This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to kf I AM six forty,
the Doctor Wendy wallsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app k I AM six
forty. You have doctor Wendy Walsh with you. This is the Doctor Wendy
Walls Show. I'm taking your calls and answering your social media questions. If
you've got a relationship question, give me a call. The numbers one eight
hundred five to zero one KFI. That's one eight hundred five to zero,
one, five, three four. Okay, Producer Kayla, who do we
have? First, we have Don with a question? Don? Hi,
Don is doctor Wendy. What's your question? Hello? Hello, We're going
to get rid of them. Okay, we have lydia. Then with a
question, Okay, Hi lydia. Now we have lydia. Hi, Hi,
doctor Hi, what's your question? Low? Hi? So my question
is in reference to my son. We are a military family. I have
two sons. They're both military and their dad, my husband, is also
a military. My youngest son, who's thirty two, My other son is
thirty seven. The oldest one has a family, he's married with two kids.
My youngest one is not, thank you. My youngest one is not.
They both served during wartime overseas. The youngest one is lyrically retired through
the army. He's gizophrenic, and very issue with him is that he's only
thirty two. Doctor. He's on medication, strong medication for his condition,
and he so much wants a family. He does need women. He gets
close to them. They like him. He's somewhat open about his condition.
When he tells them what's going on with him, they automatically and leave.
No, he doesn't. He wants a family. He wants a wife and
kids. But he's very much is he working with a therapist. He does
have a therapist, he does have doctors. And I'm actually his caregiver because
he does have moments when he has catatonic episodes where I have to go and
find him at the gym or wherever he's at because he's having an episode where
he physically freezes and he can move. That doesn't happen too often, but
it does happen. Otherwise, he's he's on medication and he's if you see
him, he looks like a normal person, which he is. Doctor.
He's so generous, he is such a good man, and you sound like
such a good mom, Lydia, And first of all, thank you to
your whole family for their service, and especially your son's having served during wartime.
I want you to explore how much of your desire to see him with
a spouse and with a family is partly so that he can have somebody else
caring for him as well, because I'm sure you, as his caregiver,
are feeling the stress of it all and wondering about what's going to happen as
he ages. And for that reason, I would suggest that you yourself get
a therapist to talk about your feelings around this. And you know, I
want to say that to everybody out there, for those that feel pressured to
have a one on one romantic relationship that's going to last a long time,
is that twenty percent of humans throughout history and today do not reproduce biologically,
either because it just doesn't happen or they can't find a mate on time.
But they are very important allo parents. They're necessary in our culture and our
species. I would say that one of the things that would probably help your
son the most is for him to gain all kinds of social support. Friends,
he can go out with and hang out with. It's good to hear
he's able to go to the gym and he's being healthy. But there's so
much to unpack here with a family, with dealing with a patient like this
that I really encourage you to get individual therapy yourself or family therapy so that
you, guys can sort out yourself. What is the best way to go
for him? He sounds like a lovely guy. I'm so proud and happy
that he he's in a family with the kind of support he's given. But
I don't want you to suffer from caregiver burnout. Lydia, thank you so
much for calling. Oh it's a tough one, isn't it? All right?
We have Tim with a question, Doctor Wendy. Okay, Hi,
My heart goes out to them. Hi, Tim, it's doctor Wendy.
Hi Tim. What's your question? Tim? My girlfriend? He has a
only fan, uh huh. And she she's with the other guys constantly every
night on the on the computer. Yes, not meaning in the real world,
No, in real world, they're videoing it. So how do you
feel about this? Well, really, I don't know how to feel,
you know, Well, that's the first question to figure out what your feelings
are around this. I think you know, as a feminist, I'll say
like women should be able to use their bodies however they want to. But
within a given relationship, you're going to set up rules, right, And
how long have you been seeing her? Four years? And when did she
begin this? A year into the relationship? And did she tell you about
it that she was going to thinking of needing to make extra money? Like,
what's her reason for doing this? Oh? No, she hit it
for me for like two years and I found out this upcoming year. Well,
she hit it for a reason because she feels that it would upset you,
right, And you know, I really think that two of you can
use this as a way to get closer, to talk about your feelings.
But what you said to me, you're not sure of your feelings around it.
So that's the first thing. I want you to get straight on your
feelings and that it's okay to have any feeling. All feelings are welcome.
Right. You may find that it doesn't this relationship is not going to work
for you because you might have feelings that say this is not going to be
okay. On the other hand, you might be a liberal guy who says,
Look, she's not meeting him in the real world. It's something she
does to bring finances into the household. I mean, there are lots of
different ways to look at it, Tim, and it's not for me to
tell you how to feel, but I do encourage you to spend some time
and find a way to communicate with her what you are feeling. When you
finally do sort it out, thank you so much for calling. All right,
Do I have time for a couple social medias? All right, dear
doctor Wendy. Is it a red flag if a girl is thirty, why
she's not a girl. If she's thirty, she's a woman. If a
woman is thirty and has never been in a serious relationship, my answer is
not necessarily, especially these days, during these times, this particular younger generation
is starting later, dating later. Everything is shifting, right, Some of
the things my generation did as teenagers people aren't starting until the age of twenty
five, right, And so just because she's never been in a serious relationship
doesn't mean she doesn't want a serious relationship. And rather than judging her for
it, ask some questions, you know why, and tell me about your
experiences, maybe sexual Maybe she's had short term sexual relationships that she said,
that's been fine, but now I want to settle down because I'm thirty and
I want to have a family. All normal, All fine, So I
think it's something that you can talk about, right, not necessarily a red
flag, all right. I think we have time for one year more.
Let me go to Instagram. Here, here we go, Dear doctor,
Wendy, my ex texted me, and then she puts in quotations just to
heads up. I took you off the Costco membership, didn't want you to
know, and go hope all is well and goes well. Take care.
Then she writes, after two years of no contact or speaking to one another
after our breakup, is this all it means? Should I just ignore it?
My heart still aches and I've never moved on after him. Advice,
Please, okay, move on. It's two years and obviously he was a
nice guy. He doesn't want you to get embarrassed at Costco. So he's
letting you say face by letting you know. That's all that is. I
know, I know, especially if someone has an anxious attachment style, they're
going to be hanging on every text and every word, and they're going to
be worried that it means more and maybe he wants you back. No,
he's just being polite and saying, by the way, don't embarrass yourself at
Costco. You're not on a Costco membership anymore. That's it. And I
know it may have triggered you because of the reminders of him, and maybe
even the reminders that he was nice. But I really encourage you to move
on. And if you can't move on and it's two years later, then
you really need to see a licensed therapist to find out what is going on
inside of you that keeps you attached to somebody that is not interested in you
anymore. Sorry. You know, some people stay attached to their excess through
fights, and you know they're fighting over the kids, the child support,
the alimony, the when the see and they find ways to hate each other.
But he keeps them attached, right, Attachment is That's the craziest thing
how it works with us. I know it hurts. I don't mean to
belittle it, but there is a giant wake up call for you. It's
time to let it go, ignore it and move on. All right.
When we come back the peacock, you know, the streamer Peacock has a
new show called Couple to Thrupple, and guess what. They get a few
things wrong about polyamory. I'll explain when we come back. You are listening
to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty we live everywhere on
the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM
six forty. KFI AM six forty, you have Doctor Wendy Walsh with you.
This is the Doctor Wendy Walls Show. Well, we knew it would
be coming right. Imagine if you had the chance to pre permissive I mean
completely all permission, non monogamous in paradise. Yeah. So there's this new
dating show on Peacock. We knew we'd get there. Couple to Thropple.
Uh huh. This is where four couples arrive on a tropical island at a
beautiful resort and they meet fourteen glamorous singles who all say that they've participated in
throuples before and they want to see if the polyamorous lifestyle is for them.
Okay, I mean think of it. A bunch of attractive couples, a
luxurious vacation on an island resort on call sex and relationship experts if you need
them, triple occupancy beds to share with the single of your choice. And
apparently those beds get used right away. It's called couple to thropple. It's
on the peacock and guess what. It gets a ton of things wrong about
polyamory. First of all, people in general use the term polyamory, and
correctly, polyamory means a love relationship between two or three, four, five,
six, whatever, a group of people who all love each other equally
and share many things together. It's not about having a sexual threesome and being
just about the sex, right. It's about people loving each other in a
committed relationship. So today there's another growing trend called ethical non monogamy or conscious
non monogamy, and people will sometimes lump that in with polyamory. It's actually
different. I mean, ethical non monogamy is getting to cheat with permission.
Basically the practice of or desire for a romantic relationship with more than one partner
at a time, but you have to have informed consent of all partners.
I remember one time when I did I think my podcast mating matters We did
a polyamory episode called Polywannacracker and one of the young women that interviewed said that
she dated a guy who was polyamorous and I go, oh, really,
how was that? And she said, well, you know, I just
got tired of hooking up with him. And I'm like him, I thought
you guys were polyamorous, Like, where's his wife? Like, what was
the deal? Oh? No, he told me he was polyamorous. I
go, what, Yeah, he told me that his wife said it was
okay. I'm like, this is not polyamory. This is a guy lying
to you. And did you ever meet the wife? Did you ever get
this informed consent from her? No? But he told me she knew.
I'm like, okay, this is gold cheating and making you feel better about
it, like you're not hurting a woman or something. I don't know.
Anyway, there's so many lucy goosey things out here. So here's what this
show gets wrong. None of the couple seem to have poly rules from the
beginning. Literally, every polyamorous couple or family that I know have some kind
of rules. Different rules. Right. It might be, well, we
all, if we're going to do it, we have to be interested in
a whole other couple, and the four of us have to have sex together,
or I have to like the wife, you have to like the husband,
and we can go in separate rooms. But blah blah blah, or
like any other dating relationship, let's figure out who does domestic responsibilities, who
raises the kids, who does the driving, and where do you sit in
the car. You remember a few years ago, I had this guy on
my show who wrote that famous book, The Game, the one about the
pickup rules, about how to pick up women. And then later he got
the Truth and he wrote a book called The Truth, and he finally settled
down with a wife and a baby and felt bad about it all. But
in the book, as he was finding his way to the truth, he
talks about trying polyamory, and he said the thing that drove him the most
crazy about it that you think it'd be great to have two or three or
more girls in the household. They always just argued about who got to sit
in the front seat, right, because at the end of the day,
it becomes this hierarchical struggle. Real polyamorous couples don't go to a desert island.
I mean a rot tropical island and just share sex. In reality,
poly couples share their individual needs. In fact, there was one study done
of polyfamilies and the people in the study mentioned that one of the primary benefits
of being polyamorous was being able to get their needs met by spreading them out
amongst multiple people. Now I'm not just talking about sexual needs. It could
be emotional needs. It could be domestic responsibility, having more people to help
with the kids. So some of the people in polyamorous pollocules as they call
them polycules. I love that. It just sounds so cute, doesn't it.
Polycules. They might be lovers, they might just be friends, they
could be exes. Right, they're just hanging around helping with the family,
and they have mutually supportive relationships. The other thing that this show from Couple
to Thrupple does is it forces what's called couple's privilege to create sexual jealousy.
So I mentioned that Thrupples and other polyamorous couples often struggle with these power dynamics,
these hierarchies. Who's the main couple and who's the extra right, So
on this show, they're very clear who the couple is and the other person
is an extra and the whole thing is done to put the person in a
secondary position and try to create some kind of sexual jealousy, thinking like maybe
they want to be in first position, right. And the other thing the
show does really wrong is they don't show any relationship building. See the biggest
misconception about polyamory is that their primary focus is on having sex. I don't
know if any of you have been in long term monogamy, but the sex
becomes the least part. I mean, at the beginning, it's the best,
it's the biggest part of the relationship. Then it becomes the smaller part
of the relationship. I'm making up this percentage, but you know, at
the beginning of falling in love with somebody, it's ninety percent about sex and
ten percent about the rest of the relationship. But ten years into it,
it's ninety percent about the attachment, the emotional intimacy, the domestic responsibility,
the building a life together, and ten percent about the sex. I had
a eurologist once when I went for a bladder in fiction and she goes,
uh, because I was single, And she said, have you ever heard
the Penny in the Jar story? And I don't know what's a penny in
the jar story, she said, So what they tell young married women to
do is the first year of marriage, put a penny in the jar every
time you have sex, and what you'll find is it takes one year to
fill the jar. And after the first year, you take a penny out
every time you have sex, and it takes twenty years to empty the jar.
That's how long term relationships work. But on this show, couple to
throupple, they move way too fast and they create instant insecurity by the other
partner. It's all you know, Ta da, ta da. It's a
reality show. It's designed to create drama. And they don't have what's called
kitchen table polyamory, you know, where they are really a family hanging out
life and supporting each other. Instead, it's about just can I have an
affair in front of my spouse's eyes? And what does that feel like?
Huh? When we come back, I have a guest who has a lot
to say about polyamory, and he thinks we have a lot more in common
with the bonobos than we do with chimpanzees, who are aggressive and the bonobos,
I mean, they're the make love not war. They have sex with
everybody for all kinds of reasons. Doctor Christopher Ryan is next author of the
New York Times bestseller Sex at Dawn, How We Mate, why we stray,
and what it means for modern relationships. You're listening to the Dr Wendy
Wall Show on KFI AM six forty we Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Welcome
back to Dr Wendywell Show on KFI AM six forty, Live everywhere on the
iHeartRadio apps. Well, if you've been listening to my show for a number
of years, you know that I have talked about the fact that we have
the widest range of sexual behavior of any primate species, but that we socially
organize, organize. I got that word out ourselves around monogamy. I'll tell
you I was a single mother for eighteen years. I felt so excluded from
dinner tables, dinner parties. Literally I couldn't find any of my friends,
my mom friends on Sundays because that's when they were doing stuff with the dude
family day. And that's why these villages of single mothers deve to support each
other because when you're excluded from monogamy, who are you? What are you?
Now? I want to tell you there's a book that I've been meaning
to read for a really long time, and I finally did it because I
was prompted by so many of my listeners who were in my Patreon group.
We decided this month to make it like a book group for the month,
and we're all reading the New York Times bestseller Sex at Dawn. They can't
stop talking about this book. I think we're going to go on for weeks
talking about it. So you know, I just reached out and I got
the author right here on the show. I'd like to welcome doctor Christopher Ryan.
How are you, Chris, I'm great. Thank you for having me.
Your book is becoming a sensation around the world. It's been out for
quite a few years now, but I think it's getting this other resurgence because
everybody seems to mention it. To me. It is called Sex at Dawn,
How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern
relationships. And we should say you co authored the book with your wife.
Who's this side? Kiatrist Tell me if I say her name correctly. Cacida
Jetha close Casilda, Casilda, it's an old Portuguese name. I saw the
two of you on stage giving a talk one time, and to realize you're
the extrovert, she's the introvert, so you do the talking. Well,
I think there's probably only one stage she ever agreed to go out on with
me, So I think I know which, which I've been talking about.
Toronto, yeah, idea City, Yeah. Yeah. When the book came
out, one of the deals. She didn't even want to be listed as
a co author, but she was so instrumental to to you know, giving
me the time to write the book and and helping, you know, reading
what I've written every day, and you've written books, you know how important
that is. So anyway, one of her only conditions was I don't do
any media. She's a very private person. So you go out and you
talk to people and leave me, leave me out of that. Well,
it seems to work wonderfully for you, guys. So let's get to the
book, Sex at Dawn. First of all, you say very clearly that
the book is not necessarily an anti monogamy book. Say more about that,
Well, yeah, I think that's one of the main misunderstandings. So it
is something I try to that's a drum I beat pretty regularly. A lot
of people have a hostile reaction to the book because they think that what it's
arguing is that there's something wrong with monogamy, and that's not at all what
we're arguing. I have great respect for people who choose to be monogamous.
My parents lived monogamously for fifty some years and happily. But the point of
the book is, let's look at what kind of species we are, and
let's if we're choosing monogamy, let's do so from an informed, honest,
open hearted perspective. And the fact is that our ancestors and our species is
not by nature monogamous. That's just simply the fact. And so if we
begin from that point and we say, well, monogamy is a viable choice,
but it is going to be difficult because it goes against our nature as
a species, then I think we will be better prepared for the challenges of
monogamy and perhaps more compassionate for occasional slip ups in ourselves and our partners,
and most importantly, we avoid the unnecessary shame and suffering of thinking that this
is something that should be easy for us it isn't, and all that unnecessary
suffering of people who are attracted to someone other than their partner and they feel
that that's an indictment of themselves or their partner, there's something wrong with their
relationship. There isn't. That's just the nature of Homo sapiens. My favorite
line that I heard you say once in a talk is just because you choose
to be a vegetarian doesn't mean that bacon doesn't smell delicious, right, exactly
because our ancestors were omnivores, So we can choose to live as vegetarians or
herbivores, but by nature, that's not the diet we're drawn to. So,
you know, and if you look at human consciousness in general, it's
pretty obvious we're very curious, intelligent, highly social species, so we're drawn
to we're curious. We were interested in different kinds of music and different kinds
of food, and we love to travel and different art, and so why
wouldn't we be curious about our sexuality. It simply makes no sense. And
some of the modern evidence that you use in the book Sex at down is
the fact that women want to have sex all through the month, not only
when they're fertile, and that sex is used for much more than reproduction in
our species. What are the other reasons, I mean my own reasons of
why I like sex, but what are the other reasons that humans have sex?
Well, the main argument that we present in sex Sedan is that our
species, along with a handful of other species, very few has co opted
sexuality for these other purposes, and the main purpose is establishing and maintaining complex
intimate social networks. So our ancestors, who you know, until very recently
in terms of evolutionary time, lived in hunter gatherer bands. They shared everything,
they shared food, they shared childcare, they shared access to all resources.
And yet the mainstream argument is that we shared everything except our sexual partners,
that we lived in nuclear families, and that's so clearly projection that you
know, when you look at anthropological studies, what you see is no,
there's no people aren't living in nuclear fans. At least people are living in
bands of anywhere from twenty to one hundred people depending on the environment, and
they're known as fiercely egalitarian, meaning they insist on sharing everything that's how they
survived through this cooperation and interdependence, and sexuality is part of that. I
heard you mentioned a few minutes ago how we're one of a very few we're
hyper sexual as far as primates go. But we're also one of the few
mammals that has sex through in ways that don't result in pregnancy. So,
as you mentioned, throughout the menstrual cycle, when the female is already pregnant
or postmenopausal. This is common in species that are highly social and highly intelligent,
and sexuality is serving these other functions in addition to reproduction. Doctor Christopher
Ryan, we have to go for a break. We stay with me for
one more. I want to ask you why you think we're more like Bonabo's
than we are chimpanzees, and also why in our anthropological past we rarely had
sex with a stranger. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI
AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy
Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Mack to the Doctor w Wall
Show on KFI AM six forty. My guest, Doctor Christopher Ryan, author
of the New York Times bestseller Sex at Dawn, How We Mate, why
we stray, and what it means for modern relationships. All right, so
so much in your book, and you interview or sort of quote so many
evolutionary psychologists evolutionary biologists, and you say that there was an error in a
lot of the early research because they seem to always compare us to chimpanzees and
never bonibos. Why did that happen? I think because Bonobo's both undermine the
sort of mainstream argument that these scientists wanted to make, which is that monogamy
comes naturally to our species. And also because Banovo's embarrass them. Bonobos are
highly sexual. Their sexuality is basically part of hourly behavior. It's constant,
and it's not necessarily intercourse all the time. But they're friends of all.
Who's one of the great experts on chimps, and Bonobo's famously said chimps use
violence to get sex. Banobos use sex to avoid violence. So bonobos undermine
this idea that our ancestors are violent and male dominant. You know that we
need these overriding social institutions to protect us from each other, because without government
or big Brother or whatever it is, you know, stopping us, we
would destroy one another. Bonobos show that that's not true. And banobos and
chimps are equidistance from humans in terms of share share, like ninety eight percent
of our DNA with both species correct, exactly, and it's exactly the same
amount with each species. So does it seem like the chimpanzees help support the
idea of patriarchy and Homo sapien precisely. Yeah. And most of the scientists
who were creating these theories were obviously men who considered themselves to be alpha males,
right, they had the psychology department at Harvard or whatever, and so
that sort of fit into their worldview. The idea of a species that's female
dominant, that's highly peaceful, that share sexual partners, that raises young interdependently,
and which has never been witnessed to rape, murder or kill an infant.
No infanticide, no rape, no murder has ever been witnessed in bonobos,
and all of the activity or in the wild, and all those things
are really common with chimpanzees. They're aggressive, they practice infanticide to try to
get the women fertile again, and very very violent and aggressive is it true
that bonobos are highly matriarchal and that if rape does take place, they will
actually punish the male females. Well, well, I mean, as I
said, no rape has ever been witnessed in banobos, But it's true that
the females will gang up on any male who who is overly pushy with a
female. And that's that's the major difference between chimps and bonobos is that in
banobos the females really stick together. In chimps, the females are separated and
they don't cooperate much. So, you know, there are applications to that
to human life. If the women stick together and protect one another and support
one another, they're much more powerful. And also if sex is freely available,
there's much less male aggression. Yes, that is one good thing is
that as sex rises in a sexual economy, then guys are happier, more
calm. You find less rape, less violence. Now, one of the
things you mentioned is that in our hunter gatherer past that we traveled in mostly
related bands of people thirty to forty and doctor David Buss says that in our
entire lifetime we probably never laid eyes on more than one hundred and fifty different
humans. We weren't having sex with strangers. And what is different about today
is that a new mate is a thumb swipe a day, and you could
potentially see a thousand or more new potential mates in a given day. How
do you think that impacts us? Yeah, I think that's a major difference
that a lot of people miss when they read the book or think about these
things. When they read that our ancestors were promiscuous maters, they think of
promiscuity as you described it, where it's sex with strangers all the time.
But our ancestors didn't know any strangers, never encountered strangers. So this was,
you know, a very different kind of promiscuity where yes, there were
multiple sexual partners, but these were all, as I said earlier, intimate
social networks, where you knew this person your whole life. You know,
you protected their children. The women breastfed one another's children regularly, You share
food, you share everything. So this is not casual, uncarrying cold sexual
interactions. This is the very opposite of that. You know, they were
probably even having sex with distant cousins. My own family is from an island
on the east coast of Canada called Prince Edward Island, and my grandmother and
grandfather were third cousins because it's a small, little homogeneous island with very few
mates to choose from. And she used to tell me when I was a
kid, you know, you can never marry your first cousin, the second
cousin, eh, but third cousin you're fine. Well, Darwin married his
first cousin, oh dear. Yeah, but right. Sex is actually not
sort of natural or normal to us, And I think that's what we need
to get closer to. Now we're seeing we only have a few minutes left,
but we are seeing a rise of women in our culture. Do you
think economically educationally, some would say we have an oversupply of successful women in
the mating marketplace who are having trouble finding mates, partly because they've got patriarchy
in their head and want a guide to make more money than them. But
do you think in the long run, creating this economic equality is good for
human mating. Yeah, I think it is. If you look at societies
with much more sort of equal income distribution and far more women and positions of
power and wealth, you see much happier families, much lower divorce rate,
much healthier children, you know, mentally, psychologically, places like Sweden,
Denmark and so on. So clearly, yeah, having women have direct access
to resources and not need to go through men empowers them to not be manipulated
and not be pushed into position that men may want them to be in a
more subservient role. And that's good news for women and for men because they
get more sex. Doctor Christopher Ryan, thank you so much for joining us
on KFI. I encourage you guys out there to get the book because although
it was based on his doctoral dissertation, it is very easy. It's an
easy read, it's fun, it's light. The book is Sex at Dawn,
How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern
relationships. Thanks for being with us, doctor Ryan, and that brings the
Doctor Wendy Walsh Show to a close. I'm always here for you every Sunday
on KFI from seven to nine pm, as well on my Patreon group every
Wednesday night at six thirty, and you can follow me on my social media
at doctor Wendy Walsh. You've been listening to the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on
KFI AM six forty Alive everywhere on the irt Radio app you've been listening to
Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always hear us live on KFI a M six
forty from seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app