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Three four. Okay, Producer Kayla, who do we have next? We have Fred with a question. Fred. Hi, Fred, It's doctor Wendy.
Hello, good evening.
What's your question.
I'm gone, I got a crazy question for you. I would like to know. I would like to hear your opinion on this.
Okay.
I'm sixty one and forty years ago. In nineteen eighty five, Yeah, there was a girl. I knew her and she's one year exactly, one year younger than me. I knew her, but we started dating and we never we never had sex, okay, but we dated for about four months. I was working out Colorado, so.
You were twenty one and she was twenty with the last time you did.
Twenty okay, Yeah, it's been that long, and I we I remember taking her home in my truck. Anyway, I told her, I said, okay, I guess this is where we shake hands good night, And she said, uh uh, so we kissed good night. But at that point my head exploded and there were fireworks over my head and stars and all kinds of stuff.
Don't you love those neuro hormones? How exciting, Fred?
All the planets were perfectly lined up, and what happened I was just well, I came back here to La to work.
I was working.
I got a real good job out here, you know about So.
After one kiss you'll you'll laughter.
I had to come out here and work. We were too young. She lived with her parents and there was no way she could you know. It's it took me three years to buy my house and then I took So.
Let me get you recently looked her up online?
No, no, I recently was working in Denver, and out of the blue I ran into her.
Oh did she remember you?
Yeah?
Yeah? Yeah?
Oh yeah?
And is she married?
Right?
No? No, she's asailable, she's just as beautiful as ever as anyways, you know, she's she went through a bad relationship, so she's you know, she's really sketchy. About, you know, so she should be. I mean, but well, we talk every day, you know now on the phone, and I'm gonna go see you in about a month. I'm gonna drive back up there, and I got a load going up there in my truck. I'm a fear but I'm
just thinking. I know, I've never been married, and I feel like I ruined my life because I was always searching for that and other women. And I mean, I've daved, I've had a couple of serious relationships, but I never ever felt that again. And I'm wondering, is that like that normal?
Okay, So there's no such thing as normal when it comes to love, Fred, What your experience is something called retro sexual attraction, meaning that at the very beginning of our life, when we have our first love, the attack of hormones on our brain is so exciting that it lingers for decades.
People literally, if you ask anybody.
Over the age of fifty sixty seventy about their first love, you will watch their face light up. You will see them go into the story of what it was like. You've had the opportunity of running into her again. Now, my biggest concern, Fred, is what happened between then and now to you that you were turned off relationships and love for forty years and then all of a sudden
it's opened up to you. I mean, we can't judge the timing, but I just want to make sure that you don't have kind of an attachment issue and that you might accidentally, without your own knowledge or permission, do something to mess this up. And that's why I always say, you know, get a therapist. You got a wingman who can help you explore your feelings. And the other thing, Fred, move slowly. You already said she's skittish, she's been in
a bad relationship, right, So move very very slowly. There's no rush, there's no rush for rush to physically touch, there's no rush for sex. Just go there and enjoy touching base with somebody from another era of your life. I'm sure you have a lot of people to talk about from way back. Whatever happened to so and so? Do you know what happened to Sow and Zoe?
Right, and just enjoy.
Each other's company. But the more you create anxiety about this, the worse it'll be for you. So keep it light, have some fun, and call me back and let me know how it goes, Fred, I'm very excited to hear. Oh my god, that's so cute. I'm rooting for them. I really am rooting for them. Dear Doc, Wendy. I'm going to social now. I am dating someone and there
is a cultural difference. I understand Americans care about how friendly someone is, but other cultures can be a little to the point, I can't tell if my guy is being rude to me or if it's a cultural difference.
How do I explore this?
You ask or you explain what that feels like from your culture. So if they say something that feels a little rude to you, then all you say is, hey, that felt very like you're criticizing me. And I'm not sure if you're joking or whether that's your culture, because in my culture, we don't talk like that to somebody we care about. So I'm curious to know how it's what your intention was. It's always a good idea to ask somebody what was your intention there? What did you
mean by that? Because here's what the experience was to me. Right, That's all you need to do is just address it, and that's how we all learn to get along. I'll answer one real quick, because then we got to go, how long do I date someone before telling them I have an autoimmune disease? You know what this is like the person who had the trauma early in life with their straining order. You don't date for very long, but you also don't tell them on the first phone call
or the first coffee date. All right, you don't let it go on where they start falling in love with you and then blah blah blah blah blah. Right, I would say, you know, as you start to build intimacy and trust and you see it's reciprocal, they're opening up to you, that's the time to explain this stuff, all right.
When we come back.
The new thing interpersonal intelligence versus intra personal intelligence. I'll explain the difference when we come back. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls 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 Wendywall Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on.
The iHeartRadio app. Can we talk.
About your interpersonal intelligence. You know, that's very different from your intra personal intelligence. Actually, I teach a class on intelligence, and I always tell the students that some other are going to get this wrong on the exam. The definitions intra means insight inside yourself, being aware of your own feelings, being authentic, being able to have some emotional intelligence about managing your own feelings, expressing your feelings to other But
inter personal intelligence is now becoming very in vogue. So maybe one time, maybe your partner somebody you're with, gave you really unhelpful advice. You know, when people say things like, well, things are going to get better or you'll get over it, and you're really not in the mood to hear these things. In fact, when they say that kind of stuff, it makes you feel worse. And on top of it, your partner doesn't even understand why you need help. I don't
understand why it's such a big deal. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. That's what people say, right well, according to a new study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the world of emotion regulation research is actually undergoing a big shift. We are moving away from intra personal meaning emotions within yourself to interpersonal getting some help from someone else.
You know.
I like to say that a healthy relationship is interdependent. You don't want two people who are too independent. You don't want people who are too dependent on each other. You want people who are healthfully interdependent, taking turns leaning
on each other's shoulders. So researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara say, but obviously, couples who have higher emotional intimacy with each other are better at regulating each other's emotions because love helps you become more motivated to calm your partner down, to reset their mood.
So the way they did this study is.
Really interesting is they would read these vignettes about life to people the participants, and some were positive, some were negative, and then for each one they would say, okay, so here's eight different emotions. Words for emotions you know, might be proud, excited, guilty, angry, afraid. At which emotion do you think the person is going to experience when.
This happens to them?
And then they ask the partner, if this happened to you and you were feeling bad, what would you like to hear your partner say right, And so here's an example. Like they're very kind of vague and could be interpreted in any way. So here's one from the study. The riskwatch I inherited from my great grandfather stopped working this morning. Repair said there's no.
Way to fix it. It was so old.
I hardly used it. I know it's just an object, but it's been in my family for ages. I wish there was a way to get it working again. I will stay right here. There's going to be a gender divide in the answers. If the person reading this is a female, the dude's going to want to find a way to fix it.
I'm guys like to fix problems.
They think the answer is fixing, but instead the researchers say what emotion do you think your partner will experience? Of course they're also asking the partner privately, what would this do to you? Write this feeling? And then what would you say to them to help them feel better? And then they asked the partner what would you like, not in front of them, what would you like? So what they found out is that people who have better
Now I'm going to use that word again, intra personal. Sorry, Yeah, intra personal intelligence, meaning they have can sense their own feelings, They know that feeling in their stomach, and they have a word for it. They tend to be more empathetic and be more accurate in guessing their partner's emotions. Also, I'm surprised to have to say this, people have an avoidant attachment style. We're really clueless about how to help their partners. But here's the big news. Empathy isn't a
trait you're born with. Yes, to some degree, some people are higher they're more empathetic than others. But it is also a skill that can be cultivated and strengthened. And there's all kinds of things you can do that are backed by science. Number one, taking someone else's perspective, literally walking in someone's shoes when something else is going on, asking yourself, hmm, what would it.
Be like if I were them? What would it like?
Literally asking that question all the time, imagining the other person's point of view. You can actually hone a skill and a practice to have more empathy by just constantly asking yourself, huh, what would it feel like to be them?
Right now?
There's also research to support the idea that mindfulness met meditation improves emotional regulation and even attunement to other people's emotions. This one study that was published in Psychological Science found that just two weeks of practicing loving kindness meditation increase brain activity in areas associated with empathy. See here's the thing. When you're meditating, you're hopefully told to allow anything, respect it, love it, love yourself, love others. Just breathe, just relax,
let the feelings come. It's everything's okay. Non judgmental awareness of our feelings, and that helps us have empathy for others. Here's one of my favorites. If you're somebody who only reads nonfiction, get off that junk. You need to read literary fiction. Or you have complex characters and they have a whole stream of different emotions, right, this will help you understand other people's thoughts and emotions. Literally, just reading
more good literary fiction will increase your emotional intelligence. And finally, just spending more time with people from different backgrounds, okay, whether it's different races, different genders, different ages, different origins, countries of origin, just to understand their perspectives, people with different political views, people with different religious views. Just spending time asking questions not being rude, not rudely criticizing, but
understand trying to understand their perspective. This can open up your mind. And here's the best news of all. Our brain is plastic brain. Plasticity is on your side. Empathy is linked to neurocircuits involving what's called the mirror neur neurons, sorry, the mirror neuron system. And this will actually grow. I like to say a lot of these behaviors, if you continue to do them, will grow new super highways, new lanes,
new offshoots. It's called intentional repetition. So simply put, if you practice empathy, you can literally rewire your brain for it. And this is what you need to have a healthy relationship. Hey, we come back. I have a very special guest. I'm so excited to have him on the show. He's the co host of the podcast called Love Factually, and he's a researcher in interpersonal relationships and he's got some interesting things to say about love. You're listening to the Dr
Wendy wall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere in 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 AMCIX live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Now, I'm about to fan girl again. You know I do this every once in a while, I get somebody on the show who I'm actually a big fan of. And this week's guest is doctor Paul Eastwick. He's a professor at UC Davis. But get this, he runs a lab where he does
research on all my favorite subjects, attraction relationships. But also he's cool because he's co hosting the podcast Love Factually, of course, available on the iHeartRadio app.
This is Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships.
So as want to be film critics, We're going to meet the people where they are.
This podcast is about what the movies get right and wrong about how relationships actually were.
Hi, doctor Paul, how are you?
Hi?
Very goodness?
Thanks someone for having me on today.
You didn't know that i'mould be fangirl on you on live radio.
Yeah right right, Okay, I'm ready. I'll see if I.
Can live up to them.
Okay, So what I want to talk about We don't have a whole lot of time, but what I like to talk about is your mate evaluation theory. But before we do that, I need to know the story behind Love Factually. It is such a brilliant title for your podcast. What is the podcast Love Factually?
And yes, So the basic idea behind the podcast is, along with my longtime collaborator and now co host, Eli Finkle, we take the science of close relationships is we have understood it and internalized it over the years, and what we do is we talk about how various rom coms and romantic films reflect what we know in the science, either what the films are getting right or what they're kind of mangling.
Well, I'm going to tell you that I have always said what they get wrong pretty much one hundred percent of them is that they they end at the beginning of a relationship.
That is is a fantastic point. There's so many of those films that classically do that right. You get what you're doing, You're seeing what amounts to something like the first ten percent of the relationship, and that's part is supposed to make it feel good and like say, send you home feeling happy and look sometimes they depict that early ten percent. Well, but we've got to acknowledge that there's a lot left to come when the movies end, when the couple gets together, right and.
They get past their limerins and move into intellectual commitment kind of love.
Yeah.
Now, we've covered plenty of movies that do cover the whole art. It's actually kind of tough if we want to give the movies a break. It's tough to go from beginning all the way to the end. Right, Are there any la Land is one that does it really well?
Yeah?
I mean also the Notebook, Come on.
The note right right, That is one of the view that goes from the beginning to end. Really the end the spoiler alertly yeah, really the end literally the Notebook. Yeah. But but they're out there, and and we like to give, you know, you know, accolades to those movies that pull it off.
So moving from the podcast onto some of your research.
Uh.
One of your most famous studies has to do with something called mate evaluation theory, and it basically talks about how people analyze, evaluate, make selection for potential mates.
And and I read the.
Whole study today because what I do is I turn it into language everyone can understand. And now I'm going to have you correct me if I say it wrong.
I'm ready, I'm ready.
There are basically five ways that people evaluate a mate. Right, First, you talk about something called shared evolved mechanisms.
And cultural scripts.
Is this David Buss's evolutionary stuff. I'm hearing that women like men who are tall, and men like women who are fertile and roundt Yeah, really.
It is is definitely meant to encompass that. Right. So anything that's like agreed upon, whether the reason for agreement is there something evolved in the mind that this is appealing to who we are as a species on average, or because I don't know, we've decided in this culture that you know, it's appealing if you can like make really great TikTok videos like actually.
Right, this is attractive.
I mean, I will say, I'm a woman of a certain age, and I've watched female body shape change over the years, and in the nineteen eighties it was the advent of the boob job, and it was very exciting to suddenly see breasts on every and now it's all about but right, So that's one example of a cultural script.
All right, moving on number.
Two individual differences that affect how a perceiver. That's somebody who's attracted to somebody views all potential mates. So is this like somebody's deal breaker list, Like this is my checklist, these are things I'm looking for.
I would think of this one as like this is like people's own personality. So some people are happy people, and honestly, they're going to be happy in whatever relationship you put them in. And some people they're not so much and they're going to be kind of miserable in whatever relationship you put them in. So that's this component. It's kind of like is your lens that you take to the whole world and it doesn't matter who you're with.
Interesting because my new husband, Julio, he is a giggly Dominican and he's the happiest person.
I've ever met in my life.
There you go.
Then I'm met his whole family in Dominican Republic and they all giggle. I was like, Wow, it's a cultural thing.
This is cool. Yep, so happy with anybody, even me.
Yeah, there you go, and like, look, don't feel bad. It's a really good good thing to be to have a little bit of some rose colored glasses.
As you view the boy.
Oh yes, I have to reel him back in all the time, as his optimism.
Is a little too high. Uh okay, moving on to the third one.
Individual differences that affect how a perceiver views some targets depending on the target's feature.
So let me take a crack at this. Yeah, so would this be correct?
Maybe somebody with an anxious attachment style might look at a partner's emotional passion and intensity as being really attractive. But if that person looking is avoidant, they might feel smothered.
That's a great example. Yeah, I mean this also would encompass the deal breaker list you mentioned earlier, the idea that that I, like, I can't stand people who you know, like going to fancy seven course meal restaurants, Like I just can't be with somebody like that, Like that is, you know, too high falutant for me. If you have that kind of deal breaker, that's this third one that you're talking about.
Not yourself. Do not invite Paul to dinner? Okay, gotcha?
All right, we have to go to we have to go to rat Okay, when we come back there two more as part of your made evaluation theory. And then I want to talk about what this made evaluation theory can teach.
Us about dating. Okay, we'll be right back.
You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on kf I 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.
I'm KFI AM six forty Live every where on the iHeartRadio app. My guest is University of California Davis Professor, doctor Paul Eastwick. He is also a researcher in attraction, relationships, interpersonal love, sex, the whole shabang. He has the numbers and the data on it. Okay, doctor Paul, your mate evaluation theory, how people evaluate mates to be a potential mate,
You say narratives about idiosyncratic reactions to one particular target. Now, I just got to admonish you on that is some psychobabble there.
Okay.
I had to think about that for a minute.
Okay, So I would say this is like, I think this is the exciting part because this is does this mean that if you like have this sense that there's great meaning to this relationship to you in particular, I don't know, like there's something about this person that makes you go, oh, it's meant to be.
It feels magical.
Yes. And also about the things that you construct along the way. And this is the one that I think is if you ask the average person what is important in your relationship, they're gonna ultimately gravitate towards these kinds of things. The special rituals we have, the pet names we have for each other, the customers that we build, the values that we've created over time. And this stuff is huge.
True.
This is as a couple creating, or what an individual creates in their life and then says, wow, this person fits that.
It is really supposed to be what you are creating. I'll say, like this where you're creating the con in a context with this particular person. And the real idea with this one is the idea that, like, I can't just take somebody else who like looks a up like your partner and substitute them in. Like, the point is that this person was there along the way for the creation of these things, Like you have memory with this person, and that's that's what it's really about.
And I always say relationships are a living thing. They're like growing a gardener together. And having been prior to meeting my now husband, I was a single mom for twenty years with two little girls, and I did not want to risk exposing my kids to a poor romantic choice that I might make. But I knew that if I kept studying this stuff, by the time they got of age and old enough, I would find my person.
But there is something now that I'm in a secure attachment where I really feel like there's a living thing. Like we're co thinkers, we're co emotional.
You know.
He does half the thinking, you know, and I do half the intellectual work. I mean, a great example, here's a simple, simple example, and I'm sure many couples do this. One of us will be working on an email and we will read it aloud to the other person. It might be an important email, and he will add more business language or analytically language to mine, and I will add more emotional language.
To Yep, we get emois in there had an exclamation point.
Exactly. Now're a team. We're thinking like one brain exactly.
Yeah, yeah, right, And it's this thing that people build together that you know, what we try to point out in this paper is we all kind of intuitively get that this is really important, and we as researchers are actually not great at capturing it. And that's for a bunch of methodological reasons that aren't especially fascinating. But the bottom line is what we think the lion's share of compatibility is how well you create a culture to your relationship. Well,
we actually just haven't. Uh, you know, there's a lot out there about that that still needs to be explored and understood.
And just so that people understand what you just said, one of the problems with doing relationship research is a lot of it is self reporting. You can't like put people in MRI machines and just say.
Oh, there's love, although some attachment.
Researchers are doing that right right right.
Okay, So let's go to what made evaluation theory can teach us about dating. Now that we know these points, what, how does that help us make better decisions?
Well, I think where it can really help people is to recognize that there's some amount of curiosity that is important when it comes to being in a relationship with somebody. It's curiosity about how did we get to this point and are the patterns we set up early in our relationships still serving us. Well. You know, one of the challenges that often happens is that, you know, couples do things because they work right, and they keep those things
going because they were effective at one time. But it can be very easy for one or both couple members to lose track of what their needs are as they change over time, and to realize that the patterns they've set up might actually now be getting in the way, might equally even be stifling one of them. And so, you know, I'm a big believer that you know that many couples can make it work, but it does require some amount of curiosity about what the other person is
experiencing and how did we get here? Do we need to mix things up or not right?
I call it rewriting the relationship contract.
From time to time. Yeah, there you go.
And also when it comes to choosing you mate, looking at some of these cultural scripts is a good idea for us to become aware of them and realize how they could be limiting us.
Yes, I mean, I'm a big believer in the idea that actually the narratives that you co create with somebody really begin from the first moment. Like a lot of times, what we think we're trying to do is assess things like how how good are you know this person's traits? Are they attractive, are they intelligent? Are they funny? But we're really doing is trying to figure out are they funny with me?
Right?
Do they seem smart with me? Do they make me feel smart? Like it's relational from the very first few minutes. I mean, we even see this if you look at you know, first impression research, and we've collected a lot
of data on first impressions. But what people are trying to do is just find something where they both have a little bit of knowledge in common, and they can kind of try to start scaffolding something together, something that they have in common, something that they can sort of bond over a little bit, and then you sort of build up from there. So you know, everything is a construction, and it really happens from the very beginning.
So when I met my husband during COVID, during quarantine and lockdown, my role was they had to meet me on a windy pier wearing a mask. Okay, and if they couldn't do that, then if they want to protect my health, it's not going to happen. And then when we sat down for I only do coffee day, so it was only twenty minutes they got you got to
leave them wanting more, you know. And then I said, when we sat down, I said, look, you know, we could sit here and brag about the masks were off at this point because we were more than six feet apart and the wind was going. Yeah, and I said, we could sit here and brag about how great we are and how datable we are. But could we begin actually by each of us telling a story of why we think we're completely undateable.
Oh that's wonderful, he said.
Okay, you'll go first.
Good, and he had a much much more tragic story than I did, but it developed intimacy from the get go.
Yep, right, it was that's great. Yeah, I spot on. I love to plug urt eron. And you know the grade thirty six questions. Oh yes, studying, Yeah, I mean right exactly. But really, what you're doing in that sixty to ninety minute period is you are getting comfortable and then talking about things that are interesting and deep and meaningful. And people can do this in short periods of time.
Oh yeah, and within ten minutes of our coffee coming, both of us had our eyes welling up with tears over our stories. Yeah, and dealing with the shame of having to tell the story too right. And so I wanted to ask you one more question before time is so tight and Radio I'm sorry. The last question has to do when it comes to this study with these sort of these models we have in our heads for what we're talking specifically heterrich sexual relations. Here, for my example,
an opposite gender parents' role is in our model of love. So, for instance, with my husband, we will be out shopping somewhere and he'll be in the next aisle over and he will clear his throat one hundred percent it is my dad. Everything about the sound, the tone and everything, And I almost get startled when I hear it. Did I unconsciously choose him partly because of that? Oh?
I don't know. I mean there is a little bit of work showing that, Yeah, that people can be unconsciously primed with images of parents, and you know, they feel a little bit more safe. And so maybe that you know, is coming from somebody of your you know, preferred age and gender that you just find yourself a little bit more attractive with that person for that reason. But this stuff is going to be really really subtle. Yeah, any unconscious effects are going to be very very small on
the whole. But it's possible that you know, things like like what you mentioned there, uh, sort of the way that he clears his throughout might might be a small thing that carried over from those unconscious leanings.
Which might have been important to me and my trauma is that my parents both died of cancer in the same year when I was young, and so interesting enough, his mother, who's eighty six years old, I.
Love, so I got a dad and a mom back with this marriage.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, right right, quite sure.
Yeah, Paul, it is a delight to have you on the Doctor Wendy Wall Show here on KFI. We are going to have your co host, Eli Finkel next week, I believe, so we'll make sure that we cover love factually as much as we can. Thanks so much for being with us. My guest is doctor Paul Eastwick, a professor at the University of California Davis. You've been listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening
to Doctor Wendy Waals. 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