@DrWendyWalsh is talking the latest news topics. (09/08) Hour 1

the adults of cal State Channel Islands. And tomorrow we're actually going to do a fun thing in class, Kayla. I had all my students take a Meersbriggs personality test. I know they're pros and cons to that test, although lots of employers use it, and I tried to make productivity groups so that for the whole semester, the group that their work the small group in class they'll be working with, is like a perfect match compatibility wise and personality wise. Oh that should be nice. Yeah, it'd be

really interesting to see. So anyway, I spent half this today looking at spreadsheets trying to figure that out. I'm also obsessed with the science of love. I've written three books on relationships, did my dissertation on attachment theory, and I have been here for ten years reporting on the science of love. On KFI producer Kayla, do you remember we had a woman on a tragic story from New Jersey whose son died by suicide after a sextortion sextortion?

I do remember the case. He was a teenager, he was home alone, he just had his braces titan, and he was in pain. So he stayed home from school and met what he thought was a cute little girl online and then this person in Africa, so that they were gonna put these naked pictures of him everywhere and blah blah blah.

just an individual, will give makeup fake profiles. They'll go on and try to friend request a bunch of people in your group so it looks like a legitimate person that your friends know, and then they start chatting with you, whether it's on Facebook, Instagram, whatever, or the dating apps themselves right, and before you know it, with a romance scam, they get you to fall in love. And it's really easy to do because we're all wired to bond. And in fact, the drug called love is the most delusional

drug that we have. We actually there's lots of research on this. We are unable to discern well when we are high on love, and when that love is filled with our own fantasies of what could be and hope is even worse. So before you know it, with romance scams, this person at the other end, who they're pretending to be, claims that you know, they need money for you know, a family member surgery or plane fair to come over

or whatever, and people just start sending money. Well, with teenagers, it can be even more dangerous because teenagers are at a developmental stage of their brain where they are particularly susceptible to something called social evaluative threat, which means your teenager is always saying to you, mom, don't say that that's awkward, Mom, don't embarrass me, right, because they really are feeling deep shame and embarrassment more than the rest

of us. It's a developmental stage. And so some of these syndicates, many of them out of the country called Nigeria, target teenagers pretending to be young, attractive females and then they end up well getting the saying that they're going to post these pictures with families. So in twenty twenty two, a young teenager named Jordan de Maay. He played in Michigan. He was a high school football player. He was contacted online by what he thought was a pretty young woman

on Instagram. Since she seemed to be friends with people, this seventeen year old knew, they began chatting. Eventually she convinced him to take a picture of his you know what with his face in it, So send some nude pictures and then this person wrote, I have screenshot all of your followers and tags and can send your nudes to family and friends until it goes viral. All you

have to do is cooperate with me. Well, this poor kid was so scared he sent all the money he had to savings account three hundred dollars, but his extorters continued to harass him. At one point, they even encouraged him to take his own life if he didn't have enough money to pay. His last text was sent to his mom. It simply read, mother, I love you. Jordan was found dead of a self inflicted gunshot wound. There's

some good news here. A year later, the Nigerian government finally began to cooperate with American investigators and are starting to allow extradition of those people charged with operating sextortion rings. And this week a federal judge in Michigan sentenced two brothers they were aged twenty one and twenty four, to seventeen and a half years in prison for their roles in extorting money for more than one hundred victims. And we don't know how many deaths. We know for sure

the death of Jordan Debay. Two others are currently being extra guided extradited to Pennsylvania. The biggest message here is We're going to track you down. Now, We're going to hold you accountable. Did you know in the a two year period from twenty one to twenty three, the FBI got more than thirteen thousand reports of sex stortion and more than twenty teenagers took their own lives because of this. This is why we have to talk to our teenagers

about this. We have to tell our kids that, you know, to be wiser online. But also it's not their fault. Is something like this happens? All right. I also want to move to other news, which is Nicole Kidman's new film, Baby Girl. How much time do I have? I know I've been rattling away here only one minute, So I just want to say this. So Nicole Kidman's new movie, which is called Baby Girl, I already have a problem with the title. She's grown ass woman. My love to

say that on the radio. Oh no, no, how old is you?

Baby Girl is the movie. She Nicole Kidman plays a breadwinner in her family, a hard charging CEO, and apparently the film opens with her faking and orgasm with her husband. Then Hobby falls asleep. Now, women, this is the first

thing we would think to do, right. She gets up, runs to her laptop opens it up because women are so visually wired, finds the most sn M pornography she can where a woman's being beaten, abused, gagged, whatever, and has an orgasm that way, and then later in the movie there she finds a young man at the office who will do it to her. In real life, the director of the movie is quoted as saying, every woman

deserves a good orgasm. Stop right there, producer, Kayla. Remember we had the anthropologist or evolutionary biologist on the show who told us that anatomically, there are percentage of women who literally cannot ever have an orgasm physiologically, that it has nothing to do with you know, this problem in their head. It just has to do with the length of the glitterists and how far it extends into the vagina.

here in the studio. In fact, and it's a very very small percentage. And in fact, most of the people he interviewed are the thousands of people he did for his surveys, said they would never want their fantasies to actually happen in real life. And there's Nicole Kidman watching Like. The bottom line is, why are we raving about a movie about a female with power who only feels happy when she's dominated by a man? All right, I'll stop, I'll see the movie. I'll see the movie later and

then I'll figure it out. On that note, though, this week I was contacted by one of the magazines I don't know, Glamour, Ask Man, whatever, Men's health. I don't. I get asked for quotes on a regular basis, and they asked the question, when is the right time to let your new partner know how much money you make? Now, now this question is specifically I think it was glamorous for women, right, Maybe it was Cosmo. I think it

was Cosmo. Now I'm thinking about it. Sorry everybody, but you know, so much has changed in the last few decades. You know, the average female outpaces the American male in terms of educational attainment. Women now make up the majority of the American workforce. An economic clout is fast becoming the purview of the feminine. But with this new economic power, I believe come a few landmines in our love lives.

First of all, according to evolutionary psychologists, who definitely have turned human mating strategy into a science, they believe our ancient biology rules. In other words, we're walking in cave women bodies that have not caught up with these cultural changes. For instance, the more money a woman makes, the more she wants her male partner to make too, So on an unconscious level, for some women, it doesn't feel natural. I hate that word natural. I made my fingers into

quotation marks right there. It doesn't feel natural to fit in with today's standards. Newsflash, ladies, there are not enough guys to go around who make more money than you, So you're going to have to deal with that patriarchy that's floating around inside you. But there's something else. There's also a new breed of lothario who loves the new social order and is hell bent on swooning a woman to get access to her purse. I don't know if you remember. A couple of years ago I did of

one of my many viral videos on TikTok. I shared a story of my own financial abuse, and literally thousands of women weighed in with their own story of men love bombing them to steal money from them. It was awful. They capitalize on women's empathy, so when they come with their sad stories of whatever, women are so quick to open their purse because they don't want to lose the relationship. So when is the right time to tell a dude

how much money you make? Well, in my opinion, there's three questions you have to ask yourself, and if you can say yes to each of these questions, then I think it's okay to tell him how much money you're making. First question, will I still feel attracted to him if I learn he makes substantially less money than me? Right, because in the first few dates, you know they're being all showy, they're picking up checks. But you have to

really question your own self about that. Second question, does this guy have enough self esteem to handle the fact that I might make more? Because there's research to show, sadly, that when a woman makes more money than her husband, he's more likely to cheat because apparently guys associate financial value with manhood. So you have to really spend some time getting to know if his self confidence is real or not. And finally ask yourself this, do I deeply

trust him with this information? Do I really know his values and his morals? Take some time, Take some time before you divulge this information. Ladies, all right, when we come back, Couples, especially young couples, are using technology in their relationships a lot. Let's talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of using tech in your relationships. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on KFI AM six forty were live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

Who knew a wedding reunion? Two months later, just because it was so much fun. Alrighty using technology in your intimate relationships. Now, I have always said that text is dangerous in relationships, especially if you're sharing really intimate stuff that could potentially be misinterpreted, right, because a text is like listening to your favorite band without the drummer or the lead singer. You kind of got the riff going, but it doesn't really have a beat or soul. And

that's what text is. It's missing vocal tone, body language, facial expression, it's missing at all, and you've got to decipher and read into those words. Well, even though I have been saying this for a very long time, I obviously it has been falling on deaf ears because young people, particularly and I have daughters who are in that space, use technology as their primary source of communication in their intimate relationships. So let's talk about the good, the bad,

and the ugly. A new study just published in the journal, yes it's an academic journal called Personal Relationships interviewed one hundred and twenty one people aged eighteen through twenty five. One hundred and twenty one is not a huge number. I like studies that are thousands of people, but usually studies that involve. Thousands of people are for port Internet studies, so there's a lot of lying going on about who people are, et cetera. These were real interviews, so you

get a lot more in information from that. So first of all, here's a little reality check for everybody. Ninety five percent of young adults text duh. Ninety percent use social media to stay in touch. And get this, seventy five percent of young adults use at least five different kinds of social media. I don't even know that when we forget. We got Instagram, we got TikTok, we got Snapchat, we got YouTube. What's left Facebook? Oh, but young people

probably aren't using Facebook. Oh she's a little baby on Facebook? Maybe like Reddit? Does that count as some of those I love? Yeah? Twitter? Twitch? No? Oh? Twitter?

So I went on the other day when I was watching Oh, I think it was at the Democratic National you know, when they all got together that conference convention there whatever, and when Kamala Harris's sister got up to talk, Oh my goodness, she was a dead ringer for that female comedian, Rebecca Johnson. Have you ever seen Rebecca Johnson do it? She's one that started off with that famous

nail salon, a bit that she did that went totally viral. Anyway, they had the same cadence, the same mannerisms, And so I tweeted, is it still called the tweet if I ex died? I exed it. I don't get it. Yeah, you know. I pulled up both of their accounts and I said, don't you think blah blah blah. I can't remember her sister's name now, is a dead ringer for Rebecca Johnson. Angela Johnson, not Rebecca Angela Johnson, and look her out. Make sure it is Angela Johnson. Think is

Angela Johnson? Anyway, it never got shown to anybody because I used to be one of the people with the blue checkm and Elon Mosk took away the blue check mark. So now our tweets don't get they get seen by zero people unless we pay him money. Every month. Oh, Wendy, I know he were on Twitter. He did. It's a weird thing anyway, but I digress. Okay, So let's talk about the benefits of using text and other and you know,

talking on Snapchat or whatever to your lever. It can be more efficient communication because it allows partners to stay connected all day no matter where you are in the world or if you're working whatever. You can shoot them little text right. Also, younger people are using a wider range of expressive language. I forgot about this part. They're using mojis, videos, photos, memes, sending TikTok videos about how they feel about the person. So technology is actually providing

young people with more ways to express their feelings. Also another benefit, it's a way to initiate new relationships, right, Because people are dming each other on social media to meet each other. It can be a better way to maintain long distance relationships. And it can be much easier for young people because they're such scaredy cats to disclose

personal stuff. Right. There are people who will type something before they can actually say it out loud, which is bizarre to me because everything I type, I imagine someday it might be read by a judge. I'm always like, this is forever somewhere, it could be brought up.

I'm gonna say this. On the way here to work today, I was on the one on one freeway and Julia was driving, so I was a passenger and I got to look at the drivers in the three cars on my right as we passed them. All three dudes were just swiping on their phone. Their phone was on the steering wheel and they were swiping. I don't know, was it Tinder, was it Instagram? They were swiping. Okay, police officers, get on out there. They're all on the one on

one right now. Okay. Other downsides. Some young couples reported that because there is text available, they feel pressured to constantly communicate, and yes, they do misinterpret those texts because they're misreading it. Also, if you're using social media to let people know you like somebody by liking their pictures, that's a lot less privacy. Intimacy should grow in privacy, not in public. And also the big one meddling from outsiders.

You get comments from strangers that poor gymnasts there and her husband being attacked online just because people didn't think he's good enough for her or whatever. Whatever. You get all those comments from strangers that you have to deal with. And then also there are mate poachers lurking in your dms who are quick to try to grab your mate. Well you're not looking, so that's a downside. But anyway, it's being used. So let's figure out how to do it correctly. When we come back, how to break up

with somebody you're still in love with. Yeah, there could be good reason too, I'll explain. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show and KFI AM six forty We Live Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

calls and answering your social media questions. The phone number for after this segment is one eight hundred and five two zero one five three four. That's one eight hundred and five to two zero one KFI. But anyway, okay, I can relax. Now let's talk about how to break up with somebody who you still love. Now. I know that sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it. But let's think about that for a minute. Love is like a drug, and many people don't practice what I call what do I call it?

Intellectual love or rational love? You know, they sort of let the hormones take over. They're lovely hormones. Love is the best drug we have, I think. And so they will fall in love with somebody and then get deep into it and maybe even stay together for a period of time a year or two years, whatever, And then they ask the life questions, Oh do you want to have children? Oh? Where do you want to live in your life? Oh what kind of career would you like to have? Oh you don't want to work. You want

to go camping for your whole life. You don't want a house? Oh, oh dear. So what happens is some people fall deep into love and still realize that if they're going to meet their life goals, they have to break up with this person. And it can be particularly hard. Now I want you to know, and just by the way, I came up with this theory all by myself, so take it for what it's worth. But I think every

breakup as how many stages? About five stages. Okay, I see it happen, I've seen it, I've experienced it, I've felt it in my life. And here are the stages. The first is contemplating contemplation, I'll get it out. Contemplation. That's when you're on the verge of breaking up. You kind of undergo a little cost benefit analysis, like, well, if I stay with this person, it's going to be this is going to happen. If I don't, maybe I could find someone better, or I can meet my life

goals that they can't meet. What should I do? So it's this silent contemplation. Now this stage could go on for weeks, months, or years while you're trying to figure it out. But after that comes the confirmation stage. This is when you've made a decision to break up. But now you want to make sure you've made the right decision. So what you do is you start to tell your closest friends. Now you pick friends unconsciously. It's usually unconscious

who will confirm your feelings. So you're not going to go to your boyfriend's sister who's going to go, no, don't leave my brother, you'll hurt him. You're going to go to your bestie who never really liked him anyway, and you're going to say, hey, you know, I'm really thinking it's time to break up, and she's going to go, you know what, Let's do a girl's weekend, a wine weekend, and then we'll talk about it. This is great, right, So that's stage two, where you get confirmation from people

who you know will confirm you. Then you got to do a little bit of testing to see if being a single person is really going to work out for you. That means, before you end the relationship, you're going to quietly, without really breaking the rules, you're going to test your value in the mating marketplace. Uh huh. And you're either going to do it by just going innocently out with

single friends, whether you're a guy or girl. You're going to go out with same sex friends for a night on the tap and see if you get any reaction, just test it out, or you don't do anything. You just observe what it would be like, or you might, especially if you're a woman, post some kind of provocative picture on Instagram and see the reaction. See if you get any dms from people right, or maybe you will

even reach out to one of your backup mates. And if you do not have a backup mate, let me explain. Evolutionary psychologists say that almost every human has a backup mate. These are people that we think about, like maybe it's a coworker or maybe somebody we flirt with online that we think, you know, if it didn't work out with my person, maybe maybe it could work out with that person. So maybe you reach out to that backup mate. Again, don't cross any lines, you don't break any rules. You

just kind of test the waters a little bit. So if you've got confirmation from your friends, if you've tested the mating marketplace, it looks like the coast is clear. Things are going to be fine. Then comes the declaration phase, and this is where you declare your intention to end the relationship. Now, depending on the length of that relationship, your living arrangements, if there are children involved, et cetera.

These conversations may involve a couple's therapists. They may involve some back and forth and breaking up and getting back together. There's that stage, right, never ever, ever getting back together. But then you do, and then stage five is the final breakup, and that's you know, some psychological strategies. There's actually research to show that if you can only think of the bad in your ex it's easier to get

over them. So you spend a lot of time not looking back with rose colored glasses, but looking back with I'm so glad I'm not there, right, And you might go completely no contact because having triggers of them reminds you and it's harder to get over. Now here's the problem. If you're really still in love with somebody, all these stages of a break up become elongated, right, so, because

you're really not one hundred percent sure. And the biggest mistake that people make when they're trying to break up with a partner who they're still in love with is they say they do one of two things. They Others say, let's just take a break. I just need a break. Whenever anybody writes to me and says my partner wants to take a break, what does this mean, I always

say they're breaking up with you. They want to test their value on the mating marketplace, and if it doesn't go well, they want to know they can come back to you. There's no such thing as let's just take a break. The other thing people will do if they are still in love but need to break up because of long term goals is they will say, let's convert this to a friendship. I think we should just be friends. This never works out, It prolongs the breakup. You can't

just flip a switch, especially if your feelings are so strong. Right, well, how do you do that? On TikTok? Did you see what happened? Oh you didn't see some of the made hands like this, but it showed up like in the whole screen. Oh that's cool. Yeah, I don't know how to do that. I need to learn. Someone's gonna have to tell me anyway, So how can The biggest question I get asked, though, is in that stage where people

are in their contemplation stage. They will write to people like me in the DMS and they will say.

And one group they said, you must stay together for one more year, like you must clearly stay together for one more year. And the other group they said you must break up right away. And they caught up with them like a year later. Guess what they found out what the people The people who broke up were happier. Really, it just prolongs. If you're having thoughts of breaking up, then you know you shouldn't break up. You should break up, like just jump in if you're having If I believe

change is good, I agree change is good. Not that you should throw I mean there are things to consider. You know, I'm a big proponent of staying together for the children. There's research to show that that's a good thing. It's good for kids' health. Revolving Dora of parental figures not good for kids at all. So there are other extenuated circumstances. Okay, what else did I want to say? About that, Oh, the phone number. When we come back,

I'm going to be answering your relationship questions. Remember I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor. But I've written three books on relationships, did a dissertation on attachment theory, and i have a lot of life wisdom. Give us a call. The numbers one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. That's one eight hundred five two zero one KFI. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. Were 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.