How Love Actually Works - Dr Anna Machin

nice to see you again I really enjoyed our first conversation we talked about Dad's the importance of fatherhood today your most recent book why we love I want to talk about that very Universal perhaps one of the most universal things that humans have got yeah why did love evolve at all okay so love evolved basically in the same way that most thing evolved is because it aids our survival so humans are arguably the most Cooperative species on the planet both in terms of the number of relationship ship we can keep going at once which is about 150 uh in terms of the duration of those relationships that can last decades and in terms of the very many different categories of relationships that we have so we're very Cooperative but cooperation is really hard as I'm we we all know we all know get along with our friends with our family with our co-workers can be a little bit stressful sometimes and it would actually be much much easier to be solitary but we have to live in a group and we have to get along with with each other to just survive and so Evolution came up with love basically it's kind of like a form of biological bribery at the most basic level so it's it's a set of neurochemicals which motivate and reward you for starting and then maintaining what we call your survival critical relationships so those relationships that are critical to you both surviving on a day-to-day basis but also passing your genes down to the Next Generation so at the most basic level that is all love is it's just this biological bribery to make us feel good about doing this really quite difficult thing are there any animals that don't have love are there any animalss that haven't evolved that it's hard to say because love is a really nebulous concept and it depends how you define it I think we all have our own definition of love and it depends at what stage you you define it I think a lot of animals feel what we would call Basic love so all the mammals for example experience attachment all the mammals are underpinned by things like oxytocin and dopamine um you know all mammals have those sort of caring nurturing relationships particularly between mothers an offspring so we would say all mammals experience love what we get a little bit hot in the head about is whether any animals experience human type love which is a little bit more complicated and what I find a little bit sad really is you know when we just assume All Humans feel love so if I say to you do you know what love is have you experienced love you'd go yeah and I'd go okay um but with animals we hold them to a very high level of evidence and so to actually tell whether an animal experiences humanlike love you kind have sort of a che a checkbox of five different things so do they experience attachment is there um neurochemistry does their neurochemistry involve beter endorphin as well beter endorphin is a more complex neurochemical it's involved in human love which we don't see in the less of mammals do they grieve which is the loss of Love uh do they have friendships so do they have relationships which are nothing really directly to do with reproduction or passing genes down just for the hell of it essentially and do they experience cognitive empathy so there are different types of of empathy um there's emotional contagion which is just oh my God you scream I scream I have no idea why I'm screaming but something's scary that's a lot of animals have that there's emotional empathy which is I can see you're really upset but I don't know what to do about it and then there's cognitive empathy which is I can see you're really upset and I'm going to help you in the appropriate way which is what humans have so I think if we use those five things um then we can say yeah some high higher mammals definitely do so for example citations the Dolphins the whales do uh gorillas chimps do um beyond that it's a little bit tricky to say dogs might um we're still not sure on the cognitive empathy with dogs but dogs certainly may experience human levels of Love um there's a wonderful effective neuroscientist unfortunately he's no longer with with us now called Yak pans and he spent his whole life researching love and what he said about human love is he said you know love is like the cupcake and loads of animals have the cupcake but what humans have done is they've over decorated the cupcake they've put lots of rubbish on top which is mostly the cultural stuff we associate with love but all that lovely decoration on top isn't actually necessary to experience love we've just kind of overly complicated it so I would say yes a lot of animals experience love I I think keeping it exclusively for humans and setting this very high bar is is maybe not fair I think going back to the biological bribery is this just a neurochemical motivation in that way it's a motivation in terms of yes so dopamine's evolved and dopamine is the hormone of motivation uh it's also a hormone of reward though so it's definitely it involves the dopaminergic system which is your reward system in your brain and if you look at the activations that occur in love certainly the dopaminergic circuit is there but it's more complicated than that uh because it involves things like beter endorphin which is addictive and that undermine that underpins long-term Human Relationships you need to make very very powerful to underpin a relationship for decades um it involves oxytocin oxytocin isn't just about um they call it cuddle hormone which kind of annoys me but um oxytocin is about orientating you towards social objects in your environment and it also acts on the amydala to calm the amydala so that you are more confident about building relationships and serotonin's evolved a serotonin is about obsessive love so it's more complicated than just a motivation to go over there and chat to someone it has this quite complex uh structure of different roles for for neurochemicals but it's bribing you or motivating you in one way or another to do things that perhaps without that soup of neurochemicals you wouldn't go and do you wouldn't sacrifice yourself in this way you wouldn't care as much you wouldn't be as Vigilant you wouldn't wake up at 3: in the morning to feed the baby etc etc no you wouldn't you wouldn't because it's just really really difficult because being social as I'm sure you know being in a group is actually costly to your survival you know it's very stressful being in a group you don't get to do exactly what you need ideally for yourself every day you have to coordinate with everybody else you've got people who are constantly trying to stab you in the back or do one over on you so you have to spend a hell of a lot of time monitoring everybody else to make sure that everyone's behaving you exist in a hierarchy which is going to dictate the access to resources you get so if you're at the top Fab you're going to get the best matate you're G to get the best food you're G to get the best shelter if you're at the bottom you're kind of screwed so um it's really really hard to do but humans mainly because we birth our babies so incredibly early we need to help each other particularly to raise our children um and we talked about fatherhood before fatherhood's one of the things that started but we need we do need that Village to help us raise our children and we need each other to learn everything we need to learn about our complex technological world so social learning is really important so we need each other to do that so it's this balance we need all these things from each other but it's so stressful it's actually quite costly um and it can be quite dangerous you have to compete you might not actually come out of it alive so yes it's at the most basic level it's there to go here we go I know it's really hard but I'm going to give you all this lovely stuff and hopefully that'll make you feel better obviously as I can hear people screaming love is much more complicated than that but that is the the reason why it evolved in the first place what about the phases of romantic love explain the way that love and lust and all of the different systems work okay so lust and attraction are two entirely separate systems lust is driven by a hypothalamus and it's associated with the sex hormones and we kind of sometimes conflate attraction and lust in Our Minds when we talk about attraction most people think about romantic attraction um actually attraction is the stage that starts all relationships all attraction is is being drawn towards somebody out of Interest or out of Desire or whatever in my or simply because you like them so attraction is a stage that you go through in your friendships it's you go through it when you first meet your baby for the first time that's a stage you go through so attraction underpins all forms of love lust is only there in romantic relationships and it's a very separate area of the brain so attraction is based in oxytocin and dopamine and and as I said oxytocin Works to orientate you to social beings in your environment and kind of block out distractions and it also quens your mixa which is the fear Center of your brain which means that sort of the nagging confidence sapping voices that can sometimes occur when you're thinking about striking up conversation with somebody those are quietens so that you feel more confident you feel more chilled about doing this quite difficult thing dopamine is there to reward you certainly but it's also there to give you a bit of a kick up bum because oxytocin is lovely but if you just have it on your on its own you probably wouldn't make any effort at all because it makes you feel really really chilled and so you probably wouldn't make the effort to go across the bar or the playground or wherever you are so we have some dopamine because it's wide into your muscles it's wide into your motor circuits go come on you've actually got to go and do something and the other important things about about dopamine and oxytocin is they make your brain more plastic so particularly in the areas relating to memory and learning and when you first meet somebody think of all the stuff you've got to learn about that person particularly if you're going to meet them again you're going to recognize them you're going to know their name you're going to know what they're interested in sound of their voice all these sorts of things so your learning areas and your memory areas become more plastic which means they're very open to change and and you do that very efficiently in those sort of first so you're being you're being neurochemically primed to be a good receptor friend yes yes to take all of this on board so that you remember that person essentially and so that's what happens in the attraction stage and attraction initially is entirely unconscious so in the Romantic sense what we do is we take lots and lots of sensory information from that person and and we're taking that sensory information because what we're trying to judge from that person is is this a good potential mate um and so we're going to take visual information about things like body shape about facial symmetry we're going to um hear what they're saying what the tone of their voice is we're going to if you're a woman you're going to smell whether they're genetically compatible so you men can't do that women can um and you're going to take in all this information and it goes through this very complex algorithm in your brain and what that algorithm is trying to test is yeah how valuable is this person as a mate how reproductively successful are they going to be and that's known as their mate value we all have a mate value on our head it's kind of like Financial value in the stock market and we will be calculating that using the indicators we've looked at to work out okay how reproductively successful is this person actually going to be and if they're a good a good bet if they're good then basically you kind of get the three cherries on the slot machine and oxytocin and dopamine floods an area of your brain called the nuclear cumbent which is incredibly unconscious very very deep um and it's simply there to start this Kickstart this process and it's entirely unconscious and that whole process of sensory intake of algorithm chundering away of oxytocin or dopamine that's like Nan seconds of time um and then at that point you know hopefully you cross over and you say hello but at some point that that signal moves from the unconscious brain into the conscious brain and we have kind of both things going at the same time where you start to you know consciously contemplate this person oh you know thinking things like oh my God they got lovely eyes or actually their tone of voice is quite annoying or oh do I agree with what they're saying what my friends think what my family think all those sorts of things and then attraction becomes an unconscious and conscious process basically dig into that genetic compatibility thing to super super sniffer skill that women have that men don't yeah okay so what that is is um there's an area of your genetic code known as the major hsto compatibility complex and that underpins the diversity of your immune response to disease rather bizarrely some of the um genes in that complex also underpin your sense of smell go figure and um what women can do is they can actually smell how close a male's set of MHC genes are to their own so if they're close to their own they will not like the smell of that person because they're too close it's suggestive of in breeding and actually what you want for your child is the most diverse immune response you can have so you need your partner to have an MHC complex as far away from yours as possible and so what we find with women is they are able to smell that and they can they can tell so it's really funny you would never consciously know you're doing it but sometimes you know like women will say to me I met him he was perfect in lots of different ways but it's just just something just something that I I can't put my finger on but didn't work for me and that's that we think women can do it and men can't either because they've evolved to do it or they've retained it we don't know where the mammals can do it obviously you can't really tell um or they've retained it and men have lost it you think because for a woman making the mistake of in breeding is much more serious because she's then if she becomes pregnant going to be out of the game nine months doing in our evolutionary past something very dangerous which is be pregnant and give birth um and so the risk to her of death is high and therefore you know you kind of have to be pretty sure that this baby that you're that you're going to birth is going to be strong and it's going to be healthy essentially so we think women can do it and Men Can't for that reason is that why humans kiss as well possibly we actually don't know not all humans kiss in the Romantic sense actually all humans kiss but only 100% of kissing across the cultures occurs between mothers and children so there are some um cultures where you don't romantically kiss so there's always been this massive debate about why did we evolve kissing because some primates kiss but they kind of they don't do it very consistently and they don't seem to do it in any particularly sort of regular context so it's quite hard so chimps you'll see chimps kissing but it's not really quite sure what they're doing some theories have been it evolved in moms and children to sort of pass masticated food um the other thing is that yes maybe it is something to do with getting closer to people and smelling them though having said that you know mammals other mammals managed to do that without kissing so why do we need to do that some people think it's something to do with testing the health of the person tasting the health of the other person um and something some people say yeah it's just a really good bonding thing your lips have got a lot of uh sensory um uh lots of nerve endings and therefore by kissing you you you know you might be increasing in terms of the bonding in terms of oxytocin and things like that cuz it's touch but do you know what nobody actually knows the answers to why we kiss I think it's really interesting the compati I think it was actually uh Mr Dunbar himself who I read I can't remember what it was I was reading I was reading something of his and he was talking about the evolution of of kissing and why it was potentially then I think he posited maybe it's increasing proximity it's a allowing you to check for compatibility between immune systems but yeah uh it's so ubiquit maybe you're right maybe you're right I I didn't realize that not all human cultures do kiss no but um at least Mo many do uh many do and it's you know it's culturally something that yeah I would say probably 80 85% of cultures kiss in the Romantic context so it's it's certainly something that's there what the ones that don't do you know do you know any of the ones that don't I know that there are some in terms of there are some uh cult in Africa that don't and there are some cultures I think in South America that don't but we don't really know why they do kiss their children so I don't know why they don't but it's just not seen as as a as a sort of a sexual romantic thing um so it's definitely got a cultural undertone to it and whether we've just all you know learned to do it I don't know talk to me about the role of love in maintaining a romantic relationship long term in dealing with the vicissitudes and jealousy and concern and male parental uncertainty okay so love is different obviously to attraction it's a different set of neurochemicals um and they are as I said they they're unique to humans uh and some of the higher primates so these are the chemicals that underpin really long-term relationships because oxytocin is is great if you are quite a shortlived little mammal like a little V or Mouse which is which is the creatures that were studied to discover oxytocin in this context but the problem with it underpinning long-term relationships is first of all it doesn't last very long a hit of oxytocin lasts maybe 30 minutes and secondly um it we grow tolerant to it so over time the hit of oxit you're going to get from someone is going to lessen and that's not going to underpin Something in the long term so we needed something that you didn't grow tolerant to the other issue with oxytocin is it's only released in any large quantities in relationships which are associated with reprodu so that's in the mother child father child relationship and in the sexual relationship it's it's increased it's sorry it's released for example in quite large quantities during orgasm and during during sexual activity it is released in friendships but at a much lower level and the problem with humans is actually the vast majority of our relationships in that 150 Network aren't sexual aren't reproductive aren't with children and so we need a chemical that's decoupled from reproduction to enable us to maintain relationships and that's where beter endorphin comes in and beter endorphin was discovered actually in the primates it's it's what's released when primates groom each other and you know all the primatologists out there will know that grooming isn't isn't a utilitarian activity it's not about hygiene it's about bonding so primates groom when they've had an argument they groom to um underpin alliances they groom to make friendships and be Trend orphan is what's released and so when we knew that there's a group at Cambridge who discovered that then Robin and I at that point were like okay well this is much more likely candidate to be the underpinning of human love than oxytocin is and so we began to research the role for beer endorphin in in human love um and we've you know spent many years doing that and done lots and lots of scans and things like that and that's that's the answer is that beer endorphin is beer endorphin is the is the neurochemical of long-term love it's your body's opiate um it evolved in the first instance as your body's painkiller so it's what's released when you hurt yourself but over time it's been coopted into the social realm and it's now what is released when you do something social and there's lots of activities decoupled from reproduction that produce it such as laughter touch exercise dancing singing you know even having a hot curry bizly um there's lots of things that that release beer and dolphin so um so it's really good for that social con context that you can get it released from and as it's and we don't grow um Toler to it over time it it remains a very potent chemical um so so that's what's underpins human love in terms of neurochemistry but obviously there are many other things going on there you've got the psychological elements of of human love so you've got things like attachment um but you've got you know all lots of things around sort of Love Languages and maintenance behaviors and empathy and trust and reciprocity and all these other things which sit in your Neo cortex so human love is very complicated when people say to me what is love I tend to say it's really hard to Define depends what level of explanation you'd like me to answer that at but what I will say is very broadly it has two Dimensions which is what sets it apart it has a biological Dimension which is the neurochemistry the neural activation the genetics that kind of thing the psychology and then it has a social Dimension and that's all that cultural stuff so that's religion politics Society media education family stories that kind of thing and that ALS Al impacts how you personally would Define love how much has our conception of Love been molested by culture do you think quite powerfully culture can overwhelm biology quite easily culture is very powerful and culture can tell you to work against what your biology is telling you to do very definitely there are many Societies in the world where there are rules around acceptable love or what is you know which drive very strongly against our biological drive to to experience love so culture is very powerful and it certainly does underpin a lot of how people Define love so if you ask the question what is love around the world you will get some very different answers I mean we obviously in the west are kind of enthralled to the concept of romantic love for example if we look at it in that context um there are many cultures in the world who don't believe in the concept of romantic love for them love between a man and a woman might be more spiritual it might be more centered simply on the family it might be actually seen as a form of self-sacrifice um in some countries is actually seen as being quite a negative thing something to do with sort of unrequited love and and kind of losing yourself in the other person so it really does depend the culture you've been brought up in the rules you've been told about what love is and what is acceptable when it comes to Love Is Love different romantic love different for men and women do men experience love in a different way do women experience love in a different way it's a it's a myth that there's this amazing I quite often I get asked that question and people say to me well you know we've got all this thing that men aren't emotionally intelligent and d d d and all that kind of stuff no if you look at the averages there are more differences within the sexes in terms of how someone experiences romantic love than there are between the Sexes so if I put somebody in my scanner and nobody tells me what sex they are I would not be able to tell from looking at the screen when we were doing it experiment for example I couldn't possi tell so the activations are the same the neurochemistry is the same what influences how individuals experienced love is much more their genetics which are not sex linked um their attachment profile um and a lot is to do with their upbringing so all of that is much more influential than what your biological sex is now some of that will be influenced along gender lines we do um tells stories differently to boys and girls about what love is and it's there's a really interesting study that I quot in the book which was looking at school children and asking them at the age of five to draw a picture of you know romantic love and all the kids regardless of their their sex or gender draw you know people happily holding hands and there's butterflies and it's all lovely and d d d and then after the age of 11 when kind of puberty's kicked in and maybe we've had a little bit of gender you know um cultural gender sort of bias coming on then the boys all do pictures of big strong man looking after small weak woman and then the girls are still doing butterflies in hearts and and that's quite no but you know it's really powerful it's really powerful what we tell boys they should feel when they're in love and how they should act when they're in love but actually if you look at their brains they're no different it's just very heavily gendered what do you think is the subtext that we tell young males about their role in love that they're the protector that they're the protector and they're The Rock and therefore you shouldn't really show emotion you shouldn't um become involved in yes the sort of emotional extremes of love you should be very balanced very controlled and and you are there to protect the female essentially and I think that's what we tell boys about love and that you know showing emotion being upset by love or being passionate about Love or Whatever these things is is a female a feminine thing to do and to cry about love is a feminine thing to do and I think that's the stories we tell because if you go to other cultures where they don't have those stories men are very open and emotional about about love not just love in the Romantic sense but love love for their friends you know you will see for example in some Arab cultures men holding hands and kissing each other and it's all very passionate it's all very out in the open and very emotional and you would not see men for example in the UK doing that because that's that's not what we do but it's not because they're incapable of it it's because they've they've been told you you don't do that you know so love is is pretty heavily gendered definitely talk to me about the genetic upbringing and Detachment contribution okay so it's it's hard to say exact what the balance is as everyone knows there's a quite there's a very complex interaction between genetics and the environment particularly when it comes to love because the genes that underpin our social cognition and the neurochemistry I spoke about are many there's many of them um even on the oxytocin receptor Gene alone which is one of the major uh genes that influences how you experience love and how you feel you know there are 26 point mutations on there that affect how you experience love or how you behave or for example how skilled you are at certain things to do with love such as empathy so in itself that's really complex and then you've got serotonin you've got dopamine you know you've got beter endorphin and they've also all got their little point mutations going on and there's probably many many more point mutations out there we haven't even found yet so it's very very complex some of them have more power than others um and some of them are what we call cumulative so there are five point mutations on the oxytocin receptor Gene which impact how good you are at empathizing that empathy as I mentioned cognitive empathy is one of the Hallmarks of human love but how Adept you are at it how Adept you are reading people's emotions and meeting that need is partly under genetic control um and of these point mutations there are there are five beneficial versions and there are five which means it's harder for you to do so the more of the beneficial versions you carry the better you are at empathizing for example um there are other areas on the oxytocin receptor Gene which are associated with your motivation to want to be in relationships um and so some people carry a version where they're very motivated to be in relationships they tend to have a lot of different relationships friendships family relationships you know love romantic love relationships they tend to find them really satisfying they're the kind of thing that that grounds them and makes them happy um whereas other people carry a version of that Gene of that that point mutation find relationships quite hard they tend not to be that motivated to be in them and actually when they're in relationships they find them quite stressful I wonder if you could do a self-report for people people there must be an introversion extroversion scale or maybe you could just do a a survey of do you find time with people to be revitalizing or do you get your energy from being on your own and then to match that up with this exactly see this a genetic influence then exactly exactly because um the oxit as I said what the oxytocin receptor Gene does is it orientates you to social people and it gives you confidence and makes you feel chilled now what it sounds like with those people who find it difficult is that that Gene it might influence things like the density of oxytocin receptors so for example you just obviously don't have as many oxytocin receptors so oxytocin just does not have the same effect on you so you are less motivated you're getting less of a benefit you're getting less of this lovely chilled feeling and less of the confidence and that might be what's affecting you and as you say that might be associated with those personality traits of introversion for example um so it's really interesting the genetics but as I said there's a very complicated interaction with your environment because the reason why your environment is so influential on how you behave in relationships how you feel is because the human babies have a very V quick period of brain growth after birth of about two years and that's because we're born too early with a very incomplete brain and the bit that's not complete is the prefrontal cortex which is where your social cognition sits and so that means it's very susceptible to the environment in which is raised and we know that now looking at um brain scans of children who are brought up in both nurturing environments and also in neglectful environment so if you're brought up in a nurturing environment you get very very high connectivity you get very dense gray and white matter in that area if we look at your amigdala it's small it's it's not hyperactivated so you're not constantly detecting risk for example uh you tend to have high circulating oxytocin um so you're kind of you've got this wonderful Foundation that you've been given by this nurturing environment to this is this is largely in independent of your genetic predisposition this independent of your this it sits on top of it uh whereas if we looked at looked at a child who maybe was neglected or even not neglected but had insecure attachments intrusive parenting or that kind of thing then you can see kind of you well in extreme places you get neuronal death so actually that person just does not have the density and of gray and white matter in there it does not have the architecture which is going to provide the foundation they tend to have overlarge uh amigdalas which are constantly activated they T have very high levels of cortisol these sorts of things so you see the impact the environments had and we know also that children who are brought up in those environments go on to struggle with relationships they go on to have more risk of antisocial behavior that kind of thing um whereas children who are brought up in nurturing environments there's much less risk of that so but having said that I would have said maybe 10 years ago if you'd said to me and my colleagues attachment so attachment is a psychological mindset um to do with uh attachment relationships are very intense their development mentally significant uh they're marked by particular characteristics such as separation anxiety disas proximity that kind of thing and they're quite rare but they're very important and your attachment profile is important in influencing how you behave when you're in love and how you feel but we always thought that it was entirely environmental that really how you turned up because that's kind of how it looked to be honest you know neglectful environment much more lik to have insecure attachment going into life you know nurturing environment much more likely to have secure attachment you know good at having relationships all that kind of stuff but then on again on the oxytocin receptor Gene a team not us found um a set of genes which are known as being differentially susceptible and what these genes are is they or these point mutations they influence how powerful the environment is on your attachment profile so if you carry a version of this Gene which means that your environment is less effective in terms of altering your attachment profile if you're in a really nurturing environment then that means obviously that the environment you're not going to have the same powerful influence of it being secure but what it does mean is if you're in a neglectful environment that environment will have much less of an effect upon ultimately your attachment relationships when you get older your ability to navigate relationships and we kind of call them the armor PL genes because we would meet people who would come into the lab and I meet people at public talks even who come up to me and they've had the worst upbringings you've heard like really awful but they are navigating their social relationship so well completely stable completely secure doing really well and we used to joke we' be like wow they must have some amazing jeans because there's something going on there that and this team found that and they found that actually these people who carry these armor plated jeans they are kind of protected from that environment and they can kind of sail through that environment kind of unscathed because they have these genes which means no actually these genes are more powerful than that environment is so it's it's really really interesting and I think we will probably find more genes and more point mutations which are differentially susceptible because the more you dig into the genetics the more complicated it gets well it's this wonderful interplay between genetic predisposition and then environmental reinforcement I suppose especially given that the genes that you are given Pres that you live in the household with your biological parents that gave you the Gen the genetic material that you're made from they have likely on average the traits that you have inherited genetically but they manifest behaviorally so if you have the genes for anxiety you tend to lean toward anxiety in terms of your genetic predisposition you're going to grow up in a household that is likely to behaviorally be more anxious so you end up with this sort of very strange ever and but it's Al yeah and it's why it's why problems cross Generations partly because of that partly because of that though obviously we have to remember that depending on recessive dominant genes fact you're anx anxious doesn't mean necessarily that that expressed itself in your in your parents but um that's why things cross Generations because if you live in an abusive household as a child and you and you build this architecture in your brain that's not particularly healthy and not particularly helpful that that is that is the brain that's going to go on to raise your children MH and you're going to be that you don't have the skills because your parents didn't have the skills that is imprinted in your brain you simply don't have the brain architecture and then you're going to pass it on so and that's why a lot of people in this field work very hard to break break that cross-generational problem because and Inter I certainly think from uh my generation's perspective a lot of the guys that I talk to almost see it from a the ascended millennials job is to be the kind of Breakwater uh or the breako in between you know Granddad was in the Faulkland or Vietnam or something and dad was a classic Boomer parent who kind of didn't really do much of the self work and didn't have access to the things maybe he would have done you know if he had access to the school of life and Dand de boton's Psychotherapy insights maybe he true would have you know done the self work and all the rest of it but a lot of a lot of my friends and I think me too um kind of see it as all right we have genuinely been given tools that allow us to kind of make a big uh Dam in front of a lot of patterns that I think have been passed down generationally uh and how much of that has come from a genetic predisposition how much of that has been reinforced by the environment that we've grown up in kind of doesn't really matter you have if if you're able to listen to a podcast like this you have the agency to be able to okay I'm about to have a kid I've got nine months as as a dad or or as a mom time for me to learn I'm going to sit down I'm going to read enough books I'm going to do the self work I'm going to you know prepare to stop this weird repetition this sort of cycle that has continued to happen for God knows how long um and this is why one of my friends has a really great answer to the question if you could go for uh dinner with four people alive or dead who would it be and he says that he wants to go with all four of his great grandfathers because he thinks would learn way more from being sat around them than he would from being sat around Isaac Newton or chel or Einstein or someone because he wants to see where do I come from and he wants oh that's that's that fear that's the that's the part of me that makes me really worried and concerned that's the social anxiety bit coming through that's the rebel in me that's where that comes oh my God that's from Granddad Tim or whatever and um I just thought that that's such a cool a cool Insight it is and and and it's also shows the huge power of the human brain for change because that's one thing thing because when I when I talk about this at talks and and the impact of upbringing on brain structure and all that kind of thing and you you always get people like oh my God you know Panic that oh it's determined and it's not because the human brain is hugely plastic and actually if you if you do the work sometimes it's much much harder for some people sometimes it's a bit easier it kind of depends but you know you can change that pattern and you can change that pattern within yourself um because the human brain is very open to changing if you give it the work getting back to romantic relationships cheating why why do men cheat what what's in it for them um well why do men and women cheat same reason um they cheat because it ultimately it's about passing your genes down the generations so human males are in this position where we're in in most societies we're in like a monogamous um structure and from from a sort of genetic reproductive success point of view that's quite constricting because you know you just have this one female and you're going to put everything into them and they're going to bring you know birth your baby and that's how your genes are going to get down the generation but you know if you're looking at a chimpanzee male he's there spreading it everywhere you know he's going to have a hell of much higher reproductive success than you are because he's in a multimale multif female group and he can just you know have sex multiple times a day and be the father to multiple multiple babies at the same time and so really that's kind of the way way monogamous species deal with that problem is that they have affairs U and we see it even in the most monogamous you know I used to work with a with a professor at UCL who studied Gibbons which is the monogamous primate and he was like no they're not they are literally always sneaking away behind rocks to you know have sex with other other you know Partners who aren't aren't in them monog Perry because that's from an evolution point of view that's how you're going to increase your reproductive success particularly if you're a male because literally sperm is not worth anything and if you're pretty damn sure that that baby can be raised without your input great you've got you've got some jeans there going down another family tree um as well as the ones that are in your in your committed relationship for women it's slightly different and for women the reason they do it because obviously once they're pregnant they're pregnant is to get better genes it's just you know that's that's the evolutionary drive to be unfaithful is because you've obviously got this wonderful investing male here who's probably going to be a great dad he going to protect provide be nurturing do all those wonderful wonderful things but hey maybe his jeans aren't so great um so I'm actually going to go and have a affair over here with this person who's really good-look and I'm going to become pregnant with him and you know in an ideal world he you know investing guy doesn't find out and they get the best of both worlds I get some really cracking genes but I also get somebody who's going to commit and raise this child alongside me so from an evolutionary point of view being unfaithful makes perfect sense because ultimately your job on this Earth from Evolution spot is to increase maximize your reproductive success as far as you can it sounds like we're strin toward here is dual mating hypothesis versus mate switching what I know that this has kind of been up in the air it was one way then it was the other way and now maybe it's going back another way what's the current state of the literature have you got any idea where we're at whether duwel mating or mate switching is currently in ascendency I don't think we're because you get two very strong sort of schools of thought really I mean I I definitely I think maybe because I come from a primate behavioral background I'm very much a dual mating person I think I think it you will I don't think we've come down on either side and it might be that they're both right and it's a mixed methodology and it it depends on the individual um because you'll observe both in humans so I don't think necessarily there's one answer or there's another answer but ultimately it's what works in your circumstances and in your environment of that time the basis of your drive is to maximize your reproductive success so how are you going to do that does that mean that women on average tend to have affairs with men that are better looking yes than their current on average on average yes they tend to go out with men who are who so one of the major measures of genetic strength is facial asymmetry um so we are genetically programmed if we if our genes were left to you know Express themselves in the phenotype in us without any environmental challenges no stresses nothing we would be symmetrical we're a bilaterally symmetrical being but when you're in the womb particularly and you're developing um they get knocked off course because you know your mom might be stressed you might be ill whatever it might be so so none of us are symmetrical but some people are pretty damn close and those are the people who managed to go through all this environmental turmoil and still come out with because the genes were strong being pretty close to Symmetry and those are the people we tend to find most attractive and what you will see on average with women is if you look at the facial asymmetry of their partner you look at the facial asymmetry of the person they had the affair with the person they had the affair with is more attractive objectively um it doesn't mean that actually that person with the lovely close to symmetry face is actually the better mate because they're probably not if we look at who people end up with they tend to end up with people not who are extremely close to symmetry they send to send up with people who are a little bit more average um because that tends to go alongside other things particularly for men things like provision and protection and all that sort of thing but yeah if you look at if you look at it on average that's what women tend to do what about the role of cheating among men given that we need to account for drops in testosterone as we learned last time uh when they get into a committed relationship when they get married and then especially when they have children so you know there is a sort of Chad to Dad pipeline um that goes on from a testosterone perspective and that is going to reduce a desire for sexual variety I'm going to guess not entirely uh and not in all men in probably but I'm going to guess that um the sort of classic male lothario that you may use an example of a single guy to then Port across onto men that are married with kids uh you're you're not quite talking about two different species but you're talking about a a little sort of Splinter faction uh away from the the original one yeah you are absolutely um and but I think we need to be aware that whilst The evolutionary drive to Cheat is is based in testosterone testosterone yes is the hormone of mate selection that's what it's there for it's there to help you select a mate and it's there to help you compete for a mate um there are other things that come into whether or not a man is going to cheat or not one of those for example is his upbringing so was he brought up in a in a culture or in a family where cheating was something that men did did was his father faithful if your father's Unfaithful you are more likely to be unfaithful so it's also to do with those cultural messages we get and also your upbringing in terms of so it's not just testosterone that will drive you to have an affair there are many other things that come into it as well I had a fascinating conversation a couple of months ago talking about uh mating ideologies over time and um it was just so uh mad Lawson he's from some Finnish Swedish scandi Place uh and he was just so so great and that really got me thinking about the biological and cultural mismatch when it comes to our sort of mating preferences that we have this sexual redistribution policy which is one man with one woman and that means that kind of in the best scenario everybody gets somebody and that's good because it means that you have a populace which is going to continue to reproduce and you're not going to have a ton of upset disgruntled men running around pushing over cars and setting fighter houses and doing stuff like that uh and yet it seems like at best humans are serial monogamous serially monogamous uh and at worst are closer to chimps and bonobos and and Gibbons yeah no absolutely and this is the problem I mean I write a whole chapter on it in in my book um under the title exclusive because we have this there are many particularly in the west we yes we have this monogamous model in society where there's one man or one woman or two people to the exclusion of everybody else now humans are aren't actually as in fact no species is purely monogamous we're just not um what monogamy is is to a large part a societal construct that's been placed upon our biological behavior in a way to try and constrain it because if we all acted like chimps and we all just followed our biological drive and did whatever we wanted to do it would be chaos and what a structured Society a civil society does not want is chaos what we want is to be predictable we want all the masses to be predictable so that the people in power can work out what you're going to do next and so one of the ways you can do that is you can put rules around um relationships and you can formalize them with marriage and you can you know say lots of legal Frameworks so you for example you can't split up without going through the courts properly because we all have to keep control of everybody's reproductive relationship so we can predict what's going on and everybody stays within their box essentially and that's what monogamy is in most societies is it's just been placed upon us by Society because by because as you say at least you know the rate of monogamy of sorry um being unfaithful is is high because actually that's more of our biological Drive is to do that and this is really I spoke to a lot of polyamorists for my book and polyamor gets a bad name uh if you ask a lot of people about what they think of polyamory they see it as immoral they see it as people who are you know have massive sex drives and um can't control their sexual urges and all this sort of stuff and it's corrupting and actually if you speak to them they say well actually what we're doing is we are acknowledging it's very moral because we are acknowledging what humans do and what humans do is they have quite often more than one romantic relationship at once so what we are saying is we're going to acknowledge that we're going to say um that this happens we're going to be open about it we're not going to creep around behind people's backs we're going to put in place rules about being respectful of each other and rules about how we balance everybody's needs in this particular complex of relationships and we're going to have open communication so that everybody knows where they stand and so in a way what they're saying is actually we are reflecting what for a lot of people is the natural state and that is that is actually how we should behave and so it's really interesting they've created like paleo relationships yeah in a way yeah they have they've sort of said this is actually how most people behave but most people pretend it's not happening and actually cause huge pain because they lie about it um and it's really interesting and actually I think particularly this this younger generation are much more open about that you know there's a lot this consensual non- monogamy um idea about the fact that actually a lot of people don't find being monogamous particularly natural and they are fighting against their urge their biological urge to remain within this quite constrained societal structure and therefore actually I'm going to be open about that and we're going to find somebody else who's happy with that and and be with them and be with other people and I think it's interesting I mean polyamory isn't for everybody obviously it's it it rears its head in terms of jealousy um and jealousy is something that comes from the fact that humans do have to couple up for a period of time after you've had a child just to make sure that child survives and that's where jealousy comes from but um for some people it works really really well what about the opposite of that the a Romantics h a Romantics I are a really interesting group of people who have had a really bad press and are quite difficult to reach I was really lucky to speak to a few from my book um a romantic people The View that people have on them is that they are very cold because they assume that when you say someone's very romantic they don't experience any sort of love and actually they do they just don't experience a romantic love so they experience platonic love very much so they have love for family love for friends love for Community love for their pets love for God whatever it might be they just do not experience romantic love and in most cases they're also asexual so they do not feel sexual attraction um and they are a fascinating group of people we don't we haven't done a lot of what we would call invasive scientific research in terms of um in terms of genetics or in terms of scanning as yet on that particular population because they are very sensitive to being looked at in that way because they don't they they're nervous about how the results would be seen but having spoken to them it shows how obsessed we are with romantic love and we place it at the Pinnacle and we really think it's the be all and end all of everything so somebody could have the most loving relationships in their lives like a you know a social network that's overflowing with love but if you don't have romantic love then you're a bit weird and that's how they're seen they're seen is a bit weird and it's bizarre because they have things called platonic life Partnerships which is they will build a life with somebody they will even have children with somebody but it's based on platonic romantic love and and for me it's very powerful because they tell us two things first of all how how imbued our society is with romantic love how difficult it is to live in a world which references romantic love so often when you don't feel it that's hard that's very exclusionary and secondly the fact that we think there's a hierarchy of love with romantic love at the top of it and that's the most effective love that's the most powerful love that's the one which is the best for your health and the best for your longevity and the best for everything else and actually it's not not that's just some cultural you know rubbish we've been told and which we swallowed um actually it's it l there is no horck it's flat and what we need to embrace as humans is how lucky we are to be able to love in so many different ways you know we have so many different ways you did mention that there's kind of a hierarchy neurochemically uh between sexual relationships and father child mother child that those seem to be the most intense at least when it comes to sort of what our body is providing us or at least what our brain is providing us with so I don't know maybe that maybe that does seem to make sense a little bit that you would look at a a friendship as a second class type but it's actually it's it in terms of when we look at things like it's very hard to compare people's feelings of love so you would say to somebody what's the most powerful of you experience and they will say yeah with my child for example but then you'll say somebody else who hasn't got children you know what's the most powerful love you've experienced I'll say with my God now it's very hard to know whether those two things are anywhere the same whether they're in the same ballp when we look at and you can't really measure love from like the intensity on a scanner screen it doesn't work like that it's not like a dose response um and you can get just as big a hit of beer endorphin for example from having a really good I don't know dance with your friends as you can from from hugging your baby or whatever so it's very hard say that one is more powerful than the other the only argument you would have for them being more more important is because they are the reproductive ones they are the ones that that Evolution says maybe are the more important because those are the ones that are directly going to pass genes down the generations from reproduction and from raising your children but when we look at things like health benefits um in terms of their in their effect upon your longevity upon your life satisfaction it really doesn't matter what sort of love you have for those for those particular measures you know we do know that the relationships you have are the biggest factor in your mental and physical health your longevity uh and your survival absolutely but what sort of love that is doesn't seem to matter that much going back to the non- monogamy thing sort of this uh battle that we have culturally and biologically what's a beta marriage I'd never heard of this before it's like a beta test so a beta marriage this was an idea that that kind of comes raise its head every now and then and it's to do with the fact that we never kind of expected to live this long you know so the idea that you would have a marriage and it would last 60 years people are like oo that sounds so you can have things called beta marriages which is they're kind of looked at in two ways either they're like a practice marriage they're like a beta test so you're going to run this marriage and probably you're restricted for like 5 years 10 years and at the end of it you can both walk away there's no formal divorce it's like a it's like a you know yeah a limited contract you know um and then you'll both walk away and maybe you've learned something about yourself or you've learned something about them or you might renew it for another 10 years who knows so so some people see it as like a test other people see it just as all marriages should have break Clauses like a lease and like after five years you should be able to go no it's not working let's just leave with what we came with no expensive divorce I'm off and that's a be to marriage um it all sounds a little bit cold and objective to me um to be honest because you know the whole love is a neurochemical cocktail of passion and amazingness and and you don't just suddenly switch that off one day and go oh it's absolutely fine I'm just going to cut that now it's the same but yeah every now and then you know it rears its head as an idea it's the same in part similar to what I think about surrogacy uh that you know being pregnant doesn't just make a child it makes a mother and the just because you've been paid 70 grand to do this doesn't mean you cut it off no yeah exactly exactly um it talked to me you know mentioned with uh appropriate scientific rigor and restraint and rationality today kind of what our ancestral setup for mating was about how actually appears in the human system but phenomenologically it doesn't feel like any of that's happening right it's this you're carried away by this wonderful roller coaster of things and you're you're you're a mother you at least two kids maybe but you probably got more now um how do you as someone who you know is swimming through the world of love at the moment how have you learned to blend some of the insights of the more kind of rational cognitive sterile uh learnings about love with what it means to be a human and to be in love and to feel it and and to navigate it I think because actually the more because people ask me quite often because you study love has it kind of lost its magic for you because you can kind of get okay I know exactly what's happening in your brain first of all I don't know exactly what's happening in your brain yeah exactly I mean first of all I don't we probably know like 10% of what's going on so first of all I don't secondly love is hugely complicated I mean really really really really complicated highly multifactorial so many different things that feed into it highly individual like really individual how I feel when I'm in love how you feel in love probably not the same you know because there's so many things that factor into it um and the more I study love the more in awe I have of it because it literally does infiltrate every fi of your being and come into every aspect of your daily life even if you're not consciously thinking about it you know you are you probably think about your family you think about your friends you do things for your family you do things for friends they do things for you you're cooperating with people all day long you know you're thinking ahead how to make somebody happy you're planning things for the future whatever it might be and it it it infiltrates every aspect of our media every aspect of our religions or based on love you know our politics everything includes love and so for me it's a hugely or inspiring phenomena and we are so lucky to experience it in the fome way that we do and in the spread of different ways that we do and the fact that we have all this art and this literature and all this these stories around love we do that because it's so hard to put into words how amazing it is so difficult to to fully say what so I can reduce it to chemicals for you and tell you which genes are involved and show you the brain activation and say uh but that's not it that's just some objective measures of something which is nebulous constantly changing highly individual so you know people come to my talks I think sometimes maybe they're a little bit lost because of Love cuz love in the in this century is quite difficult particularly if you're young and they think I'm going to give them a formula of okay if you do this and you do this and you do this then this is going to happen and it's all going to be fine no idea there will never be a formula for love because a while we can objectively measure bits of it there's this massive bit mainly subjective don't know anything about it um and we probably won't ever touch it because it's impossible to measure and shows to me how phenomenal it is and how lucky we are to have it so I actually don't get bored of it the more I experience it the more I am inspired by and I genuinely genuinely do think it's it's absolutely possibly the Cornerstone of Being Human or at least one of the very important ones because we literally wouldn't survive our culture wouldn't be the same without it we wouldn't be around without it the relationships we build would be devoid you know I mean it's just to me it's it is actually everything and that's kind of how I conclude the book you know I I basically say what is love well love is actually everything everything if you don't have it you live very much half a life definitely talk to me about the Dark Side of love how it can be used as a control yeah so the problem with love um because we need it so viscerally and because it imbues every fi in your body that need that absolute drive to find it to keep it means that it can be used against you um and we are we talked about animal love at the start the only thing that definitely separates us from the animals is that we are the only creature that uses love to manipulate so the fact that somebody needs our love we will use to make them do stuff for us now we all do that we all probably at some point have said if you loved me you'd make me a cup of tea or if you loved me you'd let if you love me you'd let me choose the color of The New Sofa or whatever it might be we have all done it but there are really serious extremes of that and because again things like beer and Dophin is addictive unfortunately some people seem to be more susceptible to that that that level of addiction find it much much harder to break so yeah it it can be used to you know at the at the minor minor end there's obviously jealousy and jealousy evolved as an emotion for the same reason as all emotions it's there to Aid our survival and when kept under control it is important because it it draws your attention to threats to your survival critical relationships and and then you can act because you felt jealous and you can do something but obviously in extreme cases it's very dangerous um you know people use love to coer to manipulate to abuse and I think we don't talk about that enough we don't talk about this dark side of it most human adaptations of which love is one have are never 100% beneficial there's always a downside and for love that downside is the fact that we use it in that way um and I there have been studies done by other people looking at abusive relationships and the role for love in abusive relationships I personally have studied it in men and men who are victims of domestic violence or domestic abuse and you know people always say yeah oh well there can't be love there because that's not love but if you speak to the people who are within these relationships they very definitely think there's love there um and quite often they will stay for love either because they see glimmers of love in that person and they love that person so much or they think their love can rescue that person I can change them I can be the person who changes them they will be different because I love them so much um and I don't think we talk about that enough because ultimately love evolved as a form of control it's Evolution's way of controlling us to make sure we reproduce and do this really difficult thing but it's kind of gone a long way the the way and and yeah we can use it to control other people and that's not a nice side of it I'm afraid that's a very unique Insight what do male victims of domestic violence or abuse say about love what what's the sort of narrative and the story that they tell you it's that it's that story sometimes it's that they love they love the person so much they think they can change and they think they can rescue them so so for some people it's kind of like a not a night and shining armor sort of thing but they do feel that this person is is damaged in some way and I can rescue them sometimes they will literally talk about love being blind and they will a lot of them had come out of the relationships when I'd spoken to them they they'd managed to end the relationships and they would look back and go I I just can't believe I didn't see it so there's like one guy who said who he he himself was violently abused but this his wife would also for example violently abuse her parents so they'd be having a having dinner and suddenly she'd pour a c a pot of hot coffee over the mother's head and drag her out the door by her hair and he would just sit there W and he was like wow I mean did I not think at the time that's really not right but it so they will talk about love being blind and and that they're just so overwhelmed by it that they don't see this thing in front of them and sometimes it's not love for the partner that keep it's love for the children unfortunately we live in a a court system here in the UK where it's still very biased towards mothers and mothers getting children in in custody battles and so a lot of them will stay because if they leave leave they are really worried the kids will end up with the mom a they won't be able to see the kids because the mom will use them as weapon and B the mom might start abusing the kids um so a lot of them will stay for that reason as well so interesting God what a what a wild i' never even thought about the the likelihood of someone who is a um abuser in the home being abuser outside of the home as well m there's this I for anyone who wants to read the housemade uh the book uh skip forward by about 90 seconds but there's a really interesting story in this so um this woman is recruited to become a housemade for a rich family the wife of the family is a total [ __ ] throughout the entire time and the child is a total [ __ ] throughout the entire time uh she ends up being locked in the upstairs attic by the husband the housemid gets locked in the Attic by the husband what it turns out is that the husband was doing this to the wife the wife then found a attractive uh supplanter of her basically someone who could come in and take her role uh and that would liberate her and the daughter because this husband was super super smart and whatever and it's this sort of weird generational trauma thing and then at the end of the book The housemade outsmarts the guy causes him to do a he like makes makes him pull his own teeth out makes him lie with uh big stack of bucks on his testicles for hours and hours and uh watches him on CCTV and then at the funeral uh she sees the mother and obviously the son had pulled his teeth out he' done all of these things and she sees the mother of the son of the the the husband H and the mother basically says good to see that you finally disciplined him I've been trying to do that since childhood wow wow yep so she' made him pull his teeth out during school when he was a child just and that totally made me think I mean it's such a good twist even just describing it in 90 seconds it's such a great twist um so just a really lovely uh explainer of that lineage you know talking about how hurt people hurt people this sort of Pang generational trauma thing that gets passed down its patterns it's genetic predisposition uh but I i' never considered it that yeah you'd have you know a abusive partner why would they why would that stop you know it's going to happen to the dog it's going to happen to the friends it's going to be emotionally manipulative to the supermarket worker to the the people that they're in the office with yeah I mean because some people that that is their personality I mean I talk about a personality in the book called The Dark Triad personality and dark Triad personality are people who are narcissists Psychopaths and Machiavellian and there is good data now showing that people who possess that particular personality type are much more likely to be abusers because the way they retain people the way they retain relationships is by I mean love scientist but it's called you know costly mate retention behaviors but basically through violence through coercion through abuse through manipulation um and you know they are much more likely to do that now but the question arises why are those people like that why do they have that personality um and and if you look back at their their childhoods quite a lot of them are perpetuating abuse they had as children so fascinating talk to me what about this tension between female relationships and their romantic relationships the sort of female female thing and whether or not romantic love is the most important one in that scenario yeah it's really interesting that one of the first studies I did when I went to Oxford um was to look at compare romantic relationships and best friendships and one of the things we found when we've looked at women was that they are more emotionally intimate with their best female best friends and they are with their romantic partner and that was really quite surprising because you're like wow because you think you think of like the most emotionally intimate relationship being the Romantic relationship maybe and these women were like absolutely not you know I keep my my deepest darkest emotional vulnerabilities uh for my for my friends my female best friends and that's really interesting and I think what we're seeing with female best friendship is actually there's quite a Revolution going on at the moment and has been for maybe the last 10 20 years in terms of how important that relationship is in women's lives what when we're looking like demographic data more women are remaining single and more women are not are choosing or aren't having children and when you that's your your life pattern then your survival critical relationships become something else and for most women they become their friends and and again I I talk about it a lot in the book and I've done quite a lot research on it because it's really fascinating because it's only really happened in the last 10 20 years because women can control their contraception and also women don't have to now marry to be independent you know you go back finally liberated on them exactly so they're on their own they don't need to marry for support for financial support for protection and they certainly don't need to have children if they don't want them and so we're seeing women building these whole chosen families now of their friendships and their friendships literally being their survival critical little bubble and that's those are the people they rely on and as I said earlier you know they they those relationships bring just as much benefit in terms of love as as a romantic relationship or a child parent relationship from an objective point of view so it's really interesting that that we are seeing this slight revolution of women choosing their friends as their pre as their premere relationship in their life why is it the case that women show more um affection or more love toward their friends and it seems like guys don't is that is that vestigal Alo parenting stuff no it's not I think it's very very cultural to be honest um as I said you know if you go to other countries um and you look at male male friendships they're not like ours I think we are we do bring up little boys to be quite restrained in their friendships you know um whilst I think we've moved on a bit where you know M men might hug each other now they certainly St very rarely will you see male friends kiss each other you won't see male friends walking down the street arm in- arm you know you won't see overt displays of affection which you will see between women friends but you go to other countries and you will see that so I think a lot of it is cultural actually and it's not really innate necessarily female friendships are made in the bathroom trip together that's well they are and women as I said and it's that and it's that emotional vulnerability because one of the best ways to get close to someone is to be completely emotionally vulnerable with them um and that's what we you know that's what counselors or therapists will teach people who are struggling is be emotionally vulnerable um and because women do that with each other it's a really really tight Bond you know you literally I spoke to a lot of women um for one of my studies and I quote some of them in the book about about their friendships and they will literally say they have seen me at my worst times they have seen me at my best times and they are still here and they will always be here they don't judge me you know know and we and and you know where's my family do for example um and I know that I can literally be anything do anything and they will be there for me do you think there's something that men can learn from women when it comes to bonding and sort of friendship love in that case I do think and I think it has improved but I do think men need to be more able to talk about emotional vulnerabilities and concerns and anxieties because I think that's something that's still quite hard for a lot of men to do um and we all have those just because you're male doesn't mean that those don't affect you they do and I think if we can come to a point where it's it is normal for men to do that and manag to do it without you know it only taking two minutes and then everyone making a joke out of it which is generally what seems to happen I think that that's very very healthy because you know men go through a lot of difficult life transitions as women do but I think they are taught to suck it up you know just suck it up move on particularly when it's something like fatherhood or it's something like you know getting a partner you you are the rock of that relationship you've got to be the one that's supporting and protecting and all that kind of thing and you've got to be immune to everything going on around you well of course you're not of course you're not I mean I followed in a father this now to know how incredibly emotionally practically psychologically diff difficult it is that transition is tough men take longer to transition to be fathers than women do to be mothers and I think there's a reason for that I read a study uh probably about a year ago now saying that on average men say I love you first and it's quite common for men to say I love you first and I thought well first off I I look I thought back to my relationships and I think it was usually me as well almost always me actually I think that said that first uh and I was like okay well that's that's interesting why might that be the case and I thought about you know the only person that I've had Direct experience of which was me and I think a part of it is feeling like you should lead in one way I'm supposed to sort of Forge forward this feels like the brave thing to do you kind of know both of you know already yeah but it's kind of on you to say it properly uh one ex-girlfriend it slipped out when she was drunk and then a couple of weeks later I was like okay well I guess we you know we both need to say this now um but then I dug a little bit deeper into uh what the authors said and it seems like this data is quite heavily skewed by uh couples who haven't yet had sex oh really ah I was like ah [ __ ] okay but it was a nice theory for a while and it still May hold true I don't know how much um this is contributed to by couples that haven't yet yet had sex but yeah as you were saying using using love to manipulate um sometimes for a variety of different goals mhm oh absolutely absolutely I'm afraid yeah that's not a study I've ever done who said who said I love you first but yeah I there's going to be a lot of confounding fact is there I think probably I've had this um idea in my mind for a little while and you're the the person I'm going to try and work it out to uh for the first time so I've fallen in love with evolutionary Psych ol over the last sort of four years or so and I think it's as close to a complete vision of how human mating works that we have it's um impressively survived the replication crisis I think it's it and behavioral genetics the two most unspeakable uh of the the psychological disciplines have actually managed to survive quite well which probably says something uh and also you know the manosphere by whatever term you want to use that uh tangential to it although I've never never been a part of it um but there was increasingly and this might be because I've I've been doing a lot of therapy and sort of emotional work over the last year or so being just sort of seeing a few holes or one particularly large hole I think that EP in particular misses and that kind of the manosphere does as well given that it's it's Downstream from it and you know when we're talking mating from a an EP perspective we're talking mate value we're talking resource provisioning we're talking City and and fertility and waste to hip ratios we're talking the environmental security hypothesis and what's the economy doing at the moment and how's that impacting the size of the all of this stuff I do understand and yeah that's maybe the that's like the nuts and bolts of what mating looks like from a human perspective but what I as of yet haven't heard any EP stuff really dig into is the phenomenological experience of what it is like to be a human going through that what does it feel like to fall in love with someone to not be able to think about much other than them to be worried about them not texting you oh well that's my male parental uncertainty getting in or that's the the the alpha difference in our mate value and you think yeah okay maybe that is what's going on from a source code level but it becomes sort of functionally pretty useless when it actually starts to imbue with the feeling of being that person of being the person that feels the feelings and um yeah I just it's something that I've been thinking about uh recently and I'd love you know I'd love to try and and maybe maybe this can't even be explained academically maybe this is the the place of Art and film and music and you know dance and and and Theater and stuff like that maybe that's where we need to go maybe poetry is the place that we need to go to to try and explain those machinations of of the person but yeah it's the it's the first time the maybe the sort of new shine of my my shiny new toy has worn off a little bit with regards to just that I love it I love it so much but I'm now starting to see the areas in which I wish that it could it could grow a little bit more yeah I think the thing about EP and yes EP is not is definitely not a perfect explanation for anything what it is is it gives us a set of drivers which we can initially place over a human behavior and go how much of this human behavior Can I explain from this set of principles based upon EP and a lot of those EP principles have come from observing animals um and from comparative animal behavior and I'm going to place those upon this human behavior I think the thing about human behavior though is humans are for phenomenally complicated things and we have so many different facets and our brains are so complex that I would be very surprised if any of us were completely driven by the explanations that EP gives to be honest I think it's a good starting point I think it's a good basic starting point but I think it's like the the basis and then on top of that you have lots of other possible explanations you have lots of other things that we can't even explain that's the point there's so much we can't explain about how humans feel um even that how do you feel I don't know how you feel you know you can't objectify that and I think as humans we always want to objectify everything and we want to be able to explain everything in scientific terms and particularly something like love you can't and I think that's something we find it hard to accept because we've got these big brains we should be able to explain everything and and also we don't like uncertainty we don't like uncertainty we like to know exactly why something is happening but I think with something as complicated as love that's not probably ever going to happen and I think that is why art and literature and a lot of those things help or exist because that's what those people are trying to do they are trying to express how they feel you know so I can tell you what exactly you know what the brain scan looks like and I explain to you why when you're first with someone you're obsessed and exclusion everything out that's because you're tone instruct I can explain to you why you're not very good at spotting people who aren't particularly nice at the start of a relationship that's because love is in fact blind because part of your brain called the mentalizing area shuts down I can explain all of these things to you but that's not the experience of it and in a way that's why I love love because actually I can't touch bits of it and that's good so I think EP is a good place to start but it's not like the Bible yeah you it can't explain everything because we are more than that talk to me about the introduction of online dating dating apps and modern mating culture and what you think that's done to love and attraction fundamentally it's done nothing to love and attraction so it hasn't changed any of the neurochemistry it hasn't changed actually what we look for or any of those really deep-seated behaviors that we've had for a long time um what it's changed is the way we meet people and what it's kind of done is it's handicapped our brains to a certain extent unfortunately so I love the way Helen fiser calls says dating apps shouldn't be called dating apps and they shouldn't they should be called introduction apps because that's what they are you're not having a date on the app they slow you into an idea that you can assess whether you're attracted to somebody by looking at a photo of them or maybe having a few texts with them no you can't so they're really good for introducing you to people um but beyond that they really don't give you very much at all because your brain has evolved to be really really good at this and that mechanism we talked about earlier when you when you start assessing people that's a really sensory experience that's based on a lot of sensory information which you don't get from a dating app the most you might get from I think hinge now you can record your voice so you might get some information from someone's voice but photos tell you nothing also dating apps you can just laugh I mean you know we're really good in person at spotting Liars um but we're not so great when it's online because again our brains are handicapped we don't have any any of the indicators that we would use to tell so they haven't altered how we how we actually choose somebody but they've kind of made it a bit trickier in some ways unless you set yourself some really strict rules which is this is an introduction app I'm not going to try and assess whether I'm actually attracted to this person on this app the only way I'm going to really be able to do that is to meet them I mean obviously safely but I I that's the only way I can really really do this I'm going to limit myself to I don't know a certain number of texts or WhatsApp messages and then I'm going to say we're going to have to meet now because I can't possibly know whether or not I'm attracted to you um and I think that's the problem I think a lot of young people in particular think that they are a really efficient way of meeting some we're kind of a bit obsessed with efficiency aren't we and I think they think it's an efficient way to meet somebody but it's not because your your brain just can't do it and also you know what relationships aren't supposed to be efficient things that are really valuable to you in terms of survival generally aren't efficient aren't generally time time you know efficient or cognitive energy efficient they tend to take time and that well the effort the effortfulness is part of the value right exactly exactly and in the old days you know when I was dating many many years ago you know yeah you put effort in you kind of tried to make yourself look reasonably acceptable you know you went out to a pub or you went out to a club or or whatever and you made an effort to talk to people and get to know people then now the fact that you can do it sitting on your sofa it's incredibly low cost you can do it while you're watching telly the risk of rejection is much less because you're not being rejected face to face so the pain is less the risk of intimacy is also much less yeah exactly and that's the problem because the reason you make effort in relationships is because they're very valuable they are really valuable and you're supposed to so it's it's in a bit of a I wouldn't say it's a mess but I think we kind of need to recalibrate what we think they do a little bit because again people are quite particularly younger people I get a lot of 20 25 year olds in my talks and they are just fed up Fed Up of them tired they find them really quite difficult to deal with um and they don't seem to feel like they're getting anywhere with them so I think Eddie design is listening you know you kind of have to recal C or rethink what they're actually meant to be doing and I don't I don't actually think that the um people who invented them are to blame you know I think they had good intentions I think they thought when they were invented this is going to be a lovely way for people to meet but they did not take into account human behavior I don't think they talk to anybody who studied human behavior um because humans will take something like this and go oh shiny new tool I'm going to do something which is going to completely warp what you thought this was going to do and they do I mean that you know you know we get we get the stats coming in from Tinder where you know 35% of men like every single female they see because then they might actually get a match you know I mean that's like and then that causes extreme mate choice because then the women go Jesus Christ I'm only gonna like one because if I like more than one I'm gonna get like a million matches and not be able to have any time so it's this extreme mate choice is happening and yeah and I don't think the designers thought that would happen but that's where we are wow that's funny and what about the contribution of my uh previous education institution of Love Ireland how do you think dating shows have contributed to uh what we think of for modern mating in love um I don't know the thing is we all love a dating show because we're all obsessed with other people's lives um and that's human because as I said we live in a hierarchy and we spend our whole time being uh really interested in other people's love lives because in a way they affect the pool of our love life you know you're getting with them so I can't get with them but actually oh it's looking a bit Rocky I might be able to get with them you know so so that's why we love watching that that's why we're really nosy um I think it depends on the data I think some of them are quite transactional and I think that's not very helpful a lot of them are obviously heavily based on looks um and looks are not as important in a long-term relationship as they are in a short-term relationship so they kind of skew a little a little bit towards short-term relationships I suppose I don't personally I know that some of my colleagues are like oh but actually I don't mind them that much as well as long as you know they are a formatted program which is very I mean I worked on a dating show you know that I worked on Married at First s side and they are edited and they are interfered with by producers so what you're watching isn't necessarily completely natural behavior it's not the most unencumbered of of what was going to happen yeah I mean no for for love Island which was I guess kind of a unique one because it was every 24 hours there's basically CCTV hundreds of cameras placed around a villa every single thing that you do is captured you have people listening to just your mic feed 24 hours a day even when you're asleep so know yeah it's it's I mean it's a level of supervision that Stalin could have only wished for and uh I I understand the the concern that people have about the sort of molesting of of those storylines in my experience it's kind of like just thinking about a midwit meme this person was a hairdresser four weeks ago if they tell her to run this scene back with a little bit more emotion this time please Melanie Melanie doesn't have that in her toolkit what she can what she can probably do is just act up to the cameras so everyone's like a bit more of what they were yeah but I I I think that you actually you're actually probably pretty right on saying in some ways it might teach young people maybe not necessarily a representative example of how relationships work but it teaches them about makeups and breakups and how people deal with disagreements and and and things like that yeah it just needs to be couched within dot dot dot and this is not real life yes exactly exactly and that's fine you know you're still watching human behavior it might not be you couldn't 100% guarantee it's all natural human behavior but you're still watching human behavior and yeah that there is a source of entertainment but you know I think it's important that we do talk about our relationships and we do observe other people's relationships you know all of these things as you say are teaching things um so I I personally you know I don't have a problem with them and there are so many but I think there are so many because we are fascinated by other people's love lives absolutely fascinated is the have you ever looked at parasocial love yes right tell me about that so parasocial love is love for a either a celebrity or for example a character on a film or a character in a book or something like that and um it's something which we're in the kind of Foothills of studying in terms of the Neuroscience of it but obviously there's been quite a lot of work done you know it's what we would have called a crush um if you're a teenager you know got a crush in a pop star or a crush in a film star and what I find fascinating about it is several things first of all the Neuroscience of it is fascinating the fact that you can build a whole relationship in your head an attachment relationship having either barely ever had into any interaction with person or none I mean that's pretty amazing that the brain can do that and actually I believe it's probably extrapolated from a religious love which is the same kind of mechanism um and we used to think if you weren't a teenager so in a teenager a crush is important because it's developmentally important because it allows you to explore your sexuality it allows you explore sensations of Love without being vulnerable basically because it's kind of all in your head it's a bit of a fantasy can help you decide and we know now particularly with lgbtq plus kids particularly if you're in an environment or a community where there are many people who uh identify as you do actually celebrities or characters and books who identify like that are really important attachment figures they're very developmentally important however the what the answer always was was but if you're an adult oh my God you have a Psychopathology there's something really badly wrong with you you must be really weird you must be really trying to fill a void in your world by you know fancying I don't know Barry Manalo or something um and actually what we're finding is that's not the case the majority of people who have parasocial relationships have perfectly normal functioning social networks families Partners all that kind of thing but this person fulfills something in them um either as a fantasy figure or as an attachment figure or somebody who just shares similar interests to them and obviously with social media you're now kind of more in touch with a version of the person you fancy than you ever have been before and it's not weird actually you know parasocial relationships only really became a thing from about the 1950s onwards when people started regularly having Tellies basically so you were regularly in contact with people and of course you know your brain doesn't understand screens when it sees someone on a Telly it's like they're in the room with you so these people are usually charismatic good-look Rich of course you're going to fancy them your brain's going well hey Perfect Mate go for it so parasocial relationships aren't strange it's just it's we have the brain capacity to add add these people to our social networks and and they can be really important how funny the uh lineage between this and potential religious um attachment uh seem really really interesting yeah yeah and I do have to be careful I am not saying the love of God is like the love of Taylor Swift yes okay um yeah religious Love is fascinating because we have taken our ability to obviously love in person which you know a lot of animals can do and we can build a relationship with someone which is a fully attachment love relationship with someone who we will never have physical contact with so that's pretty astonishing that we can do that and if we look at the Neuroscience of religion um if you put there's been some wantful work done not not by me by groups for example putting um religious followers in Scanners and asking them to have mystical experiences with their God particularly there been some good stuff done on like Karma like nuns um and they've had religious mystical experiences and absolutely on that screen is the fingerprint of love and what's really interesting also is the AA of the brain the prefrontal cortext which fars up when we are communing with a a fellow sentient being is also highly active so they are in love with a sentient being who is real and who they experience a full reciprocal loving relationship with and attachment um you know I spoke to a lot of nuns in fact for my book and really wanted to talk to them about and see whether their relationships with God had all the Hallmarks of a human you know earth-based relationship so you know yeah was the reciprocity did have maintenance behaviors what did they bring to the relationship what did God bring to the relationship did they feel empathy with God did he feel empathy with them you know all these sorts of different things and they do they have fully functioning relationships and attachment relationships which provide a secure base and which are developmentally important to them so I just think it's a phenomenal ability to have that kind of relationship and for the people who experience it hugely beneficial in most cases it's a hugely beneficial relationship to have you know we know that and we know that it's not just so the health benefits of of having religious uh relationship aren't just you go a church and there's a load of other people in it's a social network which we do expect we know people who have personal prayer with God rather than what we would call ritualistic prayer with God so you do it on your own so rather than say the Lord's Prayer which is a ritualistic prayer have personal prayer which is conversations with God we know that people have conversations with God are much healthier have good mental health good physical health have all the longevity benefits because they are having a personal relationship with someone and I it's really powerful literature actually it's really powerful research I think that's so cool it's so interesting as well to think that that pathway that we have for building relationships with other people has been tapped into by religion and you know the ubiquity of religion independently arising in God knows how many different places across the planet always makes people think well you know it must serve some sort of a purpose or else why would it it completely yeah it completely does completely does religion definitely serves a purpose and this talks about you know it's this really wonderful blending of what happens when you have a cultural technology with an existing predisposition uh in terms of the way that our psychology works and these two things just slot together pretty perfectly yeah exactly yeah I mean I find it the most and of all the areas of love that I look at in one sense it's one of the most fascinating I think because it's very powerful yeah Dr animation ladies and gentlemen and I love you I love your work I think that all of the things that you're doing are great uh what can people expect from you next and where should they go if they want to keep up to date with your okay so next I'm going to be shutting myself in the bodan library in Oxford and hopefully hopefully writing my next book which will be another book on dads but updating all that and then after that I am hoping to do more work on control the darker side of love I'm afraid um but yeah I've got a website at animations.com and I'm on Instagram and Twitter so or X as we're supposed to call it these days um and I post a lot of stuff out there which you can always see what I'm up to hell yeah and I really appreciate you thank you thank you if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give my watch