@DrWendyWalsh is breaking down the Benafir divorce (08/25) Hour 1

back in the classroom. You ready, You're ready for me. I feel like someone was a blink for you and you.

It's a lot, a lot. But anyway, we're going to be I'm feeling optimistic about this cohort, and it's different everything single semester because you get a group together in any room for anything, and they set up group rules right away. They are silent rules, silent messages, the way people look at each other and there some of the rules are don't ever talk out loud, that's awkward, and then another group the rule might be be open and chatty,

have fun. When I get a class full of extroverts or where the rule is it's cool to talk, it makes my life a breeze. But when I stare at the silent faces for two hours and fifty minutes and I don't know what's going on in there, and I'm asking questions and I'm trying to get them to it is. So that's when teaching is really hard. So I'm feeling good, but this cohort, I just have a sense it's going to be good starting tomorrow morning. Hey, a little bit

of sad news in the World of Love. Somebody who's been on the podcast on Mating Matters and on this show, doctor Helen Fisher, has passed away this weekend after a heroic battle with cancer. She was a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. The chief science advisor to match dot com, the co founder and chief science officer of Neurocolor, and she has also been a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University and also research associated at the American Museum

of Natural History. She has been my idol, my mentor. Helen Fisher was both a highly skilled academic and also really media savvy and could turn some complicated research into language that everybody could understand. I received the email from I'm proud to call him my friend doctor Justin Garcia, who's also been on the show many times, head of the Kinsey Institute, and I asked doctor Garcia if he could be on the show with us to talk about as many years with doctor Fisher. He didn't get back

to me for obvious reasons. There's funerals and stuff. And she got married actually for the first time, just four years ago, and he walked her down the aisle. So she had four wonderful years with the love of her life, John Tierney. Anyway, so a sad thing in the world of If you're in the world of love science like I am, that is a pillar that has just tumbled. And so we wish our thoughts and wishes are with Helen Fisher's family. All right, let's get into the trenches

of love. I don't know, have you been living under a rock? Did you hear Benefars all gone? Now? Do you know what benefer is? It is Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. I really if you don't know, she's a singer, actress. He's that movie maker actor guy. So on August twentieth, their second anniversary, you can analyze that, folks, Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce with no attorney involved for Bet Affleck.

Now you got to remember and their house, their Beverly Hills or wherever house, sixty eight million dollars is on the market force. If you're looking for a house, there you go. They had a big, huge wedding in Georgia. They had a quick one in Vegas that she was so quick to post about on social media two years ago,

and then a big Georgia one. Now, if you remember, they initially met way back in two thousand and two, and they like to say it was the launch of tabloids and they happened to be the couple at the moment, and they literally they met on the set of their movie Geek Geekly eatji le gili jigle g i g l I jiggle jig jiggly. Don't know. I didn't see it. You know why nobody saw it. Nobody saw it was a total bomb. He actually did press on it and made jokes about himself. But that's where the term benefit

was formed. And they got engaged. She talked about how much she loved him. He talked about No, she didn't talk that. He didn't talk that much. She talked a lot about this relationship. I sense now I don't know the woman, but I sense this is a woman who's in love with love, who all her movies are rom comms. Right, and then they get back together. What is it like

twelve years later or more than that? From two thousand and two they got engaged in two thousand and or January two thousand and four they were done after their movie that they did together bombed. He says the reason why they canceled their wedding was because of excessive media.

This is the original one. Excessive media attention surrounding their original wedding we found, says Ben Affleck in a statement, We found ourselves seriously contemplating hiring three separate decoy brides at three different locations, and we realized something was awry. We felt that this should have been a joyful and sacred day and it could be spoiled for us, our family, and our friends. So they canceled right after their movie

bombed Geek Glee in two thousand and three. Chili, there we go, Cheli, thank you, our pronunciation specialist, our linguist on staff, thank you very much. So they were supposed to be married in Santa Barbara on September fourteenth, two thousand and three. Their movie had just bombed. They cancel that. By January two thousand and four. They're done. It's over. They're done then, So twenty twenty one minus two thousand and four helped me out. Seventeen years later, she splits

up from Alec Rodriguez. Ben Affleck is leaving his wife another Jennifer, whom he had three kids with. She has two kids. She's been married four times, so she had kids with Mark Anthony right A twins, and all of a sudden they start hanging out together. So it became official in July of twenty twenty one. So we're twenty twenty four. Now, that's only three years ago. Became official of them dating again. She posted a carousel of photos on her Instagram in honor of her fifty second berth.

I remember that she made sure that she looked hot in a bathing suit and all that, and then she put a bunch of Bikinian boat pictures. In the final one was her kissing in him him kissing. Anyway, I think she's the one that led this whole thing. I think what really happened here. She's in love with love she as you know, very quickly. They did everything together. They made commercials together, and then she made that movie. So here's what I want to say. And I'm guessing

I know nothing about this. Okay, this is reported. This is me guessing she perhaps has such an anxious attachment style that she's gonna go as public as she possibly can and make it as big as she possibly can because that could make her mates go, well, I can't leave now. Everybody knows about this. It's just too big, right. So the question is did she engender all this press to make their love extra public and that helped her

maybe reduce her abandonment anxiety. In fact, the tabloid Page six reported that Benifer's marital Rose Moe's woes got it. Woes went all the way back to their honeymoon, on which the couple were hounded by photographers in Lake Cuomo, Italy, and Ben was very unhappy with the paparazzi following them, So who called on the dogs? You know, it is possible to be private in a cabin. You don't have to be out walking around Lake Cuomo where all the things are. You can go inside closed doors, be alone,

have servants. It's not a lifestyle. He's new to those, so I don't know he's famous. Two exactly. Then she made a movie without his permission about their love story, The Greatest Love Thig of all right, and then it's called the Greatest Love Story Never Told. And then she made a companion documentary called This Is Me. And even in the documentary, Jennifer Lopez reflected on Ben's discomfort with

some of her artistic choice. She said, I don't think he's very comfortable with me doing all of this, but he loves me. He knows I'm an artist, and he's going to support me in every way he can because he knows he can't stop me from making the music I made and writing the songs, I wrote, it doesn't

mean he's comfortable being my muse. Oh apparently elsewhere in the documentary, I did not see the scene Affleck is captured realizing that Lopez is sharing his private love letters to her with a team Oh wow as something for the movie. That's mad. And as you know, she was hate bombed on TikTok this summer, then she canceled her summer tour. You know what they say, you have to reach an all is lost moment. It's like a rom com. She's in the all is Lost moment in her own

rom com. And maybe it's time that her next relationship is with a good licensed therapist. I'm not saying he didn't have a piece in it. I don't know anything about him. Only thing I know about the dude is he's recovering. He has struggled with addiction in his life, which you know can be a hard road. But you know, I don't know where he is now and whatever? All right, when we come back you your life, should you get back with your ex? Is going retrosexual? A good idea?

Let me explain. You are listening to the doctor Wendy Walls show. Ok, I am six forty but live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

I'm going like ten years ago when people joined Facebook for the first time, maybe fifteen years ago, and they're finding all their old friends and then they find their high school sweetheart, or they find the college person that they had a little thing with, and now it's thirty years later, twenty years later, they're all grown up and they're like, oh, maybe and I'll go back there. I actually know a couple. They were at my wedding. Did

you meet Dana and Carl from New York? I might have, Okay, I met a lot of people, but I had a lot of drinks. They were middle school sweethearts and found each other many years later and now are madly in love and everything going great. So that kind of retrosexual can work, right, because you were at the stage of life where for sure nobody was at their stage of readiness. State of readiness, right, we're talking about middle school, high school, college, right.

But if you had an adult romantic relationship with somebody and it went south, and you think, just because time has passed, they're going to be a different person, and oh yeah, you're going to be a different person, that everything is going to be fine now just because there's time. No, So that's the other kind of retrosexual where you go back to the scene of the crime, You go back

and you live it out again. Now, there is an allure to going retrosexual because of the familiarity, Right, you don't have to do all that early stage getting to know you stuff. But I will tell you the couples very quickly fall back into their old relationship patterns. Remember that every relationship we have with anybody, cowork or family, friend, whatever,

they enliven a piece of our personality. One of the reasons I think I said this last week, Kayla, that I had so much fun at my own wedding, Thank you very much, was because I looked around the room during the dinner. I looked around the dance floor later, and every single person was a piece of me, everybody I knew. There were no strangers in the room, and it felt comforting. I felt literally complete. I felt together right, because we're not supposed to be the exact same person

to everybody. I know. In our culture we use that term two faced, no two faced. We're supposed to be two face, three face, six pas whatever. We're supposed to be a little different because each person helps us grow a piece of ourself. Right. However, when it comes to our love relationships, if it's been bad, it will go back to bad very quickly. My favorite metaphor for this, because love is the best drug that we have, is

that of a drug addic. You've probably heard years and years after being sober that an attic might say, oh, well, you know, I'm just gonna try one line of cocaine because I just don't eat more. Just that one, right, and before they know it, they're in the same bad place they were before. So rekindling old love can do the same thing. In less I'm gonna give you some criteria. You do it mindfully, and that means with the help of a professional therapist, and you attempt to do things differently.

So here's my little advice on how to get back with your ex. If you were hell bent on doing it, you went on Facebook. You found your high school. Well, if high school is different, you found somebody you dated ten years ago. Whatever, All right. Number one, make sure that both of you take equal responsibility for what happened

in the previous relationship. If one person feels superior because they blame the other for what happened, you're going to have a difficult time having equal footing in the future. So both of you have to be in a space where you can say my bad, you know what I did. I'm so sorry, and you go, no, no, really it was me. What I did was this. If you can both take equal responsibility for the things that went wrong, that's a good sign. Also, make sure that both of

you have undergone separate personal therapy. You now know your issues, you're working to change yourself. You can now enter that relationship as a new person. What is the point of therapy. The point of therapy is to either if it's psychodynamic, make the unconscious conscious, so your things hidden in your unconscious don't control your behavior in a negative way, or to teach you new behaviors that help you create new feelings and new ways of being. But you've got to

be a different person. That means both of you have had to undergo this. And finally, you wanna not fall back into your old relationship patterns, that old dynamic and so I highly suggest that you begin your new relationship with couple's therapy, not going to his therapist or not going to hurt therapist, getting a whole new therapist who meets the two of you for the first time. This is how you can learn new ways of relating and not be triggered by all the pain from the past. So, yeah,

is it possible, No, it's not. Maybe, sort of kind of, But for the most part, I suggest that you listen to Taylor Swift and never get back with an X because there are lots of other fish in the sea, lots of other fish. Incity, you don't need to go there, but retrosexual from like childhood sweetheart. That's kind of cute because nobody was ready back then. All right, when we come back, I want to divulge and share with you

that there was only one occasion in my life. For a very short period of time, a matter of maybe three months, I had what I now look back on as an eating disorder. I will tell you what precipitated it, I will tell you how it presented itself, and I will tell you how I eventually got over it. So can we talk about emotional eating when we come back. I've got some thoughts. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Welsh Show on KFI AM six forty WeLive everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

For the most part, I have been the same body weight my whole life, I mean, give or take five pounds here or there, except pregnancy. Those babies, they take up a lot of Wait. Yeah, And however, if you've been with me all these years, you probably have heard me tell the story that I was a tea nature modeling in Paris. I was raped by the owner of my modeling agency, and I came home feeling like a failure, that somehow everything was my fault. I felt great shame.

I didn't tell anybody, and of course all they wanted to know is how is Paris? How is modeling? Oh my god, let me see your portfolio and whatever. And I had no job. I'd finished high school and I hadn't started university. I was thinking of applying. I didn't know what to do. And I went to my parents' fridge and I started making these very tall sandwiches, very tall, like they were five six inches tall sandwiches. You squeeze

them down, you can get them in your mouth. And I remember eating to the point where I almost felt nauseous, and I would lie down, and then like an hour later, I'd go make myself another one, and I'd force myself to eat it. I was trying so hard to eat my feelings to make the pain go away, and that somehow this pleasure would somehow help. And maybe unconsciously, there was a piece of me that's like, I don't want to look like a model. I don't want people to

say that about me anymore. I managed to gain about twenty pounds from my parents' fridge, which is a ginormous amount of weight if you're an ectomorph and you've been tall and skin of your whole life. Eventually, a friend of mine said, let's take the bus. This is nineteen eighty to Key West, Florida from Canada. Because I looked

at a globe. I was lying there in a dead of winter and I was spinning a globe and I looked this way before the internet everybody, and I saw the most southerness point tip of the continental United States, and it was Key West, Florida. And I said to my girlfriend, let's just take a bus there. It took us like two and a half days. We slept on the Greyhound the whole thing, and we got there and

there was something about the sunshine. I got a job in making conk fritters in a van on the beach and nobody put pressure on me to be a model or be beautiful. I let my hair go crazy. I sunburned myself till my nose peeled. It didn't matter. I didn't have an agent going. But did you do to your skin? I just relaxed and that and along with the sunshine, because I also learned I had a little

senial effective disorder helped now. Just last week I was on I Do the Morning show, the Today's Show in Australia, and I was on as a guest, and the guest right before me was a formerly obese journalist from the UK who had taken ozempic and written a book about this experience of losing all this weight. And the journalist asked this person, did you They say one of the side effects is depression. Did you experience depression? And he said yes and no, And I want to explain. He said.

There was this one night where I had a bad day, so I wanted to go to my go to thing, which is go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and order an entire bucket of the kernels, which on any other time I would have been able to finish off the entire bucket, he said, So I was on ozembic. I ate two pieces and I felt completely full. I did not want to have any more. And immediately afterwards, I felt deeply sad because I didn't have my go to remedy for my emotional pain. I realized that my eating had been

emotional eating. I thought that was so insightful and so much self awareness to be able to figure that out. So emotional eating is an impulse to eat whenever you've got unpleasant emotions like what happened to me way back when, and it actually there's research that shows that emotional eating can actually change the brain's reward system and reduce your ability to even notice when you're physically hungry or when you're full. In other words, eating just becomes a habit

around emotions. Research shows at about one in five people in America engage in emotional eating often or very often. Also, what you eat when you're upset matters because certain types of food reinforce your emotional eating response. So signs of emotional eating eating when you're upset, eating really quickly, having

guilt or shame about having eaten. Your most frequent thing that you consume, fast food filled with those feel good, addictive things, eating too much, having specific food cravings or having unintentionional weighting. So I have a friend who's a registered dietitian who says it's all behavioral. You just got to change your behavior. However, emotional eating is also deeply psychological, and I believe that working on the feelings can help

change the behavior. But my friend likes to say, gaining weight is all about ewnh ewnh, eating when not hungry. If we could all just stop and ask ourselves are we hungry before we eat? That would help a lot. So what can you do? Contact your family doctor number one, get a referral for a registered dietitian or a mental health professional or both. Maybe even join a support group

like Overeaters Anonymous. It is impossible. It is one of the hardest things to overcome and eating disorder because, unlike giving up anything else, you give it up, you abstain from it. But with an eating disorder you have to go to the fridge three times a day and walk the tiger. So I know how hard it is. I also know the emotional pain associated with it, so I do. If this is you, I really want you to reach out for some professional help. When we come back I'm

really going to change gears here. I don't do segways. Well. I've been thinking a lot about how patriarchy and misogyny that flies around our culture hurts women, obviously when it's an overt act against them. However, there's a lot of patriarchy that's inside women. I used to have a bit of it myself, and it can really mess up our love lives. I want to explain this a little further when we come back. You are listening to the Doctor

Wendy Walsh Show and KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

I've written three books on relationships, did a dissertation on attachment theory. I'm a little bit obsessed with the science of love. And after this segment, I'm going to be taking your calls. You can call in and get some of my wisdom and all weigh in on your love life. I'll let the number out here. I pinned it on TikTok. It's one eight hundred and five two zero one five three four not yet after the segment, one eight hundred five two zero one kfi Okay, I've been wanting to

address this topic. It's occurred to me. You know, I'm a feminist. We hear about patriarchy, and oh, isn't it terrible. We don't make as much money as they do when they discriminate against us, and there's those glass seeling and all that stuff. But I realize the patriarchy can also hurt our love lives. Now, not just in an external way, not just in us being treated like, don't worry your pretty little head about that, honey, and let me let

me open that little door for you. You seem a little weaker.

married two weeks ago. I'm a bridal manicure there, I don't. I'll never have nails that look like this ever again. Your nails a fabulous. I had a spray on tan it's gone now, I think. And a hair piece right, fake eyelashes, fake bridle. I look good. They need to check out your Instagram at doctor all the videos on there. I wonder if I can take that video and put on TikTok. I think I can. I need some tech advice. Okay, So years ago I dated a man who was a

lovely man. He was very kind. They just put a hat in a mustache on man. I don't know how they do that on TikTok. It's very weird. And but one day I love to do the cooking and I love to serve a man. It's something I just love to do. And so I served him dinner and then something one of my kids spilt something or something, and he jumped up and he ran to the sink and he got the cloth and he came back and he was down on his hands and knees cleaning the spilled spaghetti.

And in that moment, I lost my heart on I was just like, is not masculine enough for me? It's not manly enough for me? Right? I was crazy? Indeed I was crazy. Yeah. So now I happened to be married to a man who has two favorite activities well three because he's a dude, but the main ones are doing dishes and laundry. And I feel I've scored. But what changed was me. This whole idea of what is masculine and what is feminine I had to get rid

of in my life. And I found the happiest relationship in my life with a guy whose nickname for me is CEO or boss, and I feel totally comfortable with that, right, and he's very masculine to me, especially where it counts. You know what I mean? Anyway, So I want to say that patriarchy swims inside us. Now, what is patriarchy if you don't know, It's a social system that basically holds authority over women. It encourages male leadership, male domination,

male power, and in some ways patriarchy. When women, unknowingly ingest it, we become the foot soldiers of patriarchy for the men. One of the primary ways we do it is we attack other women and keep them down. We mock other women. We may label other women as slut, stupid, or weak. We may decrease other women's value because we feel less than and we feel we have to compete with those women, so we put them down. That is patriarchy at work. Also, we have internalized ideas about gender roles,

as I did years ago, right with that guy. We have ideas about who invites the person on a date, who drives to the date, who pays for the date. Now, I do want to say this because I've always said it that in heterosexual mating relationships, you can send me all kinds of nasty emails and texts and dms after I say this. In heterosexual relationships, men should pay for the first date. And the reason why is because they like to sacrifice. We have to give them the gift

of sacrifice. We value the mate that we sacrifice for. Look, ladies, if we put on nails and hair and do all that stuff for a guy, we do it because we're sacrificing for him because we like him a lot. So we have to allow people to sacrifice a little. But as you get into the dating thing. I think we are on like our fourth date, and I said to my dude, hey, can we talk about this check here? I think it might be my turn, And he's like, no, I'm a Latin male. I pay. I'm like, dude, I

think I make about the same as you. We should just be a little more equitable here, and then it all got easier. The other way that women hurt themselves in their love lives with internalized patriarchy is with that unfair distribution of labor within the household. Women feel like they're responsible for the kids, the cleaning the house as while they're out there also getting a career and working

just as hard as everybody else. But I think the biggest, the biggest reason, our biggest way the patriarchy hurts women is we fear being real, being authentic, right because we're afraid that it will hurt our relationship if we speak our mind, if we have our voice. I'll tell you I married a guy. I met a guy, and I'm married a guy who loves a big mouth woman. Just what. He had a big mouth mother, so he thinks it's cool. So it's okay to be real. It's okay to have a voice.

phones now. If you will call, she says she can't even get there fast enough. You're dialing, so fast one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app