Romantic Love, Solved

We put love on trial — literally. Drew and I squared off in a full debate over whether romantic love is overrated. I made the case that love is basically your brain's con man, a neurochemical hijacking designed to make you delusional about deeply flawed people, and that the most intoxicating relationships are often the most toxic. Drew fought back with the evidence that love is the foundation of social infrastructure, physical health, and long-term happiness. By the end, we came to a gentlemen’s agreement: a framework that explains why we're all chasing the wrong kind of love, and what the right kind actually looks like. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:21 Round 1: Love is the Brain's Conman 00:23:33 Round 2: Love as Social Infrastructure 00:43:48 Round 3: Love and Happiness 01:05:29 Round 4: Why We're Drawn to People Who Hurt Us ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Welcome back everybody to the Solved Podcast. I am bestselling author Mark Manson, and this is my intrepid co-host, producer, and today, opponent.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Your adversary.

• 0:13Mark Manson?

  Drew Birdy.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Here we go.

• 0:15Mark Manson?

  And today, we are putting love on trial. Now, there's a few reasons for this. We just did a massive solved episode on dating, and we went through all of the different factors that bring people together, why human courtship is so strange and long and complex and socially varied, why people date the wrong people for themselves, why they date the right people for themselves, what causes attraction. But one of the things that was conspicuously missing from that episode was a deep discussion of romantic love. And that's because we wanted to do this episode and ask the question, is love overrated? You hear all these tropes, all these cliches, that love is all you need, that love, all you need is love, love fixes

• 0:59Mark Manson?

  everything, love is blind, love, love, love, love, love. Is it true, though? So we're gonna do something a little bit different and interesting this episode, everybody. We are putting love on trial. I am going to be the prosecutor, and I'm gonna be making the argument that love is completely overrated and causes, of course, I'm just, I'm just a bucket of fucking glee over here. I'm gonna be arguing that love arguably causes more problems than it solves. And then Drew, famous for being a romantic.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Resident romantic.

• 1:32Mark Manson?

  Yes. Is going to be defending love.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:35Mark Manson?

  We're gonna go back and forth, each of us, we're gonna take turns making arguments, and then the other person will have a rebuttal. And then at the end, we will try to come together and find some sort of compromise and decide, is love overrated, or am I just a cold, black-hearted soul?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Cherry's out on that.

• 1:56Mark Manson?

  Stay tuned. More at six.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  That's another, another episode, but yeah.

• 2:01Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:09Mark Manson?

  So getting right into it, as the prosecution, I will begin with one damning claim against love, and that is that love is our brain's con man.

• 2:23Mark Manson?

  Love is a neurochemical hijacking that is designed, specifically designed, to override our better judgment and cause us to become delusional and misrepresent the people that we care about in our minds. In 2005, Helen Fisher, who's somebody that we're going to be talking about quite a bit, excellent researcher, especially around the topic of romantic love, her and her colleagues put people who self-reported being, quote, intensely in love into an FMRI machine and showed them photos of the people that they were obsessed about, and the ventral tegmental area, the brain's dopamine factory, lit up like a slot machine. And when I say slot machine, I literally mean slot machine

• 3:04Mark Manson?

  because it was, it was the same reaction that you see with addicts. In fact, they even wrote in the paper that the region of the brain fired and lit up in the same way that it lights up when you show cocaine addict cocaine. So-

• 3:18Speaker 01

  A little dramatic, but okay.

• 3:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 3:23Mark Manson?

  I've definitely felt, I've definitely had some people in my life that felt like cocaine. Yeah, you know, I'm not gonna lie. So there is this addictive quality-

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:31Mark Manson?

  -to romantic love, and I think we've all felt it to a certain extent. You know, if you think about times that you've been madly in love with somebody, you obsess over them, you think about them all the time, you like scheme and connive ways to see them again, or to get closer to them, or like a cocaine addict, you're even willing to blow up your whole fucking life for them.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Do a lot of stupid shit, yes.

• 3:52Mark Manson?

  Yes, you do a lot of stupid shit. Now, what's interesting is that these parts of the brain that were lit up, they were not the emotion centers, they were the motivation system of the brain. So what it suggests, counter to what most people assume, is that love is not necessarily a feeling, it's a drive, it's a motivation, it's a, it's a, it's a primal state like hunger or thirst. So it's not that you feel love for your partner, it is you are hungry for your partner, Drew.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, this is, yes, this is true. This is true. Your motivational centers, like the ventral tegmental area is, it's full of dopamine. Dopamine is, like we've discussed before, it's the wanting, not the liking, it's motivation. It's not the actual reward system, it's the motivation to seek out reward. Okay?

• 4:47Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Sure. One little point I'll make, right?

• 4:51Mark Manson?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Okay, it's similar.

• 4:52Mark Manson?

  Before I continue.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Before you continue, yes, cocaine and love share a lot of like neurological mechanisms. I get that. Is that love's fault or is that cocaine's fault though? Okay? This is what I, like, people are like, oh, love is an addiction. Well, this is like cocaine. It's like, well, cocaine came much, much for longer after love was on the scene.

• 5:13Mark Manson?

  I'll just note that cocaine does not have a great track record with people.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fair.

• 5:17Mark Manson?

  So, the point of all of this is that because romantic love is more of a drive rather than a feeling, if you look at what psychologically happens to us, towards the things that we are driven towards or motivated for, is that we backwards rationalize the reasons that we want them.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:36Mark Manson?

  Right? And this is true of all things. Like, this is if, if I decide that I want a Rolls Royce and that that's what's going to solve all my problems in my life, I will sit there and backwards rationalize all these explanations and reasons that it should make sense and it's completely logical that I spend all my money on a Rolls Royce. We do the same thing with our romantic partners. And again, I think everybody's had this experience at some point where you like, you see, you're obsessed with this person and, you know, maybe there's some questionable behavior going on, but man, you find plenty of ways to rationalize that behavior to yourself. It turns out that there is evidence for this as well, because romantic love deactivates

• 6:17Mark Manson?

  the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which are the two reasons for having critical judgment about people. So literally, when you're looking at the person that you're in love with, Your judgment faculties are in a large part turned off. Have you ever had a friend who just dated an awful person? You were like, why are you dating that awful person?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yes, we all have.

• 6:35Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 6:36Mark Manson?

  And you're always-

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes I've been that friend.

• 6:37Mark Manson?

  Yes. Yes, me too. I have also been that friend before.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  This definitely happens, yeah.

• 6:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's, so this is, this is why you get this situation where you're like, you're sitting there, you're watching your friend date this terrible person and you're like, dude, what, what are you doing? How do you not see this?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:53Mark Manson?

  And you want to tell them, but the funny thing is, is even if you try to tell them, they can't see it.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:58Mark Manson?

  And they will have all sorts of rationalizations and excuses prepped and ready to go because their brain is already primed.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And one of those big ones is because I love them, right?

• 7:06Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:07Mark Manson?

  Okay. What's worse is that this reward system, this motivation system continues even after the relationship ends. So even if you get your heart broken, and Helen Fisher, being a great scientist, took people who had had their hearts broken and put them into the same FMRI machine and saw that they had the same region of their brain light up. So that motivation system continues even after the person is gone, or even after you're no longer in a relationship with them. So it's like, imagine being constantly motivated towards something that is impossible to attain.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:41Mark Manson?

  It's just a whole new level of suffering. That's why, you could say that's why breakups are as painful as they are. In the research literature, this whole phase, this whole kind of delusional obsession with a person, this cocaine addiction to another human being, is often referred to as limerence. It's this highly irrational, highly emotional, slightly delusional state that people get into with each other. And this is kind of your, your like, storybook rom-com love feeling. Like, it's just, the world is spinning and nothing else matters. And oh my God, we were destined to be together and it's only you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile, it's like, like the roof's falling apart and there are bills to be paid,

• 8:25Mark Manson?

  but nobody's paying them and, you know, your, your father's disowning you and like, all this stuff is happening. But it's like, but I'm in love. But the problem, the catch about limerence is that it is temporary. It only lasts, it only lasts for a few years at most. And so the theory goes is that limerence or this kind of cocaine addiction obsession with another, another person, nature instilled this in us just long enough to make a baby. And then, oh, okay, then now reality sets in. Yeah, okay, yeah, no, never mind. Actually, yeah, you are kind of annoying. Um, yeah, I got shit to do. Sorry, I gotta go.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Helen Fisher calls this the four year itch.

• 9:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Which, because what they found in the research was that after about four years is usually like, that's, that's a time actually when people get divorced or separate in some way. And it's usually just long enough to raise a kid to where they're independent enough.

• 9:21Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And then, and then they, they fuck off.

• 9:24Mark Manson?

  Peace out, yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:25Mark Manson?

  And you see this too. I mean, it's if you look at where breakups or divorces spike, it's, it is right around this period.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:32Mark Manson?

  And it's also why in like, relationship advice literature, you often see this referred to as the honeymoon period, right? It's like when you meet somebody new, you have a new relationship, that first year or two is just like absolutely golden. Everything seems perfect. Everything's happy all the time. The person you're in love with can do no wrong. And then suddenly reality sets in and you actually have to face who you're with. So that is my first argument, that love is a con man. It's nature's con man to get you to procreate, to get you to vastly overestimate what is probably a highly flawed individual, to obsess over them and become addicted to them the way you would a slot machine or cocaine, and then eventually have the receipts come due, uh,

• 10:17Mark Manson?

  two to four years later.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. All right, I'll just reiterate before I get into my note too. Is, is love hijacking the cocaine system or is cocaine hijacking the love system?

• 10:29Mark Manson?

  I definitely, cocaine's hijacking the love system.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Obviously, obviously, okay. So I don't, I always say, I always thought that argument was a little bit hyperbolic.

• 10:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  To say the least, okay?

• 10:39Mark Manson?

  Have you been around a person on cocaine and watched them make decisions?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Well.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I get that. And yes, there are parallels.

• 10:48Mark Manson?

  Cause I feel like you're proving my, you're proving my point here.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Fair, fair. No, no, no. And that is fair. That's, that's actually, I don't, I don't disagree with any of that.

• 10:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Love makes us do some pretty stupid shit.

• 10:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I will, and I'll, I'll vouch for that. I've been there, right? We all have.

• 11:03Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And I've seen it in friends like you were talking about. It's easier to see in other people and that blinding kind of like nature of being in love is it makes it really hard to see it in yourself.

• 11:13Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Like, okay, I get that. Here's the thing though, this whole hijack thing is like, oh, love is hijacking your brain and your, your behavior and whatever. So is every other drive that we have. When you get hungry, your brain is being hijacked. When you get thirsty, your brain is being hijacked.

• 11:30Mark Manson?

  This is true.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Right? Why? Right? And it's because evolution has figured this out over hundreds of thousands of generations, millions of billions of years, we've figured this out. Evolution has. It has a purpose, right? It has a, if love, if, if this feeling of love and infatuation with somebody else consistently led to poor decisions, which I mean, it does lead to poor decisions. Don't get me wrong. But if it led to poor mate selection over and over again, poor results in, in your reproductive fitness, it wouldn't be around still today, right? Like it, it serves a purpose. It's highly conserved across humanity, this pair bond. Now, like, you know, sexual fidelity and everything like that, we can discuss whether that's supernatural or whatever, but

• 12:15Speaker 01

  having this like emotional affinity and attachment to another person that's highly conserved across all cultures, even the most promiscuous and randiest of all of us, we still like have at least a period where we're temporarily fixed on one person, right?

• 12:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  That's a feature, not a book. Okay. I'll get into that a little bit more. Why is that though? You know, in the relationship or in the, the dating episode, we talked about the parental investment theory.

• 12:39Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  And human infants require so much, they, they have these tiny little brains that need to grow into big brains. Only 25% of our brains are developed when we come out of the womb. We have to do 75% of brain development outside of the womb. Okay. So, and that takes a very, very long time.

• 12:54Mark Manson?

  That explains a lot.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  It explains, it does explain a lot, right? When you, when you have a two-year-old throwing a fit.

• 12:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  You know, they're maybe only, you know, 30% of the way there or whatever.

• 13:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Children, they require these years and years of intensive care, of protection, of investment, just to survive.

• 13:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Okay. The way evolution has figured out, okay, how can we? Up the chances of that child surviving, it's by having more people help raise that child. Love and attachment and commitment, those are the mechanisms by which we've figured this out. Okay. So it evolved to solve that coordination problem, this parental coordination problem. Okay, yes, yes, there you have this temporary insanity, basically is what we're calling it, what you're calling it, right? You have this temporary insanity. Sure, that's fine, but it serves a very, very functional purpose. And that is just to get two people to stay together long enough to raise this child. Like, okay, that four year itch I was talking about, right?

• 13:49Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  When a child's about four years old, they're usually in playgroups and other people can, they're a little bit more independent enough. And yes, somebody can go off and, you know, yeah, it's okay for the, the, the union to dissolve if it has to at that point, but it doesn't always either. That's the other thing is that there's long-term research on happily married couples. Average, there was this one study that was done, I think the average was about 21 years married or together. And there's still people who are in love.

• 14:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  They also have an additional component where there's this commitment and attachment and loyalty, kind of this companionate love that you have. You still can have this, this, this passion for somebody and develop a deeper commitment over time.

• 14:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  So it's not just, it, it isn't necessarily just, oh, this all goes away after 18 to 36 months.

• 14:33Mark Manson?

  That is true. I do want to make one quick point, though, about the evolution piece, which is that you are correct that the limerence or romantic love, it evolved this kind of a mechanism to coordinate people into pair bonds to have children and develop attachment to the children. And yes, part of this delusion or irrationality that comes along with it, as you, as you said, it's a future, not a bug. I would argue that for most of human history, you know, if we're living on the savanna and you become delusional about some, some chick, it like the downsides are pretty minimal. You know, like if you, if you just like have a completely

• 15:15Mark Manson?

  Out of touch with reality perception of like who she is or what she's into or what your life's gonna be like if you're dating her, we have not, there's nothing going on. There's like, life's pretty fucking bare. So there's not a whole lot to lose in that situation. In the modern world, there's so much to lose. And it like, there's, the stakes are so much higher. If you are dating the wrong person, if you say move cross-country to move in with this person after knowing them for a week, if you are like ditching your friends or changing your jobs to like satisfy your new girlfriend or whatever, there's a lot of repercussions. So that that would only be my caveat to that.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Okay, well, at the same time, too, people in long-term committed relationships are consistently, they're happier and healthier. And I'll get to that in another section a little bit here. So we'll put a pin in that. So I don't know. I mean, yes, that could be just more of a problem, though, of modern society itself. Like, we need to get rid of love so we can have more efficient, modern society? Like, come on. Is that what you're saying?

• 16:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So we can get more done?

• 16:20Mark Manson?

  Good, I'm glad we agree.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 16:23Mark Manson?

  Glad we agree.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Okay. One other thing I'll say about this hijack kind of hypothesis you have, though, too.

• 16:29Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Again, it's not a bug, it's a feature. It wasn't just that, like, oh, there was this like mutation that came along that we like, some people started to pair bond and some people didn't. And, you know, now we have to fight about if that's right or wrong. It's not that at all, actually. There was a really interesting study that came out just a couple of years ago. Do you know all this research about prairie voles?

• 16:49Mark Manson?

  I was just, I was like, oh, here come the prairie voles.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Ah, the prairie voles. This is awesome. This is, okay. So it's really cool natural experiment that that's happened over hundreds of thousands of years. So there's these voles, they're like little rodents, like little mice, basically, right? And there's different species of voles. One species in particular, pair bonds. So they'll, they're monogamous in the sense that they'll get together and the males will help the females raise the young. Okay. Now, they, they get around, they're promiscuous, they cheat on each other, just like humans doing whatever. But they form this attachment to another bull. Okay?

• 17:24Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  There's another species of bull, the, I think it's the meadow bull, that is just completely just out there. They're just, you know, they're having fun and going at it.

• 17:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And not, there's no- A parental investment on from the males.

• 17:38Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  So what they found like there's all these studies going back into the 90s, 80s and 90s. This is where they figured out that oxytocin is a very important neuropeptide that that helps regulate this pair bond attachment that we have. Okay. Originally, what they think happened to was, okay, there's this whole evolutionary arc where oxytocin gets released when a mammalian mother is lactating. Okay. It helps release milk from the breasts. Okay. What they think happened then was that evolution selected that chemical as a neuropeptide too. That gave them an emotional attachment to the offspring. Okay. And then it co-opted it again to make us bond to each other. So it used that same kind of framework and just it's just like, oh, we're going to use it for this now.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  We're going to use it for this now. It's got a, and it's a new, whole new mechanism. Okay. So there was this really cool study though, a few years ago. So everybody thought like, oh, oxytocin is the love hormone.

• 18:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I was even, I was on one of the first studies that we used oxytocin in primates to like, look at how it increases affiliative behaviors between males and females. It was really, it was really cool stuff.

• 18:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  So we even found this like, yeah, this is pretty true. And it's pretty, pretty robust finding over and over. However, a few years ago, they found that they, they did these genetic mutations on these prairie voles and they knocked out that oxytocin receptor. So they didn't even have it. They couldn't, they, there, there was no receptor for them, for the oxytocin swirling around in their bodies to attach on their brain and like, you know, make them go and attach to another, another vol.

• 19:08Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yet they still did it.

• 19:10Mark Manson?

  Huh.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Okay. So it wasn't just like, oh, this like random mutation happened. And there's this one chemical that did it and it was kind of just a mistake. Or it was just a, like a fluke and it's kind of, it kind of works and kind of doesn't. No, no, no. Their interpretation was there's actually lots of redundant systems.

• 19:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  If one of these fails, we're going to use another one to attach, to, to, to make you attach to another individual.

• 19:35Mark Manson?

  It's super fascinating. Just a quick aside for the listener. One of the reasons why researchers study prairie voles so much is that they are one of the only species. Like it's actually very rare in the animal kingdom.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  True.

• 19:46Mark Manson?

  To be monogamous, lifelong monogamous to another partner. And prairie voles are one of the closest and most easily studied mammals that are long-term monogamous. So that's why they get studied so much. And because it's so rare, you would kind of assume that it is just a fluke mutation.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:03Mark Manson?

  Or just like something that got, some gene that got switched somewhere along the line. But yeah, that is fascinating that it is, there, there is a lot more at play.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  The point is, Mother Nature thought it was so important that it created redundant systems. So like, if this thing fails, we're gonna have a backup. One of those is, if you want to get real nerdy about it, arginine vasopressin, which is a related chemical to oxytocin. There's opioid, this whole opioid system that we have is probably involved as well. There's all these systems in the brain.

• 20:31Mark Manson?

  Coming back with the drugs, dude. It's just.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  That's true. Well, and that's a big reason. I mean, if you do look at it, people who have like, like worse social lives, don't have a lot of romantic prospects, they're more likely to do drugs. So you, like, I get it. Yes, there is a parallel there.

• 20:47Mark Manson?

  It's probably not a coincidence.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And it's not a coincidence. Yeah.

• 20:50Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  The OCD like, uh, kind of obsession, you know, that we do have with somebody though, too. You're, you're right. That's a motivational system. It's a, it's a motivation. It's not a feeling. It's a motivational system. You're absolutely right. It is. But what that does is it focuses our attention on one person long enough for us to form a bond with them. Yes, we're delusional about it. We have to put aside some harsh judgments for a while in order to form that bond. I think that's absolutely necessary, though, if you want to get into that next stage of that companionate love, which I think we'll get into a little bit more later. But I think it's just, this is a clever way that Mother Nature figured out. It's like, okay, yes, suspend their judgment for a little while. Yes, there's some downsides. Of course, there's some downsides. There's gonna be some cost.

• 21:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  But the upside is that we get a continuous species. So, therefore.

• 21:36Mark Manson?

  Drew Bernie is.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Love is not overrated.

• 21:38Mark Manson?

  Drew Bernie has spoken.

• 21:41Mark Manson?

  It's your, your turn to bring an argument.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Round number two, I'm gonna come in. Okay. Love is social infrastructure.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Okay, it's not just this feeling, it's not just this addiction we have, it doesn't just make us do stupid shit. It actually makes us do a lot of really awesome things, too. It's, I, it's, it's the foundation of social fabric. All over the world, in all cultures, we find that it's not just like this lifestyle choice that we get, it's not just a luxury, it's actually underpins so much of human civilizations. Not just families and kinship groups, which obviously it does that. The larger communities that you're in, econ- whole economic systems, we base, just about every single society around the world bases their economic system. The most basic unit is going to be the family unit, right? Which is organized through these emotions and, and ultimately marriage, right?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Inheritance laws, all these legal frameworks, there's so many laws that if they're not directly addressing some, something about, you know, marriage and, and, and cohabitation or anything like that, there's indirectly related to that, our legal frameworks are, they're all, all of these are based around people pairing off and building lives together. There might be infidelity, there might be other systems where, you know, there's, there's polyamory, there's polygyny, there's polygamy, there, all of those things, sure, sure. Still, underlying all of that is an affinity between two people. There's a, there's a pair bond of some kind, okay, that underlies a lot of this. This creates, I would argue, a more stable society as well, right? I am, I, I think I'm a little bit of living proof of this as well, too.

• 23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  So, you know, I talked about this before, grew up in humble means, we didn't have a lot of money growing up, but my parents stayed together. Okay, and look at all the data around outcomes for children of two-parent households, right? They're so much better, they're better academically, they end up making more money over time, they're better mental health-wise, and health-wise in general, they live longer, have fewer health problems, better quality of life as they age, if you come from a two-parent household, okay? There's a lot of mitigating factors around that, too, I get it, but again, that pair bond is kind of central to all of those downstream effects that happen, okay? We evolved to co-regulate. And we talked about this a lot in the emotions episode that we did, there's a co-regulation that happens with other people.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  It can happen with friendships, but the most intimate form of that is with a romantic partner, right? Your brain actually expects partnership, it looks for and seeks out partnership.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Being isolated actually requires much more metabolic resources. To give you just one example of kind of how this works, so that there's this hand-holding experiment. I think I brought this up in a previous episode too. But they brought people into an FMRI and they were going to administer a shock to them. Okay, and they told them upfront, they were going to do this, obviously. So they had to just have them do it alone. And what they saw was in the FMRI's, their amygdalas like were firing like crazy before, during and after the shock experience. But if they had their romantic partner come in and hold their hand during it, that greatly reduced that.

• 24:53Mark Manson?

  Okay. Interesting.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Greatly reduced it. Our brains are just, they're looking for, and they're wired for companionship and an attachment figure. So they showed that that same study that showed like a friend came in and it showed some reduction in those, the firing of that too. And then strangers as well, and they showed some reduction. But the greatest reduction in that kind of threat response, that brain neural threat response was from the romantic partner. Okay, your brain is actually looking for this. Like when you're in a committed relationship, you actually, those threat detection systems in your, in your brain aren't like constantly going off. But it just frees you up to do other things too. You've talked about this before, Mark.

• 25:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  You've said that one of the biggest benefits unbeknownst to you before this happened was once you decided, okay, I'm, I'm going to be in this committed, long-term committed relationship and get married to your wife. You're like, all of that, like, I don't have to worry about all this shit anymore. Like these people who go around and they're chasing those feelings that we're talking about, right? You spend so much time worrying about all of this. But once you, once you've committed to somebody, you're in a committed, loving relationship. There's less anxiety around all these other parts of your life. You can just worry about other stuff, worry about other shit. Worry about your job, worry about building a safe community for other people. All these downstream societal effects that you get start from that secure base that you have with another person.

• 26:16Mark Manson?

  Very true. Very true.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Anything to say to that so far?

• 26:20Mark Manson?

  Well, I.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got nothing, do you?

• 26:23Mark Manson?

  Wow, little shit, little shit talking coming from the, uh, the pro love side of the table.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  There's some of these downstream effects too. Uh, stable relationships are linked to better career achievement.

• 26:33Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  You make more money, you, you get promoted more often, you have higher job satisfaction and too, it helps when the, the person at home is supportive of you in your, in your role. That's one of the things. So, yes, the relationship has to be happy and that will come up over and over as a theme.

• 26:47Mark Manson?

  You could also argue too, that long-term relationships are a civilizing force on men, particularly young.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Particularly on men.

• 26:52Mark Manson?

  Like when you see, look at the benefits of marriage, men benefit more than women and, and particularly young men benefit the most. And it's, if you look at societies where things get a little bit hairy and people start rioting in the streets, or there's like political revolutions or civil wars, uh, it's typically lots and lots and lots of unmarried, uneducated, young men with few opportunities. I mean, we were even joking about this yesterday, about how, uh, before I met my wife, I was like, I was like a fucking barbarian.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:23Mark Manson?

  I just, I, I, in like now too, when she goes back to Brazil and I'm like left home for three weeks, like dude, I don't know what happens to me.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 27:34Mark Manson?

  I just, I turn into a caveman. I'm like grunting and I like forget the shower and my dirty clothes are fucking everywhere and can't feed myself. It's, it's hard.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And the, of the higher relationship quality in marriage, the research consistently shows that married adults, they just report higher relationship satisfaction quality across multiple dimensions over, even over cohabiting partners. Okay. So when you've actually made that like, I love you commitment and we're going to do this and get married, you even get a boost of satisfaction out of that. I know that's not across the board. There's problems with this. We'll get into those. I get that, but it is possible. And that is like probably the most secure base from which you can build a life and therefore build a community and build a society based off of that through that just dyadic pair and pair bonding with one other person. Married couples too, over cohabitating couples, they

• 28:29Speaker 01

  are 12% more likely to report, uh, relationship satisfaction, 26% more likely to report, uh, high stability throughout their life, not just in their relationship and 15% more likely to report, um, Feelings of higher commitment and dedication to another person.

• 28:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah, is that correlation or causation?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Fair, that's a fair, that's fair.

• 28:51Mark Manson?

  Because I would argue more stable, more committed people are more likely to get married.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Right, that's, I get that, okay. I'll just leave you with this too, there are a lot of, you're like, oh, you know, the love wanes over time and all of that. There's actually a lot of research suggesting that, no, that's not necessarily the case for a very significant proportion of people. Actually, satisfaction, relationship and life satisfaction remains relatively stable for long periods of time. And people who do get married and commit to each other over the long haul. Yes, it waxes and wanes, there's probably some, you know, variation around, I mean, I get that. But longer term, people do report that their satisfaction with their partner, with their relationship and with their life in general, remains relatively stable over time.

• 29:36Mark Manson?

  Okay, okay, are you done?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:40Mark Manson?

  Okay, good.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  For now.

• 29:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, because I will begin by saying that I don't disagree with anything you said.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:48Mark Manson?

  I think it's all, it's well researched, prairie voles, well done.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:52Mark Manson?

  You know, you gotta, gotta get the prairie, if you're talking, if you're gonna talk about monogamy, you gotta get the prairie voles in there.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  You do.

• 29:58Mark Manson?

  It's.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  They're super cute too, Mark.

• 30:00Mark Manson?

  Are they?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  They are.

• 30:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I agree with everything you said.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:03Mark Manson?

  I will make a key distinction though.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:05Mark Manson?

  That I think is absolutely cataclysmic to your case, sir.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:13Mark Manson?

  And that is, everything you're talking about is marriage. It's the result of marriage, it's a result of that explicit commitment to another person.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:21Mark Manson?

  I would argue that marriage is quite different than love. And I actually have history on my side on this one. Because it, for the vast majority of human history, love and marriage were not associated with one another. If you go as far back as the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans. Romantic love was, it was something to be cautious about. It was something to worry about. Why? Because it made you make terrible decisions. For the vast majority of human history, marriage was arranged. It was negotiated between families. It was discussed between political alliances. People would marry their cousins in vast quantities. Why? To mitigate social, economic, and political risk.

• 31:04Mark Manson?

  So marriage, by and large, was never about love. I mean, even once you get into the Middle Ages, there was copious amounts of advice that was being handed down from the kings and the lords and the church, advising parents, "Don't let your kids marry for love." At the time, Western Europe was the only place in the world that people actually had some agency in choosing who that they could marry. And that was due to a bunch of institutions and laws that the Catholic Church passed. And so it became this source of anxiety for parents and families of like, "Oh, God, what if little Johnny decides to marry little Suzie because he's in love with her? That's going to be horrible for our family's future."

• 31:47Mark Manson?

  "No, we got to make sure that Johnny marries his cousin over here." Which actually cousin marriage wasn't allowed in Europe either. But we have to make sure that Johnny marries Cindy over here because that's much better for our family's future. And so you see this tension throughout most of human history where love had nothing to do with it. It was never part of the equation. And not only was it not part of the equation, it was a risk to the equation. Most of us today, we think of Romeo and Juliet as the ultimate love story. People don't realize that contemporaries of Shakespeare, at the time, when they went to see Romeo and Juliet, when it premiered, they saw it as a cautionary tale. It reaffirmed their belief of like, "Oh, my God, don't let your fucking teenager

• 32:32Mark Manson?

  fall in love with somebody because this is what's going to happen to you."

• 32:39Mark Manson?

  So it really wasn't until the 19th century with the Romantic Movement in Western Europe that you get this notion of that you should marry the person that you're in love with. That because we have agency and because we get to choose the life that we have, why not maximize our life to be as happy as possible? This was a new and revolutionary idea in the 19th century. And it began with a lot of the moral philosophy that came out of England with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. And then it bled over into the Romantic Movement with people like Gerda. And it eventually trickled its way down into the culture where people started looking

• 33:23Mark Manson?

  for marriage partners based on who they love. It's funny because if you, you know, I remember in high school, I read Jane Eyre and I thought it was the most boring fucking book in the world. I'm like, this is like just the most cliche love story ever. And what I realized at the time, it was so transgressive. This idea that you would marry for love or pursue somebody out of love rather than the best status or opportunity for your family or for what your parents would approve. It was completely transgressive at the time. So it is something that we take for granted today, but it is, love and marriage are a very recent pairing.

• 34:04Mark Manson?

  And I think if you, you could make the argument that maybe it's too high of a bar. If you look at countries in the world that have arranged marriages, a place like India, they have some of the lowest divorce rates in the world as well. And I think a lot of that has to do simply with expectation. There's just an understanding of like, yeah, my spouse isn't supposed to satisfy all of my emotional needs. By the way, I'm not saying we go, we implement arranged marriage and, you know, marry people for economic reasons. I'm just saying that like, these are two very different institutions. That's fair. And for most of human history, they were, they were separate in most people's minds. You called love a social infrastructure.

• 34:46Mark Manson?

  And by love, I think you mean marriage primarily. Marriage is also a market. Dating is a market. It's something that you come to.

• 34:56Mark Manson?

  With a certain amount of value. Okay. And you try to find the most, maximize the most amount of value you can get out of it as well. All the things that you described, the, the social and economic stability, a lot of that is a function of the value of the partners that are put together. Now, I would argue that if dating is a market, and it is to a certain extent, you know, in, in the dating episode, we talked about how much attraction is driven by perceived status, how much of it is driven by,

• 35:29Mark Manson?

  how much you think the person is going to add to your life. Sure. Right? It's completely natural and human. Well, if, if you look at it that way, then you have to ask yourself, how is love influencing how this market functions, right? Like, if you have people who are trying to make decisions in a market, and their decision making is constantly getting hijacked and blocked by this like crazy motivation or drive, they're constantly rationalizing all these reasons to be with somebody who, by all accounts, is probably not the right person for them to be with, it's hard for a market to function efficiently that way.

• 36:10Mark Manson?

  I would add on top of that, what we are experiencing, the, the so-called dating crisis that we're in the midst of today, is actually kind of an outcrop of this issue, right? Because what happens when you get on a dating app? You're primarily thinking, whether you're conscious of it or not, you're probably looking for status indicators, right? How good-looking is the person? How much money are they making? How popular are they? What school did they go to? All of these status indicators, yet you're showing up to the date expecting to be swept off your feet and in love. And so, of course, you end up with a population that is constantly frustrated because you have infrastructure and a dating market infrastructure that has been optimized for status matching.

• 36:56Mark Manson?

  But the population at large, the culture at large, still sees dating and marriage through the lens of love. Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily go back to marrying for money and, you know, being very-

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Political reasons.

• 37:11Mark Manson?

  Political reasons and alliances and all that. I'm just saying that like, we have to be very honest about what's going on here.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 37:17Mark Manson?

  And in fact, like, when you look at research, it's interesting. So recently, a number of researchers have actually tried to like, use AI to do matchmaking. So they have like, taken people and figured out all these variables about, you know, who they are as a person and what they're interested in. They've tried to run machine learning on all those factors to predict which single people are going to hit it off and become attracted or fall in love with each other. And they can't do it. And the conclusion they eventually came to is that love emerges in the interaction itself. You can't predict when it's gonna be there and when it's not gonna be there.

• 37:55Mark Manson?

  And so I would just argue that our poor understanding of love, dating, marriage, how it all actually functions, has been leading people to a lot of disappointment. And I would say that the overestimation of love, this idea that your ideal partner should satisfy all of your status-driven desires, satisfy all of your economic and social needs, and satisfy all of your emotional needs on top of that, and sweep you off your feet, and be your prince charming, or your whatever, sleeping beauty. It's completely unreasonable. And something has to give somewhere.

• 38:39Mark Manson?

  And when you look back across the vast history of human civilization, the thing that is given is the love. And you've been talking about commitment and the importance of commitment, how it makes people's lives better, how marriage makes people's lives better. I agree with all that. I've experienced it myself. But there's a, to a certain degree, I would argue, the commitment comes first, the love comes second. And I think-

• 39:12Mark Manson?

  For whatever reason, our culture and our society, we've got it backwards. We think love hits you like a fucking lightning bolt and then you commit to that person. And I, I would call that framing into question entirely.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, that, I don't disagree with that, that last point you made, okay? And I'm not saying that love should be the only thing that dictates who you get into a relationship with, or spend your life with, or anything like that. That's not what I'm saying at all.

• 39:39Mark Manson?

  So we both agree that John Lennon was a dumbass.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yes, I will, okay, I will agree with that. Love, all you need is love is not, right, yes. I, I agree with that.

• 39:49Mark Manson?

  By the way, John Lennon, not the greatest track record with, with women, should be noted.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so. I would agree with that. Like, love should not be the sole motivating force for you to get into a relationship, stay in a relationship, anything, of course.

• 40:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And I also agree too, that commitment could actually precede the feelings of love that you have, and often do.

• 40:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Look at the statistics for arranged marriages, say in India, or any other places where they have arranged marriages. They're usually, if not about the same satisfaction within the relationship, or better sometimes too, than compared to other societies that don't have arranged marriages. Sure.

• 40:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I get that. What I am saying though, is that love, it, it deepens that relationship to the point where all of those downstream effects I was talking about at a societal level, actually, there's a stronger glue there. And I think love is part of that, a big part of that.

• 40:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  That attachment you have to another person, that commitment, it's fueled that you, like you said, love is a motivational system, right? A lot of that commitment, a lot of that, kind of like social glue that we have, that is fueled by an attachment to another person that's underpinned by love.

• 40:59Mark Manson?

  Drew, we're getting too nuanced here. We, we, we're supposed to be like those guys on cable TV who are just screaming at each other and...

• 41:07Speaker 01

  All, okay, I'll, I'll push back on one other little thing then, before we wrap this up then, okay? Which is, yes, the modern dating market, as you called it.

• 41:16Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  It is broken. I absolutely agree with that. It's garbage. It's hot garbage right now. That doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater here though, okay? Just like, you know, the, the, the housing market is broken too. Should we all just give up on, on that?

• 41:30Mark Manson?

  On homes, yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  On homes and all of that, okay? So, yes, the modern dating market is broken. Yes, we probably look at it, I would argue... We look at it too much like a market, maybe a little bit. Although it is like, there's a reality around it that you're trying to get the best bang for your buck out of this quote unquote market.

• 41:47Mark Manson?

  No pun intended.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Right. But we don't, just because that's broken, doesn't mean it can't be worked on and fixed. And can't address some of those issues too.

• 41:57Mark Manson?

  Okay. Always the optimist, Drew. Always the optimist. All right. Well, what's your next point?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Love and happiness, Mark.

• 42:06Mark Manson?

  Oh, the, those come, they never happen together, do they?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Well, come on, there's, yes, there's a lot of nuance in this. And yes, I know.

• 42:14Mark Manson?

  I'm being facetious, by the way. Love and happiness are probably like the two most strongly correlated things. But anyway, I'm stealing your point.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  We all, we have, we've all heard about the loneliness crisis.

• 42:24Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Right. There is some debate as to like, how long this has actually been going on. People have been lonely all throughout human history, obviously, right? But, um, you know, back in the like late 2000s, early 2010s, there were some, those studies that came out that said, uh, you know, social isolation can be as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Basically a pack of cigarettes a day for your physical health, not just your mental health, your actual physical health. You don't live as long. Um, you have increased heart rate or heart disease incidences, cancers, all of that, uh, they've associated with chronic loneliness or chronic social isolation, depression, anxiety, cognitive decline too. So higher rates of, uh, like Alzheimer's.

• 43:05Mark Manson?

  But isn't that just an argument for friendship?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Friendship is part of it. Okay. That is part of it. I've thought a lot about this too, because you know, I'm, I'm real big on like friends take up a bigger part of my social life than, than romantic partners generally have, um, in my adult life they have anyway. I've thought a lot about that. And yes, they're great. The, the thing is, is about a romantic partner, there's, there's certain things.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  They can provide that friends can't, not just sex, Mark, okay?

• 43:33Mark Manson?

  I just saw you look at me. Why are you assuming that that's where I'm going?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can.

• 43:37Mark Manson?

  I'm actually, it's funny because I'm agreeing with you and I, and I, and I was not thinking about sex, but.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  There, there's just certain things, there's a level of intimacy and that you only get with your, your, your romantic partners that you can't get through friendship. The Harvard study on happiness, they sometimes call it, it's actually called the Harvard study on adult development. Okay, but they often call it the Harvard happiness study. So it's that one that's gone all the way back to, I think, was it the twenties or thirties?

• 44:01Mark Manson?

  Uh, late nineteen thirties.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Late nineteen thirties. Started with a. Started then, they're still going to today.

• 44:06Mark Manson?

  Started with a graduating class of, uh, uh, senior men from Harvard. And then they started tracking them every single year for seventy years.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Until they die, yeah.

• 44:14Mark Manson?

  Basically until they die.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And then they started adding more cohorts along the way.

• 44:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  It's this huge study, it's still ongoing. They look at every single factor they can find and then they go in and they, they comb through the data this way, right? Some of the things that have come out of that, spending time with a loving partner predicts day to day happiness better than your physical health habits. Okay, it doesn't like exercising, uh, uh, eating right, getting good sleep, all of that. If you spend time with somebody that you love on a daily basis, more or less, that has, is a stronger predictor of your, your happiness than not, okay? Um, and it's not just about like marriage and commitment, like we talked about, it's not just about that. The quality of the relationship really matters here. Emotional warmth from close partners is one of the strongest predictors of healthy aging.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  So it's not just that you're married, it's not just that you have somebody else, a warm body around. It's that, that quality and the love that you feel with the other person actually predicts physical health, like on a very, very long time horizon. Okay, spousal support is another one, um, that it buffers, buffers against age-related decline. So things like dementia, you know, Parkinson's or, or Alzheimer's. And you just see an overall boost in happiness too. If you, if spending time with a supportive, uh, emotionally warm person that you feel connected with. All of those things flow from like this, this pair bonding love experience that we have.

• 45:39Mark Manson?

  From love.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:41Mark Manson?

  Say it true.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  No, not all. I'm not gonna say all you need is love. That's not what I'm saying. That is not what I'm saying.

• 45:46Mark Manson?

  Comes from love.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yes, also too, the flip side of that.

• 45:50Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Loving somebody makes you vulnerable. It makes you, it opens you up to heartache and despair and all of those things. Yes, you are opening yourself up to that. That absolutely means you can be hurt. I get that. Okay? But just like you've always said, Mark, you can't have the benefits without the costs.

• 46:10Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Right? You have to risk something. Meaning only comes from risking something.

• 46:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  This is something I've, as I've gotten older, because for the longest time I was just like, ah, you know, I got my friends and I can date around here and there.

• 46:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  And all of this. The thing that over the last few years that I've really realized is like, oh, that's the whole point. The whole point is that you can get hurt, that this will hurt at some point. And that's what makes it more meaningful. And that's why you do all this crazy shit even too, is because it's kind of worth it in the end. There's a lot of like, you know, people who, especially today, they're just like, I'm not doing this. These insane statistics where people are just dropping out of the dating market altogether. People under 30, it's something that only like 40% of people are even looking for a relationship. 40% of single people under 30 right now are even looking for a relationship. This is in some studies, that's what they say, some pockets at least. That's insane.

• 46:58Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of what that is, is that they're saying, you know, I don't need anyone. What they're saying is I'm afraid to need anyone.

• 47:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  And I get it. Yes, you're protected and you know, you're not putting yourself out there and you're not vulnerable to heartache and fine, I get that. That's not like freedom though. That's just, you're just defending yourself.

• 47:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And it's not, you're not actually engaging with the world. That requires some risk.

• 47:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  That requires putting yourself out there and maybe getting your heart broke a little bit. People see all the risks. They don't do the proper cost benefit analysis here though.

• 47:33Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Because the upside is so huge.

• 47:35Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Not just all the health benefits that I just went through, but just life satisfaction in general too. It's there. Yes, it takes work. Absolutely, it takes work.

• 47:48Mark Manson?

  But everything good takes work.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Everything good takes work. Absolutely. Even long-term durable patterns of dysfunction in your relationships. Those aren't even like, a lot of people are like, well, this just isn't for me. There's some people who, yes, this works for, but it's not for me because obviously over and over again, I'm. Raising my hand here too, because it was like over and over again, the relationships, long-term committed stuff, not for me. Even that though, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. You can work on these things. There's been some really good research coming out, like couples therapy is actually very, very effective. Something like 70% of people who do it, say they've gotten some benefit out of it at least, if not save their entire marriage for it. If you stick with it long enough, something like 20, 30 sessions, most

• 48:31Speaker 01

  people say that they've resolved the issues that they went in to address. It's, it's actually very, very effective. So it's, it's not that you can't learn these skills. Yes, there's problem. Yes, love can cause a lot of problems. And yes, you can love the wrong person, or yes, you can get into very, very toxic relationships, and it can really fuck your life up. But you can also learn not to do all of those shitty things to each other, right?

• 48:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  That's, that's a very, very real possibility. People do it all the time. Growth really is possible in this area, and it can make you happy, happier.

• 49:04Mark Manson?

  I don't disagree with that. Question though, if emotional warp from a partner predicts healthiness and happiness better than say, money, or IQ, or all these other things?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Which is also found, yes.

• 49:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Why do we spend so much more time optimizing for our careers than our relationships?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Because I think it goes back to that, we're afraid. Relationships, a loving committed relationship is an incredibly vulnerable thing to be in, like I just said. And it's a lot easier to say, well, if I just make some money, then I'll be happier. If I just achieve these things and get this outside validation from usually strangers, then hey, I'll be happier. That's why I think we do that. I think it's, I think it's a big distraction. It's a big hand wave.

• 49:46Mark Manson?

  I've also noticed too, I've observed in people that they see that, like, because I think at this point in our generation, like, most people, or most smart people who think about this stuff, kind of intuitively understand that, you know, you gotta work on yourself to have a good relationship. Basically, it's, you know, you want to make yourself as healthy and whole as possible before you jump into a really serious, long-term, committed relationship. But what I've observed is that a lot of people, I think, either take that too far, or again, there's that kind of status love mismatch going on where they are working so hard on their career, they're building up skills and fitness and different experiences, so that when they finally do meet their partner, they're gonna

• 50:28Mark Manson?

  be this like, well-rounded, interesting person who's gonna have a lot going on. The problem is, is that those things don't predict chemistry. They don't predict the spark. They don't predict the love happening, right? Like, it's, it's so many people, I think, use that as a subtle form of avoidance.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:45Mark Manson?

  It's like a form of productive procrastination, right?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:48Mark Manson?

  It's like, oh, I'm just gonna take another year and like work on my career a little bit more. Then I'll be ready to find my partner or whatever. And then before they know it, they're like 35 or 40. They haven't met enough people. They don't know what they like. They don't know who they're compatible with or who they have good chemistry with. And so they, they like go on all these dates and they're just confused of like, why is nothing happening?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  What we've found in attachment science too, if you're an insecure attachment style, if you're avoiding or anxious or disorganized, whatever it is, what's the best way to fix that? It's not therapy, actually. It's being in a healthy relationship with a secure, either a secure person or somebody who at least is aware of what's going on and is helping.

• 51:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  You can both grow together.

• 51:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  So it's not, it's not about like getting yourself fixed first.

• 51:35Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying a relationship can fix you. I'm saying it's a space where two people can grow in a way that helps them heal.

• 51:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna get in my rebuttal here in a second. And I'm gonna, we're gonna land in the same spot. I think I'm gonna end up making the same argument you're making right now, but I'm gonna come at it from completely the opposite side. So you, you, you point out that love drives happiness, that it is the strongest correlate of life satisfaction.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  One of, yes, I put it way up there.

• 52:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's way up there. Definitely top three, potentially top one. I would argue that love doesn't necessarily drive happiness. Love amplifies whatever the underlying relationship already is. So if the relationship is healthy and happy, the love is gonna 10x that. But if the relationship is unhealthy and miserable.

• 52:30Mark Manson?

  Then the love is going to 10x that. So it's love itself is not driving the joy and happiness. Love is just amplifying whatever emotion is already there.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:40Mark Manson?

  And by the way, this, there's a finding that also came from the Harvard study that backs this up. So it found that relationship quality actually matters more than relationship status. Low quality relationships or unhappy marriages are not better than no marriage. They're actually worse than having no marriage. So you're better off being single than being in an awful miserable.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 53:05Mark Manson?

  Horrible relationship.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:07Mark Manson?

  But it's even worse than that because as I laid out at the top of the show, our romantic love behaves in our brain very much in the same way as like a chemical addiction or like a gambling addiction. And what drives more addiction? Well, intermittent reinforcement. If you look at the science behind like what makes gambling so addictive? Or what makes video games so addictive? It's that there is a endless series of unpredictable rewards. Like that seems to be kind of the formula of like what gets people hooked on a certain activity or a certain behavior is that it is, it's going to be.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  That's variable reward schedule.

• 53:46Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's going to be very satisfying at different unpredictable times. And what is an unstable relationship? It's something that's incredibly satisfying at very unpredictable times. It is a slot machine. And today it comes up all red and you lose all your money, but tomorrow you might hit the jackpot. And if you have a mind that's susceptible to that, you can, you can easily fall prey to it. And so it's, there's kind of this sick pressure within our own brains, which is that the, the exact thing that makes an unhealthy relationship unhealthy is also what makes it more addictive and more consuming, which is the irony, right? Like it's just anecdotally, I've noticed that.

• 54:32Mark Manson?

  People who are actually happy in their relationships, they don't really talk about themselves. They don't talk about the relationship.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:38Mark Manson?

  They don't really have anything to say because they're fucking happy. But the people who, there are certain people that are like always posting online about themselves, or always posting online about each other, they're always talking about, oh, she's so amazing. Oh, my God, he's like, he's my dream man and like all this stuff.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  And they want to know all about your relationships too.

• 54:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's funny because whenever my wife and I meet a couple like that, we're like, they're, they're gonna get divorced. Like 100% chance they're gonna get divorced.

• 55:09Mark Manson?

  Okay. But it's, it's one of those things that it's like, if you have, like, a, like, a rich person doesn't have to tell people he's rich.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Right, sure. A confident person doesn't go around saying how confident they are.

• 55:17Mark Manson?

  A happy couple doesn't have to go telling everybody how happy they are. The squeaky wheel makes the most noise and...

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Okay, are you kind of making the argument to, you know, how people, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60% of marriages fall apart, depending on demographics and all, there's a lot of nuance to that number, so don't quote me on that. But are you saying so that, you know, there is this huge kind of idea out there right now, or a lot of people are just like, well, the odds are against me, so I'm just not even going to... Again, we're not necessarily talking about marriage, but this is trickling down now into, I'm just not even gonna date.

• 55:47Mark Manson?

  So this is where I come around and I, I agree with your final point.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:51Mark Manson?

  Which is that I think, I do think that perhaps we are in a world where we are too aware of these dynamics. And I, I do think young people, they're, they're so aware, they, they grew up in therapy culture. They grew up learning about all this stuff. They, they grew up learning about self-esteem and protecting themselves and, you know, not settling and all this stuff. And it's, so I feel like they kind of intuitively understand that, like, well, being in a fucked up relationship is, is gonna be worse than being by myself. And if I can just be happy by myself, then like, what, I don't have to worry about anything. So I do think there's like a little bit of logic behind it, but to your point, I do think the, the risk reward is off.

• 56:30Mark Manson?

  The thing that, that they're missing, which you're correct about, is that the way to get better relationships is to be in relationship. It's like anything else, you, the only way, I guess the fallacy here is, is what we talked about just a few minutes ago, of like the people who are like, I'm gonna get my life together, I'm gonna be a happy, whole person on my own, then I'll be ready to date and be in relationships. And that, that can only take you so far. I mean, there, there's like, there's a minimum level of kind of self-sufficiency and independence that you need to get to. So it's like, if you're... If you're still living in mom's basement and don't have a job, like, okay, go get a job.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Obviously, right.

• 57:05Mark Manson?

  Go get your own place. You know, if you still don't, uh, if you don't have like a social, you don't have any friends and you don't have any money, like, okay, get some money, get some friends. But once you're kind of at a baseline functionality, optimizing yourself anymore isn't gonna drive a ton of results. Like, you do need to get out there and start having these experiences in relationships, because that is how you get better at relationships, is you have a couple bad relationships, you learn from them, you learn where you got tricked. Like, it comes back to the con man, right? Your brain is a con man, it's, it's tricking you into falling in love with these people. And so you need to learn where the tricks are. You need to learn, like, what, what the games your brain is playing with you, so that you don't play

• 57:49Mark Manson?

  them next time. So that you, you spot them and you're like, oh, I remember the last time I fell for a girl like that.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:55Mark Manson?

  Did not end well.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  That I agree with very much, yes, okay.

• 57:58Mark Manson?

  So yes, you do need to get out there and start having these experiences. And yes, the risk of toxic relationships is very real, especially if you, if you get a really bad relationship. Like, yeah, it, it can kind of fuck you up for a while. So like, it, it is, it is a real risk, there are real repercussions, but the alternative is just bad. So you might as well get into the game, start getting better at it, start learning about yourself, start learning about the sort of partners you attract, and, and, and try to improve, because there is no other way to improve it. Like, it, I think one of the startling or surprising things about this is that just knowing all this stuff doesn't really inoculate you to it. It's, it's, there's actually like-

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Can vouch, yeah.

• 58:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I, I mean, speaking from personal experience, speaking from like, watching Friends, but I mean, it's just, there's actually, um, are you, have you ever read about like Tolstoy and his wife?

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:55Mark Manson?

  It's like, it's so fucked up. So Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina, arguably like, the best romance novel ever written, one of the most famous books ever written, and his marriage with his wife was like, so contentious, so toxic, so fucked up. So Tolstoy was a bit of a weird, I mean-

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yes, he's an outlier, I get that.

• 59:18Mark Manson?

  He's an outlier. I, I wanna, I wanna like, preface this by saying that like, I'm a, I'm a Tolstoy fanboy. I, I personally think he's like, maybe the greatest novelist who's ever lived. That dude was a little bit crazy. He was very idealistic in his personal life. So when he, when he got engaged to his wife, the night before their wedding, he handed her all of his diaries and journals because he felt like she should know everything about him. What she didn't realize is that his diaries and journals documented in explicit detail, every prostitute he had gone to, every, every gambling debt he had, every like terrible thing he had done to anybody. And so she spent the whole night before her wedding weeping about the guy she was about to marry.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  At least he's honest.

• 1:00:05Mark Manson?

  At least he's honest. At least, hey, there are worse problems, I guess. They went ahead with the marriage and it, from day one, they were married for 48 years. From day one, it was highly contentious, highly toxic. They were both incredibly manipulative towards each other. They intermingled every aspect of their lives. She edited and rewrote War and Peace for him. He was like, would demand full totalitarian control over the household. They would manipulate each other, backstab each other, turn kids against, their kids against each other. They would write in their diaries awful shit about each other.

• 1:00:45Mark Manson?

  And then they discovered that they were both sneaking into each other's offices and reading each other's diaries. So then they started writing in their diaries about each other so that the other one would read it and manipulating them, each other through their diary entries. It was just a whole fucking mess.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  That is another level of toxic.

• 1:01:03Mark Manson?

  It's another level of toxic, for sure.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 1:01:06Mark Manson?

  Finally. So late, late in Tolstoy's life, he had a pretty massive spiritual awakening, a religious conversion. By the way, he had become this rich and famous, probably the most famous living author in the world. And he had decided at like the ripe age of, I think, 75, that he wanted to give away all of his money and possessions to the needy and poor and become a peasant in the countryside. He had eight kids.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Mark Manson?

  Obviously, his wife was like, fuck no, dude. Get back to work.

• 1:01:40Mark Manson?

  She was so afraid that he was gonna change a will and write a new will to like, give away all their possessions to, to the church, that she would sleep in his office. And she like, would, literally would not leave his side. It drove him so crazy that he finally ran away in the middle of the night when he was 80 years old, contracted pneumonia and proceeded to die a week later. So.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Okay. That's a dramatic example.

• 1:02:07Mark Manson?

  All of this is to say.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  I get it.

• 1:02:08Mark Manson?

  The man who wrote Anna Karenina.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:11Mark Manson?

  Who, who arguably wrote the most powerful and poignant passages about love, some of the most powerful and poignant passages about love ever written. Was an absolute disaster in his, in his marriage and his personal life.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  And just like we mentioned, John Lennon, same thing.

• 1:02:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. I get that.

• 1:02:28Mark Manson?

  Complete mess. So.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  But there's gonna be a certain person that hears that story and say like, see? It's just not even worth it. And it's the same type of person, or it's the same, same argument that's made with a lot of people are like, oh, the government just can't do anything right. Therefore, we shouldn't have a government. It's like, no, what you're arguing for is better government.

• 1:02:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  What you're actually arguing for is better relationship skills, better, better skills where you can express and receive love.

• 1:02:53Mark Manson?

  Yes. And I a hundred percent agree with you. And, and the cautionary tale of Tolstoy is, is not that you shouldn't get married. It is that just because you intellectually understand this stuff, doesn't mean you're good at it.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay.

• 1:03:06Mark Manson?

  It's like reading 10 books about basketball and then thinking you can go play in the NBA.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Right. Right. Like you're a three point shooter.

• 1:03:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You have to go play basketball.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:16Mark Manson?

  There's no other way to do it.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  That I agree with.

• 1:03:18Mark Manson?

  So we've established that your brain is a bit of a con man. We've established that a terrible relationship is, from a mental health, physical health point of view, worse than no relationship. My final argument against love is that romantic love in particular, that initial limerence, that initial sweep you off your feet, it is more likely to happen with somebody who is completely toxic for you.

• 1:03:47Mark Manson?

  This is the unfortunate truth is that healthy love tends to be a little bit boring. That doesn't mean that it doesn't feel amazing, that it's not great, that it's, that it isn't a beautiful thing. It's just a little bit boring. And the, the people who are exciting, who keep you awake at night because you can't stop thinking about them, chances are they're pretty fucking toxic. So there's a thing called the dark triad, uh, which is there, it's three personality traits that are highly interrelated and they basically predict all antisocial behavior. Uh, so narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Um, I think people are pretty familiar with narcissism and psychopathy, um, or being a psychopath.

• 1:04:31Mark Manson?

  Machiavellianism is basically, it's being manipulative. It's basically like, uh, being scheming and playing games with people to like, get a one up on them. It turns out that people who are high in dark triad traits are extremely magnetic, especially upon the first impression. They are generally rated as more attractive, more confident, more desirable, and achieve far more short-term mating success. It's actually like, the dark triad is, it's really fucked up. It's a little bit of like a sore spot for me because, you know, back when I was in the men's dating advice industry, there was a small cohort of that industry, which at the time was known as the manosphere. It is since now blown up and is mostly popularized

• 1:05:14Mark Manson?

  by Andrew Tate. But the manosphere guys would, they looked at this research result, the fact that dark triad men in particular, uh, come off as more confident, more sexually attractive, and have more short-term mating success. As a result, they celebrated it. They said, this is, this is the behavior that we should be That's the goal. emulating. We should be, we should adopt dark triad traits as much as possible, which is a terrible fucking idea because dark triad people are miserable people. So it is, it is actually completely self-defeating. But the point for all of us is that the charm is real, the seduction is real, and what follows is also unfortunately often very

• 1:05:54Mark Manson?

  real. The other point I want to make around this is that intense chemistry is often driven not by genuine compatibility or genuine admiration for the other person. If you are experiencing extremely intense chemistry with somebody, sexual romantic chemistry with somebody upon first meeting them, Ninety nine times out of a hundred, it's going to be driven by some sort of trauma induced compensation. There's some deep childhood wound that this person has like somehow tapped into, whether through their personality, or the way they talk to you, or the way they look, or whatever it is. And it's that that overwhelming

• 1:06:38Mark Manson?

  response of emotion and obsession over this person is often driven by that that childhood wound that needs to heal, that it's like it is this person is somehow mapped on to that that childhood wound and you are basically playing out the same pattern with them individually. I actually went through an experience like this in college. It was absolutely crazy. I sat next to a girl in the computer lab one day. It started talking to her, somehow got talking about music, and there was just this like intense magnetic attraction that at up to that point in my life, I had never felt like it was

• 1:07:19Mark Manson?

  so intense, like I just couldn't stop staring at her, couldn't stop talking like was like, holy shit, this girl is amazing. We ended up talking the whole day in the computer lab. I invited her to dinner. We went to dinner. She had a had a boyfriend for five years. I was dating another girl. By that night, we were like hooking up at my, we basically spent a week straight together. We were completely obsessed with each other, like could not physically be in a different room. And I'll let you guess how this ended.

• 1:07:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I've seen that movie before. How many days do you think it lasted? Yeah, I think it made it to like day six, maybe it was in hindsight, I mean, I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I thought I thought I honestly thought I had just met the love of my life. And I think she thought the same thing and What ended up happening is that we were kind of caught in this whirlwind of fantasy and delusion. And eventually, you spend enough time with the person, you start seeing all of the nitty gritty details of them, you start seeing the reality of who they are. Some of these things start to become impossible to ignore. And then reality comes crashing in. And basically, it's like, the higher the high of that initial romantic dizziness, the harder the crash when it comes.

• 1:08:43Mark Manson?

  And so she and I just ended up in these like screaming arguments over really stupid stuff. And I think it's just because we had invested so much of ourselves and put so much expectation on a relationship that had only lasted like five days and had no understanding of like the fact that we're actually dealing with a real human being, an individual on the other side. So yeah, it came apart and I actually don't think I ever like talked to her or saw her again after that. So it's like, I actually had a friend who was also a dating coach back in the dating advice industry and he had a saying, he used to say, the brighter the candle burns, the faster it goes out. Yeah, okay. Definitely true. Sure.

• 1:09:28Mark Manson?

  My last point, and then I'll kind of wrap up with a meta point. So love bombing. Love bombing is when somebody just expresses so much attraction for you so quickly. It's often coupled with promises of long-term commitment, affection, you know, it's like gifts. It's just like, it's a lot. It's like a tidal wave of attention and affection. And generally, the person who's love bombing you, like, they do seem to genuinely have intentions of spending the rest of their lives with you. It's funny because when you look at the research on attraction, it's just a reminder of like how selfish people are.

• 1:10:08Mark Manson?

  Because one of the driving things about attraction is just somebody who's really into you. Like, if somebody's really, really into you, you're like, that's a pretty smart person.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  This is one way to get me interested in you is to be interested.

• 1:10:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  I have a very, very flimsy ego that can be easily manipulated. Hundred percent agree with that.

• 1:10:29Mark Manson?

  I mean, it's not the, it's not the only thing.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:10:32Mark Manson?

  Obviously, and it's not even like the biggest factor, but it is funny that we tend to be attracted to people who are attracted to us. Like, it's just, we're, we're a little egocentric in that way. Love bombing really leverages this mechanism, especially in insecure people, right? Because if you're insecure, you're, you're kind of desperate for people to be interested in you. And so when you get love bombed, it just feels like, oh my God, it's like a life preserver in, in a, in an ocean of despair.

• 1:11:01Mark Manson?

  The problem is, is that love bombing is not coming from a very genuine place. It is also coming from a very toxic place. It's coming from a very, it's coming from a place of inadequacy. And fortunately, a lot of dark triad people will intentionally use love bombing as a tactic to manipulate people into getting what they want. Coincidentally, Andrew Tate, his whole method that he sells to young men is to essentially love bomb young women. And, and, and love bombing, it's the sort of thing that it works, you know, we, we talked about in the dating episode, how insecurity attracts insecurity and security attracts security. Love bombing only works on highly insecure people.

• 1:11:43Mark Manson?

  Like, it's really if you're desperate for affection, if you are starved for validation, then a love bomb is going to, it's going to feel like a godsend. Whereas if you are a pretty secure, high self-esteem individual, guy starts love bombing you, your first thought's going to be like, what's wrong with him?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. He's compensating for something.

• 1:12:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, he's definitely like, he's, he's, he's a little bit unstable. The point of all of this is that, again, that romantic love, that initial limerence, it's, we're all susceptible to it.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:19Mark Manson?

  We've all got this con man who's kind of tricking us in our brains. And not only are we susceptible to it, but we're most susceptible to the most toxic people. And it is actually the most destabilizing behaviors and traits in people are the things that are the most intoxicating and exciting and romantic. And as we discussed in my rebuttal to your last argument, it is

• 1:12:44Mark Manson?

  Getting caught in one of those toxic cycles in a really toxic relationship, it can actually make you worse off than just being alone. And so it is, I do think people are right to be hesitant.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:12:55Mark Manson?

  To be skeptical. But I also do think that they should be actively looking for a relationship and partner. But it is, again, it comes back to what are you prioritizing? What are, how are you filtering people? And I just think love as a filtering mechanism, you have to be very, very, very careful.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Fair. Okay. Okay. A couple of things I want to point out. One of them with your, the college girlfriend story you had.

• 1:13:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  You were in college, you were young, you were 20, 21, maybe?

• 1:13:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:13:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So there's that. Sure. That, I mean.

• 1:13:34Mark Manson?

  By the way, I would not take that experience back. It was, it was.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:13:39Mark Manson?

  A shit show.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Point for Drew.

• 1:13:41Mark Manson?

  It was an absolute shit show. It completely disrupted my life and I'm sure it disrupted her life far more than it disrupted mine. Cause she was the one who was in a very long-term committed relationship.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Mark Manson?

  But yeah, don't regret it.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Okay. You, my point is though, that you were young and yes, we do dumb things when you're young. There's more going on than just like love overtaking us. It's, we're just not good at emotional regulation at that point.

• 1:14:04Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  So that's, that's one point I'm going to make, that you can actually learn to avoid those relationships and hopefully you do. I feel like I've gotten better at that as I've gotten older too. Another thing, I guess you kind of alluded to it, but yes, it is very, very common for like anxious attachment types to get with avoiding attachment types.

• 1:14:24Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  You're right. That's the people who really aren't good for us. For some cruel reason, we just tend to get with these people. Like you said, it's typically like a childhood wound of some kind that we're strangely trying to figure out with this, and we see this in this other person, hoping that they can fix it.

• 1:14:39Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  And it just turns out they're the exact wrong person to fix that. Totally agree with that. That happens all the time.

• 1:14:44Mark Manson?

  But just because.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Our initial attraction is often flawed just because our, our, our first impressions are usually not right, or they're not the best for us, or whatever it is. That doesn't mean, again, we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Um, I think what you're talking about is that fairy tale kind of infatuation. Of course, that's not sustainable. The, the, the tale of Romeo and Juliet is real, and the lesson from it is real, which is young dumb love needs to be tempered.

• 1:15:17Mark Manson?

  Gets people killed.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Right? You drink, you end up drinking M lock, right?

• 1:15:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  You, you mentioned this, you said that, uh, what actual love often looks like is more boring. And that wasn't really something I think I figured out until, uh, the last few years either. So in my current relationship now, when we first started dating, I was like, does she even like, I don't think she likes me. I didn't think she liked me. Cause I've been so, I've usually been the avoidant one in so many of my adult relationships. And, um, I've usually been with a more anxious person, or at least that's how it ends up shaping out. And then, you know, I get this constant, there's always this like, the anxious person is always kind of like, they're the ones keeping in contact with me. They're the ones trying to push things along. They're the ones, you know, like, do you like me? Um, what I thought were demands they were putting on me, all of these

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  things, right? This relationship that I'm in now, that didn't happen. She's a pretty secure person and it didn't happen. I'm just like, this is, does she like me? I have no idea what's going on. And it wasn't until the relationship progressed far enough that I kind of brought that up. And I'm like, no, I didn't know. I didn't think you really liked me. And she's like, this gets to the point about over therapizing thing. It's a little bit like, I brought up, I'm like, yeah, I've, you know, historically been pretty avoidant. And she was a little bit taken back by that, you know, like a little bit like, mm, I better watch out because I've been in these situations before. I'm fairly secure, but avoiding people. I'm attracted to them just like a lot of, a lot of people are. Um, and, and so she wanted to watch out for that. But what we, when we finally did have this honest, open conversation about it, it was like, oh, this is just like, this is what a healthy relationship looks like. It's boring. And so.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  I do agree that we put way too much emphasis on that early initial fairy tale infatuation phase. And that gets like, you know, all the rom coms from the 90s and 2000s like blew it way out of proportion and romanticized it way too much. I definitely agree with that. But there's a lot of research that shows what actually does work and does predict success. And again, those are skills you can practice. Those are things you can, I'm living proof of this.

• 1:17:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  I was terrible at this. And I just thought, like, yeah, I got caught in that phase where it was chasing that high.

• 1:17:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It was chasing that cocaine addiction, as you called it, you know, of another person. But you can, over time, I think we just get better at this as we get older. And there's just a whole suite of predictors of success that aren't personality based, actually. It's not like a compatibility necessary thing. It's, it's these behaviors that you can practice and you can cultivate in yourself. So there was this, this one meta-analysis. It was 40, it was 43 different studies on the relationship success. And they had, they found four big predictors of relationship satisfaction. Okay.

• 1:17:55Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  One of them was perceived partner commitment. Okay. So how much do you think your partner is actually like in this with you? Right? Just appreciation for the other person. Sexual satisfaction was up there too. And then low conflict. The master variable kind of in all of this, though, was partner responsiveness. And this is something I had to learn. Again, this is, it can be learned.

• 1:18:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  You can learn this.

• 1:18:17Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  So it's not just that, like, you have these, like, awful behaviors coming from somebody else with a dark triad or anything like that. Yes, that's part of it. Obviously screen those people out. But just being able to cultivate some sort of responsiveness with your partner. And this is what I kind of had to learn as an avoidant person.

• 1:18:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  When you have somebody who might be a little more anxious or prone to anxiety, it doesn't take a whole lot.

• 1:18:39Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  It does not take a whole lot. When they come to you, instead of looking at them as like demands, you're like, oh, I need to be responsive to this. And same to them too. So there's a mutual responsiveness that really predicts a lot of, of relationship success and satisfaction. And that's what really I think underpins love more than anything. It's like a responsiveness, you're responsive to somebody. No, you're not responsible for their happiness or anything like that, but you are responsive to them.

• 1:19:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  And so it's not about these personality traits. It's not about like you're attracting the wrong person. It's just. You don't have the skills for it. You don't have, you haven't developed the experience and the skills. This is why young people fall for all the wrong people for them. It's because they haven't developed those skills yet and we haven't taught them very well either in, in our culture and society.

• 1:19:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Even narcissists, they can't fake, they can only fake empathy for so long and then it does fall off the tracks, sure. But if you can train yourself to notice that and focus more on those responsive behaviors within a relationship, that can predict a lot more success.

• 1:19:41Mark Manson?

  The responsiveness thing overlaps really well too with the Gottman Institute research.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:49Mark Manson?

  So for listeners that, you know, the, the Gottmans have been probably the preeminent researchers on, on marriage stability and satisfaction for 40 years now.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Mark Manson?

  And their primary method of researching is that they literally just film married couples. They film them fighting, they film them hanging out, they film them talking about random things in their, in their relationships. And they did, they've just built this massive archive of footage and then they track those married couples longitudinally. And they see which ones divorce and, and break up. And then they go back and, you know, if, if, say if a couple gets divorced, they go back and they start looking at all the tape to like, look at all the different micro expressions and transactions and, um, and different things that were said and different personality types and all that stuff to, to try to, to define commonalities through the marriages that stay together and stay happy and the marriages that end up falling apart.

• 1:20:44Mark Manson?

  And he kind of came up with this framework that he, he calls bids for affection. And it is really about this, this responsiveness, like, you know, it's, the Gottmans argue that it's the hallmark of, of happy couples is that, you know, each partner throughout the day is going to make bids for affection in different ways, whether it's through initiating a conversation or, um, you know, Putting your hand on their leg or asking them how they feel about something or asking for, you know, to get something off a high shelf for whatever it is. And it's what they find is that happy, stable couples, a vast majority of those bids are fulfilled or responded to.

• 1:21:27Mark Manson?

  And then the relationships that fall apart, there's a larger percentage of those bids are either ignored or they're shot down. The responsiveness piece, it does, it really does, that feels like the DNA of like a stable, long-term commitment.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's the basis more for like a more durable form of love. What you are describing is this initial infatuation.

• 1:21:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I get that. Okay. But there's, I think what you learn is that there is a more durable form of love that involves your active participation, not just how the other person makes you feel.

• 1:22:03Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Okay. It's like you're actively involved in, in the relationship in a way and, and building and sustaining that love. It's not just a thing that's just there. It's actually something you have to work at. And responsiveness is really the, one of the underlying bedrocks of it.

• 1:22:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So with that, why don't, why don't we, we get into the conclusion. So we've both made our arguments. We've rebutted each other. We've made counter arguments. I do think there is a clean way to synthesize all of this. And it actually comes back to Helen Fisher, who I mentioned at the top of the show. She has this framework that I love. And I actually wrote about, God, at this point, 15 years ago.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 1:22:45Mark Manson?

  I wrote, I wrote my first article about Helen Fisher in 2010.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  God. Oh, my God.

• 1:22:50Mark Manson?

  2010, I wrote about Helen Fisher for the first time. And I wrote about this framework because it was, when I discovered it, it answered a lot of questions. And I think it actually is kind of the map to. To synthesize everything that you and I have both been talking about here. So she calls it the three loves framework. And she, what, what she has found in her research is that humans tend to experience what we call love, the single word for love. It's, it's actually three different experiences. And they vary based on context and situation and from person to person. But they also, they vary biologically, neurologically. So the first one is lust, which is just sex drive.

• 1:23:34Mark Manson?

  It's primarily hormonally driven. It's craving for sexual gratification. It's relatively indiscriminate. You are just kind of like, oh, that person's hot. Right. You know? And it doesn't go a whole lot further than that. You can feel it for anybody. You can feel it at any time. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. You can even be sexually attracted to somebody you actively don't like, which I think everybody's probably experienced at one time or another. Oh, yeah. The second love or the second, second mechanism is romantic love. So this is that early stage limerence, infatuation that I was railing against

• 1:24:14Mark Manson?

  that often gets glorified in the culture and rom coms and old romantic movies or romantic novels. So romantic love is primarily driven by dopamine, norepinephrine. I can never say that fucking word. Norepinephrine. Norepinephrine and serotonin. It's generally, it's characterized by an obsessive focus on a single person. And it's an obsession to the point of euphoria. There's intrusive thinking. They, there's an emotional roller coaster. You, when they don't text you back immediately, you are just at a nervous wreck. And then when they show up at your door, you're like elated and life is perfect. And then when they go home, you start freaking out that you're never going to see them again. And it's just kind of this.

• 1:25:00Mark Manson?

  This very irrational up and down experience that you feel from moment to moment, like your entire happiness revolves around them.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  It's where the addiction metaphor comes in.

• 1:25:11Mark Manson?

  Yes, is absolutely, it maps very well to the addictive mechanisms inside the brain. And as the point you made was 100% true as well is that it primarily evolved to focus our mating energy long enough on a single individual to build that pair bond, to build like the trust and respect and history and experiences together for a longer term relationship to actually initiate. Doesn't always initiate, but it's that's, that's what the mechanism is there for. And then finally, the third love is the attachment system, or it's the companion at love, which is the one that we finished talking about. So this is primarily driven by oxytocin and vasopressin.

• 1:25:54Mark Manson?

  It's a calmer, more peaceful, secure connection with a long-term partner. There's a deep sense of trust and safety. You know, it's funny, when we did that happiness episode and we talked about eastern and western understandings of happiness and how a western understanding of happiness is very excitable. It's like very dramatic and like these epic adventure and like really awesome day and like, oh my God, this was so cool, we'll never forget it. Whereas like an eastern understanding of happiness is very peaceful and calm and serene. I would say that those two understandings of happiness map very well to

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:33Mark Manson?

  Romantic love and companion at love. Like romantic love is extremely exciting. It, it just feels like you are flying through the air. There is an adrenaline rush to it. There, it's just, it's a completely overwhelming feeling. Whereas companion at love is just this peace, this calm, it's a serenity. I've noticed, it's crazy, like there have been times where like my wife and I have actually noted it, like we will just sit on, we won't even talk, like we'll sit on the couch together. Maybe I'm playing a video game and she's reading a book. And we'll just be so happy for like hours, like much happier than if we were

• 1:27:15Mark Manson?

  skydiving or climbing the pyramids or whatever like I in in that moment, I would actually rather just be sitting on the couch with my wife, not like not doing anything.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:27:26Mark Manson?

  Oh, shucks. But it is. It is funny because it is. I we talked about it as being boring. I would say it is externally boring.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  From the outside.

• 1:27:34Mark Manson?

  From the outside, it looks incredibly boring. If from the inside, if you are the one experiencing it, it is incredibly satisfying. It is. It's actually in kind of a Buddhist sense, it is almost enlightening in that like you don't want to be anywhere else. You're like, I don't want to change this moment.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  No, no, no craving.

• 1:27:53Mark Manson?

  No, yeah, it's a moment of no craving. It's like I am fully whole and satisfied in this moment. And this is really, this is that long term pair bond. This is, this is the life partner. This is the, the social infrastructure that you talked about. This is the bedrock of human civilization, of the human family system. This is the parent bond that is lasts long enough to raise healthy, thriving kids to give them a better chance in their lives. All of the good long term stuff comes out of this. Now, the interesting thing is, is that all of these, all three of these loves, they kind of operate separately within us. They can all be directed at the same person, but they can be directed at multiple people

• 1:28:36Mark Manson?

  at different times. Also, what's interesting about the three loves is that they, they tend to be the entry point into the next one. So generally speaking, you find somebody sexy and then you go talk to them. And then you kind of develop a romantic love for them. Like it doesn't happen the other way around, or at least not very often. It's like that initial sexual interest is what opens the door to meeting them and then experiencing that romantic love. And then that romantic love is what keeps you bonded to that person long enough to ideally start building that, that companion at love. I think we're both

• 1:29:16Mark Manson?

  correct in that when I was primarily criticizing romantic love, because I think it is overrated. I think a large degree of that is for all the reasons I stated, but the thing that's interesting about romantic love is that it really is sort of a thing that just kind of happens. Like it is. It's not, it's not a skill you can develop. It's not like, it's not something you can predict. It's not something you can go through a dating app and accurately predict like, oh, I'm gonna fall in love with this person. It just, it, I mean, there's a reason why people call it getting struck by lightning, cuz it just feels like it happens to you.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Falling in love.

• 1:29:52Mark Manson?

  You're just like, holy shit, I'm obsessed with this person. And so as a result, I think people have a very passive disposition towards it. They're like, well, I hope it happens to me, you know? And it's, this is at one of the cores of my argument, is that because people overestimate it, they, they assume that all relationships function that way. So it's, you know, you see single people who are like, well, I hope I meet my, my special someone one day, or I, I hope I meet the one, as if it's like something that just happens to them. The thing is, is that romantic love is just one middle step in a larger process. And you do have lots of control over other parts of that process, as we talked about in the dating episode.

• 1:30:36Mark Manson?

  So it is, like, I, I think one of the issues with it is that people just feel resigned to how they feel. And, and then once they do fall in love with somebody, they feel resigned to like, well, this is the person I fell in love with. So yeah, they're toxic and they treat me like shit, but like-

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Can't help who you love.

• 1:30:51Mark Manson?

  But you can't help who you love. And it's like, it, it becomes a justification for like tolerating a lot of bad shit. And so for that reason, I think, and I imagine we both agree on this, that romantic love is highly overrated.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:03Mark Manson?

  That people need to really downgrade it in their mind. And I think it needs to be kind of culturally downgraded to a certain extent as well. Whereas companionate love is more active, it is skill-based, it is something that you have to mindfully approach and practice and get better at. Relationships do need maintenance, they do need repair, they, they, and they also need upkeep. And these are skills that you can learn, but you mostly have to learn them by doing them. And I think you and I would probably both agree that companionate love is probably underemphasized or undertaut or underrated-

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:41Mark Manson?

  -to a certain degree.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely. I'm gonna point out, you did say this though, that you think each one of those forms of love is still necessary. I think it's the, it's in the emphasis where we get screwed up. So yeah, um, I, I would agree, just like you shouldn't be doing lines of coke all the time, ever, really.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that's not sustainable.

• 1:32:01Mark Manson?

  We're gonna put a quote on Instagram. It's like, uh, do cocaine in moderation. Drew Bernie.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  So yes, totally agree where we end up on this. Would be interested to see everybody leave some comments and see where you're you land on this though, too. What did we miss? What do we? What do you think we maybe we? Maybe we were over emphasizing something?

• 1:32:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, leave a comment for that. Maybe we'll put a poll up too on Spotify.

• 1:32:27Mark Manson?

  That'd be interesting.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  To see, see where we land on some of this.

• 1:32:29Mark Manson?

  Tell us, tell us who won the, the, the, the.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:32:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 1:32:33Mark Manson?

  You know, you know what's funny too, is I do think there's a large aspect of culture in this as well. Like, yeah, I do think.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:32:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like I, I, I just think about living in Latin America and, you know, being married to a Latina.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Romances.

• 1:32:48Mark Manson?

  Romance, there's a lot of emphasis put on romance and, uh, and you can see it in the results down there.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Well, and just the way, you know, we grew up with Disney movies and rom coms too, you know, that and that was a big shift, I think, from, from previous generations as well. So yeah, there's a huge cultural component to this. Yeah.

• 1:33:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  If you, you go talk to like Russians or people who live in Eastern Europe and something and like, you guys are just obsessed with this. This is weird.

• 1:33:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's definitely there's a cultural element to it.

• 1:33:14Mark Manson?

  I do think you need both. Like, I, I do think you.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  And there's nothing wrong with romantic love. I don't want to say there's like, there's the overemphasis is the, the problem.

• 1:33:23Mark Manson?

  In a vacuum, there's nothing wrong. It's just like, you have to be aware that it, it will often come up with the wrong people and, and, and you just need to be ready for that. Like, just don't blindly trust it.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe that's where evolution screwed up is that, uh, we, we had to learn that first before actually going through it.

• 1:33:41Mark Manson?

  And again, I think it's probably because most of human history, we evolved where there wasn't a whole lot of downside to falling in love with the wrong person.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:33:50Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, it's worst case scenario, okay, well, you, you have another baby and, you know, it's like, everybody's in the same tribe. Everybody knows each other. Everybody's each other's cousin. So like, what's the difference?

• 1:34:01Mark Manson?

  Whereas in the modern world, yeah, if you fall in love with the wrong person, like, there can be some pretty drastic repercussions. Right. Yeah. This was fun. Yeah, this was fun. I like this format. Let us know, everybody, how you feel about this format, if you enjoyed it as much as we do. I think I could see us doing this again. Yeah. If people are really into it. As always, please follow us and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. It's the best thing you can do to help us get the word out to more people, to help other people experience the joys of falling in love with the Soul Podcast. That's right. There's nothing like it. Until next time, everybody, I love you.