You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy
Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Another week of being in love. Yeah, I'm actually still in love,
Kayla. Can you believe it? Julio and I have been together three
and a half years. I love your love and every day we tell each
other we love each other. But you got to understand, I was never
this girl. My I was so analytical and I never had that feeling.
Those butterflies in the stomach, mind you careful. Those are anxiety. I
had longing, I had worry, I had oh my god, is it
gonna call? All that kind of stuff. But I never had the feeling
of a secure attachment, the feeling of peace. It's not a high when
you're actually in love and both people on their same page. It's not a
high. It just feels safe, it feels calm. And it took me
eighteen years of therapy to get my own act together to be able to take
it in Now. I want to say, if you've been following me,
you should know I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm a psychology professor,
not a therapist. I am a veteran as a patient, though,
But I became obsessed with the science of love a few decades ago because I
was dating every bad boy in the book, and I just would do the
I had such weak boundaries. I had such high empathy that I would find
ways to forgive them for their bad behavior. And by the way, they
were not bad behavior. They are not bad people. They had a different
attachment style than I had. They had an emotionally avoidant attachment style. They
probably felt completely smothered and engulfed by me, so they ran away faster than
anything. Actually, I was more like, I would think, anxious,
ambivalent, which means that I kept this cool. Nobody could see me sweat,
nobody could see me suffering. I'd be like, I will just wait
it out till he calls me back. But then what would happen is when
he had eventually would call back. I was a little snarky, a little
bitchy. Can I say that on the radio? Kala, Yeah, that's
fine, okay. I was a little resentful, and that's how it would
come out. But I learned through therapy that this was a negative gift.
I was giving myself because it was playing out on all kinds of childhood stuff
that I had. And once I learned that I literally deserve love, nice
guys started to look attractive to me. Isn't that amazing? I picked a
guy who's a total giver. Now, let me tell you what's coming up
in the show before I talk more about my love life, because he can't
stop making you sick. All right? Uh, I want to talk about
deception in relationship and whether it's okay to ever lie, even tell a white
lie. There's some science on this. Also, there is one thing that
can benefit your relationship more than anything else, and it's an act of self
care that I will touch on later. Also, dating has changed, and
now that we're into the new year twenty twenty four, experts are saying that
there are some dating trends that are happening this year that if you're single,
you should know about. Plus, I'll be going to social media this week
to answer some of your questions. If you want to go onto my social
media, it's at doctor Wendy Wallash. You can just post a question in
there. I'll keep your name anonymous, and I'll be happy to answer it
and I'm going to close up the show with some of my favorite relationship skills
that I learn myself, because I believe relationships are far more about skill than
luck, and I can teach you a few of the things that through my
tricks that I use in my relationship. But first I want to talk about
the stages of love. First of all, you should know this. You
have a certain feeling of love. Psychologists would call this an internal working model
for love. Look at that psychobabble. What they mean is you have an
idea of what feels normal and right and love to you. The person you're
in a relationship with might have a totally different expectation and feeling of love.
Doesn't mean the two of you don't love each other. Doesn't mean the two
of you are not in love, but you may be having two separate experiences.
So if you come from the place of well, if they're in love,
they should do this or they should say this, there's no shoulds.
Okay, there's no shoulds in love. But there is one thing that's common
in most relationships. Even though you might be each living in your own love
world, separate love worlds, and these are the stages of falling in love
according to science, because love just isn't psychological, it's also biological. Right,
people talk about chemistry. We had such great chemistry, and generally that
has to do with, you know, the firing of your neurotransmitters, the
release of all kinds of delicious neuro hormones at the beginning, right. So
a lot of people think that as they move through the stages of love that
they are actually falling out of love. But nothing could be further from the
truth. What they're doing is transitioning from one phase to another, and each
phase has its own pros and its own cons but we have to understand it
while we're experiencing it, so we don't just dump somebody because we think,
oh, oh, nan in love anymore. All right. So phase one
is when you first meet somebody and you're highly attracted, and I like to
call that the drunk on love stage. This is a stage where your new
partner can do no wrong in your eyes. You want to see them all
the time and talk to them. In fact, some of the neuro hormones
that are released actually enable you to go on less sleep during this stage,
Like to meet someone new and you're up like chatting at two to three in
the morning and you still get up for work the next day and you're not
even tired. Yeah, that's the early stage of drunk on love. Now,
the pro the wonderful thing about this stage is it feels so darn good.
It is delicious. It is literally the best drug we have, and
people want to extend this stage as long as they possibly can. Interesting enough,
if you do want to extend this stage, you got to slow things
down right, delay the onset of first sex in this new relationship, explore
each other intellectually, emotionally, physically in stages in a slow way, and
then you can extend that. Unfortunately, so many people today jump into bed
at the first hint of those neural hormones and then within like a week,
they're like, I don't have the same feeling anymore. It must not be
for me, right, No, no, no, Stay in the drunk
in love stage as long as you can. But here's the big cone.
You know that saying love is blind. It's true. Those neuro hormones make
you unable to deserve well. So one of the problems with the drunken love
stage is you go into your little love cocoon and you don't have the eyes
of your village on that person. You're not introducing them to your friends and
family. That's why cultures that have group dating, or you know, marriages
where they're what is it called fixed up marriages, match marriages, made for
range marriages, raineforce marriages, or rage marriages often do better right because you
have the eyes of everybody else helping you make decisions, and you don't get
trapped in the drunk on love stage making poor choices for yourself. So there's
goods and bads to every single stage. Now, if you're lucky, you
will move from the drunk on love stage somewhere near the six month mark.
In my opinion, it's different for everybody, right, depends how fast you
move sexually. It might happen in two months if you were, you know,
knocking boots on the first night. If you're slowing things down, it
might be nine months or twelve months before you go into stage two, which
is called the reality check stage. When we come back, let's talk about
what happens in the reality check stage of your love life. You're listening the
Doctor Andy 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. We are talking about the stages of love that tend
to be universal. The length of each stage may vary, but there are
certain things that happen when you first meet someone to your neurochemistry that cause a
sort of cascade of feelings. At the beginning, and I mentioned that stage
one is the drunk on love stage that feels so delicious, but you're really
not making good decisions. My best advice on that stage is try to introduce
the person to as many other people in your life and get their opinion because
you need other eyes on your brain is not making good choices, especially if
you've experienced childhood trauma and you have what we call a bad picker. Right,
it's not a textbook term, but people like to call it a bad
picker. You might want other people's eyes on it, but anyway, stay
in there, have a great time, and around the six month mark it
might vary, you start to move into the reality check phase. This is
a phase where your brain starts to see the person as oh, a human
being, not so perfect as you imagined, and that's when your prefrontal cortex,
the reasoning part of your brain, starts to kick in and do a
cost benefit analysis, like what is the cost of being with this person?
What is the downside? Wait? What is the benefit of being with this
person? Because you're learning lots of things about them now. You're learning you
know, what they eat and when they sleep, and who they hang with,
and what they're goals and values are. In a little bit about their
financial psychology, and you know, you're just learning about their politics now,
and you're learning a bunch of and you're thinking what am I gonna accept and
what or is there too much of a negative that I'm going to have to
walk away? Now? The important thing at this reality check stage is that
you start having healthy communication. I don't want you to just suddenly make a
hasty conclusion unless your you know, red flag list is just you're checking off
everything there and you're like, oh, oh, these are all deal breakers
and now I see them. Then you have my full permission to end things
quickly and move away and tell the person, by the way, don't ghost
them. That shows you don't have enough emotional intelligence to be able to have
a conversation with somebody, So how can you have a relationship? But if
there aren't too many negatives, I want you to talk about them, just
confront them head on, right, be proactive, because what you're doing now
he is starting to learn some relationship skills together. So, Okay, I
know this is silly and it's little, but I noticed at about the six
month mark that Julio has a very weird habit of leaving drawers open, not
wide open, sometimes an inch. They might be kitchen drawers, they might
be bureau or dresser drawers, And I go around behind them him and close
them. And I mentioned it to him, and then I thought to myself,
is my job? Is this his problem or my problem? It's really
not his problem. I mean, he doesn't mind it. I mind it,
so it's my problem. So I brought it up as a cute little
joke, like, oh my gosh, look at this, And then I
realized it's not my job to change him. If I believe this is my
problem, it's up to me to do something about it if it bothers me.
So rather than going around behind him and slamming drawers closed. Yeah,
that's called passive aggressive behavior. I close them with different It sounds funny.
I make it an exercise routine, son As I squat down and use the
back of my heel. Sometimes you use a knee, sometimes you use an
elbow or a shoulder, because it's good to move your body in all different
ways. And every time I close one of his drawers, I say the
words out loud, I love you, Julio. I love you Julio.
I love you Julio. And he's in another room laughing at me, and
he'll be like closing drawers again. Again. It's just my exercise routine.
And so I have now transformed what I perceive to be a negative into a
positive. So that's a small thing, but there might be bigger things that
you might have noticed. It's time then to confront them, all right,
get past that, and then after you pass about a year. And I
really believe, Okay, I want to say this to everybody. Please let
a calendar year pass before you start being so Instagram official. I know that,
Okay. So I want to tell some explain something about our perception of
time. The younger you are, the longer. It feels that life is
going on. Remember how long you had to wait for summer vacation when you
were a kid, or wait for Christmas to show up, wait for your
birthday to roll around. Well, let me tell you at my age,
I blink and my new birthdays here, it just time goes very very quickly.
It speeds up because it's based on the percentage of time we have been
on the planet versus how much time we have left on the planet. So
I understand when you're in your twenties that at the two month mark you're wanting
to post that selfie. Together, I am going to caution you to please,
if you're in your twenties, wait six months. If you're in your
thirties or forties or fifties or sixties, please wait a year. Please let
four seasons go by before you publicly post about your relationship. And here's why,
there's a very good chance it's not going to last that long, because
you know, relationships you know sometimes don't and then you have to deal with
the public scrutiny of the breakup while you're also grieving. So that's hard.
So I would say wait until you move into stage three, which I call
the adjustment phase, which is from year one to year two, and this
is when you start to get into routines. You are fully integrating into each
other's lives. You may move in together. You're literally counting how many spatchel
is between you and dividing up what to give away, what to keep,
et cetera. You know, I recently visited my brother and his wife and
they've been married, I think like twelve years, but they had two full
households. They were both single parents when they met, and they kept they
are two full sets of dishes, like twelve place settings each or something.
And she said, well, we just don't want to give up one,
you know, we want to have everything together. So I want you to
know that in this stage three, the adjustment phase, in the first and
second year of relationship, you're adjusting to each other. You're also now figuring
out who's going to do what in the household. I don't know if you
know this, but relationships are about managing a household, and there's all kinds
of care that the household may need, and maybe laundry and dishes. It
may be errands or taking care of cars or taking out trash or taking care
of children or whatever, and this is the time where you need to bring
it up. Do not wait, ladies. I'm saying this to ladies because
research shows it more often happens to ladies. Don't wait until you're exhausted and
you're seven years into the relationship and you have a meltdown and you say all
I do is work in this house and you don't do anything. It's the
adjustment phase where you're going to have to work out the domestic responsibilities and you're
going to have to learn to compromise. All right, stage four, maybe
you're there the all in stage two to five years. Let's talk about this
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 Walls
Show on KFI AM six forty. Are live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
I'm talking about the stages of love, how our idea of love changes as
our relationship grows more secure, more mature, more safe, hopefully not more
boring. Right, So, after the all in stage. You've made your
big commitment to each other. You're either moving in or getting engaged or getting
married, you know, basically around the two year mark. I am in
now because I've been with Julio three and a half years. What I call
the rejuvenation stage. And let me explain what that is. That's relationships.
After you've been together three years or more, you become so accustomed to each
other, you have worked out most of the kings. You are starting to
fall into maybe a mature companionate love, which is not a bad thing.
Hopefully you have maintained emotional intimacy, you've developed deep trust and honesty. But
the downside here is you risk sliding into routine, sliding into boredom. Let
me explain something about the human mind. The human mind needs the perfect balance
of excitement and safety and security. So we don't want too much excitement.
I mean, a little bit once in a while is really fun. But
if you're living a life that's filled with a relationship that's filled with roller coasters
and it's all ups and downs, that can be very exhausting, destabilizing and
does not feel secure. On the other hand, if your relationship has become
so safe and so routine that it verges on boredom. Your brain is going
to look around for some excitement, and hopefully your brain is not going to
look outside of your relationship for that excitement. But there are things you can
do in the rejuvenation stage to add novelty to your relationship. I want to
say there's tons of research on this. So long term monogamous people who report
after the five year mark still feeling deeply in love with their partner, still
feeling excited by their partner, they always seem to do one important thing,
well two things actually. One is they maintain some autonomy. This doesn't mean
secrets from your partner. We're going to be talking about deception next. Autonomy
just means personal growth, things that you're into. For instance, ma Julio
is into classic cars. The magazines around the house full of classic cars.
He's swiping on his phone. It's not tender, it's old cars. It's
the wildless thing. And he'll be like, look at these wingee wipers.
They're original. They'll be like, yeah, okay, he knows every part,
specifically classic Porschas. He's obsessed like a savant. A car will drive
by and he will mention the wheels and I have to go, oh,
yeah, those are great wheels. I don't know what the hell he's talking
about, all right, but I go with it. That's his thing.
He has this hobby, he has his friends. He rides motorcycles with the
guys. Once in a while, he goes to see classic car shows with
the guy. That's his thing, and I'm glad he continues to grow in
that area. I also happen to get in the car with him the other
day. I got in his car because we had been taking my car into
the shop, and the radio went full blast with some kind of sports podcast,
and they were talking about which young men athletes were being cast in the
next scene of the next season of whatever sport. I don't think those are
the right words. They're not cast on a team, Kayla. What are
they? They picked for a team? There's a drafted You go yeah,
and then who I said to Julio, Oh, I love that you're into
all this boys stuff, and he goes, yeah, I have a little
pocket when I'm not with you into mustard. Right. So, anyway,
you have to grow independently in your relationship and still do your own stuff.
That you're interested in, right, But at the same time, you have
to create novelty and excitement in your relationship. So my favorite thing is live
comedy. Julio never went to live comedy in his whole darn life, but
he will surprise me every once in a while with tickets to live comedy,
and he likes to do that. So we do something novel and different.
He likes to go to art museums. I should like it more because it's
good for your brain and your mind and it's a smarty pants thing to do.
But he's smarter than me, so he gets tickets all the time to
art museums and we go and or we will do road trips, like if
we're running errands, he will say, let's just go to a different neighborhood,
go to a different home depot to get the suffet I don't know it,
will find a different place for lunch. These small things put your partner
in different schema, which means it puts them in a different setting and your
eyes see your partner in a different light. And this actually creates a newness,
a new feeling to your relationship. So when you're in this rejuvenation stage,
while it feels safe and secure and trustworthy and wonderful and peaceful. In
all that, I advise you not to let it slip into boredom. Think
of things that are new and different to do, because this is the most
secure thing you can do for your relationship. At the same time, you
know, cultivate a little bit of independence, grow individually, because that's something
you can bring back into your relationship. You know, the other night,
I was out to dinner with two longtime girlfriends. We don't get to see
each other very much. We're all roommates in our twenties and now we're having
birthdays decades later. And on the way I couldn't even wait until I got
home. I got in the car and I called him and I told him
all the new news that I had got at dinner. Right, it was
all exciting to me. And so that's what you need to do, is
bring new thought into your relationship. And also, if you find yourself sliding
into negativity the what has he done for me lately kind of thinking, I
want you to work hard to shift your brain into gratitude. Catch your long
term partner being good at least once a day, and say thank you and
be specific what you're thanking them for and tell them how and why it has
improved your life. Stay in a place of gratitude and your relationship will stay
exciting. Also do some new stuff, new stuff, you know, when
we come back. I've always wondered about whether it's okay to do little white
lies in your relationship. Well, I did a little white lie recently in
my relationship. It wasn't like full on lie. What it was is I
just chose not to disclose report something that happened. You know, omitting a
story is that a lie? Let's explore this 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 if you're just joining the show.
I have a PhD in clinical psychology, I'm a psychology professor, and I
am obsessed with the science of love. I've written three books on relationships,
did a dissertation on attachment theory, and I spend a great deal of time
on my social media and writing books and blogs and podcasts and just talking the
science of love because I am fascinated by it. I should let you know
that every Wednesday we have a wonderful Patreon group, a lot of KFI listeners,
some other people actually, some from all over the world, and it's
at six thirty every Wednesday night. If you want to join that, you
just go to patreon dot com slash doctor Wendy Walsh. I'd love to meet
you all right. Deception deception in your personal relationships. This is quite a
controversial subject. Now. Deception involves either lying outright telling a lie. Sometimes
it's just distorting the facts a little bit. Sometimes it's full on making up
stories, hiding the truth, or just misleading your partner in some way.
Now, there are different kinds of deception, and some are worse than others,
and there is some debate about what is okay deception and what isn't.
So here's an example. One time I had a friend and she wanted me
to go to my dermatologist. There was this certain kind of I don't know,
glycolic acid or something she wanted me to buy, and she wanted to
meet me and give me cash for me to go buy the for her.
And I'm thinking to herself myself, why what's the cash and what's the slip
and the money to me? And what's this about? And she said,
I don't want to call in order it myself because I don't want it to
go on a credit card, because I don't want my husband to know.
And I said, oh, because he has you on a budget. And
she said, no, I don't want him to know. I'm using things
on my skin to look younger. And then she said, which was hysterical
to me, the truth is he wouldn't want to know. Well, I'm
sure he would have wanted to know, because soon after her skin got looking
good and she lost a little bit of weight, she divorced him. She
was getting ready for the mating market place. That's what that deception was about,
anyway. So there's certain kinds of deception that seems so light, but
maybe they're not. Now I said, I would share some deception with you.
I think I might have already mentioned on the show. Where's my problem?
Since I'm an external processor, I literally don't have the ability to lie
because I think out loud all the time, Kayleb, did I tell you
that? Like the day after we got engaged, I get a phone call
from one of the old bad boys that used to chase me back in the
day. No way, Uh huh? What did he say? He was
on and off relationship for like ten years, broke my heart over and over
and over again. Again he did nothing. I kept throwing myself You know
what they say, you don't throw good money back over bad money, or
you don't try to get blood from a stone. You know, doing the
same thing over and over and expecting a different outcomes defines same thing. All
of that means the same thing. I kept throwing myself back at somebody who
wasn't able to give me the love I deserved. So he calls, pretends
he doesn't know, but maybe he does, like the unconscious knows all.
And he says, Oh, I'm coming into town love to get together for
coffee. You haven't seen you in a few years. And I say,
I just got engaged, and he said, oh, congratulations, that great.
Okay, Well i'll call you next week and I'm in town. That
was four weeks ago. I neglected to tell Julio about that exchange because I
was like, I don't want him to get all jealous over nothing that doesn't
matter. But then I'm kind of telling a white lie. So here's the
thing, honey, I know you're listening. He listens to the show.
That's the problem. So I tell every truth out on the show. So
Julio's listening, So now you know. Anyway, I felt bad about that
because we have such honesty between us that even small benign things I think should
be told in relationships. I think there's no such thing as okay deception.
People will say, well, I don't want to hurt my partner, so
I shouldn't tell them that. But look, if you were outright lying,
if you're concealing your spending and finances, that's financially cheating, and that can
be dangerous in relationships. If you're embellishing your background, you met somebody,
and it's a problem. If you're outright fabricating stories, if you're omitting information
like I did, if you're even withholding your true feelings about something, withholding
your emotions can be a form of lying. Now, obviously, if you're
literally cheating, that's a big form of lying. Here's the problem. You
say to yourself you know, it's just a white lie. I don't want
to upset them. They're not going to care if I spent that little extra
money or whatever. But what happens is once you learn you can lie a
little bit, then you learn you can lie a lot because there aren't repercussions
if you're pulling it off. And the other thing that happens is all it
takes is one lie or omission of fact to be discovered and you've lost all
trust and relationship. There was some research out of the Kinsey Institute last year
that asked people on dating apps what was the thing in profiles or on first
dates that made them turn off a potential mate more than anything, and they
said the discovery of any lie. So if you're lying about something like your
height, or your weight or your age on a dating app, what happens
when the person meets you and they go you But they're searching by age,
right, and if I put that I'm actually that age, they might not
find me. So I'll just tell them on the first date the truth.
You know what they feel deceived as soon as they meet you for that first
coffee, and you tell them by the way I lie on my app this
is, then they don't know what to believe. They don't know what else
they can believe at all. If you can lie that easily and that publicly,
then you have lowered your mate status in their eyes. That happens in
intimate relationships too. All it takes is the discovery of one omission, one
little lie, and you have lost trust. And it takes so long to
build that trust up in a partner. I know why you lie. You're
trying to avoid a fight. You want to preserve your own self image,
you want to seek approval, you want to hide that you're a little bit
insecure about something. You want to protect your partner so they don't get hurt
by information. You know what. Let them decide if they're going to get
hurt or not. You're not in charge of their feelings, right, Maybe
you might fear the consequence of telling that lie. Whatever it is, deception
harms relationships. Okay, maybe you're in a relationship and you're wondering if your
partner is deceiving you. Well, there are some telltale signs, and I'll
explain 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 KFI AM
six forty on demand,