This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on k I AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I am now going to my social media because I love to answer your questions on relationships.
Reminder, I'm not a therapist.
I'm a psychology professor, but I've written three books on relationships and I like to.
Say I did the work.
I'm a survivor of eighteen years of therapy on and off over the course of twenty.
Eight years, and.
I have a lot of wisdom. I'm a woman of a certain age and I've got some wisdom for you. So let's go and look at the dms. Remember I will always keep your identity anonymous. You can DM me on any of my social media platforms. The handle is at doctor Wendy Walsh. Okay, Hi, Doctor Wendy says this listener. I just started seeing my ex of five years again, so that I mean you were together five years you were broke up five years ago. I'm guessing we were
broken up for a year and a half. Oh no, so they were together for five years, then you were broken up for a year and a half. Got it While we were broken up. I was bi curious, it's fair, So on one drunken night on vacation, I ended up having a three way with a couple who are somewhat in our friend group. I see them maybe every couple months. All three of us knows it was purely physical because the girl was also by curious, and yes, I did
things with the guy too. I'm wondering if I should tell my boyfriend because he knows them, and I feel weird about keeping him in the dark. But another part tells me that it would give him unnecessary anxiety about it, because to me, it was completely just an experimental thing of the past. Well, this is an interesting conundrum, and this is an excellent question. I want to start by
talking about the by curious thing. First of all, if you believe the work of Kinsey and some of the more recent work of evolutionary psychologists, they would say that we are all kind of wired to be bisexual. Calm down, you, people who are homophobic and freaking out. Kinsey was one of the first sex researchers to look at not only
people's behavior, but they're fantasies. Because he did his work in the nineteen forties, fifties, sixties, and he asked people about their sexual behavior, what they did with who frequency,
but he also asked them what they fantasized about. And he found he had a scale one to six right Kinsey scale, one being one hundred percent heterosexual in behavior and fantasy and one being one hundred percent homosexual in behavior and fantasy, and he found that most humans are actually around a three folks.
So there you go.
It's a big, long scale and a gray area. Not that you may act on it, but you may have fantasy material. There's nothing wrong with being curious now, whether it's a couple or an individual. When you enter a relationship, if you are socializing with somebody that you've had sex with before, you might feel this urge to be completely
come clean and be intimate. My answer is for you to assess what it would mean to you a current relationship, because your real struggle is I want to have one hundred percent authenticity and honesty about everything in my relationship, but you also want to not hurt your partner. Or give them unnecessary anxiety. Now, the other piece is you have two potential loose cannons out there, the other people who may talk. They may have another drunken night and
mention something. It's not fair to swear them to secrecy because their experience is their experience, and they own it, and everybody owns their own experience. My feeling is this, if it doesn't come up and there's no reason to bring it up, there's no reason to tell every single detail of your sexual background, especially because you're telling them
to a heterosexual man. Now, there's research to show that men are more squeamish about hearing about female sexual history than we are women about hearing about a man's sexual history. That is also evolutionary programmed into us. It's not just about the sexual double standard. It is the fact that in our anthropological past, if men risked hooking up with a woman who liked to share her eggs with the team, then he might have ended up raising another guy's eggs.
So therefore.
He's sort of naturally not going to want to hear about even you know, as open minded as my fiance is, he doesn't want to hear. He doesn't want to hear. So my personal advice is to not bring it up unless you find it's necessary. Unless it's being brought up. If you start, you know, socializing with this couple more often, if they start flirting with you, if they make an allusion to what happened, you're going to have to come clean.
If you and your partner might be having a conversation someday about past sexual experiences and he's sharing things with about him, okay, then it makes sense. But to bring it up for no reason, just to cause anxiety in him. I don't think you need to. Don't think you need to. If you guys disagree with me, please send me a DM because I know you know that I'm always about open, honest and authenticity, But this time I disagree.
You disagree, you should tell him.
I think that there's nothing more embarrassing than being in a couple with somebody, and then you're on the outside of an inside, an insider that everybody's aware of except for yourself.
They're not close, she said, they might see them only every couple.
They're in the same friend group, so they will see each other. And then this man knows that he slept with my girl, and I have no idea. I just want to know, you know, I just want to be aware, so there's no inside kiki or like you know, behind my back.
I don't like that.
I also want to wait till their relationship becomes more solid, because she said she just started, says for facts of five years, why don't we wait till they grow some intimacy?
Then you had me around this man and you didn't tell me till two years after that you had sex with him because you wanted to wait to feel more secure. Now I don't trust you. That's how That's just how I operate. I don't know if I'm right, but that's just how I feel.
I'm gonna say, pick your time, Okay, yes, but pick your time fair.
That's fair.
I think that's fair. All right?
That was That was a prickly one, wasn't it. There's lots of opinions on that. Okay, here's another one. Hey, doctor, Wendy, have you been through a situation where you miss a guy the person who had a situationship with Oh, you're making a big assumption that I had a lot of situationships. Okay, I did, but we didn't call them situationships. Then we just called them friends with benefits, or we call them hookups,
we call them booty calls. Actually in my day anyway, that you miss him so much that when he's back in the picture, you feel nothing but anger and resentment when you speak to him. Am I crazy? This is a weird thing. Okay, my darling. Here's what I want to say to you. I want you to call a therapist, especially a therapist who specializes in attachment, because it sounds to me like your attachment style maybe on the anxious side.
And I have had that exact situation happened to me before that, even though it was a hook up, a booty call, a situationship of friends with benefit I became kind of attached. And then when they didn't reciprocate or they didn't provide the emotional intimacy that I craved, I was angry and I was often passive aggressive with them, even you know, when I was in a sexual relationship, doing weird game, playing weird games with them, because I was actually unaware of how angry I was that the
relationship wasn't meeting all of my needs. And it was only through therapy that I learned that my reaction was related to my own attachment style.
And I will say that it is very.
Very common for women to not be able to adapt to a hookup culture or situationships because women's biology is unique and women are often their bodies get attached through hormones and oxytocin, and it's very difficult for them to have just a part time, one foot in relationship. So please reach out to a therapist because I want you to work through this the way I did. All right, when we come back, I got more from your social media if you'd like to send from my social media.
If you'd like to send me a DM, the handle is at doctor Wendy Walsh. All right, you've been listening to the Dr Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty.
We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Going into my dms on Instagram if you'd like to send me one, It is at doctor Wendy Walsh at d R Wendy Walsh. Okay, dear doctor Wendy. This man asked me out on a date and told me I can choose the restaurant. I chose a pricey place because that's where I eat. When I sent him the restaurant, he told me he was thinking more tacos and beer,
not philet mignon. I told him we could change the place, but he stopped responding. I feel like he thinks I'm a gold digger or something. Should I pop up with tacos for him?
No? So here's what you learned. You guys are not a good match. You see, this is how you learn.
The beginning of any new relationship is all about eliminating those that are inappropriate. If you want to have a lifetime of tacos and beer, then yeah, chase him down.
That's going to be it.
If you're a philet mignon girl, it's not that he thinks you're a gold digger. He thinks you're.
Out of his league, and that's okay. You can move.
Along unless you're ready to be tacos and beer and fast food and get a little billy maybe some hips, all the fattening food.
No, you know, if you make more money now.
I also I want to sort of clarify something here that we right now in the mating marketplace have an oversupply of successful women. So you're gonna find ladies that there are a lot of women making way more money than men. So the words to the whys here is probably don't suggest the super expensive restaurants right away and just see where it goes. Because your idea of a power man might be a guy who can power a stroller. Right So maybe you learned don't do Philly Migno right away.
He's not getting back to you, which tells me that he's lost interest, not because he thinks you're a gold digger, but because he thinks you're out of his league. Now, if you really, really, really really like him, then do what you said pop up with Takos.
What does that mean?
Show up? Don't show up like at his house? That sound stockersh like.
Well, when you're into somebody and you want to like prove you know, yep up, like you bring a cake or a pie.
Or she knows she's going to see him, I guess she knows where she's going to see him, because I don't want to be stalkering him or anything. All right, dear doctor Wendy, I can't stop ruminating on my latest breakup.
Oh I'm sorry about that. It's destroying me mentally.
Oh. What are some healthy hobbies I can start to alleviate myself. Well, first of all, you need to go see a therapist because this kind of rumination is chronic anxiety. It could be related to attachment insecurity, something that happened early in life.
I don't know.
I'm not your therapist, but I would say you need to see a licensed therapist to work through some of the stuff. From my own personal experience, having recovered from an anxious attachment style, having spent months and years decades of my life ruminating over lost men who I couldn't get back, I will tell you the number one thing that helped me was exercise. Yeah, just get to the gym, work out how hard, especially cardio, get those endorphins going.
You'll feel so much better. That's what worked for me. All right, here's another one, Dear doctor Wendy, I need help. Okay, Well, thanks for reaching out to me. I am new to this area and my first meaning new to LA or new to the area of dating. New to the area of dating as sind a person.
What do you think they mean?
I would assume new to the because I'm new to La.
Okay, okay, La.
I'm new to La and my first connection was with ooh, a dangerous person. I want a restraining order. What are some other ways I can find safety and community in a new area.
Well, I have to tell you something.
I have gone to the police a number of times in my life to ask for restraining orders on people, often strangers, often somebody I might have had one date with when I was a young hot woman.
Okay, that's when the stuff happens.
And they were very clear that it's super hard to get a restraining order unless somebody physically assaults you, shows up at your house regularly and you can take pictures of them, they're et cetera. But if they're on public property, even then it's hard. Remember in the documentary on Netflix with the what's the name there?
The Dutch baby, No no, No, the Duchess and.
The Prince and Princess are up in Santa Barbara, the real life ones Harry and Megan.
So Megan was saying when.
She was on suits and dating him and she was filming in Toronto. The you know, thousands of people would be peering through fences and doing everything she said. In real life that would be having a stalker, but the police could do nothing because they were standing on public land.
Right.
It's very hard to get a restraining order.
I have one.
You do have one on somebody. I do.
My ex boyfriend. He was he was not okay, he was dangerous, a dangerous person.
Is he in this state? No, He's in New.
Jersey, thankfully, and I don't think he can afford to fly to this state greatly. However, getting the restraining order was very difficult. It took a bunch of different the order chances. He violated it every single week. I was at the police department submitting that he violated.
The only reason he.
Got arrested was because he assaulted another man who I was dating. So it's hard as a woman out here.
I hate to tell you this, my love.
If you ask me how you can find safety and community when you're in a new area, it may simply mean if he knows where you live, moving, I'm sorry, finding a new place, and you may be able to get out of your lease if you feel threatened, But you've got and You've got to find new friends through your work, through the gym, through other kinds of social connections. But you've got to get healthy people around you so that you can feel safe.
That's so scary and a protector.
You were able to break your lease if you were if you felt like your life was in danger, So hopefully California is the same way.
Yeah.
Yeah, I broke my lease and it was no no.
You know, I'm a landlord and one of the things I do is criminal background checks on people because if you know, if you put somebody in your building and they do some violence on another, I think landlords might even be able to get sued because the bad person in there near there.
Yeah, it's so hard.
It's you know, one of the most vulnerab groups in our society, our young females, and we need to rally around them and help keep them safe. And guys, you need to do that. Walk them to their cars, be nice to them, be the good guy. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy wall Show on KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty Welcome back to.
The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty, Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Well.
I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I've got married this weekend and it's very exciting. It's different depending on what your age is, the kind of partner you would choose. You know, I've always said a relationship is an exchange of care. That care can take so many different forms. It can be emotional support care. It can be intellectual stimulation care. It can be financial care,
sexual care, domestic care, childcare. It can be all those things. Right, But as we get older, it gets real because when till death do us part is.
Spoken, it's you know, potentially authentic.
Right.
So gray marriage is something that I feel, having just gone through, it is a sacred On the other hand, this is also a time of life for many where long term marriages culminate. I don't like to say fail, I don't like to say breakup. I like to say finish, the work has been done. I wanted to invite a guest who works with couples all the time, doctor Dana McNeil. She is an expert in relationships and she really understands that in our most intimate relationships, we all just want
to be her. She's a therapist practicing in San Diego, Doctor McNeil, Did I get that right? You did, San Diego. Thanks for being with us. So let's talk about gray divorce. First of all, when we talk talk about gray divorce, we're talking about divorce over the age of forty five fifty.
The forty five fifty ish, yeah, as we're starting to well, maybe stop coloring our hair, but we've probably all been gray for longer than that. But yes, that's typically and it's about thirty percent of the percentages of divorces across the board. So it is actually the highest percentage or of the population of divorce is people over fifty, more than any other age group. We are seeing that that is the area where we are getting more and more divorces occurring.
So I read a statistic once.
I don't know if this is accurate when people banter around that fifty percent divorce rate. It doesn't apply to every marriage. But you only hit the fifty percent risk when you've been married more than twenty years, right, So if you're younger, you're actually more likely to.
Stick it out.
But it is, so let's talk about why at this time, what happens in people's individual development and what's happening in the relationship.
There's so many reasons.
I mean. The first is often if a couple has put all the focus on their children and now they're empty nesters, that phrase, which is we're finally getting our children to like get out and like move on.
With their lives.
Or they've gone off to college and we haven't developed our relationship.
We've just put all of our focus, all of our energy.
All of our time into taking the kids to soccer practice, going to rehearsals, getting their lives sorted.
That's one thing that happens.
Retirement happens if there's an age gap between you and your partners.
Say maybe you married somebody that's five or six.
Years older than you and ones ready to retire. They want to go have vacations, they want to go have fun, and you're still in your career, or you're a business owner and you're not ready to retire. That can create differences in the ways that you want to spend your life.
There can also be differences in the way that you handle sex or the way that you approach sex, or maybe one of you has problems with sex or doesn't desire sex the same way that you did anymore, And so some couples are like, I'm sorry, I'm still in my sexual prime and I'm not going to be with
somebody that doesn't put a focus on sex. There can be a lot of reasons, and one of the ones that I see a lot in my clients is that we have grown apart right, and there's a we are in marriages a lot longer than we used to be. If you think about like back in the day when we were pioneers, we were dying off at thirty years old.
Now we're living well into our hundreds.
If we do this right, and if you say, okay, your kids are gone and they're out of the house and you're fifty to fifty five, it's a lot of time left with somebody that you don't have any common
interests with, that you don't enjoy spending time with. And one of the things that I see that's the most painful for me to see in clients is you can be on the couch with them and still fill alone, and that is devastating when you have time to think, I maybe got thirty good years left, and is this what I want to spend it with?
With some that I can't even carry on a conversation with.
So just to say that, because I've all always said that when they invented the words till death do us part, death was pretty imminent. And if you got married in the year nineteen hundred, the average length of that marriage was about twelve years. And so this idea that we're supposed to be to find our soulmate in our twenties and stay with them until our eighties is actually very rare, isn't it.
Yeah, And we're asking so much more of our partners these days. We are asking our partner to be our best friend, to be that person that wants to go shoe shopping with us, to be the sexiest person that I've ever met, and to still be hot and not be hanging out in yoga pants all day, even though we went through a pandemic together. To be funny, to be interesting, to be intell like we ask so much.
We used to ask, like you have child bearing hips and you can plow a farm, you will do We ask so much more, and we are coming more and more to divorce, not because of the four big a's, which were alcohol, addiction, abandonment, abuse. Right now we're like, well, you're not as interesting as I likes, aren't have fun with you. So we're coming up with a lot more reasons to validate our reasons for divorce as well.
And I would also add that women's economic rise means women are putting up with you know, their demands are higher. They're like, I don't really need you to pay the bills, so you've got to do all this other stuff now, and if you're not going to do it, I can go find somebody else.
Yeah, they are wanting to have intellectual stimulation. They're wanting to be partnered. They want their partners to recognize that you know, this is and there's needs to be a quality in our relationships. And so it's no longer okay for a lot of my female clients to just in their perspective, carry the burden in their relationship, especially in emotional loads, for like taking care of the things that go into making a home a home.
They're not okay with it anymore.
I do want to say that great divorce isn't always bad, right, I mean, we're not looking at good and bad here. It's just sort of a phenomenon. But the pain you mentioned comes from probably when one person wants to keep the relationship.
Yeah, there's pain, or there's a lot of times couples are I've been letting you know four years that there's a problem and the other partner has sort of been having an affair with their job, so the mistress has been getting the best part of them for a long time. And then one person will just be like, Okay, I'm done and they're like, what are you talking about?
I had no idea, And.
It's like, well, you kind of were in denial or maybe you didn't know what to do with it so you didn't address it.
And I hate to put a gender on it, but it's more often that men are blindsided by divorce.
Right, Yeah, that'd be right. Yeah.
Now, is there a way to have a healthy, good gray divorce.
Sure, I mean, if you still intend to try to have some sort of friendship and remember that, especially if you still have children together, you still do have a common value and you are modeling for your children what healthy couples ending looks like. Right, It doesn't have to be something horrific. You can do it with care and with kindness and with love and hopefully still retain your friendship. This is a person that's had a lot of milestones in their life with you, that have been with you
some really rough times. And it's not that you're saying I don't care about you anymore. I just don't care to continue forward with you.
We have to go to a break. But when we come back. You mentioned something children of adult divorce. Let's talk about the other people who are involved in gray divorce and they include adult children, grandchildren and also new partners who you know, family holidays, what's happening for the future. Let's talk about this when we come back. My guest is doctor Dane McNeil in private practice in San Diego. We are talking about Gray divorce. You're listening to the
Doctor Wendy Wall Show KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty, Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. My guest doctor Dana McNeil in private practice in San Diego, California, works with a lot of couples and we're talking about gray divorce. Hopefully it won't happen, but if it does happen, just know it's very common, more common than one would think.
All right, doctor McNeil, and we talk about the impact on adult children, whether they're in their twenties or thirties or even forties, what the experience is like for them when the family they've always known is now separated.
You know, it's mixed. Some kids are like, I'm glad you guys did this. If you were staying together for me, you didn't need to write. I've seen you unhappy for a long time. I've seen you disconnected for a long time. It's time I appreciate that you stay together until I got on my feet. Please go live your best life.
Some kids are not that way. They want you to continue to be that unit because when they come home on holidays, they want things to be exactly the way that they always were, and they want their parents to sort of be frozen in time so that when they need them, they have that appliance that they can turn on, which is going to the family home and having everything be exactly the same.
So there's different ways.
That kids show up, and a lot of it is how much you've been enabling your children to not have to deal with anything in life. I mean, if you haven't been modeling for them what healthy couple's communication looks like. There's the potential that this will catch them off guard and they don't know how.
To respond to it right because they learn their relationship skills from their parents. It's funny you mentioned parents frozen in time, because we all have this fantasy that our parents are just sitting at home waiting for us to come back, that our bedroom will stay the same, that the food will be the same. I had the sad event that my mother died of breast cancer when I was thirty and she was just sixty.
And I went to the.
Funeral and they are all these young women and replacement daughters there and they say, oh, I never got out of the house unless your mother called.
She was amazing. I loved her, And I was like, who are all these people? She had friends, She had friends.
Except for sidea mime.
Yes.
But so that is part of it, is that children have to understand that their parents are humans and have all the same human needs, all right, let's talk a little bit about now. Not necessarily that the relationship breaks up because of an affair, but some people very quickly are comfortable in couples and they very quickly get into another relationship, and that can be very confusing, especially you
had talked about earlier. If you spent twenty five or thirty years together, in every single family holiday together, what do you do now around the holidays and you have a new partner.
Yeah, what you mentioned is statistically more often for men. The research shows that more often than not, men or in another relationship, if not mere within a year, and women are typically two, three, four five years, so there's a lot more distance. Women tend to want to get sorted and get their life and men are like, no, I can't be alone. I need someone to take care
of me and plan my social events. And so I think having some honest communication about when is it going to feel like it's too soon, and maybe making an agreement as the original couple what feels like tolerable for men being conscious, I mean the male and the female, which which feels best for us? What do what do our kids want? And what's realistic for our kids?
Right?
And maybe having like a family conversation. How do we want to break up holidays if it's uncomfortable? Does mom get Christmas Eve and Dad gets Christmas Day? With new partners being sort of creative and having some flexibility and ask telling your kids why it would mean so much to you if they were willing to help you do something for yourself, not just for.
Them all the time in a loving way.
It's hard for kids to get around their head around the fact that they're grown up now. I mean, I think when we're at our parents' presence, we always seem to be kids again. Yeah, and in that kind of demanding All right, before we go, some tips of advice. If you say that a good thirty percent of divorces happen over the age of fifty, is there anything people
can do to prepare themselves? And by the way, I had a financial specialist on a few years ago, and she was saying that divorce actually takes place two to four years psychologically, two to four years before it's actually filed. And during that two to four years, men are hiding money and women are getting plastic surgery.
Okay, all right, I more see that they're contemplating what life will look like they're oftentimes fantasizing about what it's going to be like to live by themselves and not have to pick up their partner.
They've been looking at ads for apartments.
And kind of like visualizing how much they can afford what their lifestyle will.
Look like with They're going to get back on friends that aren't necessarily sure friends. Right. Yeah, I remember, like one of my friends, I knew she was getting divorced before she knew she was getting divorced, because I watched her Instagram change.
I love every picture used to be always.
Her and her husband, and then there were a lot of her alone and looking more sexy than a woman in her fifties should maybe on Instagram, and then a bunch of shots of her out with girlfriends all the time. And I'm like, that girl's had it for divorce, and lo and behold, it happened. But I knew it beforehand.
Yes, a lot of mental preparation and rehearsal about what life is going to be like without them, and maybe also like how will I handle the holidays? They might have already had some thoughts about it. A lot of times when couples are coming in to separate in my office, the partner that is we call the leaning out partner that's already planning for the divorce, has already thought well about how they might want to do it and have some suggestions.
So right, so let me ask you this as a couple's therapy, when couples come for therapy because someone has brought up divorce in your experience, is the divorce pretty much eminent? Are they come into couple's therapy really to try to fix the relationship.
It depends if you're saying I want a divorce when you're in the midst of in physiological arousal because you're in a fight, That is not typically because you want a divorce. And I often say to my clients, please don't mention it when you're in the midst of being upset.
If you've gone for like several long walks on the beach and you've contemplated and you want to come back and have a conversation in the backyard about how you can't go on, that's probably more real than I got mad because you forgot to put gas in my car
and I want a divorce. That's just you're releasing energy and you're not handling it in a good way versus I've been thinking about this for a long time, so it's usually in the context of how it's been brought up, how responsive the other person is, like they are they taking you seriously because oftentimes I've heard you say this so many times.
I don't even take it seriously anymore.
Right, it shouldn't be used as a threat and a weapon or definitely the D word shouldn't come out. Any parting words for people who feel like their long term marriage is on the rocks. Any advice.
About the pros and cons. Every relationship is going to have things that you don't like. So if these are deal breakers and you're okay with moving into relationship with its own set of problems, maybe this is the best thing for you.
And sometimes change is good. Thank you so much, doctor Dana McNeil for joining me on the Doctor Wendy Wall Show. You guys are in the San Diego area, you can where can they find you? Do you have a website?
Yeah? We also do intensives for people around the country that want to come travel and spend a few days with us. It's called therapy getaway. And then yes, we can see anyone in the State of California by telehealth, or they can come local to my office in San Diego.
Thank you, thanks for being with us, and that brings this episode of The Doctor Wendy Wall Show to a close. It is always my pleasure to be with you every Sunday from seven to nine pm.
Yeah, I'm a missus now.
Thanks for 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.