This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k I AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy wallsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on I AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. Okay, if you have been listening to my show for the ten years ten years. I think it's going to be ten years in September, which is like in a minute, ten years that I've been on k I AM six forty. You know that I have
a PhD in clinical psychology. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm a psychology professor, not a therapist.
Yeah yeah yeah.
But I'm a little bit obsessed with the science of love. I have spent three decades of my life reading every little bit of scientific research that there is on dating, mating, and relating and the wide spectrum of how people couple up or triple up or whatever it may be with them right, And I feel like I've educated myself very well. I also feel that I've done a very good job of taking scientific information and turning it into language everybody can understand. And I want to be very clear, this
does not mean that I dumb anything down. This means that I try my best to not use psychobabble and instead just say, in plain English, this is what the research says. Now, why you might ask have I spent three decades of my life studying this subject and continuing to do so, And I will tell you it is because I had so many relationship problems in my own life, from a young woman onwards. I have been when people say, well, have you been married, have you been divorced? Have you
ever really had an affair? One?
Have you been?
I've been everything from a mistress to a girlfriend, to a wife, to a live in girlfriend, to a divorcea to a survivor of domestic violence, a survivor of financial abuse. And you're like, well, it sounds like that that's all your fault and your poor choices that you made. Yes, I did make a few porn choices. Are you holding your pearls when you say that poor choices? Because they
were unconscious choices. And I want us to all stop judging each other and understand that our model for love, our idea in our head for love, is formed in the first three years of life, and then we go out in our adul romantic life and we say, hmm, that person feels familiar. You know, love is not about finding happiness, it's not about finding pleasure. Love is about
finding the familiar. And sadly, through most of my decades of single life and married life and living in life and divorce life and single mother life and everything else, I was finding the familiar in people who would leave me with feelings of loss abandonment, sometimes highly criticized, because in my early life that was what love felt like. You see, kids are going to love their parents no matter what. And this is not to put down my parents.
I think I had great parents. Like every parent, they did the best they could with the tools they had. But because of life circumstances, my dad was in the navy, and he was gone. He was gone more than six to eight months a year, in a very inconsistent pattern, gone for three weeks, back for two days, gone for three months, back for three weeks. You know, it was craziness. And this is the nineteen sixties where there was nobody had help.
The village wasn't there.
We were always sort of the strangers moving around all the time. There was no giant village of cousins because we were moving so much, and so half time, my frazzled mother with three children under the age of three, stop right there, three children under the age of three, I'm sure would leave the three of us in a playpen while she would just go vacuum to tune out the screaming. And I was at the bottom of the
toddler tumble because I was the only girl. So I had brothers who were doing very naturally normal, high testosterone brotherly.
Things like beating me up.
And there's my model for love, longing for a man who would come back and save me, but being pummeled by what was there at the moment. Now, nobody's fault here. This is the nineteen sixties. The term parenting as a verb was never even coined until the nineteen seventies. It wasn't something you did. It was just you were a parent because there was a git around. But you didn't parent. You didn't try to enrich their lives, you didn't try to help shape their mental health. You just fed them
until they got up. Right was the time. And so after many many decades suffering all kinds of relationships that you would judge me is for making poor choices. I went to therapy. I was in therapy on and off for eighteen years, and I learned about myself and I shared everything in my books. I've written three books about relationships. I did a dissertation on attachment theory. I know more about attachment theory as it relates to me than maybe even my therapist. So the question is why did I
study it? Because I was obsessed with healing myself. But at the same time, I knew that I wasn't alone, that other people were struggling men and women with attachment I need to use the word disorders, but attachment pain, attachment injuries. And I am so happy to tell you. If you've been following me, you know that back in December, I proposed to my boyfriend live on air. We've been together four years, and this weekend we tied the knot.
We got married. Yes, I'm missus now. No I'm not taking his name, and no he's not taking my name. Why was I able to make this commitment Because I reached a stage in my personal journey where I could tolerate kindness, where I could learn to accept care and know that it was okay and that I deserved it. And the world wasn't going to fall apart and he wasn't going to abandon me. But it was a very
long journey for me. And the reason why I continue to do this show, continue to talk about relationships is because I want everyone to have the feeling I have, and that feeling is trust, security, and a sense of calmness. Now we are all also to people of a certain age, and people's needs change across the lifespan when they're choosing partners. You know, when till Death Do Us part was invented, death was pretty imminent, and if you're having a kind of grayish marriage.
Death might be pretty imminent.
He hates it when I make that joke, by the way, but I love it because a relationship is an exchange of care, and care can take many different forms, and the care that we're both anticipating in the future is real care in the last third of our lives. So anyway, congratulations to me, Congratulations to my wonderful new husband. Oh my god, husband, I can't believe I'm saying that after
all these years. All right, on this show, I want to talk a bit a lot about love here and there, but also stay tuned because I have a very special guest at the end of the show, Who's going to talk to us about not only ray marriage, but gray divorce. Yeah, I want to prevent that. Okay, gray divorce. Hey, it may be natural for some, but not if you've got married when you're already gray. Look, I'm not gray. I color my hair. I just want to say, you can't
even see a gray hair. You're listening to the Doctor 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 k I AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. So, if you follow me on social media, specifically TikTok, you know that I've got a million followers.
You know probably if you've been following me for a while, that my brand is slowly in transition. So here's the thing.
When you get stuck in one space on social media, it becomes everything. And the truth is, I'm so much more than relationship advice. Although I love to give relationship advice.
Here's my theory.
By the way, about my little identity transformation here. During all the years that I was single and had attachment injuries and was in therapy and was in graduate school, trying to put an intellectual eye on love to ultimately heal myself right, And so I wrote three books on relationships. I did a dissertation on attachment theory. I became obsessed with our romantic attachment style and how we could heal early life trauma that could lead to us finding constantly
being attracted to partners who hurt us. So I really walked my walk. I don't know if you've ever heard that saying. I think it's from the book Jonathan Livingston segul we teach best what we most need to learn, And so I would every time I would learn something new. And you know, my career as a journalist a real taught me how to take scientific information and put it
into language everybody could understand. So I blogged, and I do podcasts, and I go on radio, and I write books and I talk about wow, this aha moment, Oh my gosh, just well, look what I learned. People with an avoidant attachment style are mostly attracted to people with an anxious attachment style, and there's this constant running all
the time in their relationship and nobody's really happy. But those relationships tend to last a really long time, by the way, because the running becomes the glue instead of emotional intimacy. Anyway, that would be one example of what I might have put in a TikTok video. So when I met my fiance during the pandemic and we you know, I continued to do all the things I've been teaching you guys for the last ten years on KFI. I did them. I did them because I've been teaching them.
We teach best what we most need to learn. And I was able to build a secure attachment for the first time in my life. I literally this morning, we were in bed and I said I was going somewhere for the day and he was going somewhere for the day, and I said, oh, I'm not going to see you all day and he's and I said, I don't think I've ever had this kind of feeling where I didn't even want to take a day off from somebody, And
he said me either, never had this feeling. So now that I have what's called a secure attachment, I find myself just a little a little less interested in lot, you know, hardcore relationship advice, although you'll notice coming up later in the show, I have a lot of stuff for happily together couples to keep it happily together. Right, So we're going to talk about whether a relationship can survive cheating. Ten topics you should be talking about to
make your relationship stronger, et cetera. I'm still learning that, Okay, still keeping it with you. But anyway, So on TikTok, lately, you know i'd circle around. I say this to my students too. I get off on side railroad trains of stories and then I circle it back. We're talking about
social media and kids. So on my TikTok, I've been doing lots of videos talking about how I'm changing, And one of the videos is describing a road trip I took during COVID with two teenagers to eight different states, and I at one.
I've attended many Black Lives Matter.
Protests because it was during those days, and one of them was up in a tiny town in Montana, and I showed video of this and I was really quite astounded at how many people came.
Out fully armed.
Well, I just showed the video right very few seconds of it, TikTok banned me, warned me, shut me down. It was the craziest and I couldn't figure out why I got this warning.
I was just talking about a road trip and.
Teenagers and what we ate and where we stayed. But then one of my I posted another video saying does anybody know why my last video was taken down? And then they said they don't allow pew pews. That's the code, that's the code that the robots can't understand pew pew. Apparently that means again anywhere on TikTok. So I was both happy about this news and upset. My wonderful video that I spent a long time editing got taken down.
By the way, it did get put back up because I edited out that particular scene, So if you want to go look at it, it's up.
There on TikTok.
So, you know, as our government is trying harder and harder to protect kids, and there's all these rumors that TikTok is going to be banned because the Chinese are spying on us and our kids, and they're dominating and manipulating and controlling the brains of our youth.
All very true.
By the way, I think the social media companies are starting to get nervous and take some personal responsibility. The data is undeniable, this infinite scroll that young brains enacting. They're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling where they stay engaged in those videos as long as possible. The research is clear that this is not okay for kids. You see, because of children's brain development, they don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex that's impulse control. They don't have the
ability to stop themselves or regulate their behaviors. Right, we get mad at them that they're on their phones too long, and that's like saying, why do you keep eating all that sugar when we're the ones feeding it to you? Right, So they're addicted. They're addicted mom and dad. So technology, now, there have been some of the tech companies have enacted forty four changes across different platforms to improve youth safety and well being. So this includes things like listen up.
Instagram has announced that it will filter comments considered to be bullying. So now, because of good AI and the robots, it'll scroll through the comments if it looks like it's nasty, then they're just going.
To get rid of it.
It's also using machine learning to identify bullying photos. I wonder what's a bullying photo. Maybe when they take someone's face and do weird things with it or whatever and making fun of them.
I don't know.
Also, YouTube is now going to alert users when their comments are deemed defensive, so you'll get a little note saying we don't like this on this platform, and YouTube promises to remove hate speech now. Privacy is another issue right. Instagram says it will notify miners when they are interacting with an adult who has been flagged for suspicious behaviors. Owannder of miners would be alerted about me because I
got flagged for the gun thing. You never know, I might be in a system now as a bad person. Not that I send dms to minors anyway. And it also does not allow adults to this one to message miners who are more than two years younger than they are, you know, the two year gap. You know why because that conforms to the statutory rape thing. So statutory rape is like, obviously you can't have sex with somebody under the age of eighteen, but if you're nineteen, you could
have sex with a seventeen year old. That's to keep the nineteen year olds and their girlfriends from going to jail for that, right, So it's two year gap. The other thing they're trying to do is improve time management. So many of the platforms YouTube Kids has in fact turned off auto play. You know how when you get on YouTube and it goes from one video to the another video to another video. Won't do that for kids. They have to search and select the new one, which
takes time. They're also going to have more notifications telling people like, you've been on too long, But I'm telling you that doesn't work. There's this guy on TikTok who jumps and he goes, hold up, now you've been scrolling for too long, and as soon as I see him.
I just swipe past him. So I don't really think that works.
Hey, speaking of social media, when we come back, there's an unlikely social media platform you probably use every single day that's now the number one platform being used to find love. Let's talk about how you could use it if you're single. When we come back, you are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on k I Am six forty We're live everywhere on the iHeart 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. Well, the way that people meet and mate in the mating marketplace seems to have changed. I think people are getting sick of traditional dating apps. I don't know why, by the way, because I used Bumble and I found my love on Bumble. But I do want to say this, it's not about the dating apps that are bad. People always say I hate the dating apps.
They're bad.
It's not about the apps, it's about the skill. And I've done lots of segments in the past where I talked about how to use dating apps. Well, I'm going to continue to continue to teach that, so stay with me. Also, you know, I do this Patreon zoom group every Wednesday night at six thirty, So if you ever want to come on, you can ask me any questions about dating apps, et cetera. I'll be happy to even weigh in on
your profile. I'll tell you what you can do. But new research this week from datingnews dot Com also published on Datingadvice dot com says that the number one platform that people are looking.
For mates on is Kayla. You're not going to believe this.
LinkedIn really LinkedIn the business more on Instagram? Uh huh wow, more than Instagram. Okay, So let's talk about dating and mating in the workplace. According to research from getnuxs dot org, twenty two percent of married couples in America met through work and fifty two percent of employees have been involved at one point or another in a workplace romance.
Uh huh.
A survey from the Society for Human Resource Management, they found that a quarter there's about twenty five percent, folks. One in four of US workers reported that they are open to having a workplace romance. And just last year, Forbes Advisor commissioned a survey of two thousand employed Americans and they found that sixty percent of adults have had a workplace romance, and of those, forty three percent married someone they worked with. Now, this is a problem because
we are post me too now hashtag me too. Human resources departments know that romances at the workplace can be a legal nightmare. So it kind of makes sense to me that LinkedIn has exploded as an online mating marketplace.
Let's think about it.
Since the pandemic, everyone had to pivot right and go online for everything their work, et cetera. So people moved from water cooler conversations at the office to emails, DM zooms,
even online networking events. I'm going to go out on a limb here and tell you that I would say that evolutionary psychologists would argue that the whole darn reason why people have occupations, professions, and work is less about basic survival and much more about increasing their mate status in the eyes of others.
Let me tell you.
When I was on the dating apps, there was no such thing as an employee, no such thing as a coworker. There were founders, vps, managers, consultants. I mean, I had a handyman once and I said, what do you put on your app profile that you do?
And he goes, oh, that I'm in construction management. Okay, why not? That's what people do now.
If you compare a LinkedIn profile with a dating app profile, you get so much more. In LinkedIn, you can do a deep dive into somebody's background. You could estimate their income, you can look at their whole network of people they even might mention their hobbies, any volunteer work they do.
Schooling is a good one.
What if they went to your alma Mada and you can call them up and go, hey, I'm an alumni, or what if they're from your hometown. All that is in most LinkedIn profiles. So here are the best benefits from meeting on LinkedIn. In my opinion, I'm going to tell you the best way to do it. After this Number one, you can find someone with real world common interest. They could be from a specific industry that you might
be in. They might be doing charity work your college. Also, it allows you, when you scroll through LinkedIn profiles, to find really targeted commonality rather than what I would like to call the pithy self promotion that people write on dating app profiles. I mean, who doesn't love sunset, walks on the beach? Gag me, I'm done with it, right hiking, Let's go hiking right now. Another benefit of LinkedIn is
that you can really vet people. I know that the dating apps in recent years allow people to connect their profiles with their Instagram profiles, so you can kind of see who their friends are. See if you know someone in common, but on LinkedIn, their professional network is right there before your eyes. You can investigate them through real world contexts. You can look at their comments, you can see who they're reviewing. And here's the best part about LinkedIn.
Just want to say it, get it out there. There's no HR policy to worry about. Since the advent, as I mentioned of the me too movement, workplace romances have become a nightmare for human resource departments. Many companies have even enacted love contracts or complete romance prohibitions in their employment contracts. So so far, I mean until next month, I guess I don't know. LinkedIn doesn't have any HR hall monitor to get nosy about you noodling?
So how do you do it?
First of all, I do want to say this, do not send a private DM to a stranger on LinkedIn with anything flirty. You wouldn't do it if you met somebody in a restaurant or a grocery store. Why would you do it online? So the first thing you do if you identify somebody who's attractive to you is you follow them, and then you become a watcher. You follow them and you ask yourself what posts are they commenting on? How active are they on the site. What can you
learn about them by what they're posting? Just watch them for a while and it sounds creepy, but this is what people do. Okay a second. Now you're going to enlist your mutual connections. They have a thing on LinkedIn mutual connections. You click on them and you see who you know in common. So are you intimate enough with any of those people to get some information? Could you send them a simple message saying like, hey, so and so singled you know? Or could you introduce me or whatever?
You can? You see the network right there.
Now, when you get brave, you can finally send a private message. Now, please make it short and sweet and keep the topic on business at first. Include a mention of whatever your common interest is. You know, maybe you have the same you work for the same charity, you went to the same university, whatever, same hometown, whatever.
But don't be flirty.
It's creepy when a complete stranger sends a flirty kind of DM, and then all you do is you watch for their response. Do they reciprocate? When they reciprocate, do they extend the conversation by asking you a question? If they're Kurt short perfunctory or worse, completely silent. You got your answer, don't pursue further. Okay, silence is an answer. And then my suggestion would be getting the real world fast, find a professional pretense to get on the phone or
zoom and then you know. Then you got the advantage of visuals right and voice, and your brain will be able to pull in more information about whether this person is right for you. So then it gets back to real world dating. That's how you do it. Don't be creepy, keep it light, keep it on business. You want to keep them as a business contact if it doesn't work out, right,
But I totally understand why people are doing it. Alrighty, when we come back, let us talk on the same note about why your company needs a love contract, because there's some Shenana agains going on when it comes to love in real world workplaces.
You are listening to the Doctor wendywallsh 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 k I AM six forty we're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You know, in life and in our culture, rules are changing all the time, and it's really important that we keep up with the changes in our culture. Remember, the very existence of a human being is every day and sometimes in every moment, making a decision between your personal survival you might call it selfishness and the survival of the tribe. Because we are not meant to be alone.
We are wired to bond, we are wired to have social support. In fact, the worst thing for humans is isolation. We learned that during quarantine, and so we also have to keep our ear to the ground of the tribe says is acceptable. You know, before the break, I was talking about how LinkedIn is now one of the most powerful platforms where people are finding love, and I think that's sort of a digital way of people moving away
from being direct in workplaces. In workplaces, it is very important that we understand that people need to feel safe in a work environment. Now that doesn't mean that you cannot meet somebody at work, but it does mean that if you do make an overture to somebody, who better be on your level, meaning not somebody under you, and you're the manager, Okay, can't do that. That's sexual harassment
for sure. If you hold any kind of power over a person, influence even for a promotion, their paycheck, whatever, you can't ask.
Them out, just don't, okay.
But if they're in another department and on around the same level, of course you might meet somebody. However, you don't want them to feel uncomfortable. So if you make a little overture and it's not responded to, then move away. That's actually I think employment lawyers would agree with me that that's not considered sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is continual
or it is quid pro crow. If you don't do this, then you're not going to get this promotion, or it's like this toxic environment where you're constantly people are making comments about your body all the time. Right. I have a coworker, not here, not here, at another place who always mentions if I've lost weight or gained weight every time I see them, And I don't know if you're aware that women lose and gain four or five pounds on a regular basis. That's just our life. That's what
women do, and it irritates me every time. So I finally de tend to gently say, hey, you know, nowadays we don't talk about women's bodies at all in the workplace.
It just like I said, it real sweet and cute and he stopped. So there you go.
So many companies to protect themselves from all the sexual harassment lawsuits that have flown around is they write a love content tract for their employees. Now, these things have been used for decades, but since the Me Too movement in twenty seventeen, their use is pretty widespread in a
lot of industries. It's essentially a legal document. It's signed by two employees who are having a romantic relationship, and your original employment contract might say something like if you enter into a romantic relationship in the workplace, you must report it to HR and then you will be asked to sign a love contract. The whole reason it's designed to protect the company from claims right and also from other coworkers witnessing. Would you guys get going on and
calling that a hostile work environment. There is nothing more uncomfortable when you're trying to get your job done to see two colleagues canoodling over by the water cooler. So the love contract might have rules about that too, So The love contract should prohibit all kinds of sexual harassment as I mentioned, including quid pro quo and toxic environment. They also make you both admit that the relationship is consensual and that it won't have a negative impact on
your work at all. It also may include the possibility of department transfer. So if you do fall in love with the office and you do report it to HR as you were told you're supposed to do, one of you might have to be transferred. That might just be a rule. At our company, their HR department says, I mean, I'm not talking about our company, iHeart. I mean they're
whatever high hypothetical company I'm talking about. Their HR department might say, here, at our company, as soon as you admit that you're in a romantic relationship, one of you've got to go, not leave the company, but will facilitate a transfer. It also this istant important part. So relationships at the office usually aren't so bad until it ends right, and then people don't want to work with the person and it's a.
Toxic environment there.
So the love contract might include things about what happens that ends that protects employees from inappropriate conduct retaliation.
Also, of course, love.
Contracts are going to include limitations on public displays of affection at the office.
This is gross. Don't be kissing in the hallway, that's just weird.
So according to research, there are plenty of reasons why HR departments need to have love contracts. One study showed that one in four employees are open to having an office romance, and one in five married couples in America actually met at work. So even if you do lay down the law and attempt to say enforce a no workplace.
Dating at all rule, that rule is going to be broken.
There are exceptions in love contracts, like you can't date subordinates. That's a lose lose for the subordinate. You got to know that. And also remember, love gets messy. There's gossip around the office. It's going to happen when it starts. There could be envy, jealousy, resentment.
Ugly breakups.
This can be a big problem for companies and for HR departments. So it's really important that to avoid all this drama that companies set up some specific guidelines.
I personally think it's a great idea.
I think in everybody's employment of contract it should be Look, if you date anybody at the office. You've got to disclose it to us, and if you don't, then that could lead to termination of your contract. And then if you do, you'll be asked to sign a love contract in some way. Let's face it, workplace romances are land mines, okay, but we're doing it like one in four people, right, it's so crazy.
All right.
When we come back, I'm going to go to my social media and I'm going to be answering some of.
Your relationship questions.
The handle everywhere is at doctor Wendy Walsh, at Dr Wendy Walsh, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok wherever. Just send me a message. I'm not going to say your name on air, we'll keep it private, but send me a question. I'll be happy to answer it. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty We 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.