This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to kf I Am six forty the
Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Doctor Wendy Walsh,
Will You Live? Is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. If you are new
to my show, you should know that I have a PhD in clinical psychology.
I'm a psychology profess California State University, Channel Islands. I've been obsessed
with the science of love for quite a few decades. You may have read
one of the Boyfriend Test, How to Tell his Potential before you Lose your
Heart or the girlfriend How datable are you really? Or the Thirty Day loved
Talks, Purge Yourself a voice, Cheaters, commitment phobes all out there.
I have been reading about the science of love. Kids coming up in the
show. I am going to pull you off the guilt train. Whether you're
divorced and feel like somehow your marriage was a failure. Ooh, I'm going
to change your language. Still attached to your ex in some way, maybe
even through the courts and with lawyers. I don't know your child free and
you feel like somehow that's not how things are supposed to happen perpetually single.
Maybe you're having an affair. Let me tell you it's all normal. It's
part of beam and being. We're going to talk about the way people date,
mate and regulate. Also coming up in if you're in a new relationship
and you're wondering if it's time to take it to public. Some people call
that a harsh ready to do a hard launch on social media or another way.
Well, I'll tell you whether it's time or not. Questions you should
be asking yourself and oh, one simple way to tell you're in a secure
relationship. You won't believe this simple question to self. Do I have producer
Kayla with me? How are you, my dear at wady? How are
you are you with me producing? I'm good? How are you doing lady?
Oh? God, we're talking all over each other? Question for you?
Yes, Oh, we have a delay because I'm gonna say about Portos
or Kayla's on a little bit of a Vika, but she's there with us.
Have you spent much time when in your life? I mean wall to
wall solitude in your life. I think when I moved away for the first
time I spent the first time is on with hude. So yeah, yes,
I ask, well, I want you to listen closely because I want
to talk about loneliness versus welcome solitude, what's the difference, and how much
relationships or don't need relationships. And here's the reason why I'm going to tell
this story. I've actually this past week probably spent more time alone and in
solitude than I have done in my air adult life. Now, I am
not like my friend, the famous attorney Lisa Bloom, who's been hiking the
Pacific rail and literally has been sending me missives whenever she gets a little bit
of internet. Literally it's like literally on her own for days and days and
days days and in the wilderness. No less, I am girl. Okay,
I did go for a hike by myself. I was terrified that I
would get lost, and I did get lost. But guess what all paths
lead down? Okay, if you went up, it's got to come down
at some point in my way. But for me, it doesn't matter why
I ended up in solitude. I want about what the experience was like for
me. And maybe there are people out there, maybe you're listening, you
also have felt alone at one time of another. You know we are to
be with each other throughout our entire human history. We have to rely and
I always have on others for our survival, both our literal survival helping to
procure food, and also our emotional val We needed others to protect us from
things like physical threats. We needed this sense of community. So neuroscientists would
say that we have evolved and our brothers adapted to something called social proximity.
We don't do well lone interesting enough, during my week of solitude, I
watched a movie but a Lonely Man. You might see it. It's probably
like number one on Netflix right now, a man called Otto, and if
you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you see it. It's about a
lonely, very grump widower and then what happens. I mean, he actually
tries to take his own life a number of time, different ways. It's
a comedy, I know. And so in next door across the way moves
in this bubbly, talkative, energetic young family. The mom is vignant,
she's Latina, she's talking half the time in Spanish, she's laughing, she
doesn't even seem to know rumpiness. She's just cheering him up. With her
food, and as you can imagine, things change for him. Whole life
changes because of this one woman, and then his relationships to everybody else seems
because of how he changed internally. Now, I want to remind you that
lose social isolation as our punishment for other human beings. We exile the vibe.
Think of it. Two year olds, three year olds, four year
olds. What's the best punishment time out for from a few minutes of social
isolation. At the other end of the spectrum, the worst and most documented
in humane punishment, solitary confinement of somebody who's experiencing abseration the worst thing we
can do. So what's the difference between social ice that hurts us and a
well needed rest and a break from others that might help us grow? First
of all, there is documentation, lots of lots of lots of research.
Who are alone, not by choice? Right, your brain start experience uncertainty,
ruminating, your stress areas of your brain light up, and you know,
we are meant to have companionship, we are meant to have intimacy with
others. And one study in fact, back in nineteen and it was a
huge study, eleven thousand people that's a giant group of people. They found
that the upperiencing the most social isolation had above average declines in cognitive function.
I recall, we actually don't think as well. Also another sound that people
who are alone too much actually become more hostile. Well, that would have
been auto right listening to the Tom Hanks character definitely felt very very hostile.
On the of seventy five hundred older adults, found that those had been hurt
or hard done by others and who had decided to withdraw it out more hostility.
Now, it's interesting because some people when they get older are happy and
others not. And I found some really interesting research that really helped me this
week. And you might have heard of the big five personality traits agreeableness,
conscientiousness, traversion, openness, and your stress tolerance. Right, So personality
traits are well researched and documented. They're pretty hardwired. And most of us
there that happened across the lifespan, like, for instance, we all become
more conscientious as we get older, deliberate, self disciplined. Anyway, here's
what the research says. That women who are high and agreeableness would say,
that's me. How a higher risk of becoming lonely as they aged, and
the most conscientiousness, detail oriented, oh, higher risk of becoming lonely men
were. The more agreeable a man was, the more he had a lower
risk of being lonely. The more conscientious he lower risk of becoming lonely.
Oh, here's a silver lining. People who are more neurotic and anxiety worriver.
Actually women women, neurotic women don't become lonely people around us. There
is a lone time that's good for you. Maybe when you're alone and fewer
people, you grow more empathy. You focus on just those one or two
people you meet, some compassion for them and their life. Let me tell
you there was a few days this week I only talked to the postman.
You're Joe's cashier, and they were really fascinating people to me with long conversations.
Search to show that more alone time makes you more productive. Yeah,
despite all that open concept of the office chatting not good for productivity, A
long time can make you feel more creative. So spending some time alone can
make you stop and plan your life a little bit. And finally, and
I head ranced this week, solitude can help you listen to your inner voice.
Listen to yourself. What do you Who are you? Where are you
going? Yeah, I'm going through a lot of that is that nest syndrome
thing, I think. But I did learn something else. I think this
is my theory. I'm just making this up, but I think it's true.
I think being alone give you bags under your eyes. Wait, wait,
stay with me. I have to explain this. So one time,
so my mother had bags under her eyes. I'm getting I'm starting to have
bags under my eyes. So I asked a plastic surgeon once, what do
you do for that? And he said, nothing. Fluid under your eyes
and the muscles in your cheeks from smiling, pump out the fluid. But
if you're not chatting, and you don't have an ace, and you're not
smiling enough, it doesn't get a chance to pump out the fluid. I
know. So I started talking to myself the walls and smiling at myself in
the mirror a lot. I had to pump out that fluid, you guys,
because a couple days into the mirror, I'm like, wait a sec,
my face is not being animated enough anyway, So it can you.
It can also be very hurtful to you. The question is whether you're isolated
by choice because he eats some alone time, or whether somebody else is imposing
it on you. And if someone's imposing it on you, they coumbent on
you to reach out and find some social support. All right, when we
come back, if you are in a relationship or not in a relationship,
and you have some feelings of guilt around your situation, I am going to
pull you off the guilt train. I'll explain when we come back. You're
listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI Am six forty. You have
Doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. So
I mentioned that this week has been one of the loneliest but self and lonely
weeks of my adult life. And last night I decided to just clean myself
and go out to dinner alone, like into a restaurant. You know what,
You can always sit at the bar because there's act which is the bartender,
and also there's usually people sitting there. So I was chatting with a
couple. They were lovely couple and they had just started dating like nine months
ago, and we got into a little conversation out this idea of feeling like
our pastnships we're somehow a failure. If you're one of those people who thinks
that, I want to remind you that there is no such thing as a
failed relationship. We stay together until we've finished growing. I think of relationships
as easium for our minds. It's a way for us to get a workout,
and when you get strong enough, time to leave that gym and move
to the next level. Think of the things that your quote a failed relationships
have produced for you, maybe the Holy Grail children. Maybe you learned something
from that person. When we are in a relationship, we're a cooperative thinker
learning from each other. I always say that a relationship is kind of like
the Aven diagram. Two circles. You don't want to be two separate circles.
Those are polite roommates living in a house. You also so overlapped that
you're ameshed. Nobody can remember whose problem is. Who's want your circles to
overlap just enough. But on the outside, there you are continue row to
bring something new into the relationship. You know, when till the West part
was invented, death was pretty imminent. And our biggest problem now that our
relationships are failing, it's that we're outliving them. Our life spans are so
long now that even the most monogamous of humans, which anthropologists speculate is about
fifty percent of people completely monogamous, even those monogamous people may have two or
even three long stints of monogamy with some mate selection in between. We call
that dating. Right, So, I want you to know, using the
length of a relationship as a litmus test for success as anant of its success
doesn't make sense. Look, maybe you had trauma in your childhood and as
a result, you've got an attachment style that's a little bit insecure, and
you have a hard time telling if somebody is safe or not whether you can
trust love or relationship. Maybe for you, if you date somebody for one
week and you see the risk, you're like, oh no, I am
not walking back down into the scene of that crime again. I'm going to
burst in already. How can you say that's a failed relationship. That is
a very succestionship for you because you figured it out in one week that this
person would be bad for you. Right, So, yet length of a
relationship is one of the worst things we can do. If we're trying to
say whether it's successful or not. All right, there are people out there.
It may not be you, but there are people out there who believe
that if they did not give birth to biological children, that how they failed,
They failed to reproduce, they failed in some way. Well, the
truth is, since the beginning of time, in our species of full twenty
percents, men and women do not reproduce biologically because we need them to help
raise the in species, we are cooperative breeders. They are the aunties and
uncles and cousins and neighbors and preachers and coaches. And these are the aloe
parents who help raise the entire village of children. If odd in our anthropological
past, or parents trying to focus on keeping their own kids alive, well,
our species would have been predators. But we had to have some aloe
parents around to babysit while to protect the tribe while we were dealing with kids.
We need aloe parents and they are importances. Look, maybe you're somebody
who never married and you're single for life, if you've got sort if you've
got that person who you can call, if you're in need, Then you
don't have failed relationships built what you need. Maybe you're divorced but not really
meaning that you're divorced, but you and your ex are still kind of best
friends, are hanging out. Maybe there's a good reason to keep parts of
that union alive. Got kids to raise. Maybe you're not ready to enter
into another relationship yet, and yes, having an affair. Look, the
research has been really consistent over the past couple of decades that about twenty and
twenty five percent of married men cheat. Right, Oh, I'm sorry,
but ten tip that wrong. Ten to fifteen percent of women, twenty to
twenty five percent of men tend to cheat. But why there could be a
good reason your partner's ill. Maybe your partner is you're you're exhausted with taking
care caregiver exhaustion. Right, Maybe you're staying together for really good with kids,
money, finances, and you're finding a way to meet your needs outside
of that. Look is how dangerous it can be? Nothing worse than second
actual jealousy. Right, you know you're odd. Right, I'll tell you
one thing that attitudes about cheating have changed in the nineteen seventies. We won't
care so much about cheating like we do now. We're obsessed with it is
because we put all our emotional eggs in one basket. We are lover to
be everything to us, and if we lose that person, we seem to
lose our world. Oh you know, I do suggest that you don't cheat.
It's real painful when someone finds us falls apart. Some people use it
as a stepping stone to a new relationship. Maybe you're just unhapped and you're
not ready to leave. You don't have to leave yet, there's no pressure.
Believe there's still a few more warm fuzzies in your relationship than cold pricklies.
And the time isn't right yet, So I'm here to pull you off
the guilt train. There's no one right way of love or have a healthy
relationship. Speaking of interesting relationships, there's a term that's thrown around a lot
called monogamish. Monogamish like you're kind of monogaus but not you're monogamish. Let's
talk about if your relationship could tolerate that mott. If you're listening Hulio,
mine could not. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Walsh Show and KFI AMC
Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio Act. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand
from kf I AM sixty forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh. Would you
gets it with the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. I was talking earlier about people
who may be staying in unhappy relationships for all kinds of reasons. For the
kids, that's a good one. You know, the research shows that staying
together for the children is actually good for the children. And let me explain
why. Because when two people separate, they children are more likely to be
you know, lose their friends, have to move their school, they lose
their village, and they also may suffer from poverty because maintaining two households is
way more expensive than maintaining one, and so it's hard on kids. Kids
can actually thrive pretty well with consistency, even with a couple of bickering parents,
if they have all the other village support that they need, their school
system, their friends, their coaches, etc. But you yank the kids
out of that because of divorce, and that is what hurts the kids.
Kids need consistency. So you maybe stand together for the kids very noble reason,
or maybe you're having an affair on the side, which I said up
to twenty to twenty five percent of men do. Married men do, and
about ten or fifteen percent of married women. I'm not making any moral judgments.
I know you're listening like I'm a guest. Is she's saying it's okay
to have an affair. I'm not saying it's okay. I'm saying it can
be very problematic. And sexual jealousy is a real thing, Okay, can
cause really big problems, but it's a messenger that something's wrong in your relationship
and you're not being fulfilled enough. And it's not just about sack. One
research study I shows I read showed that men actually choose to have affairs more
for emotional reasons and physical reasons. They want someone to listen to them because
their wife stopped listening a while ago, and women they're not getting enough emotional
support from their husband, so they'll go out and a guy will, you
know, talk a lot of sweet nothings into their ear. It feels real
good. So it's not just about the sex. So if you ever considered
making your relationship monogamish, monogamish, that's something between a monogamous relationship and a
fully open relationship. Now, being monogamish is different for every single couple,
but it basically means this term, you're not fully open, You're not fully
closed. You know where the term click came from the podcaster, author and
sex columnist Dan Savage. He coined the term, and he uses monogamish to
describe his own relationshi and ship with his long term partner where they're both in
this long time committed relationship I think like almost thirty years or something, but
they have the occasional intimate encounter with other people. Now, I want to
say something, Dan Savage is gay. He clearly states though that before he
was out, he had many heterosexual relationships. He clearly states that he believes
he understands women. But I just want to say I have my own bias
here and my own biases that I am a heterosexual woman, and so Dan
Savage has never worn a woman's brain. Okay, we have evolved to have
sexual jealousy. Now, there are some people who can suppress their sexual jealousy.
They tend to be people who may have an avoidant attachment style. They
don't really want a lot of closeness and intimacy, and that's why they water
down the milk. With multiple partners and multiple relationships, men are able to
suppress sexual jealousy, not so much thinking about their wife with another man,
but they're able to separate sex from feelings easier than women are. But there
are some suggested about four percent of women have high testosterone and they're going to
have sex like a band, meaning they can separate it out. I'll tell
you though, there are some people that should never ever ever try a monogamish
or open relationship. This is my opinion, and those would be people who
have an anxious attachment style that used to be me. That means they have
heightened levels of sexual jealousy and they're worried about abandonment and their partner's going to
leave them. So that's no, that's not going to work for them.
Also, people who are in a relationship where the power dynamic is unbalanced.
Even though you can say, well, we're too consenting adults and we decided
together to open up our relationship and we're going to be monogamish. Yeah,
if one person is entirely financially dependent on the other, can you really give
consent? Right? Can you really be an adult and give consent if you
need the support and the money and your kids fed. Just saying, or
what if there's a big age gap? You know, the power in a
May December relationship always lies with the older person, no matter what their gender
is. Do you know why? Because they have more life experience, they
have more knowledge. They can easily manipulate the other. It's quite a thing
to have a relationship where there's, you know, decades of age between the
two of you. The other thing you should know is that monogamish is not
a one size fits all. It involves lots and lots of talking about rules,
boundaries, circumstances and renegotiating it all the time. I know somebody who
has a monogamish marriage and they have a rule that is, if you step
out of the relationship to have an intimate accounter with somebody else, it can't
be anybody we socialize with, right You don't want to have to sit at
the dinner table later with that person. That's one rule. It's a good
one, am I kind of like that one. And the other rule they
erected is only one time on that merrig around. Okay, so one time
if you're going to have a new partner outside one time. This sure doesn't
work for women because women never have good sex the first time. If you're
a woman who has first great sex with somebody the first time you meet them
or the first time you have sex, you need to DM me because I
can't believe this is true. It's usually like the third time before things really
get going with women and they can calm down and have an orgasm, etc.
The other thing is you have to constantly renegotiate your preferences, your needs,
your boundaries. You have to constantly mutually agree. You know, you
might have rules around well, how long can you flirt? What is the
chatting going on? It's a lot of detail, right, And you also
have to be able to withdraw your consent at anytime. You have to be
able to say I'm not doing this anymore, and the other person has to
say okay, right. See there's the problem. Once you taste that something
new, you know, you're like, oh, maybe I want to have
that for dinner a lot, right, But both partners have to have the
right to curtail the arrangement at any time. Now, there is some small
research that says that some PSALM. Monogamish couples report greater emotional intimacy between each
other because they're always talking about the tender subjects. They're always negotiating, reaffirming
their boundaries. And also it can for some people if they can tolerate,
enable some personal growth and help them get to know each other. But I
just want to warn you you're playing with fire. Honestly, beware of the
dangers of playing with fire, and ask yourself, are you doing monogamish because
you're actually testing the waters out there and to think of leaving your relationship,
that's a real question. Hey, on the opposite end, are you thinking
of going public with your new relationship? Is it time to do a hard
launch. I'll explain maybe it is, maybe it isn't. There's some questions
you need to ask yourself. When we come back. You are listening to
the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show and kf I AM six forty. We're live everywhere
on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM sixty kf AM six forty. You have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you.
This is the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show. I remember one time I had a
date with a man years ago and he decided to tell me this story.
Now, it was a first date, and so it was kind of interesting
that he would choose to tell me this story. He told me that he
had dated a woman for about two months. They had been having sex,
but they had not had the conversation, the what are we conversation? Where
is this going? And then one day he was shocked to see a picture
of the two of them on Facebook, with her announcing to the world that
she's dating him. Well, he told me that he broke up with her
immediately, that he was so angered by this. This was a fragile relationship
that she took public too early. Not surprising. He made a point of
telling me that story on our first date as a warning, like doing you
better not try that, right. I think people are always afraid because I
have all the social media that I could have put my whole life out there,
But if you really look at how curated my social media is, it's
not that personal. So it made me start to think, when is the
right time to completely go public. You might call it becoming Instagram official or
hard launching your relationship how do you know when it's the right time, when
to have that explicit, clear announcement that you are in a relationship. First
of all, let's talk about why this matters. There are a lot of
people who dip their toe into love. They get into these situation ships,
or they have slow love where they take their time seeing other people and getting
to know somebody, or they're in a cocooning phase. They've met each other
and now they're deep in the cocoon and they haven't really brought the relationship out
two people because they've been alone, busy falling in love. You know,
my boyfriend Julio and I met near the beginning of the pandemic, and we
had the gift of time, as we all did during quarantine, and so
we got to spend unlimited amounts of time with each other. And there's no
rush to go public because who were we going out with. Everybody was under
quarantine, right, So we waited a year till our first anniversary before I
posted a picture of the two of us on my Instagram and we had the
conversation about it. So I do want to say though, that all the
relationships eventually have to go somewhere they're either going to turn into something more solid
or they're going to fall apart. But they're moving, they're happening, They're
gonna go somewhere. So I put together this little list of questions to ask
yourself if your relationship is ready for a hard launch. So the first question
is about time and duration. If you're young, I want to say this,
have you been dating at least six months? Okay, it shouldn't be
all over your social media. If it's less than six months, the relationship
is just too fragile because when you do that hard launch, now the world
is weighing in. You're gonna have their exes seeing it. They're going to
have other friends that may have feelings of envy. You're gonna have mate poachers
come along and try to steal your mate. Oh, it's a big deal
when you do a hard launch. So, as I mentioned, Hulu and
I waited for a year because we're older and time goes by faster. Honestly,
like we blinked, any year went by. Plus, don't you find
like in the pandemic we lost like three years of our life. It's kind
of like rip van Winkletown. I can't remember what season or what year of
anything between January of twenty twenty until January of twenty twenty twenty twenty three.
I think it's just a blur to me. So make sure you're dating at
least six months. But just as important, have you had the what are
we conversation? And are both of you confident in your relationship or is one
of you hoping for more? Right? Also, don't do a hard launch
until you've done a soft launch. Have you already done that soft launch with
your intimate friends. Nothing worse than having a close friend of yours or a
family member see it first on social media. That's terrible. You got to
get out in the world and socialize with your inner circle first. Another question
to ask yourself. Are you comfortable with social media in general? Discuss the
boundaries for each of you. I know a couple, a young couple,
and she loves the social media. He does not. He's against it.
They've come to a compromise. He doesn't mind taking pictures of her for her
Instagram. He is fine with the odd couple picture around an anniversary or something,
but he doesn't want to be all over her Instagram and he's not posting
her and he told her, It's not that I'm trying to do something sneaky.
I just don't like social media and that's to be respected. Look,
are you doing it because it's exciting and fun and you can't wait? Or
are you doing it not to announce the security of your bond but to validate
a fragile bond? Are you having feelings of abandonment? Are you wondering if
it's real? You think if you push it and push it and make it
public that somehow it'll stick. No, it'll explode, It'll spiral down,
and there are other people to think of. Will your ex be protected?
Has enough time gone by that it will be okay? Is your X in
another relationship? Is theyre X in another relationship? Are you doing it because
you're trying to hurt your X? These are important questions to think about.
Right, have you blocked your X? I believe in that. Don't hang
your life out in front of the X. And here's the biggest thing.
Are you prepared to deal with an online breakup as well? Once you do
that hard launch, once you go public, it's not like happily ever after.
Now your relationship is out there, and now things can happen. It
doesn't mean that you have to talk about every detail of your relationship, but
when you do finally break up, you also have to do a hard announcement
about that. Right now, if you're not into social media, I do
want to say that you can send a group text to friends that includes,
you know, photograph of your partner. You can call friends and family.
You can get together with friends and family. You can introduce them, you
can you should be taking your partner to meet your family. You should be
meeting their family is before you go into the wild wide world of social media.
Or maybe you just plan a little gathering where you get everybody together,
have a nice dinner together. There are ways to do it without social media.
Speaking of social media, when we come back, I am going to
my social media. If you'd like to send me a question, just DM
me at doctor Wendy Walsh at Dr Wendy Walsh. I will not announce your
identity. I will keep it confidential. I know these are tender topics and
you don't know who might be listening, but if you have a relationship question,
feel free to send it in. When we come back, I will
be answering your questions. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on kf
I Am six forty with Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening
to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always hear us live on kf I am
six forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the
iHeartRadio app.