You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand KFI AM six forty. You
are listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. This is the Doctor Wendywall Show. Welcome
to the show. Okay, sit back, because for the next two hours,
I want to talk about your love life. You know, it's something
really interesting. I've producer Kayla with me right now. Kayla, do you
find that when you tell people you work on the Doctor Wendy Wall Show,
do they often say, ooh, she talks about sex. Do you get
that love? Yeah? I do. And it's so weird because only every
once in a while do I talk about sex. I'm not a sex therapist.
I'm not a sexologist. I happen to have a PhD in clinical psychology.
I've written a few books on relationships, but I rarely talk about sex
unless it's in the context of relationship skills, like when is the right time
in a relationship to have sex for the first time? Well after you've built
trust. But I don't give plumbing tips. I don't know why people always
you know what. I actually ran into Mark Thompson in the hall and he
said to me, I love your show. I listened to it all the
time, but I don't listen to it with my girlfriend because of all that
talk of masturbation. Why do I talk about masturbation. I don't think you've
ever talked about masturbation on the show. Okay, so if you're new to
the show, I talk about the science of love. Yeah, the biological
those are the neurochemicals that may help you fall in love or keep in love,
and also the psychological and the social piece. That's what I talk about.
Do you know why I talk about it? Because love is super good
for your health. Love is amazing for your physical and your mental health.
There has been study after study that has found that people who are married report
higher levels of happiness, they live longer, they drink less alcohol than their
unmarried counterparts. Okay, now I know now you're thinking, oh, so
she thinks everybody needs to get married. I don't necessarily think that we need
this institution of patriarchy. But there are ways to get the health benefits of
married people. And mostly it's about consistency. So if you listen to me
for a few years, you know, or if you've written my books,
that written my books, you might have written my books. You might have
written a anecdotal story that appeared in my books. No, if you've read
my books, you know that I spent a lot of years with a dysfunctional
attachment style. It was only after years and years of work with a licensed
clinical therapist where I learned how to calm down my anxious attachment style, how
I learned how to be attracted to somebody who has a secure attachment style.
My favorite metaphor for the stages of growth as we grow internally is this.
Imagine your dysfunction, and we all have dysfunctions. Is a hole in the
street. You're walking down the street, you don't see the hole, you
fall in. Okay, Eventually you go to therapy and the therapist says,
you know, this be your problem. So now you're walking down the street
or going through a dating app, and now you see that hole, You
recognize that hole, and you fall in it again. The third stage is
now you've grown a little bit more. You have better awareness, better self
control, able to manage your emotions. You walk down that street, you
see that hole, you recognize it, the player, the player, chick,
the person who's going to break your heart, et cetera. And you
very carefully walk around that hole. That's stage three. Stage four is you
take a different street. And I feel like I did that with my relationship
with Julio. I've been with Julio for three years now, and it's just
a different relationship because he's a kind caregiver and I'm used to these kind of
stone wall avoidant alpha guys who aren't warm and fuzzy, and now I got
warm and cuddly and fuzzy. But I learned to take a different street.
And here's how I will describe how I feel now, and this is why
I know my health must be better. I just feel calm, I feel
at peace. I'm not worried if he's gonna call me back, or he's
gonna show up, or can I trust him? Right? So research also
shows I mentioned that he's a cuddler, that hugs and handholding actually can lower
your blood pressure because they increase the hormone oxytocin and it lowers the stress hormones
in your body. So being in a health being in a good, healthy
relationship now, I do want to say being in a toxic relationship, even
if you're married, you're not gonna get the health benefits. If you're walking
around on eggshells because you're always worried that the person's gonna, you know,
jump at you for something or get angry with you for something, or if
you don't have a voice, if you have true opinions and feelings that aren't
welcome in your relationship, or god forbid, you're actually experiencing some kind of
emotional or physical abuse. That kind of marriage does not actually improve your health.
But there are studies the show that happily married people or happily living together
people, people in happy, consistent, supportive relationships actually have lower rates of
blood pressure, They have lower rates of heart disease and diabetes and everything.
We know also that health habits are highly contagious within relationships. I actually know
a woman who has an obese husband, and I mean this with love,
who carries around with him to social events in case they won't be available.
Pocket meat, as we call it, pocket meat. He's always got meat
in his pocket. Well, it's wrapped in plastic and it's usually preserved.
Like I don't know, those sticks of beef you buy at at the convenience
store, what are those things called beef jerkys or whatever. This is not
on my diet. I don't know what these things are, sausages whatever.
He's always got him in his pocket. Anyway, Their children also overeat and
suffer from OBEs. Remember OBEs is not a character flaw. It's a biopsychosocial
event. Begins with a genetic predisposition and then a nasty food industry who puts
addictive things into food, etc. Anyway, this mom managed to lose one
hundred pounds while living with this family with mister pocket Meat because she didn't let
the health habits become contagious any longer. So, if you are in a
relationship with somebody who does not have positive health habits, it's going to be
a long, hard road. On the other hand, dating someone who's healthy
and fit and has positive health habits is the best thing for your health.
Like I know a guy who met his wife specifically, he went searching on
there's an app called like fit dating or fitness dating or something. He doesn't
even work out, but he went there because he wanted a partner who would
be healthy. Now he does work out. He built a gym in the
house for them. She trains him. She's like a trainer right anyway,
So I just want to tell you that the reason why I am so obsessed
with the science of love is because love is good for us. Good love,
good relationship skills are good for our mental health and our physical health.
When we come back, I have a question to pose to you. Why
are these modern liberated women getting married in one of the oldest institutions of patriarchy,
marriage a wedding and taking their husband's last name. Let's break this down
when we come back. You are listening to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on
KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening
to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall
Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App.
I want to talk about weddings and I want to talk about marriage. Actually,
now that the pandemic is behind us, you probably went to a lot
of weddings this summer. Like that, everybody seems to be getting married.
And there are two times in our lives when we're most likely to tie the
knot. Either when we're young and we're in our reproductive window. We know
that marriage is still one of the best nests we have for children. At
some point, hopefully we will have childcare in every workplace, we will have
more institutional governmental supports for single parents of all genders, and marriage will be
less necessary. But when it comes to raising children, building that one economic
nest where two people pour their resources into offspring that show up actually is still,
according to research, the best we can do for kids. I happen
to have had my kids out of wed luck, so I speak from experience.
The research is very clear that children of single parents or the parents themselves
suffer more mental and physical health issues. The children tend to get lower grades,
earlier onset of sexual activity, more experimentation with drugs and alcohol, et
cetera. Et C'm just don't shoot the messenger. I'm just telling you what
the data says. And so I worked very hard to be a mother and
a father and a caregiver and a protector and a provider and a nurturer.
And I would say that probably my health suffered as a result of it because
I worked so hard to put my kids first. But anyway, more and
more women are entering into a traditional marriage full on with the wedding now weddings
have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger over the decades. When my own parents
got married in nineteen sixty, they got married in a small church ceremony with
friends and family, and they went back to my grandmother's house and in the
dining room posed for pictures and had some cake and tea like that was it.
My mother was in a beautiful white wedding gown. It was a Catholic
wedding, but it wasn't today's giant show or the destination wedding that It's like
a Hindu wedding that goes over three or four days. I can't believe the
money people are spending. My theory is that people think the more public they
make it, the more eyes that are on it, the more they sacrifice
economically to make it happen, the more it'll have to stick. Right.
I think they think that everyone's looking, so we have to make this workout.
It's not necessarily true. What I find interesting is that so many so
called feminist women with careers are still taking their husband's last name. Kayla,
when you get married, do you plan on taking your man's last name?
I always felt like I wanted him to kind of take mine. Yeah,
that's a great idea, the older I get. I'm open to it.
It'll see. And and if you did, what would be the reason that
you would take another man? You would get rid of half your identity?
Definitely hypheny But I think it's kind of a unifying thing that way. Our
children are you know, they have our name he has like it's it's a
unifying family. Okay. And so then let me ask the next question,
because you're actually reflecting the research that I'm about to explain. Why would you
want your children to have his name? Does he own them? There has
two? Uh, and they are yours? Yeah? Can it well hyphened
him hyphened? That's what I did with you? Yeah, yeah, might
have both our names. I said, anything that comes out of me that
I manufactured is going to get my stamp on it, my name on it,
especially after what you have to go through to get him here exactly.
So here's what the research says that this whole bridal tradition of a woman taking
a husband's name remains very, very strong. This is research according to the
Pew Research Center, among women in opposite sex marriages in the United States,
four and five changed their name in the last few years. This is recently,
and believe it or not, hyphenated names are less common. So the
idea of taking of not changing your name or taking a hyphenated name actually started
in the very late seventies and gained steam in the early eighties, but it
never picked up from like one out of five, right, it never cruised
past that. Now, I if you've listened to me, you know that
when I was twenty one, I had a big, white Catholic wedding for
my mother. Literally, I remember being in my wedding dress getting ready and
the bridesmaids there in the back room, and I kept saying, Oh my
god, I feel so stupid. I feel so stupid. Isn't that funny?
I kept saying that I feel so stupid. They're like, no,
you look beautiful, Like I feel so stupid. So I so didn't support
this, but I didn't know. I wasn't aware. This is all in
my unconscious that I never booked a professional photographer. Oh no, I think
I did, But I never ordered one of those fancy hardcover wedding albums.
And then after months after the wedding, my mother had put one together professionally
paid some big dollars for it and sent it to me as a gift,
or maybe it was a first anniversary gift. Do you know where that wedding
album is now? I have no idea it's gone. I probably tossed it
at some point. I cared so little about this because I knew I wasn't
getting married for me. I was getting married because of the pressure from my
mother. So that's what I will attribute to the fact that I did not
take his last name, no hyphenated, no nothing. My feeling was,
my name is Wendy Walsh. My name is always going to be Wendy Walsh.
It also bothered me that the big security password for all the banks is
what is your mother's maiden name? Like a woman's identity is so deeply lost
that now it's a security password. Okay, Like she doesn't even exist except
a security password. So I would hope that my daughter. So my daughter's
got double barreled. My older one ended up taking my name. She has
my last name that she uses. The younger one uses her dad's last name.
They could do whatever they want, right, whatever they want doesn't matter
to me. But that is the number one reason that women say the most
feminist women out there that they want to have the same last name as their
kids. So why can't we just name our kids both names? Or why
can't we take each other's name? Wouldn't that be funny if I took Julio's
last name and he took mine. He said he'd be open to that.
There is a divide politically, by the way, among conservative Republican women,
ninety percent, according to the Pew Research study, took their husband's name,
compared with sixty six percent of liberal Democrats. Also, the more educated a
woman is, the more likely she is to keep her name. When you
want to keep the name that's on your diploma, I don't know. But
then there are other women who are surging ahead, making money and doing the
traditional thing. Like j Lo she is missus Affleck after she has made a
name for herself. She's taken his name. Anyway, do whatever you want,
ladies. But I know you can argue with me, well, if
you keep your own name, that's actually your father's name. So it's still
patriarchy, I know, But when are we going to end it? When
are we going to end the patriarchy? That's what I'm saying. I just
want to pose the question, Hey, maybe you did get married, maybe
you have a new baby, maybe you're a first time father. I want
to talk to you when we come back. I know things are tough,
now they're going to get better. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show
and KFI AM six forty Belove everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to
KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show
on KFI AM six forty Alive everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You know,
I had children at the eleventh hour of my fertility window. I had my
two babies at the age of thirty six and forty one, and I like
to say I pretty much took the last man standing. He was a non
smoking, non drinking vegetarian. I said, you're good enough, come on
in, and we got pregnant very quickly in our dating life. Again,
I do not suggest that you follow my steps, that you follow my path
in life. I learned experientially what not to do. Okay, So actually
I became pregnant eight weeks into dating, and so we decided he was forty
I was thirty five. It's like, let's just do this. He moves
in with me. So we had to weather the all the bumps that come
with the first year of dating, the first year of living together, and
the first pregnancy all at the same time. So you can imagine the stress
we were under. After I had my first baby, I was very lonely
because I learned that all your career women friends show up for the baby shower
or a quick little visit, they bring a frilly, little pink dress,
and then they go back to the clubs, and so it was a very,
very lonely time. It's a time of finding your identity as a mother,
giving birth to a mother really in that year, and trying to find
a village. And I joined every kind of mother group that you possibly could.
You know, I actually eventually found a toddler nursing group because everyone had
weaned their babies and were back to work and I was still breastfeeding. I
ended up breastfeeding each of my kids for three years. And at a toddler
breastfeeding support group. Do you know who was there? Hippies? There were
women with either I used to say, either short short gray hair or long
gray hair down to their butt. There were no other hairstyle, but they
were great and they helped me keep it up, and it was wonderful because
there's different issues. However, one of the mom groups I went to,
I can't remember what it was called. I had some funny little acronym,
but it was supposed to be a support group for new moms, and they
had a very clear rule meeting number one, you cannot bash your baby's father,
because apparently these groups had spiraled down into a just whining session about how
little the men participated and how they were off at the gym and having fun
and at work and these women were lonely and isolated, and how they were
pressuring them to have sex that they didn't want and they were just grumpy and
it was terrible. So I thought that was really interesting that I wasn't the
only one experiencing a grumpy man in the house. Well, now there's research
to support what so many women go through. This was a study that followed
men a longitudinal study from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty. They followed five hundred
first time fathers and one hundred and six second time fathers expecting their second child,
and they compared they looked at. They collected data on how old they
were, how educated they were, what their income was, their relationship duration,
the child's biological sex, the child's temperament, because sometimes there are difficult
babies, they'd cry a lot and they're more stressful in a relationship. And
what they wanted to do is look at what happens postpartum to men compared to
what often happens postpartum to women. We know about that. There's lots of
research on the postpartum experience of mothers. And even if you don't have a
clinical postpartum depression, there is culture shock. I like to say there can
be two men in a relationship until a mother enters the room, meaning that
when a woman, women can be totally equal to men career wise. Well,
we don't know seventy seven cents on your dollar, but you know,
for the most part, until the needs of a mother step into the relationship,
and all of a sudden, women are like, wait, what,
I'm supposed to go to work, I'm supposed to look good. I've been
up all night, I've got two bleeding nipples, I got at a pisiotomy
that's trying to heal, and you want me to have sex with you like
it is just a shock. Your bodies are just overwhelmed with what happens.
So there's been tons of research on that. But what they found when they
started looking at first time fathers is that having a child was associated with a
big relationship decline in satisfaction for first of all, both first and second time
fathers, but the first time fathers took the biggest hit. The first time
fathers showed the highest level of relationship satisfaction before birth and then the biggest dive
afterwards. At eight weeks postpartum, first time fathers reported much higher relationship dissatisfaction
and that continued up to fourteen months postpartum. Okay, let's stop and tear
this apart and analyze this data. Men, gentlemen, Okay, there are
three of you in this love triangle now, and that baby comes first to
her. You know, if you're on a sinking ship and there's a lifeboat
and there's only one seat in it, and she's choosing you, or you're
shooting your genes into the future, she's going to grab that baby, okay
and save it. I want you to reframe your I'm feeling abandoned by her
into Look at that, She's caring for another part of me, my genes.
Right, reframe it. She's taking care of you. Now, as
far as the sex thing comes, you should know that long term monogamy is
filled with phases and stages, and there is a time after birth when women's
hormones go way down, especially when they're breastfeeding. In fact, I was
dry as a desert. It was a bad scene. It was painful.
No, it was terrible, Kayla, you're laughing at me. It was
terrible. It hurt. So you're gonna have to be creative. You're gonna
have to find other things to do, other places to do it. No,
no, not other women. Stop stop, I mean the shower whatever.
Maybe Mark Thompson was right, Kayla. Maybe he was right. I
think he was. Doctor. He said, I talk about masturbation. I
never do, and here I am in this in the shower. Anyway,
here's the other interesting thing about this data. The study found no other association
between that other stuff I talked about, age, income, except you know
all that the attitude of the baby, the disposition of the baby. None
of that mattered except one thing, relationship duration. So you would think that
if couples had been in the long stable relationship before the birth of the first
baby, that they would report less of a relationship decline. But the research
showed the opposite. The longer their relationship had been before the birth of the
first baby, the deeper the dive in their relationship satisfaction. Let's think about
it. They got set in their ways. They thought it was going to
be like this forever. When you're in a new relationship, it's change all
the time. For sure, dating and then maybe you're living together, and
then you get engaged, and then you're married, and then there's a pregnancy
and oh there's so much new stuff all the time. You eventually adapt.
But if you've been in a long relationship and then the baby shows up,
get ready. It's a big life change. But I want to say this,
their phases and stages and what you're doing now, investing in your offspring
has a tremendous amount of meaning. Grow the muscles of monogamy, grow the
strength to weather it out. Give your baby mama some love, Help her
out, because that's how you'll find happiness, not nagging and begging, and
understand that she's giving to your genes, your genes when we come back.
You know, there are some myths about love that you might hold that can
be killing your love life. I'll explain. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy
Wall Show and KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome back to The
Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty. I am obsessed with the
science of love because it took me a whole lifetime to actually learn this stuff.
You know, love isn't about locke. Love is about skills, and
you can learn these skills at any stage of your lifespan and in any stage
of the relationship you're in. And when I was young, I believed so
much nonsense about love that people still believe, like there's a soulmate out there.
I really believe there's one for me. It's a soulmate. Maybe I'll
meet my soulmate. No, this is playing into the whole love is all
about luck. I will hear people say sometimes, you know, if it
happens for me, it doesn't happen. You make it happen. You use
human mating strategies. You get yourself all ready to be out there on the
mating marketplace, and you get on those apps, and you go on those
dates and you make it happen. Those are the people who get married.
And in fact, it is the women who know how to negotiate commitment who
get married. Believe me, there are no grooms magazines. Okay, Guys
don't spend their whole life dreaming about the tuxedo they're gonna wear walking down the
aisle. Every guy on the planet, in the back of his brain thinks
that he's gonna have a nice, stable girlfriend or wife or somebody at home
and then be a free man. Elsewise, No, you have to snag
him, nail him down, make him feel like there's no better deal for
you. I know I sound very sexist, but this is evolutionary psychology.
Women are more relational, women tend to have more. They hold the keys
to the emotional locker. Men fall in love faster, but they don't say
I love you faster, and they also don't ask for commitment faster. And
if you never ask for commitment, if you never negotiate commitment, you're never
gonna get it. Okay, So it's not coming from him. He's you
know, definitely can you imagine that, Kyle is theyre a guy out there
going I can't wait to meet my wife. I just want to meet my
wife. We could be so lucky. Yeah, maybe she'll marry me.
In the movies maybe, but not in real life. They want to keep
you and they want to have side action because you never ask for commitment.
That's what happens anyway. That's one myth that there's a soulmate out there.
The truth is, if you have good relationship skills, then you will find
there are many, many, many appropriate mates. And also so you will
be attractive to many more people because you have good relationship skills. So learning
those relationship skills about being open, honest, vulnerable, being able to deal
with conflict, etc. So let's talk about three myths that are very common,
very very common. The people still believe they could be ruining their love
life. This was actually comes from a research study published in the Family Journal,
so it's a peer reviewed academic journal. I can't remember how many hundreds
of people they interviewed for this, but here's what they found out. The
number one belief the belief that disagreements conflicts, fights, arguments, TIFs are
bad for a relationship. If you have fights, it's a bad relationship.
That is a myth. The research actually says the opposite. The people in
the healthiest relationships have tiny little border skirmishes all the time and they never have
the big, blow it out giant fights because they haven't built up the pressure
right, so having tiny little conflicts. Julio and I had won this morning
over breakfast. It wasn't a big deal, but I was saying that I
wanted to cut down on my acid reflux, and of the list of foods
I mentioned, I mentioned coffee. So he just started nagging me at the
breakfast table, like, why are you drinking coffee? You just told me
last night they should be drinking so much coffee. And I looked at him
and I said no. I said, I want to reduce my acid reflux,
which means I shouldn't drink coffee before I lie down at night. Don't
want it to come the acid to come back up first thing in the morning
while I'm sitting up. I think I'm okay. Anyway, he was all
I said, And don't nag me. Uh. I didn't say it like
that. I said it really sweet, honey, I really appreciate that you
care about my health. It means a lot to me. But I perform
better with positive rewards, like you're doing a great job, instead of nagging
me to change something. That's how I said it. I did because I
learned my relationship skills in eighteen years of therapy. Anyway, that's how you
do it. You do little tiny border skirmishes on a regular basis. You
make that communication sandwich. You know, the communication sandwich starts out with a
layer of love, follow and like I love that you care about my health.
Follow with a layer of something hard to chew on. But please don't
nag me back to another layer of love, cause you know, because you
remind me about my health, I'm going to live for a long time.
We're gonna be together, and that's wonderful. Right, So, disagreements can
be good for a relationship if they're the right kind of disagreements. Okay,
myth number two. Oh so many people have this myth. They have a
belief that in a healthy relationship, their partner should be able to read their
mind. They say things like I shouldn't have to tell you, or you
should know by now, who are you talking to? An abandoning mother who
was not connected to you as a toddler. She should have known, she
didn't, Okay, but your wife, she won't know unless you tell her.
Right, you can't get mad at somebody for not doing something that you
didn't give them direction to, right, you have They can't read their mind.
There's no partner out there who can read your mind. That means you
have to know your mind. You have to have insight into your own feelings.
And step two, you have to be able to put those feelings into
polite words. And usually when people are beginning to express their feelings for the
first time, they say it in a snippy, defensive way because they're not
used to it. But it's okay. You'll be able to say it kindly
like I did de Julio today. All right. And the third thing is
this idea. It aligns with the soul mad idea, this idea that relationships
are predestined, it was meant to be wit. No, it's not.
It's a fluke that you even ran into each other on that dating app.
Okay, it's a fluke. You're now going to put your mating strategy and
your relationship skills to it. And you are going to grow a garden in
this relationship. You're gonna water what you want to grow, not the weeds.
That means, don't be a nagger with the negative stuff. And and
you're going to create your dream relationship. It's not predestined, doesn't it happen?
The cupid didn't shoot a bow and arrow, the cosmos didn't come together.
You created this, the two of you, by doing the work that
you need to do. And I encourage you to do that work. All
right. When we come back, I am going to be going to my
social media because this week so many dms came in and there are some very
fascinating questions that you guys have sent me, so I have got to answer
them. You are listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six
forty alive everywhere on the iHeartRadio app KFI AM six forty on demand