you're in love with, your judgment faculties are in a large part turned off. Have you ever had a friend who just dated an awful person? You were like, why are you dating that awful person? Yes, we all have. Yes. Absolutely. And you're always, sometimes I've been that friend. Yes. Yes. Me too. I have also been that friend before. This definitely happens. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And it's, so this is, this is why you get this situation where

you're like, you're sitting there, you're watching your friend date this terrible person. And you're like, dude, what are you doing? How do you not see this? Right. And you want to tell them, but the funny thing is, is even if you try to tell them, they can't see it.

Right. And they will have all sorts of rationalizations and excuses prepped and ready to go because their brain is already primed. And one of those big ones is because I love them, right? Yes.

Okay. What's worse is that this reward system, this motivation system, continues even after the relationship ends. So even if you get your heart broken and Helen Fisher being a great scientist took people who had had their hearts broken and put them into the same fMRI machine and saw that they had the same region of the brain light up. So that motivation system continues

even after the person is gone or even after you're no longer in a relationship with them. So it's like imagine being constantly motivated towards something that is impossible to attain. Okay. It's just a whole new level of suffering. That's why you could say that's why breakups are as painful as they are. In the research literature, This whole phase, this whole kind of delusional obsession with a person, this cocaine addiction to another human being, is often referred to as limerence. It's this highly irrational, highly emotional, slightly delusional state that people get into with each other. And this is kind of your storybook rom-com love feeling. Like it's just the world is spinning and nothing else matters and oh my God, we were destined to be together and it's only you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And meanwhile, it's like, like the roof's falling apart and there are bills to be paid, but nobody's paying them and, you know, your father's disowning you and like all this stuff is happening. But it's like, but I'm in love. But the problem, the catch about limerence is that it is temporary. It only lasts. Of course. It only lasts for a few years at most. And so the theory goes is that limerence, or this kind of co-courns. or this kind of cocaine addiction obsession

with another person, nature instilled this in us just long enough to make a baby. And then, oh, okay, then now reality sets it. Yeah, okay, yeah, no, never mind. Actually, yeah, you are kind of annoying. Yeah, I got shit to do. Sorry, I got to go.

Helen Fisher calls this the four-year itch. Yes. Right, yeah. Which, because what they found in the research was after about four years is usually like that's a time actually when people get divorced or separate in some way.

And that's usually just long enough to raise a kid to where they're independent enough. Yep. And then they fuck off. Peace out. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And you see this too.

I mean, it's if you look at where breakups or divorces spike, it's, it is right around this period. Yeah. And it's also why in like relationship advice literature, you often see this referred to as the honeymoon period, right? It's like when you meet somebody new, you have a new relationship. That first year or two is just like absolutely golden. Everything seems perfect. Everything's happy all the time. the person you're in love with can do no wrong

and then suddenly reality sets in and you actually have to face who you're with. So that is my first argument that love is a con man. It's nature's con man to get you to procreate to get you to vastly overestimate what is probably a highly flawed individual to obsess over them

and become addicted to them the way you would a slot machine or cocaine And then eventually have the receipts come due two to four years later. Okay. Okay. All right. I'll just reiterate before you even mind that too. Is love hijacking the cocaine system or is cocaine hijacking the love system?

Right. I definitely cocaine's hijacking the love system. Obviously. Yes. Okay. So I always thought that argument was a little bit hyperbolic to say the least. Okay. Have you been around a person on cocaine and watch them make decisions?

Oh, well, I get that. And yes, there are parallels to somebody newly loved. You're proving my point here. Fair. Fair. No, no, no. And that is fair. That's actually, I don't, I don't disagree with any of that. Yeah. Love makes us do some pretty stupid shit. Yes. I will, and I'll vouch for that. I've been there, right? We all have. Yes. And I've seen it in friends like you were talking about. It's easier to see in other people. And that blinding kind of like nature of being in love is, it makes it really hard to see it in yourself. Like, okay, I get that.

Here's the thing, though, this whole hijack thing. It's like, love is hijacking your brain and your behavior and whatever. So is every other drive that we have. When you get hungry, your brain is being hijacked. When you get thirsty, your brain is being hijacked. This is true. Right? Why?

Right? And it's because evolution has figured this out. Over hundreds of thousands of generations, millions and billions of years, we've figured this out. Evolution has. it has a purpose, right? It has a, if love, if this feeling of love and infatuation with somebody else consistently led to poor decisions,

which, I mean, it does lead to poor decisions, don't get me wrong, but if it led to poor mate selection over and over again, poor results in reproductive fitness, it wouldn't be around still today, right? Like, it serves a purpose. It's highly conserved across humanity, this pair bond.

Now, like, you know, sexual fidelity and everything like that, we can discuss whether that's supernatural or whatever. But having this like emotional affinity and attachment to another person that's highly conserved across all cultures, even the most promiscuous and randiest of all of us. We still like have at least a period where we're temporarily fixed on one person, right? Yeah. That's a feature, not a book. Okay. I'll get into that a little bit more. Why is that though? You know, in the relationship or in the dating episode, we talked about the parental investment theory. And human infants require so much

much. They have these tiny little brains that need to grow into big brains. Only 25% of our brains are developed when we come out of the womb. We have to do 75% of brain development outside of the womb. Okay. And that takes a very, very long time. That explains a lot. It explains. It does explain it a lot, right? When you have a two-year-old thrown a fit, you know, they're maybe only, you know, 30% of the way there or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Children, they required these years and years of intensive care, of protection, of investment, just to survive. Yeah. Okay. The way evolution has figured out, okay, how can we up the chances of that child surviving? It's by having more people help raise that child. Love and attachment and commitment, those are the mechanisms by which

we've figured this out. Okay. So it evolved to solve that coordination problem, this parental coordination problem. Okay, yes, yes, you have this temporary insanity, basically, is what we're calling it, what you're calling it, right? You have this temporary insanity, sure, that's fine, but it serves a very, very functional purpose. And that is just to get two people to stay together long enough to raise this child. Like, okay, that four-year itch I was talking about, right? Yeah. When a child's about four years old, they're usually in play groups and other people can,

they're a little bit more independent enough. And yes, somebody can go off and, you know, it's okay for the union to dissolve if it has to at that point. But it doesn't always either. That's the other thing is that there's long-term research on happily married couples. Average, there was this one study that was done with, I think the average was about 21 years married or together. And there's still people who are in love.

They also have an additional component where there's this commitment and attachment and loyalty, kind of this companionate love that you have. You still can have this passion for somebody and develop a deeper commitment over time. So it's not just, it isn't necessarily just, oh, this all goes away after 18 to 36 months. That is true. I do want to make one quick point, though, about the evolution piece, which is that you are correct that the limerence or romantic love it evolved as kind of a mechanism to coordinate people into pair bonds to have children and develop attachment to the children

and yes part of this delusion or irrationality that comes along with it as you as you said it's a future not a bug I would argue that for most of the human history you know if we're living on the savannah and you become delusional about some some chick it like the downsides are pretty minimal you know like if you if you just like have a completely out of touch with reality perception of like who she is or yeah what she's into or um what your life's going to be like if you're dating her we have not there's nothing going on there's like life's pretty fucking bare so there's not a whole lot to lose in that situation in the modern world there's so much to lose and it like there's the stakes are so much higher you

If you are dating the wrong person, if you say move cross country to move in with this person after knowing them for a week, if you are like ditching your friends or changing your jobs to like satisfy your new girlfriend or whatever, there's a lot of repercussions. So that would only be my caveat to that. Okay. Well, at the same time, too, people in long term committed relationships are consistently, they're happier and healthier. And I'll get to that in another section a little bit here. So we'll put a pin in that. So I don't know. I mean, yes, that could be just more of a problem, though, of modern society itself.

Like, we need to get rid of love so we can have more efficient modern society. Like, come on. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So we can get more done. Good. I'm glad we agree. I don't think so.

Glad we agree. Okay. One other thing I'll say about this hijack kind of hypothesis you have, too. Yes. Again, it's not a bug. It's a feature. It wasn't just that, like, oh, there was this like mutation that can. came along that we like some people started a pair bond and some people didn't and you know now

we have to fight about if that's right or wrong it's not that at all actually there was a really interesting study that came out just a couple of years ago do you know all this research about prairie voles i was just i was like here come the prairie voles here come the prairie voles this is awesome this is okay so it's really cool natural experiments that that's happened over hundreds of thousands of years so there's these voles they're like little rodents like little mice basically right. And there's different species of voles. One species in particular pair bonds. So they'll, they're monogamous in the sense that they'll get together and the males will help the females raise the young. Okay. Now they get around. They're promiscuous. They cheat on each other,

just like humans doing whatever. But they form this attachment to another bowl. Okay. Yeah. There's another species of vole. I think it's the meadow voul that is just completely just out there. They're just, you know, they're having fun and going out. it. Yeah. And not, there's no, uh, parental investment on from the males. Okay. So what they found, like there's all these studies going back into the 90s, 80s and 90s. Um, this is where they figured out the oxytocin is a very important, um, uh, neuropeptide that, that helps regulate this pair bond attachment that we have. Okay. Originally what they think happened to was, okay, there's this whole evolutionary arc where oxytocin gets released when a mammalian mother is lactating. Okay. Uh, it

helps release milk from the breasts, okay? What they think happened then, though, was evolution selected that chemical as a neuropeptide, too, that gave them an emotional attachment to the offspring, okay? And then it co-opted it again to make us bond to each other. So it used that same kind of framework and just, it's just like, oh, we're going to use it for this now. We're going to use it for this now. It's got a whole new mechanism. Okay. So there was this really cool study, though, a few years ago. So everybody thought like, oh, oxytocin, it's the love hormone. I was even, I was on one of the first studies that we used oxytocin and primates to like look at how it increases affilative behaviors between males and females. It was really, it was really cool stuff. So we even found

this like, yeah, this is pretty true and it's pretty, pretty robust finding over and over. However, a few years ago, they found that they did these genetic mutations on these prairie voles and they knocked out that oxytocin receptor. So they didn't even have it. They couldn't, they, there was no receptor for them for the oxytocin swirling around in their bodies to attach on their brain and like you know make them go and uh attached to another uh another vol right yet they still did it huh okay so it wasn't just like oh this like random mutation happened and there's this one chemical that did it and it was kind of just a mistake or it was just a like a fluke and it's kind of it kind of works and kind of doesn't no no no their interpretation was there's actually

lots of redundant systems. Yeah. That if one of these fails, we're going to use another one to attach, to make you attach to another individual. It's super fascinating.

Just a quick aside for the listener, one of the reasons why researchers study Prairie Voles so much is that they are one of the only species. Like, it's actually very rare in the animal kingdom. True.

To be monogamous, lifelong monogamous to another partner. And Prairie Vols are one of the closest and most easily studied mammals that are long-term monogamous. So that's why They get studied so much. And because it's so rare, you would kind of assume that it is just a fluke mutation or just like something they got, some gene that got switched somewhere along the line.

But yeah, that is fascinating. That it is, there is a lot more at play. The point is mother nature thought it was so important that it created redundant systems. So like if this thing fails, we're going to have a backup. One of those is, if you want to get real nerdy about it, argonine vasopressin, which is a related chemical to oxytocin. And there's opioid, this whole opioid system that we have is probably involved as well. There's all these systems in the brain. Coming back with the drugs, dude.

That's just, that's true. Well, and that's a big reason. I mean, if you do look at it, people who have like worse social lives don't have a lot of romantic prospects, they're more likely to do drugs. So you, like, I get it. Yes. There is a parallel there. It's probably not a coincidence. And it's not a coincidence.

Yeah. Okay. The OCD like kind of obsession, you know, that we do have with somebody, though, too. you're right. That's a motivational system. It's a motivation. It's not a feeling. It's a motivational system. You're absolutely right. It is. But what that does is it focuses our attention on one person long enough for us to form a bond with them. Yes, we're delusional about it. We have to put aside some harsh judgments for a while in order to form that bond. I think that's absolutely necessary, though, if you want to get into that next stage of that companionate love, which I think we'll get into a little bit more

later. But I think it's just, this is a clever way that Mother Nature figured out. I was like, okay, yes, to spend their judgment for a little while, yes, there's some downsides. Of course there's some downsides. There's going to be some costs. Yeah. But the upside is that we get to continue the species. So, therefore,

Drew Burney is not overrated. Drew Bertie has spoken. It's your turn to bring an argument. Round number two, I'm going to come in. Okay. Love is social infrastructure. This episode is brought to you by Factor. Look, everybody.

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just make us do stupid shit. It actually makes us do a lot of really awesome things too. It's I it's, it's the foundation of social fabric all over the world in all cultures. We find that it's not just like this lifestyle choice that we get. It's not just a luxury. It's actually underpins so much of human civilizations, not just families and kinship groups, which obviously it does that. The larger communities that you're in, whole economic systems, we base just about every single society around the world bases their economic system. The most basic unit is going to be the family unit, right? Which is organized through marriage. Yeah. And ultimately marriage, right? Inherence laws, all these legal frameworks. There's so many laws that if, if,

If they're not directly addressing something about, you know, marriage and cohabitation or anything like that, there's indirectly related to that. Our legal frameworks are, they're all, all of these are based around people pairing off and building lives together. There might be infidelity. There might be other systems where, you know, there's, there's polyamory, there's polygony, there's polygamy, there's all of those things. Sure, sure.

Still underlying all of that is an affinity between two people. There's a pair bond of some kind, okay? that underlies a lot of this. This creates, I would argue, a more stable society as well, right? I am, I think I'm a little bit of living proof of this as well, too. Yeah. So, you know, I talked about this before. Grew up in Humble Means we didn't have a lot of money growing up.

But my parents stayed together, okay? And look at all the data around outcomes for children of two parent households, right? They're so much better. They're better academically. They end up making more money over time. They're better mental health-wise. and health-wise in general, they live longer, have fewer health problems, better quality of life as they age if you come from a two-parent household. There's a lot of mitigating factors around that, too.

I get it. But again, that pair bond is kind of central to all of those downstream effects that happen. We evolved to co-regulate. We talked about this a lot in the emotions episode that we did. There's a co-regulation that happens with other people. It can happen with friendships, but the most intimate form of that is with a romantic partner, right? Your brain actually expects partnership. It looks for and seeks out partnership. Being isolated actually requires much more metabolic resources. To give you just one example of kind of how this works so that there's this hand-holding experiment. I think I brought this up in a previous episode too, but they brought people into an fMRI and they were going to administer a shock to them. Okay. And they told them up front,

they were going to do this, obviously. So they had to just have them do it alone. And what they saw was in the fMRIs, their amygdala's, like, were firing like crazy before, during and after the shock experience. But if they had their romantic partner come in and hold their hand during it, that greatly reduced that. Okay? Interesting.

Greatly reduced it. Our brains are just, they're looking for, and they're wired for companionship and an attachment figure. So they showed that same study that showed like a friend came. in and it showed some reduction in the firing of that too. And then strangers as well and it shows some reduction. But the greatest reduction in that kind of threat response, that brain neural threat response was from the romantic partner. Okay. Your brain is actually looking for this. Like when you're in a committed relationship, you actually, those threat detection systems in your

brain aren't like constantly going off. But it just frees you up to do other things too. You've talked about this before, Mark. You've said that one of the biggest benefits, unbeknownst to you before this happened was once you decided, okay, I'm, I'm going to be in this long-term committed in a relationship and get married to your wife, you're like, all of that, like, I don't have to worry about all this shit anymore. Like, these people who go around and they're chasing those feelings that we're talking about, right? You spend so much time worrying about all of this. But once you, once you've committed to somebody, you're in a committed loving relationship, there's less anxiety around all these other parts of your life.

you can just worry about other stuff, worry about other shit, worry about your job, worry about building a safe community for other people. All these downstream societal effects that you get start from that secure base that you have with another person. Very true. Very true. Anything to say to that so far? Oh, I...

Yeah, you got nothing, do you? Wow, little shit talking coming from the pro-love side of the table. There's some of these downstream effects, too. Stable relationships are linked to... better career achievement. You make more money. You get promoted more often. You have higher job satisfaction and too. It helps when the person at home is supportive of you in your role. That's one of the things. So yes, the relationship has to be happy and that will come up over and over as a theme. You could also argue too that long-term relationships are a civilizing force on men,

particularly young men. Particularly on men. Like when you look at the benefits of marriage, men benefit more than women and particularly young men benefit the most. And it's if you look at societies where things get a little bit hairy and people start rioting in the streets or there's like political revolutions or civil wars, uh, it's typically lots and lots and lots of unmarried, uneducated young men with few opportunities. I mean, we were even joking about this yesterday, about how, uh, before I met my wife, I was like, I was like a fucking barbarian. Yeah. I just, I, I, I, I, in like, now too, when she goes back to Brazil and I'm like left home for three weeks, like, dude, I don't know what happens to me.

I just, I turn into a caveman. I'm like grunting and I like forget the shower and my dirty clothes are fucking everywhere and can't feed myself. It's hard. Yeah, exactly. And the higher relationship quality in marriage, the research consistently shows that married adults, they just report higher relationship satisfaction quality across multiple dimensions, even over cohabiting partners.

okay so when you've actually made that like i love you commitment and we're going to do this and get married you even get a boost of satisfaction out of that i know that's not across the board there's problems with this we'll get into those i get that but it is possible and that is like probably the most secure base from which you can build a life and therefore build a community and build a society based off of that through that just diatic pair and pair bonding with one other person married couples too over cohabitating couples, they, uh, 12% more likely to report, uh, relationship satisfaction, 26% more likely to report, uh, high stability throughout their life, not just in their relationship. And 15% more likely to report, um, uh, feelings of higher commitment and,

and dedication to another person. Yeah. Is that, is that correlation or cause it? Fair. That's a, that's a fair. That's fair. Because I would argue more stable, more committed people are more, or more likely to get married. Right. That's, that's, I get that. Okay. I'll just leave you with this, too. There are a lot of, you're like, oh, you know, the love wanes over time and all of that. There's actually a lot of research suggesting that, no, that's not necessarily the case for a very significant proportion of people. Actually, satisfaction, relationship, and life satisfaction remains relatively stable for long periods of time and people who do get married and commit to each other over the long haul.

Yes, it waxes and wanes. There's probably some, you know, Variety. I mean, I get that. But longer term, people do report that their satisfaction with their partner, with their relationship, and with their life in general remains relatively stable over time. Okay. Okay. Are you done? Sure.

Okay. Good. For now. Yeah. Because I will begin by saying that I don't disagree with anything you said. Okay. I think it's well researched. Prairie Vols, well done.

Right. You know, you got to get the prairie, if you're talking, if you're going to talk about monogamy, you got to get the prairie bowls in there. You do. You do. It's, they're super cute too, Mark. Are they? They are. Yeah. I agree with everything you said.

Okay. I will make a key distinction, though. Okay. That I think is absolutely cataclysmic to your case, sir. Okay. And that is, everything you're talking about is marriage. It's the result of marriage. It's result of that explicit commitment to another person.

Okay. I would argue that marriage is quite different. than love. And I actually have history on my side on this one because it, for the vast majority of human history, love and marriage were not associated with one another. If you go as far back as the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans, romantic love was, it was something to be cautious about. It was something to worry about. Why? Because it made you make terrible decisions. For the vast majority of human history, marriage was arranged. It was negotiated between families. It was discussed between political alliances, people would marry their cousins in vast quantities.

Why? To mitigate social, economic, and political risk. So marriage, by and large, was never about love. I mean, even once you get into the Middle Ages, there was copious amounts of advice that was being handed down from the kings and the lords and the church advising parents, don't let your kids marry for love. at the time Western Europe was the only place in the world that people actually had some agency in choosing who that they could marry. And that was due to a bunch of institutions and laws that the Catholic Church passed.

And so it became this source of anxiety for parents and families of like, oh, God, what if little Johnny decides to marry little Susie because he's in love with her? That's going to be horrible for our family's future. No, we got to make sure that Johnny marries his cousin over here. which actually cousin marriage wasn't allowed in Europe either. But we have to make sure that Johnny marries Cindy over here because that's much better for our family's future. And so you see this tension throughout most of human history where love had nothing to do with it.

It was never part of the equation. And not only was it not part of the equation, it was a risk to the equation. Most of us today, we think of Romeo and Juliet as the ultimate love story. People don't realize that contemporaries of Shakespeare at the time when they went to see Romeo and Juliet, when it premiered, they saw it as a cautionary tale.

Of a, of a, it reaffirmed their belief of like, oh, my God, don't let your fucking teenager fall in love with somebody. Because this is what's going to happen to you. Sure, sure. So it really wasn't until the 19th century with the romantic movement in Western Europe, that you get this notion of. that you should marry the person that you're in love with. That because we have agency and because we get to choose the life that we have,

why not maximize our life to be as happy as possible? This was a new and revolutionary idea in the 19th century. And it began with a lot of the moral philosophy that came out of England with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. And then it bled over into the romantic movement with people like Gerta. and it eventually trickled its way down into the culture where people started looking for marriage partners based on who they love.

It's funny because if you, you know, I remember in high school I read Jane Eyre and I thought it was the most boring fucking book in the world. I'm like, this is like just the most cliche love story ever. And what I realized at the time, it was so transgressive. This idea that you would marry for love or pursue somebody out of love rather than the best status or opportunity for your family

or for what your parents would approve. It was completely transgressive at the time. So it is something that we take for granted today, but it is love and marriage are a very recent pairing. And I think if you could make the argument that maybe it's too high of a bar. If you look at countries in the world that have arranged marriages, a place like India, they have some of the lowest divorce rates in the world as well. And I think a lot of that has to do simply with expectation.

There's just an understanding of like, yeah, my spouse isn't supposed to satisfy all of my emotional needs. By the way, I'm not saying we go, we implement arranged marriage and, you know, marry people for economic reasons. I'm just saying that like these are two very different institutions. That's fair. And for most of the human history, they were separate in most people's minds. You called love a social infrastructure, and by love, I think you mean marriage, primarily.

Marriage is also a market. Dating is a market. It's something that you come to with a certain amount of value. Okay. And you try to find the most maximize the most amount of value you can get out of it as well. All the things that you described, the social and economic stability, a lot of that is a function of the value of the partners that are put together. Now, I would argue that if dating is a market, and it is to a certain extent, you know, in the dating episode, we talked about how much attraction is driven by perceived

status, how much of it is driven by how much you think the person is going to add to your life, right? It's completely natural and human. Well, if you look at it that way, then you have to ask yourself, how is love influencing how this market functions? Right? Like if you have people who are trying to make decisions in a market and their decision making is constantly getting hijacked and blocked by this like crazy motivation or drive, they're constantly rationalizing all these reasons to be with somebody who, by all accounts, is probably not the right person for them to be with. It's hard for a market to function efficiently that way. I would would add on top of that, what we are experiencing the so-called dating crisis that we're in the

midst of today is actually kind of an outcrop of this issue, right? Because what happens when you get on a dating app? You're primarily thinking, whether you're conscious of it or not, you're probably looking for status indicators, right? How good looking is the person? How much money are they making? How popular are they? What school did they go to? All of these status indicators, yet you're showing up to the date expecting to be swept off your feet and in love. And so, of course, you end up with a population that is constantly frustrated because you have infrastructure and a dating market infrastructure that has been optimized for status matching, but the population at large, the culture at large, still sees dating and marriage through the lens

of love. Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily go back to marrying for money and, you know, And, you know, being very political reasons. Political reasons and alliances and all that. I'm just saying that, like, we have to be very honest about what's going on here. You know, and in fact, like, when you look at research, it's interesting. So recently a number of researchers have actually tried to, like, use AI to do matchmaking. So they have, like, taken people and figured out all these variables about, you know, who they are as a person and what they're interested in.

They've tried to run machine learning on all those factors to predict which single people are going to hit it off and become attracted or fall in love with each other. And they can't do it. And the conclusion they eventually came to is that love emerges in the interaction itself. You can't predict when it's going to be there and when it's not going to be there. And so I would just argue that our poor understanding of love, dating, marriage, how it all actually functions has been leading people to a lot of, a lot of disappointment. And I would say that the overestimation of love, this idea that your ideal partner should

satisfy all of your status-driven desires, satisfy all of your economic and social needs, and satisfy all of your emotional needs on top of that, and sweep you off your feet, and be your prince charming or your whatever sleeping, beauty, it's completely unreasonable. And something has to give somewhere. And when you look back across the vast history of human civilization, the thing that is given is the love. And you've, you've been talking about commitment and the importance of commitment, how it makes people's lives better, how marriage makes people's lives better. I agree with all that. I've experienced it myself. But there's a, to a certain degree, I would argue, the commitment comes first,

the love comes second. And I think for whatever reason, our culture and our society, we've got it backwards. We think love hits you like a fucking lightning bolt, and then you commit to that person. And I, I would call that framing into question entirely. Okay, okay. That, I don't disagree with that, that last point. And I'm not saying that love should be the only thing that dictates who you get into a relationship with or spend your life with or anything like that. That's not what I'm saying at all. So we both agree that John Lennon was a dumbass. Yes, I will agree with that. All you need is love is not.

Yes. Right. Yes. I agree with that. By the way, John Lennon, not the greatest track record with women should be noted. Yes, very much so. I would agree with that. like love should not be the sole motivating force for you to get into a relationship, stay in a relationship, anything of course.

Yeah. And I also agree, too, that commitment could actually precede the feelings of love that you have and often do. Yeah. Look at the statistics for arranged marriages, say in India or any other places where they have arranged marriages. They're usually, if not about the same satisfaction within the relationship or better sometimes, too, than compared to other societies that don't have arranged marriages. Sure. Yeah.

I get that. What I am saying, though, is that love, it deepens that relationship to the point where all of those downstream effects I was talking about at a societal level, actually there's a stronger glue there. And I think love is part of that, a big part of that. Yeah. That attachment you have to another person, that commitment, that's fueled that you, like you said, love is a motivational system, right? A lot of that commitment, a lot of that kind of like social glue that we have, that is fueled by. an attachment to another person that's underpinned by love. Drew, we're getting too nuanced here. We're supposed to be like those guys on cable TV who are just screaming at each other. And all, okay, I'll push back on one other little thing then before we wrap this up. Okay. Which is, yes, the modern dating market, as you called it. Yes.

It is broken. I absolutely agree with that. It's garbage. It's hot garbage right now. That doesn't mean we throw the baby out with bathwater here, though. Okay. just like, you know, the housing market is broken too. Should we all just give up on that?

On homes? On homes and all that. Okay. So yes, the modern dating market is broken. Yes, we probably look at it. I would argue we look at it too much like a market, maybe a little bit. Although it is, like there's a reality around it that you're trying to get the best bang for your buck out of this quote unquote market.

No pun intended. Right. But we don't, just because that's broken doesn't mean it can't be. worked on and fixed and you can't address some of those issues too. Okay. Always the optimist, Drew. Always the optimist. All right. What's your next point? Love and happiness, Mark. This episode is brought to you by IM8. Modern life, as we know, is kind of chaotic. We're overstimulated, undernourished, and somehow expected to optimize our sleep, our stress, our gut, our brain, our immune system, and our mood and still be a functional human being at 9 a.m.

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help itself. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Those come, they never happen together, do they? Well, come on. There's, yes, there's a lot of nuance in this. And yes, I know. I'm being facetious, by the way. Love and happiness are probably like the two most strongly correlated things. But anyway, I'm stealing your point. We all, we've all heard about the loneliness crisis. Yes. Right. There's some debate as to like how long this has actually been going on. People have been lonely all throughout human history, obviously, right? But, you know, back in the, like, late 2000s, early 2010s, there were some those studies that came out that said, you know,

social isolation can be as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, basically a pack of cigarettes a day for your physical health, not just your mental health, your actual physical health. You don't live as long. You have increased heart rate or heart disease incidences, cancers, all of that. They've associated with chronic loneliness or chronic social isolation. Depression, anxiety, cognitive decline too. So higher rates of like Alzheimer's. But isn't that just an argument for friendship? Friendship is part of it. Okay, that is part of it. I've thought a lot about this too because, you know, I'm, I'm real big on, like, friends take up a bigger part of my social life than, than romantic partners generally have in my adult life they have anyway. I've thought a lot about that. And yes, they're great. The thing is, is about a romantic partner. There's, there's certain things they can provide that friends can, not just sex, Mark, okay? Why are you assuming that that's where I'm going? Yeah, I mean, you can. I'm actually, it's funny because I'm a great. I'm a great. I'm actually, it's funny because I'm a great.

with you and I and I and I was not thinking about sex but yeah yeah there there's just certain things there's a level of intimacy um and that you only get with your your your romantic partners that you can't get through friendship the Harvard study on happiness they sometimes call it it's actually called the Harvard study on adult development okay but they often call it the Harvard happiness study so it's that one that's gone all the way back to i think was it the 20s or 30s uh late 1930s Late 1930s, they started then. They're still going to today. Started with a graduating class of senior men from Harvard.

And then they started tracking them every single year for 70 years. Until they die. Yeah, basically. And then they started adding more cohorts along the way. It's this huge study. It's still ongoing. They look at every single factor they can find. And then they go in and they comb through the data this way, right?

Some of the things that have come out of that, spending time with a loving partner predicts day-to-day happiness better than your physical health habits. Okay, doesn't, like, exercising, eating right, getting good sleep, all of that. If you spend time with somebody that you love on a daily basis, more or less, that is a stronger predictor of your happiness than not, okay? And it's not just about like marriage and commitment, like we talked about it. It's not just about that. The quality of the relationship really matters here. Emotional warmth from close partners is one of the strongest predictors of healthy aging.

So it's not just that you're married. It's not just that you have somebody else a warm body around. It's that that quality and the love that you feel with the other person actually predicts physical health like on a very, very long time horizon. Spousal support is another one that it buffers against age-related decline. So things like dementia, you know, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And you just see an overall boost in happiness too. if you if spending time with a supportive, emotionally warm person that you feel connected with. All of those things flow from like this this pair bonding love experience.

For love. Okay. Say it true. No, not all. I'm not going to say all you need is love. That's not what I'm saying. That is not what I'm saying. That is not what I'm saying.

Yes. Also too, the flip side of that. Loving somebody makes you vulnerable. It makes you, it opens you. up to heartache and despair and all of those things. Yes, you are opening yourself up to that. That absolutely means you can be hurt. I get that. Okay. But just like you've always said, Mark, you can't have the benefits without the costs. Right? You have to risk something. Meaning only comes from risking something. Yeah. This is something I've, as I've gotten older,

because for the longest time, I was just like, ah, you know, I got my friends and I can date around here and there and all of this. The thing that over the last few years that I've really realized is like, oh, that's the whole point. The whole point is that you can get hurt, that this will hurt at some point. And that's what makes it more meaningful. And that's why you do all this crazy shit even too is because it's kind of worth it in the end. There's a lot of like, you know, people who, especially today, they're just like, I'm not doing this. These insane statistics where people are just dropping out of the dating market all together. People under 30, it's something that only like 40% of people are even looking for a relationship. 40% of single people under 30 right now that

are even looking for a relationship. This is in some studies, what they show them, some pockets at least. That's insane. Yes. And I think a lot of what that is, is they're saying, you know, I don't need anyone. What they're saying is I'm afraid to need anyone. Yeah. And I get it. Yes, you're protected and, you know, you're not putting yourself out there and you're not vulnerable to heartache and fine, I get that. That's not like freedom, though. That's just, you're just defending yourself. Yeah. And it's not, you're not actually engaging with the world. That requires some risk. Yeah. That requires. requires putting yourself out there and maybe getting your heart broke a little bit.

People see all the risks. They don't do the proper cost-benefit analysis here, though. Because the upside is so huge. Yep. Not just all the health benefits that I just went through, but just life satisfaction in general, too. It's there. Yes, it takes work. Absolutely, it takes work.

But everything good takes work. Everything good takes work. Absolutely. Even long-term durable patterns of a dysfunction. in your relationships, those aren't even, like, a lot of people are like, well, this just isn't for me. There's some people who, yes, this is works for, but it's not for me because obviously over and over again, I'm raising my hand here too because it was like over and over again. Relationships, long-term, committed stuff, not for me.

Even that, though, don't throw their baby out with the bathwater here. Yeah. You can work on these things. There's been some really good research coming out, like couples therapy is actually very, very effective. Something like 70% of people who do it say they've gotten some benefit out of it. least, if not save their entire marriage for it. If you stick with it long enough, something like 20, 30 sessions, most people say that they've resolved the issues that they went in

to address. It's actually very, very effective. So it's not that you can't learn these skills. Yes, there's problem. Yes, love can cause a lot of problems. Yes, you can love the wrong person or yes, you can get into very, very toxic relationships. Yep. And it can really fuck your life up. Yeah. But you can also learn not to do all those shitty things to each other, right? Yeah. That's a very, very real possibility. People do it all the time. Growth really is possible in this area. And it can make you happy, happier.

I don't disagree with that. The question, though, if emotional warmth from a partner predicts healthiness and happiness better than, say, money or IQ or all these other things. Which is also found, yes. Yeah. Why do we spend so much more time optimizing for our careers than our relationships? Because I think it goes back to that. We're afraid.

Relationships, a loving committed relationship is an incredibly vulnerable thing to be in, like I just said. And it's a lot easier to say, well, if I just make some money, then I'll be happier. Yeah. If I just achieve these things and get this outside validation from usually strangers, then, hey, I'll be happier. That's why I think we do that. I think it's a big distraction. It's a big hand wave. I've also noticed, too, I've observed in people that they see that, like, because I think

at this point in our generation, like most people are. most smart people who think about this stuff, kind of intuitively understand that, you know, you got to work on yourself to have a good relationship. Basically, it's, you know, you want to make yourself as healthy and whole as possible before you jump into a really serious long-term committed relationship. But what I've observed is that a lot of people, I think, either take that too far or, again, there's that kind of status love mismatch going on, where they are working so hard on their career. They're building up skills and fitness and different experiences so that when they

finally do meet their partner, they're going to be this, like, well-rounded, interesting person who's going to have a lot going on. The problem is that those things don't predict chemistry. They don't predict the spark. They don't predict the love happening, right? Like, it's so many people, I think, use that as a subtle form of avoidance. Yes. It's like a form of productive procrastination. Right, right. It's like, oh, I'm just going to take another year and, like, we're on my career a little bit more, then I'll be ready to find my partner or whatever. And then before they know it, they're like 35 or 40. They haven't met enough people. They don't know what they like. They don't know who they're compatible with or who they have good chemistry with. And so they

they like go on all these dates and they're just confused of like why is nothing happening. We found in attachment science too. If you're an insecure attachment style, if you're avoiding or anxious or disorganized, whatever it is, what's the best way to fix that? It's not things. therapy, actually. It's being in a healthy relationship with either a secure person or somebody who at least is aware of what's going on and is helping. You can both grow together. Yes. So it's not, it's not about like getting yourself fixed first. Yep. And I'm not saying a relationship can fix you. I'm saying it's a space where two people can grow in a way that helps them heal. Yeah. I'm going to get in my rebuttal here in a second. And I'm going to, we're going to land in the same spot. I think I'm going to end up

making the same argument you're making right now, but I'm going to come at it from completely the opposite side. So you point out that love drives happiness, that it is the strongest correlate of life satisfaction. One of, yes. I put it way up there. Yeah, it's way up there. Definitely top three, potentially top one. I would argue that love doesn't necessarily drive happiness. Love amplifies whatever the underlying relationship already is. So if the relationship, is healthy and happy, the love is going to 10x that. But if the relationship is unhealthy and miserable, then the love is going to 10x that. So it's love itself is not driving the joy and happiness. Love is just amplifying whatever emotion is already there. Okay. And by the way,

there's a finding that also came from the Harvard study that backs this up. So it found that relationship quality actually matters more than relationship status. Low quality relationships or unhappy marriages are not better than no marriage. They're actually worse than having no marriage. So you're better off being single than being in an awful, miserable, horrible relationship. Yes. But it's even worse than that because as I laid out at the top of the show, our romantic love behaves in our brain very much in the same way as like a chemical addiction or like.

like a gambling addiction. And what drives more addiction? Well, intermittent reinforcement. If you look at the science behind like what makes gambling so addictive or what makes video games so addictive, it's that there is an endless series of unpredictable rewards. Like that seems to be kind of the formula of like what gets people hooked on a certain activity or a certain behavior is that it is, it's going to be a variable reward schedule. Exactly.

It's going to be very satisfying at different unpredictable times. And what is an unstable relationship? It's something that's incredibly satisfying at very unpredictable times. It is a slot machine. And today it comes up all red and you lose all your money, but tomorrow you might hit the jackpot. And if you have a mind that's susceptible to that, you can easily fall prey to it. And so there's kind of this sick pressure within our own. own brains, which is that the exact thing that makes an unhealthy relationship unhealthy is also

what makes it more addictive and more consuming, which is the irony, right? Like, it's just anecdotally. I've noticed that people who are actually happy in their relationships, they don't really talk about themselves. They don't talk about the relationship. They don't really have anything to say because they're fucking happy. But the people who are certain people that are like always posting online about themselves. They're always posting online about each other.

They're always talking about it. Oh, she's so amazing. Oh, my God. He's like, he's my dream man and like all this stuff. And they want to know all about your relationships. Yeah. And it's funny because whenever my wife and I meet a couple like that, we're like, they're going to get divorced. Like 100% chance they're going to get divorced.

Okay. But it's one of those things that it's like if you have like a rich person doesn't have to tell people he's rich. Right. Sure. A confident person doesn't go around saying how confident they are. A happy couple doesn't have to go telling everybody how happy they are. The squeaky wheel makes the most noise. Okay.

Are you kind of making the argument to, you know, how people, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60% of marriages fall apart, depending on demographics and all. There's a lot of nuance to that number, so don't call me on that. But are you saying so that, you know, there is this huge kind of idea out there right now or a lot of people are just like, well, the odds are against me. So I'm just not even going to, again, what I'm not necessarily talking about marriage, but this is trickling down now into I'm just not even going to date. So this is where I come around and I agree with your final point, which is that I think, I do think that perhaps we are in a world where we are too aware of these dynamics. And I do think young people, they're so aware. They grew up in therapy culture.

They grew up learning about all this stuff. They grew up learning about self-esteem and protecting themselves and, you know, not settling and all this stuff. And it's so I feel like they kind of intuitively understand it like, well, being in a fucked-up relationship is going to be worse than being by myself. And if I can just be happy by myself, then, like, what, I don't have to worry about anything. So I do think there's, like, a little bit of logic behind it. But to your point, I do think the risk reward is off. The thing that they're missing, which you're correct about, is that the way to get better relationships is to be in

relationship. It's like anything else. The only way, I guess the fallacy here is, is what we talked about just a few minutes ago of, like, the people who are like, I'm going to get my life together. I'm going to be a happy whole person on my own, then I'll be ready to date and be in relationships. And that can only take you so far. I mean, there's like, there's a minimum level of kind of self-sufficiency and independence that you need to get to. So it's like if you're, if you're still live in a mom's basement and don't have a job, like, okay, go get a job. Obviously, right. Go get your own place. You know, if you still don't, if you don't have like a social, you don't have any friends and you don't have any money. Like, okay, get some money. Get some friends.

But once you're kind of at a baseline functionality, optimizing yourself anymore isn't going to drive a ton of results. You do need to get out there and start having these experiences and relationships because that is how you get better at relationships. Is you have a couple bad relationships. You learn from them. You learn where you got tricked. Like it comes back to the con man, right? Your brain is a con man. It's tricking you into falling in love with these people.

And so you need to learn where the tricks are. You need to learn like what the games your brain is playing with you so that you don't play them next time. So that you spot them and you're like, oh, I remember the last time I fell for a girl like that. Okay. Did not end well. That I agree with very much. Yes. Okay.

So yes, you do need to get out there and start having these experiences. And yes, the risk of toxic relationships is very real, especially if you get a really bad relationship. Like, yeah, it can kind of fuck you up for a while. So like it is a real risk. There are real repercussions, but the alternative is just bad. So you might as well get into the game, start getting better at it, start learning about yourself, start learning about the sort of partners you attract, and try to improve because there is no other way to improve it.

I think one of the startling or surprising things about this is that just knowing all this stuff doesn't really inoculate you to it. It's, it's, there's actually like, can vouch, yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, speaking from personal experience, speaking from like watching friends,

but I mean, it's just, there's actually, are you, have you ever read about like Tolstoy and his wife? Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's so fucked up. So Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina, arguably like the best romance novel ever written. one of the most famous books ever written.

And his marriage with his wife was like so contentious, so toxic, so fucked up. So Tolstoy was a bit of a weird. I mean, yes, he's an outlier. I get that. He's an outlier. I want to like preface this by saying that like, I'm a Tolstoy fanboy. I personally think he's like maybe the greatest novelist who's ever lived. That dude was a little bit crazy.

He was very idealistic in his personal life. So when he got engaged to his wife, the night before their wedding, he handed her all of his diaries and journals because he felt like she should know everything about him. What she didn't realize is that his diaries and journals documented in explicit detail every prostitute he had gone to, every gambling debt he had, every like terrible thing he had done to anybody. And so she spent the whole night before her wedding weeping about the guy she was about to marry. At least he's honest. At least he's honest. At least, hey.

There are worse problems, I guess. They went ahead with the marriage. And from day one, they were married for 48 years. From day one, it was highly contentious, highly toxic. They were both incredibly manipulative towards each other. They intermingled every aspect of their lives. She edited and rewrote war in peace for him. He was like, would demand full totalitarian control over the household.

they would manipulate each other, backstab each other, turn their kids against each other. They would write in their diaries awful shit about each other. And then they discovered that they were both sneaking into each other's offices and reading each other's diaries. So then they started writing in their diaries about each other so that the other would read it and manipulating them each other through their diary entries.

It was just a whole fucking mess. That is another level of toxic. It's another level of toxic for sure. Wow. Okay. Finally. So late in Tolstoy's life, he had a pretty massive spiritual awakening, a religious conversion. By the way, he had become this rich and famous, probably the most famous living author in the world. And he had decided at like the ripe age of, I think, 75 that he wanted to give away all of his money and possessions to the needy and poor and become a peasant in the countryside. He had eight kids.

obviously his wife was like fuck no dude get back to work she was so afraid that he was going to change a will and write a new will to give away all their possessions to the church

that she would sleep in his office and she like would literally would not leave his side it drove him so crazy that he finally ran away in the middle of the night when he was 80 years old contracted pneumonia and proceeded to die a week later

so okay that's a dramatic example. All of this is to say, I get it. The man who wrote Anna Karenina, who arguably wrote the most powerful and poignant passages about love, some of the most powerful and poignant passages about love ever written,

was an absolute disaster in his marriage and his personal life. And just like we mentioned John Lennon, same thing. Yes. Yes. Okay, I get that. Complete mess. But there's going to be a certain person that hears that story and see like, see, see,

it's just not even worth it. And it's the same type of person, or it's the same argument that's made with a lot of people who are like, oh, the government just can't do anything right. Therefore, we shouldn't have a government.

It's like, no, what you're arguing for is better government. Yes. What you're actually arguing for is better relationship skills, better skills where you can express and receive love. Yes.

And I 100% agree with you. And the cautionary tale of Tolstoy is not that you shouldn't get married. It is that just because you intellectually understand this stuff doesn't mean you're good at it. Okay, okay. It's like reading 10 books about basketball and then thinking you can go play in the NBA. Right, right. Like you have three-point shooter.

Yeah, you have to go play basketball. Right. There's no other way to do it. That I agree with it. So we've established that your brain is a bit of a con man. We've established that a terrible relationship is from mental health, physical health point of view, worse than no relationship. My final argument against love is that romantic love in particular, that initial limerence, that initial sweep you off your feet, it is more likely to happen with somebody who is completely toxic for you.

This is the unfortunate truth is that healthy love tends to be a little bit boring. That doesn't mean that it doesn't feel amazing, that it's not great, that it isn't a beautiful thing. it's just a little bit boring. And the people who are exciting, who keep you awake at night because you can't stop thinking about them, chances are they're pretty fucking toxic. So there's a thing called the dark triad, which is it's three personality traits that are highly interrelated. And they basically predict all antisocial behavior. So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

I think people are pretty familiar with narcissism. and psychopathy or being a psychopath. Machiavellianism is basically it's being manipulative. It's basically like being scheming and playing games

with people to like get a one-up on them. It turns out that people who are high and dark triad traits are extremely magnetic, especially upon the first impression. They are generally rated

as more attractive, more confident, more desirable and achieve far more short-term mating success. It's actually like the dark triad is it's really fucked up.

It's a little bit of like a sore spot for me because, you know, back when I was in the men's dating advice industry, there was a small cohort of that industry, which at the time was known as the Manosphere. It is since now blown up and is mostly popularized by Andrew Tate. But the Manosphere guys would, they looked at this research result, the fact that dark triad men in particular come off as more confident, more sexually attractive. and have more short-term mating success. As a result, they celebrated it.

They said, this is the behavior that we should be emulating. We should adopt dark triad traits as much as possible, which is a terrible fucking idea because dark triad people are miserable people. So it is actually completely self-defeating. But the point for all of us is that the charm is real, the seduction is real, and what follows is also, unfortunately, often very real. The other point I want to make around this is that intense chemistry is often driven not by genuine compatibility or genuine admiration for the other person. If you are experiencing extremely intense chemistry with somebody, sexual romantic chemistry with somebody upon first meeting them, 99 times out of 100, it's going to be driven by some sort of trauma-induced compensation.

there's some deep childhood wound that this person has like somehow tapped into whether through their personality or the way they talk to you or the way they look or whatever it is and it's that that overwhelming response of emotion and obsession over this person is often driven by that that childhood wound that needs to heal that it's like it is this person is somehow mapped onto that that childhood wound and you are are basically playing out the same pattern with them individually. I actually went through an experience like this in college. It was absolutely crazy.

I sat next to a girl in the computer lab one day. It started talking to her, somehow got talking about music, and there was just this like intense magnetic attraction that up to that point in my life I had never felt. Like it was so intense. Like I just couldn't stop staring at her. Couldn't stop talking. Like was like, holy shit. This girl is amazing.

We ended up talking the whole day in the computer lab. I invited her to dinner. We went to dinner. She had a had a boyfriend for five years. I was dating another girl. By that night, we were like hooking up at my, we basically spent a week straight together. We were completely obsessed with each other. Like could not physically be in a different room.

And I'll let you guess how this ended. Well, yeah. Yeah. I've seen that movie before. How many days do you think it lasted? I think it made it until like day six maybe. It was in hindsight, I mean, I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I thought I honestly thought I had just met the love of my life.

And I think she thought the same thing. And what ended up happening is that we were kind of caught in this whirlwind of fantasy and delusion. And eventually you spend enough time with a person, you start seeing all of the nitty, gritty details of them, you start seeing the reality of who they are. Some of these things start to become impossible to ignore. And then reality comes crashing in. And basically it's like the higher the high of that initial romantic dizziness, the harder the crash when it comes. And so she and I just ended up in these like screaming arguments over really serious. stupid stuff. And I think it's just because we had invested so much of ourselves and put so much

expectation on a relationship that it only lasted like five days and had no understanding of like the fact that we're actually dealing with a real human being and an individual on the other side. So yeah, it came apart. And I actually don't think I ever like talked to her or saw her again after that. So it's it's like I actually had a friend who was also a dating coach back in the the dating advice industry. And he had a saying, he used to say the, the brighter the candle burns, the faster it goes out. And yeah, okay. Definitely true. Sure. My last point, and then I'll kind of wrap up with a meta point. But so love bombing. Love bombing is when somebody just expresses so much attraction for you so quickly. It's often coupled with promises of long-term

commitment, affection, you know, it's like gifts. Gifts. It's just like, It's a lot. It's like a tidal wave of attention and affection. And generally the person who's love bombing you, they do seem to genuinely have intentions of spending the rest of their lives with you. It's funny because when you look at the research on attraction, it's just a reminder of like how selfish people are. Because one of like the driving things about attraction is just somebody who's really into you.

Like it's, if somebody's really, really into you, you're like, that's a pretty smart person. This is one way to get me interested in you is to be interested. Yeah, exactly. I have a very, very flimsy ego that can be easily manipulated. I mean, it's not the only thing. Obviously, and it's not even like the biggest factor, but it is funny that we tend to be attracted to people

who are attracted to us. Like it's just we're a little egocentric in that way. Love bombing really leverages this mechanism, especially in insecure people, right? Because if you're insecure, you're kind of desperate for people to be interested in you. And so when you get love bombed, it just feels like, oh, my God, it's like a life preserver and an ocean of despair. The problem is, is that love bombing is not coming from a very genuine place. It is also coming from a very toxic place.

It's coming from a very, it's coming from a place of inadequacy. And, unfortunately, a lot of dark triad people will intentionally use the, love bombing as a tactic to manipulate people into getting what they want. Coincidentally, Andrew Tate, his whole method that he sells to young men is to essentially love bomb young women. And love bombing, it's the sort of thing that it works. You know, we talked about in the dating episode how insecurity attracts insecurity and security attracts security, love bombing only works on highly insecure people.

Like it's really if you're desperate for affection, if you are starved for validation, then a love bomb is going to, it's going to feel like a godsend. Whereas if you are a pretty secure high self-esteem individual, guy starts love bombing you, your first thought's going to be like, what's wrong with him? Right. Yeah. He's compensating for something. Yeah. He's definitely like he's, he's a little bit unstable. The point of all of this is that, again, that, that, romantic love, that initial limerance, it's, we're all susceptible to it. We've all got this con man who's kind of tricking us in our brains. And not only are we susceptible to it, but we're most susceptible to the most toxic people. And it is actually the most destabilizing behaviors and traits in people are the things that are the most intoxicating and exciting and romantic. And as we discussed in my rebuttal to your last argument, it is getting caught in one of those toxic cycles in a really toxic relationship.

It can actually make you worse off than just being alone. And so it is, I do think people are right to be hesitant, to be skeptical. But I also do think that they should be actively looking for a relationship and partner. But it is, again, it comes back to what are you prioritizing? What are, how are you filtering people? And I just think love as a filtering mechanism, you have to be very, very, very careful. Fair. Okay. Okay. A couple of things I want to point out. One of them, with the college girlfriend story you had. Yeah. You were in college. You were young. You were 20, 21 maybe. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's that. Sure. That, I mean, by the way,

I would not take that experience back. It was, It was a shit show. Point for Drew. It was an absolute shit show. It completely disrupted my life. And I'm sure it disrupted her life far more than it disrupted mine. Because she was the one who was in a very long-term committed relationship. But yeah, don't regret it.

Okay. My point is, though, that you were young. Yes, we do dumb things when you're young. There's more going on than just, like, love overtaking us. We're just not good at emotional regulation at that point either. So that's one point I'm going to make that you can actually learn to avoid those relationships. And hopefully you do. I feel like I've gotten better at that as I've gotten older to. Another thing, I guess you kind of alluded to it, but yes, it is very, very common for

like anxious attachment types to get with avoidant attachment types. You're right. That's the people who really aren't good for us for some cruel reason we just tend to get with these people. Like you said, it's typically like a childhood wound of some kind that we're strangely trying to figure out with this and we see this in this other person hoping that they can fix it. Yep. And it just turns out they're the exact wrong person to fix that. Totally agree with that. That happens all the time.

But just because our initial attraction is often flawed, just because our first impressions are usually not right or they're not the best for us or whatever it is, that doesn't mean, again, we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I think what you're talking about is that fairy tale kind of infatuation. Of course, that's not. sustainable. Yeah. Of course, the, the, the tale of Romeo and Julia is real. And the, the lesson from it is real, which is young, dumb, love needs to be tempered. Gets people killed. Yeah, right? You drink, you end up drinking Amlock, right? Yes. You mentioned this. You said that, uh, what actual love

often looks like is more boring. And that wasn't really something I think I figured out until, uh, the last few years either. So my, in my current relationship now, when we first started dating, I was like, does she even like, I don't think she likes me. I didn't think she liked me. Yeah. Because I've been so, I've usually been the avoidant one in so many of my adult relationships. And I've usually been with a more anxious person, or at least that's how it ends up shaping out. And then, you know, I get this constant, there's always this like, the anxious person is always kind of like, they're the ones keeping in contact with me.

They're the ones, you know, like, do you like me? What I thought were demands they were putting on me, all of these things, right? Yeah. this relationship that I'm in now that didn't happen. She's a pretty secure person and it didn't happen. I'm just like, this is, does she like me? I have no idea. What's going on? And it wasn't until the relationship progressed far enough that I kind of brought that up. And I'm like, no, I didn't know. I didn't think you really liked me. And she's like, this gets to the point about overtherapizing thing. It's a little bit like, yeah, I've, you know, historically been pretty avoidant. And she was a little bit taken back by that. You know, like a little bit like, I better watch out because I've been in these situations before. I'm fairly secure, but avoiding people. Yeah. I'm attracted to them just like a lot of. of a lot of people are. And so she wanted to watch out for that. But what we, when we finally did have this honest open conversation about it, it was like, oh, this is just like, this is what a healthy relationship looks like. It's boring. Yes. And so I do agree that we put way too much emphasis on that early initial fairy tale infatuation phase. And that gets like, you know, all the

rom-coms from the 90s and 2000s like blew it way out in proportion and romanticized it way too much. I definitely agree with that. But there's a lot of research that shows what actually does work and does predict success. And again, those are skills you can practice. Those are things you can, I'm living proof of this. Yeah. I was terrible at this. And I just thought like, yeah, I got caught in that phase where it was chasing that high.

Yeah. It was chasing that cocaine addiction, as you called it, you know, of another person. But you can over time, I think we just get better at this as we get older. And there's just a whole suite of predictors of success. that aren't personality-based, actually. It's not like a compatibility and necessary thing. It's these behaviors that you can practice and you can cultivate in yourself.

So there was this one meta-analysis. It was 43 different studies on the relationship success, and they found four big predictors of relationship satisfaction. Okay. One of them was perceived partner commitment. Okay, so how much do you think your partner is actually like in this with you, right?

just appreciation for the other person. Sexual satisfaction was up there too, and then low conflict. The master variable kind of in all of this, though, was partner responsiveness. And this is something I had to learn. Again, this can be learned. You can learn this. Yes. So it's not just that you have these like awful behaviors coming from somebody else with

a dark triad or anything like that. Yes, that's part of it. Obviously screen those people out. But just being able to cultivate some sort of responsiveness with your partner. And this is what I kind of had to learn as an, avoidant person. Yeah. When you have somebody who might be a little more anxious or prone to anxiety, it doesn't take a whole lot. Yes. It does not take a whole lot when they come to you, instead of looking at them as like demands, you're like, oh, I need to be responsive to this.

And same to them, too. So there's a mutual responsiveness that really predicts a lot of relationship success and satisfaction. And that's what really I think underpins love more than anything is like a responsiveness. You're responsive to somebody. No, you're not responsible for their happiness or anything like that, but you are responsive to them. Yeah. And so it's not about these personality traits. It's not about like you're attracting the wrong person. It's just you don't have the skills for it. You don't have, you haven't developed the experience and the skills. This is why young people fall for all the wrong people for them. It's because they haven't developed those skills yet. We haven't taught them very well either in our culture and society.

Yeah. Even narcissists, they can't fake. They can only fake empathy for for so long and then it does fall off the tracks, sure. But if you can train yourself to notice that and focus more on those responsive behaviors within a relationship, that can predict a lot more success. The responsiveness thing overlaps really well to with the Gottman Institute research. Yes. Yes. So for listeners that, you know, the Gottmans have been probably the preeminent researchers on marriage stability and satisfaction for 40. years now. Yeah. Yeah. And their primary method of researching is that they literally just film married couples. They film them fighting. They film them hanging out. They film them talking about

random things in their relationships. And they did they've just built this massive archive of footage. And then they track those married couples longitudinally. And they see which one's divorce and break up. And then they go back and, you know, if say if a couple gets divorced, they go back and they start looking at all the tape to like look at all the different micro expressions and transactions and different things that were said and different personality types and all that stuff to try to define commonalities through the marriages that stay together

and stay happy and the marriages that end up falling apart. And he kind of came up with this framework that he calls bids for affection. And it is really about this responsiveness. Like, you know, it's the Gottman's argue that it's the hallmark of, of happy couples is that, you know, each partner throughout the day is going to make bids for affection in different ways, whether it's through initiating a conversation or, you know,

putting your hand on their leg or asking them how they feel about something or asking for, you know, to get something off a high shelf or whatever it is. And it's what they find is that happy, stable couples, a vast majority of those bids are fulfilled or responded to. And then the the relationships that fall apart, there's a larger percentage of those bids are either ignored or they're shot down. The responsiveness piece, it really does, that feels like the DNA of a stable long-term commitment. Yeah, and I think it's the basis more for like a more durable form of love. What you were describing is this initial infatuation.

Yeah. Yes, I get that. Okay. But there's, I think what you learn is that there is a more durable form of love that involves your active participation, not just how the other person makes you feel. Yes. Okay. It's like you're actively involved in the relationship in a way and building and sustaining

that love. It's not just a thing that's just there. It's actually something you have to work at. And responsiveness is really the one of the underlying bedrocks of it. Yeah. So with that, why don't we get into the conclusion? So we've both made our arguments. we've rebutted each other.

We've made counter arguments. I do think there is a clean way to synthesize all of this. And it actually comes back to Helen Fisher, who I mentioned at the top of the show. She has this framework that I love. And I actually wrote about, God, at this point, 15 years ago.

Is that right? I wrote my first article about Helen Fisher in 2010. God. Oh, my God. 2010, I wrote about Helen Fisher for the first time. And I wrote about this framework because it was when I discovered it, it answered a lot of questions.

And I think it actually is kind of the map to synthesize everything that you and I have both been talking about here. So she calls it the three loves framework. And what she is found in her research is that humans tend to experience what we call love, the single word for love. It's actually three different experiences. and they vary based on context and situation and from person to person, but they also vary biologically, neurologically. So the first one is lust, which is just sex drive. It's primarily hormonally driven.

It's craving for sexual gratification. It's relatively indiscriminate. You are just kind of like, oh, that person's hot, right? You know, and it doesn't go a whole lot further than that. You can feel it for anybody. You can feel it at any time. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. You can even be sexually attracted to somebody you actively don't like, which I think

everybody's probably experienced at one time or another. The second love or the second mechanism is romantic love. So this is that early stage limerence infatuation that I was railing against that often gets glorified in the culture and rom-coms and old romantic movies or romantic novels. So romantic love is primarily driven by dopamine, no repinephrine. I can never say that fucking word. Norapherin. Norapherin.

And serotonin, it's generally, it's characterized by an obsessive focus on a single person. And it's an obsession to the point of euphoria. There's intrusive thinking. There's an emotional roller coaster. you, when they don't text you back immediately, you're just at a nervous wreck. And then when they show up at your door, you're like elated and life is perfect. And then when they go home, you start freaking out that you're never going to see them again. And it's just kind of this, this very irrational up and down experience that you feel from moment to moment. Like your entire happiness

revolves around them. It's where the addiction metaphor comes in. Yes. It's absolutely. It maps very well to the addictive mechanisms inside the brain. And as the point you made was 100% true as well, is that it primarily evolved to focus our mating energy long enough on a single individual to build that paraben, to build, like, the trust and respect and history and experiences together for a longer-term relationship to actually initiate. It doesn't always initiate, but it's, that's what the mechanism is there for. And then finally, the third love is the attachment system or it's the companionate love, which is the one that we finished talking about.

So this is primarily driven by oxytocin and vasopressin. It's a calmer, more peaceful, secure connection with a long-term partner. There's a deep sense of trust and safety. You know, it's funny when we did that happiness episode and we talked about eastern and western understandings of happiness. and how Western understanding of happiness is very excitable. It's like very dramatic and like these epic adventure and like really awesome day and like,

oh my God, this was so cool, we'll never forget it. Whereas like an Eastern understanding of happiness is very peaceful and calm and serene. I would say that those two understandings of happiness map very well to romantic love and companionate love. Like romantic love is extremely exciting. It just feels like, You are flying through the air.

There is an adrenaline rush to it. It's just, it's a completely overwhelming feeling. Whereas companion at love is just this peace, this calm, it's a serenity. I've noticed, it's crazy. Like there have been times where, like, my wife and I have actually noted it. Like, we will just sit on, we won't even talk. Like, we'll sit on the couch together. Maybe I'm playing a video game and she's reading a book.

And we'll just be so happy for. like hours. Like much happier than if we were skydiving or climbing the pyramids or whatever. Like I, in that moment, I would actually rather just be sitting on the couch with my wife not like not doing anything. Oh, shucks. But it is, it is funny because it is I, we talked about it as being boring. Yeah. I would say it is externally boring. From the outside. From the outside, it looks incredibly boring. If from the inside, if you were the one of, you are the one of experiencing it, it is incredibly satisfying. It is, it's actually in kind of a Buddhist sense, it is almost enlightening and that like you don't want to be anywhere else. You're like, I don't

want to change this moment. No craving. No, yeah, it's a moment of no craving. It's like I am fully whole and satisfied in this moment. And this is really, this is that long-term paraben. This is the life partner. This is the social infrastructure that you talked about. This is the bedrock of human civilization of the human family system. This is the parent bond that is last long enough to raise healthy thriving kids to give them a better chance in their lives. All of the good long-term stuff comes out of this. Now, the interesting thing is that all of these, all three of these loves, they kind of operate separately within us. They can all be directed at the same person, but they can be directed at multiple people at different times. Also, what's interesting about

the three loves is that they they tend to be the entry point into the next one. So generally speaking, you find somebody sexy and then you go talk to them and then you kind of develop a romantic love for them. Like it doesn't happen the other way around or at least not very often. It's like that initial sexual interest is what opens the door to meeting them and then experiencing that romantic love. And then that romantic love is what keeps you bonded to that person long enough to ideally start building that companion at love. I think we're both correct. And that when I was primarily criticizing romantic love, because I think it is overrated, I think a large degree of that is for all the reasons I stated. But the thing that's interesting about romantic love is that

it really is sort of a thing that just kind of happens. Like it is, it's not a skill you can develop. It's not like, it's not something you can predict. It's not something you can go through a dating app and accurately predict like, oh, I'm going to fall in love with this person. It just, it, I mean, there's a reason why people call it getting struck by lightning because it just feels like it happens to you. Falling in love. You're just like, holy shit, I'm obsessed with this person. And so as a result, I think people have a very passive disposition towards it. They're like, well, I hope it happens to me, you know?

And this is at one of the cores of my argument is that because people overestimate it, they assume that all relationships function that way. So you see single people who are like, well, I hope I meet my special someone one day or I hope I meet the one as if it's like something that just happens to them. The thing is, is that romantic love is just one middle step in a larger process. And you do have lots of control over other parts of that process, as we talked about in the dating episode. So it is, like, I think one of the issues with it is that people just feel resigned to how they feel. And then once they do fall in love with somebody, they feel resigned to like, well, this is the person I fell in love with.

So, yeah, they're toxic and they treat me like shit. Can't help who you love. But you can't help you love. And it's like, it becomes a justification for like tolerating a lot of bad shit. And so for that reason, I think, and I imagine. we both agree on this, that romantic love is highly overrated. Yes. That people need to really downgrade it in their mind.

And I think it needs to be kind of culturally downgraded to a certain extent as well. Whereas companionate love is more active. It is skill-based. It is something that you have to mindfully approach and practice and get better at. Relationships do need maintenance. They do need repair. They, and they also need upkeep. And these are skills that you can learn, but you mostly have to.

learn them by doing them. And I think you and I would probably both agree that companion at love is probably under-emphasized or undertaught or underrated to a certain degree. Yes, definitely. I'm going to point out, you did say this, though, that you think each one of those forms of love is still necessary. I think it's in the emphasis where we get screwed up. So, yeah, I would agree just like you shouldn't be doing lines of coke all the time, ever, really. right yeah like we're we're gonna put a quote on instagram it's like uh do do cocaine in moderation drew burney so yes totally agree where we end up on this um would be interested uh to see everybody leave some comments and see where you're you land on this though too um what did we miss what

do you think we maybe we maybe we were over emphasizing something yeah um yeah leave a comment for that maybe we'll put a poll up too on uh spotify That'd be interesting. To see, see where we're really on some of this. Tell us, tell us who won the, the, the, the, the debate. Yeah, there we go. You know, you know what's funny, too, is I do think there's a large aspect of culture in this as well. Like, yeah, I do think.

Oh, yes. Yeah, like, I, I, I just think about living in Latin America and, you know, being married to a Latina. Yeah, yeah. Romances. Romance. There's a lot of emphasis put on romance. And, uh, and you can see it in the results down there. Well, and just the way, you know, we grew up with Disney movies.

Yeah. And rom-coms to, you know, that. And that was a big shift, I think, from from previous generations as well. So, yeah, there's a huge cultural component to this. Yeah. Yeah. You go talk to, like, Russians or people who live in Eastern Europe and something, and they're like, you guys are just obsessed with this.

This is weird. Yeah. So, yeah, it's definitely a cultural element to it. I do think you need both. Like, I do think you. And there's nothing wrong with Romantic love. I don't want to say there's like, there's, the over emphasis is the problem. In a vacuum, there's nothing wrong.

It's just like you have to be aware that it will often come up with the wrong people. And you just need to be ready for that. Like just don't blindly trust it. Yeah, maybe that's where evolution screwed up is that we had to learn that first before actually going through it. And again, I think it's probably because most of the human history we evolved where there wasn't a whole lot of downside to falling in love with the wrong person. Right. Yeah. Right.

Like it's worst case scenario, okay, well, you have another baby. And, you know, it's like everybody's in the same tribe. everybody knows each other, everybody's each other's cousin. So like, what's the difference? Whereas in the modern world, yeah, if you fall in love with the wrong person, like there can be some pretty drastic repercussions. This was fun. It was fun.

I like this format. Let us know everybody how you feel about this format if you enjoyed it as much as we do. I think I could see us doing this again if people are really into it. As always, please follow us and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. It's the best thing you can do to help us get the word out tomorrow. more people to help other people experience the joys of falling in love with the Solve Podcast. That's right. There's nothing like it.

As always, please join the community. If you want to go deeper into any of these topics, find actionable exercises, accountability groups, live webinars with Drew and I, as well as just going deeper into the content, the research, understanding all of these topics on a much deeper level. check out community.solvepodcast.com. We've got a great community of thousands of people there who are following us every month and working on a lot of the same stuff that we're working on. And I think that's it.

I think that's it. Until next time, everybody, I love you.