This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k I AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app KFI AM six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show producer Kayla. How are you this week? I am wonderful. How are you good, Raoul? How you doing excellent? Did you work all weekend? All weekend? Oh? Oh yeah, there's a lot of news. I heard a lot. Michael Krocher, welcome back. Haven't seen you
in ages. Thank you so much. It's been a minute. Ere yeah, and it's been a busy day, busy couple days, I see. So I just want to be the one who's in the middle. If you're new to my show. By the way, I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor. I've written three books on relationships, done a dissertation on attachment theory, and in the last few years have been very worried about the polarization of America. I have been
very concerned because here's the thing. When you go to your grocery store, when you go to the gas station. When you go to the gym, did you know you walk among the other team and you get along, don't you? You get along just fine. In fact, you go to dinner parties with the other team. But for some reason, all it takes is one person to say something that sounds like it's on the other side of the
political aisle from you, and you start to dislike them. For years, when I watched, for instance, people fighting on my comment streams on Facebook, I would say something silly like, if you guys are fighting, Russia's winning, hah. But now I understand what's been happening with social media, international infiltation and the bots. They want us hating each other. And I want us to come together over this tragedy. An American life was lost a
firefighter protecting his family. Two other people were injured, three if you include former President Trump, who was the target of this assassination. And I want everyone to please stop talking about whether it was this or that or how did it. This is not acceptable in this country. We need to have intelligent
discourse. We need to understand that we are all far more alike than not, and the best way to have conflict is to take your emotions, funnel them through your prefrontal cortex, turn them into something verbal, rational, a narrative logical. Whether you're having interpersonal problems with your lover or your mother or your boss, it is up to you to not be triggered. It's up to you to take the higher road and try to understand. I want us
all to practice this second this sentence. Help me understand why you have this opinion. You know, I was actually out at a dinner party this week and they were talking about music and art, and somehow the conversation turned a little bit into politics. And when it became clear after two sentences that one person at the table had a different political view than the other five people, we switched it back to music. But why do we have to do that?
Why couldn't we have turned and said, oh, help us understand why you have this opinion. I want to know you better, I want to know about your experience. I have said many times in the last few years that the arguments we have in America are less about right and left, blue and red. They are more about rural and urban. And if you know me, you know that I own a farm in an urban area, and I also a farm in a rural area, and I also live in an
urban area. In one home I drive a pickup truck, and another home, I drive a tesla. And I hear the language in the social events and in the grocery stores in both places. And I will tell you this that the needs of people who live in rural areas are very different than the needs of people who live in urban areas. You might be listening to me right now on a ranch somewhere, and you know what I'm saying. You might be listening to me in Trader Joe's or Whole Foods and drive into there,
hopefully not airone. No, I'm sorry, this is expensive, okay, guys, And you might be thinking, what could they need different? They don't need their guns? Oh yeah, have you ever had a bear show up on your ranch? Honestly, act, this stuff happens to lots of people in America. So without debating all the policies, whether it's gun control, abortion or whatever, I don't even want to get into debating the policies. I just want to say, we need to understand each other more.
We need to stop and love each other more. I talk about love for a good reason. Because it is the thing that brings us happiness, joy, security and meaning in our lives. It is more important than anything, and it's most important that we learn to love each other right now, especially those who think differently than us. Speaking of somebody who preached love, I was very sad to learn that this week one of my heroes, doctor
Ruth Westheimer, passed away at the age of nineteen ninety six. Did you know When she started on New York radio, they gave her a Sunday night show to talk about sex, and near the end of her career, she used to get mad when people would say that she was a sex therapist, because I'm not a sex therapist. I'm a therapist and I just want to talk about relationships. So when people say I talk about sex a lot,
I always say never unless it's in the context of a relationship. She was much more about the plumbing and knew far more about the plumbing than I did. But I know about the psychological pieces that lead to the league in the plumbing if there were I don't know about this metaphor. It's not going anywhere. I want to say something about doctor Ruth that I learned this week as I was reading some of her biographies. One is, did you know she's
a survivor of the Holocaust. She was only ten years old and in Germany they were sending it was called the Kindertransport, they were sending young children to safer countries, and they sent her to Switzerland to a school, a boarding school, at the age of ten. She never saw any of her family members ever again. They all reportedly died in Auschwitz. She eventually went to Paris, studied the soborn, married a French guy, and then she went
to Israel. She lived there and anyway, she ended up in New York and met the love of her life, mister Westeimer, and had a very long marriage, two children. She became a US citizen, and her advice was so beautiful, partly because it was delivered in the voice with a strong German accent, who sounded like a grandmother. And most of us can at of a certain age, can remember the first time we heard doctor Ruth on the radio, and I was, you know, so I should tell you
that. When I started this job ten years ago at KFI, our program director Robin Bertoluchi sat me down. She's brilliant, and she said, okay, here's the thing. You can talk about anything, but you better use anatomically correct language. And I was just using a metaphor, wasn't it, Kaylin? Am I going to get fired for plumbing? Oh we'll see if we have a meeting. Okay, we have a meeting on Monday. Yeah,
about the plumbing out of four uh so? But doctor Ruth did that, and then some right she talked about things that would curl your hair. I mean, Kayla, honestly, I don't even think I could say them on the radio. Right now, you make me want to do a deep dive Old Ruth segments from New York long before. I'm trying to think what is anatomical correct? No, I just don't know what for a sexual intercourse? No rimming like eating? Oh see can eat? Okay, it would
be oral sex. I think we should just check. I'm so sad. I don't know. Anyway, she talked about that before anybody did. Wrap it up, wrap it up. This is dangerous for going into dangerous or the scs on the boat. Oh my goodness, with a perfect gem in grandmother advice. You gotta hear her. She's amazing. Is it like tips and tricks or how to do it right, yes, and how to do it safely all right. She was pro pro sexual health programming. She was
yeah, everything, she was amazing. When I got out here in nineteen eighty eight from the East Coast, and I was in my I lived my car for about five months, and so I had on the radio all the time, and I discovered KFI back in nineteen eighty eight, and she was she had a show that was on here on KFI from New York. Oh, that's right, she told me in that interview that she started on KFI.
Yeah. And when I first started here, we used to have carts all around the room that had doctor Ruth's name on the cards for the intros and outros, and it was just the coolest thing to connect the two. She was such a pioneer, such a pioneer, and such a sad loss to us. Anyway, I'm glad she blazed the trail for people like me and many other people. And we have moved past just sex. Now we talk about sex in context of relationships. And on that note, when we
come back, let's talk about your marriage and how secure it is. Well. According to research, there are two ways to tell if you have a cure marriage. I'll explain when we come back. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on KFI AM six forty were live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty AFI Am six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. Well, you can have one without the other. You can have love without marriage.
You can have marriage without love. Sadly, but you know what, before I say this, I just want to say that, you know it's absolutely okay for your marriage to mature into something called mature companion. At love, there's less lust, there may be less affection, but there's respect and there's
a feeling like you've accomplished a lifetime together. You know, when I was a kid, I used to spend my summers, many summers going to say on my grandparents farm on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and my parents were probably happy for the break. Drop us off at the farm, come back a few weeks later, and whenever we went there as a family, my grandparents slept in one bedroom of this four bedroom farmhouse, but whenever the kids
were there alone my grandma had her own bedroom. She never slept in there, And I thought, it's this a secret I'm supposed to keep. Am I not supposed to tell my mom and dad grandma and grandpa don't sleep together? Like I had never heard of such a thing. Of course, I was eight, ten, twelve, fourteen years old. They had mature companion at love. They raised eight children, They ran a farm together. The bed wasn't big enough for two old people anyway, right, It's okay.
Nobody was divorcing. They weren't worried about being in a French maid's costume and swinging from chandeliers. Come on, it's okay for a relationship to mature into a beautiful companionship. They weren't fighting, they weren't disrespectful to each other. They had just moved into their own rooms, had their own division of labor, if you will, in the household. So you probably know that in
just a few weeks, I'm so nervous I am getting married. If you have not seen my wedding proposal, my marriage proposal to my fiance Julio, it is Where is it? It's on my YouTube, Yeah, it's on my YouTube channel. In fact, I think if you just google the words doctor Wendy Welsh proposes to boyfriend, it comes up everyone. It's all kinds of people. That right, you can see the whole story. But I
have been thinking more and more about how to have a secure marriage. In fact, on the way here today, I said to Julio, are you still sure you want to marry me? I'd be what if I turn out to be a crazy person? Now we've been together four months? Four months for okay, I'm going to rename myself Wendy Biden because I've been miss speaking. Well, you've been doing a lot of wedding planning and a lot of physical labor, so it's going to have an effect on your cognitive I think
you're not seen now like him. Just yet, I feel like I'm getting there. Didn't I say that doctor Ruth lived ninety six years? She lived, she lived ninety six years, not nineteen ninety six years. She lived ninety six years. Four more years. She would have hid a century. So I said to him, what if I turn out to be crazy? And he said, I think I would have known by now we've been together four years. So I don't know about him, But who knows? What
could happen the day after the wedding anyway. So I've been reading a lot about secure marriages, and particularly I like studies from academic journals, as you know, not just websites with blogs. And here's a new study published in a journal called Personal Relationships, and it examined the factors protecting couples from marital
strain. Okay, marital strain happens to everybody at some point. It's a kind of distress conflict that comes from all kinds of things, like interpersonal differences that means just arguments, right, because you're different, financial, press,
sexual what do you call it? When one a low desire, high desire or whatever, balancing caregiver roles, or dealing with all the extended family, the mother in law issues right, or any major life transitions including menopause, including childbirth, including god forbid, if somebody gets sick and there's a health issue. Right. So this research found that there are two protective factors that
can actually safeguard you against marital strain. And what these factors do is they create what I like to call resilience heartiness, emotional resilience that creates a deeper bond between the partners. All right, let's talk about what they are. Number One, If you do this, you have a secure marriage. You prioritize emotional intimacy in spite of the challenges. So let's talk about emotional intimacy.
The research has shown, at the end of the day, no matter how much money you have, no matter where your health is like, no matter whatever, emotional intimacy is the glue that keeps people faithful and connected. And that's that real sense of closeness, deep closeness where you really feel connected with your partner. Emotional intimacy involves a whole lot of trust. You literally trust your partner, but you also understand your partner, and you also share
everything you know. People say, oh, isn't it okay to lie to your spouse about some things, Well, then you don't have emotional intimacy. Emotional intimacy is being completely honest all the time, even with the prickly subjects, telling them everything. It doesn't mean criticizing them, but telling them your
response to their behavior. Perhaps, so, when you've got emotional intimacy, it means that both partners are willing to be vulnerable with each other, I mean share their deepest thoughts, their emotions, their fears, their dreams. But here's the caveat. They're willing to do this because they know they're not going to be just they're not going to be laughed at. So that's prioritizing emotional intimacy. This creates resilience in a relationship. All right. Here's another
one. The other one you are generous with your empathy. Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand and be sensitive to all the emotional states of other people. Now, I know some people have to learn empathy. Some people are born with a natural amount of empathy. Some people too much actually, because you have to have boundaries otherwise you become a doormat if you're like, oh, they need that, and they need this, and they need that,
and what do you need? All right? So empathy is about seeing the feelings in others, showing that you understand and you see them, and empathy can be learned. You know, there was this one research study I saw one time, and it was about teenagers and juvenile detention. You know, teenagers who have been involved with the criminal just system. Often they become hardened. Right, they're not even aware of their own feelings. Let alone
having empathy to other people. So I think this was a Canadian study. I remember reading. What they did is they took these teenagers, these hardened criminal juvies, and they put them in preschools with little two year olds who were mostly preverbal, and they asked them to just watch the kids and identify what they were feeling. Now, they were given emotional language ahead of time, a little lesson, so they had a whole bunch of vocabulary they could
use. And all they were asked is what do you think that kid is experiencing? And they literally were teaching empathy to kids who had never learned empathy. And guess what, you can do it yourself. You can learn to recognize feelings and others. You can download from the internet a whole list of emotional vocabulary and you can start to well, it starts actually by recognizing the
feelings in yourself and then trying hard to read the faces of others. You see, when partners have stress, if you can show empathy to your partner, then that tells your partner that they're being understood and they're cared for, and that alone reduces the stress. So when we come back, have you ever had that feeling you meet somebody and you just click. Maybe you call
it chemistry. Actually scientists call it a positive limbic response. Let's talk about this when we come back, because we don't have it with everybody, and sometimes it's completely opposite. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Waalsh Show on KFI AM six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. KAFI Am six forty, you have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy
Walsh Show. So my darling, Julio was away with his family for the last week. He went to his son's college graduation in Scotland. His mom was there, everybody was there, and it was our longest separation in the four years we've been together. Twelve nights. I was up at my farm most sleep, but I noticed something. I had trouble getting to sleep.
I had trouble staying asleep. I had trouble sleeping in and I started to think about it and I was like, oh my goodness, twelve nights we've been separated and I haven't slept more than six hours consecutively and some nights just five hours. And I was like, that is just weird because I used to sleep like I love my beauty sleep, I love my nine hours.
Maybe that's the problem why I'm losing my beauty, Kilin, Maybe just not getting the sleep you are not if you think you're losing your beauty, I'm going to digress and change the subject, because what since I went there? Okay, so up, you know, heading into my wedding, I have girlfriends actually saying to me, so, you need to get some botox before your wedding. I'm like, have we normalized this plastic surgery life so much?
So? I had this other conversation with a girlfriend this week who said that her friends are pressuring her to get a full on facelift and they will take her there and they know the best doctors and they'll nurse her after. And I said to her, whatever happened to aging gracefully? Whatever happened to like? I said to her, you know what, I was really hot for decades and I've done that. I have done that doesn't interest me really hot? Do you know you sent me pictures of you bad? Ten out
of ten? But I literally feel like I've done that. I don't need to be that. I do love that my mind and my voice are still being utilized in the world, and that is important to me. But this whole reliance on physical beauty, in fact, it used to bother me when people would compliment me on my looks, because I think that's not me. I didn't do anything. I was just born that way, Like that's you don't really know me then. And so anyway, ladies, I am not
getting any botox before the wedding. As another girlfriend said, it doesn't matter. You can touch up all the pictures anyway. I'm like, oh really, so it's about filters and plastic surgery. Okay, back to me not sleeping for twelve nights. So Julio comes back. We hug each other immediately at the airport, and I feel something in my body like not arousal. My whole body starts to relax, like just relax. Caleb, why are you laughing? Did you think I was feeling that? My mind did go
there? Said it. If I was twenty five, it would have been not now, Okay, I just felt this deep sense of relaxation, right, and that night I slept like eight and a half hours, just solid, right. And I've always said, like, I have these friends in Toronto who have a company. You should check it out called instant Chemistry dot com. And it's a cheek swab saliv attest. You spit in a tube, you mail it to them and they could tell if you will have genetic
compatibility in a relationship. And I always say to Julio, we need to do this instant Chemistry because we're gonna get the highest score they've ever seen. And he said no, because what if we don't. I just don't want to know. And I'm like, but we do, we know? Uh So, anyway, do you ever feel sometimes there are people out there that you just click with and sometimes you call it a chemistry. Maybe you feel like you're just on the same wavelength with somebody you meet, You feel in
sync vibing. Well, researchers would say that's because you have a positive limbic response. Okay, let me break it down for you. Our limbic systems our brain system. It's composed of four parts of our brain. The amygdala. Now, the amygdala is the fear center and it's where fight or flight gets processed. Here, the hypothalamis, and that's where we process our bodily feelings like hunger and thirst. Our thalamus where we track the sensory input,
and our hippocamist campus sorry used to control our emotional responses to stimuli. You put all those together, you call it the limbic system. Imagine this. Your limbic system helps you react to the world emotionally. It's making a whole bunch of assessments. Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? Am I afraid? Is this dangerous? What is my body experiencing? What is my emotion to my heart experiencing? This is your limbic system.
So when you have a positive limbic response, you feel energized. You have this connection to somebody else. It's like an invisible emotional dance that the two of you do where you connect now doesn't have to be sexual. You can have a positive limbic response. I actually sat on the plane this week and I came back with a retired police officer. It was very interesting story because he ran Pacific Division for years and he told me lots of stories because that's
my area. So I was really fascinated with everything he said. And he was an extrovert and he was chatty. He's also a teacher, so his stories were good and I was just enthralled with all his stories. We were having a positive limbic response. Was it sexual? It was just mood boosting, a mood boosting interaction where we were kind of in harmony with each other. Now in an intimate relationship. Though, when you do have a positive
limbic response that is also physical. Think of the big hug at the airport I had with Julio. It creates something called coregulation. It's where you help regulate each other's not only emotional state, but physiological state. Julio was the first boyfriend I've had it in my many, many decades of life, where we need to be touching at all times, toes in bed, hands, when we're walking on the street, holding hands, and something happens to both
our bodies when we're touching. Today, we went for a picnic. We met during COVID right there was no restaurants open, and we did a lot of picnics, and he said, let's go to the very first park we went to when I held your hand for the first time, and we went
and we just laid down on a blanket and had a picnic. I was mad because I don't really eat much bread, but about a really good crusty baguette, and then I forgot it and left it on the counter, and I was so bummed because I had the olive oil to dip it in and everything. I was so bummed. But no beg yet. I'm gonna eat it before I go to bed. That's I'm gonna do. I love I love bread. I try not to eat too much, get a little poofy. Yeah, I'm not gonna get plastic surgery, but I'm also not going
to get puffy anyway. We don't feel a positive limbic response with everybody, but when we do, it feels particularly special. And that's why you might call it your soulmate or instant chemistry or whatever it is. It's actually something physiological that's happening because you have this connection, and it's really cool when it
happens. Hey, when we come back, I want to try to answer the question, and there's research that for this, of course, about how honest people are in their dating profiles, and in which parts of the country are they more honest than others, and what do they lie about. Oh, you're going to be surprised right now, Let's go to the twenty. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walshot the 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. You know, one of the many jobs
I have in the gig economy, have many many jobs. I've been in the gig economy before there even was a gig economy because I have attachment anxiety, which means when it comes to intimate relationships, I have had a fear of putting all my emotional eggs in one basket because I mean, what if you break up? What if something happens right? And in my career it was the same way. There was only one time that I had one contract.
It was at Channel thirteen News. I was a weekend anchor, a weekday reporter and it was an exclusive contract, meaning I wasn't allowed to work for anybody else. And I was there for three years. And let me tell you, it felt like prison. Some people think those contracts are security, but not me. It felt like prison. And so I've been in the gig economy anyway, I've resolved my attachment issues. You know that I'm in love with my Julio. We're getting married. Everything's great. I'm a
one man woman. But I still have many jobs. So that was a long preamble to say that one of my many jobs is as an ambassador for a website called datingadvice dot com. And so they do a lot of procurement of data on mating habits of the American single and they came out with a new study this week that I found really interesting, attempting to answer the question
how honest are people's dating profiles? Okay, so they did this big survey I don't know how many thousands of people as they do, and they asked singles to rate how honest they were. Now, on average, singles rate it the honesty of their online dating experiences. You ready for this at a moderate of about one point five out of ten, meaning if you rate your profile as being a ten, it means one hundred percent honest. If you rate it being a one, it means it's one hundred percent full of lies.
Five point one was the average. That means half of the stuff that you see in most dating profiles is a lie. Lie, Lie Lie. Now let's talk about where in the country, according to this survey by datingadvice dot Com people are more honest. Turns out it's South Dakota. They had an impressive seven point five out of ten. They have more integrity. I think who was the worst. I know you'd like to think it's La. La wasn't that great? It's Rhode Island the least honesty, scoring only three
point four out of ten in honesty. All right, let me explain all this to you. First of all, evolutionary psychologists who have studied mating practices mating strategies around the globe have long known that deception is a common practice in made attraction. We all lie a little bit to make ourselves look better. It's because they're competition for mates. And when you have high competition, then you know, people embellish their own traits a little bit because they want to
appear more attractive. So, according to research that I recall reading from the Kinsey Institute, men are more likely to lie about I don't even need to tell you, you know, right, Men are most likely to lie about height, hair, and income. We know what it means when you're wearing a hat in every single picture. Dude, It's okay, we love ald men, just take the hat off. Women. Women are more likely to lie about their age or their body weight, and this has evolutionary history in
it, right. Traditionally, through the evolution of our species, women like men who have resources that they can help support babies, and we like tall men because that's all good genes, et cetera. And men tend to like women that are more in their fertility window age and who are you know, have a nice hip to waste ratio, so they have more estrogen and there's more likely that they'll be able to reproduce healthy babies. So this is just
hardwired in us from our evolution. So this, this survey from Dating Advice, just supports all this, right, This is cross cultural human behavior that we all lie a bit. However, because of the anonymity of a digital dating profile, the opportunities to deceive are even greater on a dating app then they might be. You know, you're in a bar and you're telling somebody a little lie, etc. So looking at the data, here's one of
the things I noticed. People who live in less populated states or states with few urban centers are less likely to deceive, and people who live in states like New York and California or their big urban centers, they're more likely to lie on their profiles. So this leads me to believe that people lie if there's a or they lie less if they think they're going to be discovered. Right. If it's in a smaller place, smaller population, somebody might know,
you, know, of your cousin whatever. In big cities, of course, there's more anonymity. But here's what disturbed me the most. Remember I told you evolutionary psychologists say men lie about height and income when women lie about age and body weight. Well, according to the research by dating advice dot Com, thirty two percent of the lies have to do with relationship status.
Okay, so this tells you that you need to do a full assessment of potential mates because many of the people on dating apps, who supposedly should be single if they're on a dating app, may actually be married or at least committed to somebody else. You know, there's also other research I want to remind you about that. The Kinsey Institute discovered this a while ago that one of the biggest turn offs for potentially for single people is lies on a
dating app. You see, love is about trust. Love is about sharing truths with each other and being vulnerable. If you start out a relationship with an untruth or a betrayal, it makes it so difficult to build trust. You know, years ago, I did a lot of dating app coaching, helping people do their profiles, and the most common thing people would want to do is say, well, let me just lie about my age for the search engines, because they're not going to search my age group because I'm too
old what they'll be searching for. And then I'll just tell them in the first text, actually I'm older, let me tell you. I always told people not to do that, and the one time it happened to me, literally, I went out a date with a guy who said he was sixty five, and then I met him in the restaurant and he looked fine, and I probably would have continued to date him, but then he told me he was seventy three. I was like, the age wasn't the issue,
it was the lie. The lie bothered me so much, I couldn't get past it. I couldn't go any further. So I'm telling you just be truthful and authentic. You're not looking to impress four hundred people. You're looking for one person who's into you and your perfect and perfect self. That's what you're looking for, all right. Hey, when we come back, I am heading to social media and I am taking your calls. The phone number is one eight hundred five to zero one KFI. If you've got a relationship
question, you give me a call. That's one eight hundred five two zero one five three four. I'll also head over to social media and answer some of my ms. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on KFI AM six forty are 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