You're listening to kaf I Am six forty on demand. Kaf I Am six forty. You are listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. This is the Doctor Wendy Walls Show. Welcome to the show. Okay, sit back, because for the next two hours I want to talk about your love life. You know, it's something really interesting. I've producer Kayla with me right now. Kayla, do you find that when you tell people you work on the Doctor Wendy Walls Show, do they often say, oh, she talks about sex.
Do you get that lot? Yeah? I do. And it's so weird because only every once in a while do I talk about sex. I'm not a sex therapist. I'm not a sexologist. I haven't have a PhD in clinical psychology. I've written a few books on relationships, but I rarely talk about sex unless it's in the context of relationship skills, like when is the right time in a relationship to have sex for the first time, well after you've built trust. But I don't give plumbing tips. I don't know why
people always you know what. I actually ran in to Mark Thompson in the hall and he said to me, I love your show. I listen to it all the time, but I don't listen to it with my girlfriend because of all that talk of masturbation. Why do I talk a lot of masturbation. I don't think you've ever talked about masturbation on the show. Okay, so if you're new to the show, I talk about the science of love.
Yeah, the biological those are the neurochemicals that may help you fall in love or keep in love, and also the psychological and the social peace. That's what I talk about. Do you know why I talk about it? Because love is super good for your health. Love is amazing for your physical and your mental health. There has been study after study that has found that people who are married report higher levels of happiness, they live longer, they
drink less alcohol than their unmarried counterparts. Okay, now I know now you're thinking, oh, Sushi thinks that everybody needs to get married. I don't necessarily think that we need this institution of patriarchy. But there are ways to get the health been fits of married people. And mostly it's about consistency. So if you listen to me for a few years, you know, or if you've written my books, that written my books, you might have written
my books. You might have written a anecdotal story that appeared in my books somewhere. No, if you've read my books, you know that I spent a lot of years with a dysfunctional attachment style. It was only after years and years of work with a licensed clinical therapist where I learned how to calm down my anxious attachment style. How I learned how to be attracted to somebody who has a secure attachment style. My favorite metaphor for the stages of growth
as we grow internally is this. Imagine your dysfunction, and we all have dysfunctions. Is a hole in the street. You're walking down the street, you don't see the whole, You fall in. Okay, Eventually you go to therapy and the therapist says, you know, this could be your problem. So now you're walking down the street or going through a dating app, and now you see that hole, You recognize that hole, and you fall
in it again. The third stage is now you've grown a little bit more, you have better awareness, better self control, able to manage your emotions. You walk down that street, you see that hole, you recognize it. The player, the player chick, the person who's going to break your heart, etc. And you very carefully walk around that hole. That's stage three. Stage four is you take a different street. And I feel like
I did that with my relationship with Julio. I've been with Julio for three years now, and it's just a different relationship because he's a kind caregiver and I'm used to these kind of stone wall avoidant alpha guys who aren't warm and fuzzy, and now I got warm and cuddly and fuzzy. But I learned to take a different street. And here's how I will describe how I feel now, and this is why I know my health must be better. I
just feel calm, I feel at peace. I'm not worried if he's going to call me back, or he's going to show up, or can I trust him? Right? So research also shows I mentioned that he's a cuddler, that hugs and hand holding actually can lower your blood pressure because they increase the hormone oxytocin and it lowers the stress hormones in your body. So being a being in a good, healthy relationship now, I do want to say, being in a toxic relationship, even if you're married, you're not going
to get the health benefits. If you're walking around on eggshells because you're always worried that the person's going to jump at you for something or get angry with you for something, or if you don't have a voice, if you have true opinions and feelings that aren't welcome in your relationship, or god forbid, you're actually experiencing some kind of emotional or physical abuse. That kind of marriage does not actually improve your health. But there are studies the show that happily
married people are happily living together people. People in happy, consistent, supportive relationships actually have lower rates of blood pressure, They have lower rates of heart disease and diabetes and everything. We know also that health habits are highly contagious within relationships. I actually know a woman who has an obese husband, and I mean this with love, who carries around with him to social events in case they won't be available. Pocket meat, as we call it, pocket
meat. He's always got meat in his pocket. Well, it's wrapped in plastic and it's usually preserved. Like I don't know, those those sticks of beef you buy at the at the convenience store, what are those things called beef jerkys or whatever, I don't this is not my diet. I don't know what these things are, sausages whatever. He's always got him in his pocket. Anyway, their children also overeat and suffer from OBEs. Remember OBEs
is not a character flaw. It's a biopsychosocial event. Begins with a genetic predisposition and then a nasty food industry who puts addictive things into food, etc. Anyway, this mom managed to lose a hundred pounds while living with this family with mister pocket Meat because she didn't let the health habits become contagious any longer. So, if you are in a relationship with somebody who does not have positive health habits, it's going to be a long, hard road.
On the other hand, dating someone who's healthy and fit and has positive health habits is the best thing for your health. Like I know a guy who met his wife. Specifically, he went searching on there's an app called like fit dating or fitness dating or something. He doesn't even work out, but he went there because he wanted a partner who would be healthy. Now he does work out. He built a gym in the house for them. She
trains him right, She's like a trainer right anyway. So I just want to tell you that the reason why I am so obsessed with the science of love is because love is good for us. Good love, good relationship skills are good for our mental health and our physical health. When we come back, I have a question to pose to you. Why are these modern liberated women getting married in one of the oldest institutions of patriarchy marriage wedding and taking
their husband's last name. Let's break this down. When we come back. You are listening to The Doctor Wendy Walls Show and kf I AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to kf I AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I want to
talk about weddings and I want to talk about marriage. Actually, now that the pandemic is behind us, you probably went to a lot of weddings this It seems like that everybody seems to be getting married. And there are two times in our lives when we're most likely to tie the knot. Either when we're young and we're in our reproductive window. We know that marriage is still
one of the best nests we have for children. You know, at some point, hopefully we will have childcare in every workplace, we will have more institutional governmental supports for single parents of all genders, and marriage will be less necessary. But when it comes to raising children, building that one economic nest where two people pour their resources into offspring that show up actually is still, according to research, the best we can do for kids. I happen to
have had my kids out of wedlock, so I speak from experience. The research is very clear that children of single parents, or the parents themselves suffer more mental and physical health issues. The children tend to get lower grades, earlier onset of sexual activity, more experimentation with drugs and alcohol, etc. I'm just don't shoot the messenger. I'm just telling you what the data says. And so I worked very hard to be a mother and a father and
a caregiver and a protector and a provider and a nurturer. And I would say that probably my health suffered as a result of it, because I worked so hard to put my kids first. But anyway, more and more women are entering into a traditional marriage full on with the wedding. Now, weddings
have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger over the decades. When my own parents got married in nineteen sixty, they got married in a small church ceremony with friends and family, and they went back to my grandmother's house and in the dining room posed for pictures and had some cake and tea like that was it. My mother was in a beautiful white wedding gown. It was a Catholic wedding, but it wasn't today's giant show or the destination wedding that It's like
a Hindu wedding that goes over three or four days. I can't believe the money people are spending. My theory is that people think the more public they make it, the more eyes that are on it, the more they sacrifice economically to make it happen, the more it'll have to stick, right I think. I think they think that everyone's looking, so we have to make
this work out. It's not necessarily true. What I find interesting is that so many so called feminist women with careers are still taking their husband's last name. Kayla. When you get married, do you plan on taking your man's last name. I always felt like I wanted him to kind of take mine. Yeah, that's a great idea. The older I'm open to it'll see. And if you did, what would be the reason that you would take another man? You would get rid of half your identity. I would I
would definitely hyphenate. But I think it's kind of a unifying thing that way. Our children are. You know, they have our name, he has. It's a it's a unifying family. Okay, And so then let me ask the next question, because you're actually reflecting the research that I'm about to explain. Yeah, why would you want your children to have his name? Does he own them? There is two they're yours. Yeah, that's what
I did with Yeah, yeah, mine have both our names. I said, anything that comes out of me that I manufactured is going to get my stamp on it, my name on it, especially after what you have to go through it again him here exactly. So here's what the research says that this whole bridal tradition of a woman taking a husband's name remains very, very
strong. This is research, according to the Pew Research Center, among women in opposite sex marriages in the United States, four and five change their name in the last few years. This is recently, and believe it or not, hyphenated names are less common. So the idea of taking of not changing your name or taking a hyphenated name actually started in the very late seventies and gained steam in the early eighties, but it never picked up from like one
out of five, right, it never cruised past that. Now, if you've listened to me, you know that when I was twenty one, I had a big, white Catholic wedding for my mother. Literally, I remember being in my wedding dress getting ready and the bridesmaids there in the back room, and I kept saying, Oh my god, I feel so stupid. I feel so stupid. Isn't that funny? I kept saying that I feel so stupid, and they're like, no, you look beautiful, Like I
feel so stupid. So I so didn't support this, but I didn't know. I wasn't aware. This is all in my unconscious that I never booked a professional photographer. Oh no, I think I did, but I never ordered one of those fancy hardcover wedding albums. And then after months after the wedding, my mother had put one together professionally paid some dollars for it and sent it to me as a gift, or maybe it was a first anniversary gift. Do you know where that wedding album is now? I have no
idea it's gone. I probably tossed it at some point. I cared so little about this because I knew I wasn't getting married for me. I was getting married because of the pressure from my mother. So that's what I will attribute to the fact that I did not take his last name, no hyphenated, no nothing. My feeling was, my name is Wendy Walsh. My name is always going to be Wendy Walsh. It also bothered me that the big security password for all the banks is what is your mother's maiden name?
Like a woman's identity is so deeply lost that now it's a security password. Okay, Like she doesn't even exist except a security password. So I would hope that my daughter. So my daughter's got double barreled. My older one ended up taking my name. She has my last name that she uses. The younger one uses her dad's last name. They could do whatever they want,
right, whatever they want doesn't matter to me. But that is the number one reason that women say the most feminist women out there that they want to have the same last name as their kids. So why can't we just name our kids both names, or why can't we take each other's name? Wouldn't that be funny if I took Julio's last name and he took mine.
He said he'd be open to that. There is a divide politically, by the way, among conservative Republican women, ninety percent, according to the Pew Research study, took their husband's name, compared with sixty six percent of liberal Democrats. Also, the more educated a woman is, the more likely she is to keep her name. When you want to keep the name that's on your diploma, I don't know. But then there are other women who are
surging ahead, making money and doing the traditional thing. Like j Lo she is missus Affleck after she has made a name for herself. She's taken his name. Anyway, do whatever you want, ladies. But I know you can argue with me, well, if you keep your own name, that's actually your father's name. So it's still patriarchy, I know. But when are we going to end it? When are we going to end the patriarchy?
That's what I'm saying. I just want to pose the question, Hey, maybe you did get married, maybe you have a new baby, maybe you're a first time father. I want to talk to you when we come back. I know things are tough, now they're going to get better. You're listening to KFI AM sixty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You know, I had children at the eleventh hour of my fertility window.
I had my two babies at the age of thirty six and forty one, and I like to say I pretty much took the last man standing. He was a non smoking, no drinking vegetarian. I said, you're good enough, come on in, and we got pregnant very quickly in our dating life. Again, I do not suggest that you follow my steps, that you follow hello my path in life. I learned experientially what not to do. Okay, So actually I became pregnant eight weeks into dating, and so
we decided he was forty, I was thirty five. It's like, let's just do this. He moves in with me. So we had to weather all the bumps that come with the first year of dating. The first year of living together, and the first pregnancy all at the same time, so you can imagine the stress we were under. After I had my first baby, I was very lonely because I learned that all your career women friends show
up for the baby shower or a quick little visit. They bring a filly, little pink dress, and then they go back the clubs, and so it was a very very lonely time. It's a time of finding your identity as a mother, giving birth to a mother really in that year, and trying to find a village. And I joined every kind of mother group that you possibly could. You know, I actually eventually found a toddler nursing group because everyone had weaned their babies and we're back to work and I was still
breastfeeding. I ended up breastfeeding each of my kids for three years. And at a toddler breastfeeding support group, do you know who was there? Hippies. There were women with either I used to say, either short short gray hair or long gray hair down to their butt. There was no other hairstyle. But they were great and they helped me keep it up, and it was wonderful because there's different issues. However, one of the mom groups I
went to, I can't remember what it was called. I had some funny little acronym, but it was supposed to be a support group for new moms, and they had a very clear rule meeting number one, you cannot bash your baby's father, because apparently these groups had spiraled down into a just whining session about how little the men participated and how they were off at the gym and having fun and at work, and these women were lonely and isolated,
and how they know we're pressuring them to have sex that they didn't want, and they were just grumpy and it was terrible. So I thought that was really interesting that I wasn't the only one experiencing a grumpy man in the house. Well, now there's research to support what so many women go through. This was a study that followed men a longitudinal study from twenty seventeen to twenty
twenty. They followed five hundred first time fathers and one hundred and six second time fathers expecting their second child, and they compared They looked at they collected data on how old they were, how educated they were, what their income was, their relationship duration, the child's biological sex, the child's temperament, because sometimes there are difficult babies. They cry a lot, and they're more stressful in a relationship. And what they wanted to do is look at what
happens postpartum to men compared to what often happens postpartum to women. We know about that. There's lots of research on the postpartum experience of mothers. And even if you don't have a clinical postpartum depression, there is culture shock. I like to say there can be two men in a relationship until a mother enters the room, meaning that when a woman, women can be totally equal
to men career wise. Well, we don't know seventy seven cents on your dollar, but you know, for the most part, until the needs of a mother step into the relationship and all of a sudden, women are like, wait, what, I'm supposed to go to work, I'm supposed to look good. I've been up all night, I got two bleeding nipples, I got into psotomy that's trying to heal, and you want me to have sex with you, Like it is just a shock. Your bodies are just
overwhelmed with what happens. So there's been tons of research on that But what they found when they started looking at first time fathers is that having a child was associated with a big relationship decline in satisfaction. First of all, both first and second time fathers, but the first time fathers took the biggest hit. The first time fathers showed the highest level of relationship satisfaction before birth and
then the biggest dive afterwards. At eight weeks postpartum, first time fathers reported much higher relationship dissatisfaction, and that continued up to fourteen months postpartum. Okay, let's stop and tear this apart and analyze this data. Men, gentlemen, Okay, there are three of you in this love triangle now, and
that baby comes first to her. You know, if you're on a sinking ship and there's a lifeboat and there's only one seat in it, and she's choosing you, or you're shooting your genes into the future, she's going to grab that baby, okay, and save it. I want you to reframe your I'm feeling abandoned by her into look at that. She's caring for another part of me, my jenes right, reframe it. She's taking care of
you. Now. As far as the sex thing, comes. You should know that long term monogamy is filled with phases and stages, and there is a time after birth when women's hormones go way down, especially when they're breastfeeding. In fact, I was dry as a desert. It was a bad scene. It was painful. No, it was terrible, Kayla, you're laughing at me. It was terrible. It hurt. So you're going to have to be creative. You're gonna have to find other things to do,
other places to do it. No, no, not other women. Stop stop, I mean the shower whatever. Maybe Mark Thompson was right, Kayla. Maybe he was right. I think he was. Doctor. He said, I talk about masturbation. I never do, And here I am in the shower. In the shower. Anyway. Here's the other interesting thing about this data. The study found no other association between that other stuff I talked about, age, income, except you know all that, the attitude of
the baby, the disposition of the baby. None of that mattered except one thing, relationship duration. So you would think that if couples had been in the long stable relationship before the birth of the first baby, that they would report less of a relationship decline. But the research showed the opposite. The longer their relationship had been before the birth of the first baby, the deeper the dive in their relationship satisfaction. Let's think about it. They got set
in their ways. They thought it was going to be like this forever. When you're in a new relationship, it's change all the time. First you're dating, and then maybe you're living together, and then you get engaged, and then you're married, and then there's a pregnancy, and oh, there's so much new stuff all the time. You eventually adapt. But if you've been in a long relationship and then the baby shows up, get ready. It's a big life change. But I want to say this, their phases
and stages and what you're doing now. Investing in your offspring has a tremendous amount of meaning. So gentlemen, grow the muscles of monogamy, grow the strength to weather it out. If your baby mama some love, help her out, because that's how you'll find happiness, not nagging and begging, and understand that she's giving to your genes. Your genes when we come back, you know, there are some myths about love that you might hold that can
be killing your love life. I'll explain. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show and kf I Am six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to kf I AM sixty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on kf I Am six forty. I am obsessed with the science of love because it took me a whole lifetime to actually learn this stuff. You know, love isn't about lucke. Love is about skills, and you can learn these skills at any stage of your life span and
in any stage of the relationship you're in. And when I was young, I believed so much nonsense about love that people still believe, like there's a soulmate out there. I really believe there's one for me. It's a soulmate. Maybe I'll meet my soulmate. No, this is playing into the whole Love is all about luck. I will hear people say sometimes, you know, if it happens for me, it doesn't happen. You make it happen.
You use human mating strategies. You get yourself all ready to be out there on the mating marketplace, and you get on those apps and you go on those dates and you make it happen. Those are the people who get married. And in fact, it is the women who know how to negotiate commitment who get married. Believe me, there are no grooms magazines. Okay, Guys don't spend their whole life dreaming about the tuxedo they're gonna wear walking
down the aisle. Every guy on the planet, in the back of his brain, thinks that he's going to have a nice, stable girlfriend or wife or somebody at home and then be a freeman. Elsewise, No, you have to snag him, nail him down, make him feel like there's no better deal for you. I know I sound very sexist, but this is evolutionary psychology. Women are more relational, Women tend to have more. They
hold the keys to the emotional locker. Men fall in love faster, but they don't say I love you faster, and they also don't ask for commitment faster. And if you never ask for commitment, if you never negotiate commitment, you're never going to get it. Okay, So it's not coming from him, he's you know, definitely. Can you imagine that, Kayla, Is there a guy out there going I can't wait to meet my wife. I just want to meet my wife. We could be so lucky. Yeah,
maybe maybe she'll marry me. In the movies maybe, but not in real life. They want to keep you and they want to have side action because you never ask for commitment. That's what happens anyway. That's one myth that there's a soul made out there. The truth is, if you have good relationship skills, then you will find there are many, many, many appropriate mates, and also you will be attractive to many more people because you
have good relationship skills. So learning those relationship skills about being open, honest, vulnerable, being able to deal with conflict, etc. So let's talk about three myths that are very common, very very common. The people still believe they could be ruining their love life. This was actually comes from a research study published in the Family Journal, so it's a peer reviewed academic journal. I can't remember how many hundreds of people they interviewed for this, but
here's what they found out. The number one belief the belief that disagreements, conflicts, fights, arguments, tips are bad for a relationship. If you have fights, it's a bad relationship. That is a myth. The research actually says the opposite. The people in the healthiest relationships have tiny little border skirmishes all the time, and they never have the big, blow it out giant fights because they haven't built up the pressure right, so having tiny little
conflicts. Julio and I had one this morning over breakfast. It wasn't a big deal, but I was saying that I wanted to cut down on my acid reflux, and of the list of foods I mentioned, I mentioned coffee. So he just started nagging me at the breakfast table, like, why are you drinking coffee? You just told me last night they should be drinking so much coffee. And I looked at him and I said no. I said, I want to reduce my acid reflux, which means I shouldn't drink
coffee before I lie down at night. I don't want it to come the acid to come back up first thing in the morning while I'm sitting up. I'd think I'm okay. Anyway, he was all I said, and don't nag me. I didn't say it like that. I said it really sweet, and honey, I really appreciate that you care about my health. It means a lot to me. But I perform better with positive rewards, like you're doing a great job instead of nagging me to change something. That's how
I said it. I did because I learned my relationship skills in eighteen years of therapy. Anyway, that's how you do it. You do little tiny border skirm on a regular basis. You'll make that communication sandwich. You know, the communication sandwich starts out with a layer of love, following like I love that you care about my health, follow with a layer of something hard
to chew on. But please don't nag me back to another layer of love because you know, because you remind me about my health, I'm going to live for a long time. We're gonna be together, and that's wonderful. Right, So, disagreements can be good for a relationship if they're the right kind of disagreements. Okay, myth number two. Oh so many people have this myth. They have a belief that in a healthy relationship, their partners should be able to read their mind. They say things like I shouldn't have
to tell you, or you should know by now. Who are you talking to? An abandoning mother who was not connected to you as a toddler. She should have known, she didn't. Okay, but your wife she won't know unless you tell her. Right, you can't get mad at somebody for not doing something thing that you didn't give them direction to, right you have. They can't read their mind. There's no partner out there who can read your mind. That means you have to know your mind. You have to
have insight into your own feelings. And step two, you have to be able to put those feelings into polite words. And usually when people are beginning to express their feelings for the first time, they say it in a snippy, defensive way because they're not used to it. But it's okay. You'll be able to say it kindly like I did to Julio today, all right. And the third thing is this idea. It aligns with the soul made idea, this idea that relationships are predestined, it was meant to be.
No, it's not. It's a fluke that you even ran into each other on that dating app. Okay, it's a fluke. You're now going to put your mating strategy and your relationship skills to it, and you are going to grow a garden in this relationship. You're gonna water what you want to grow, not the weeds. That means, don't be a nagger with the negative stuff, and you're going to create your dream relationship. It's not predestined, isn't It happened? The Cupid didn't shoot a bow and arrow, the
cosmos didn't come together. You created this, the two of you, by doing the work that you need to do, and I encourage you to do that work. All right. When we come back, I am going to be going to my social media because this week so many dms came in and there are some very fascinating questions that you guys have sent me, so I have got to answer them. You are listening to The Doctor Wendy Welsh Show on KFI AM six forty or live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app KFI AM sixty on demand