Speaker 1: This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI
Speaker 1: AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy
Speaker 1: Walls Show on k I AM six forty. We're live
Speaker 1: everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I am now going to
Speaker 1: my social media because I love to answer your questions
Speaker 1: on relationships.
Speaker 2: Reminder, I'm not a therapist.
Speaker 1: I'm a psychology professor, but I've written three books on
Speaker 1: relationships and I like to.
Speaker 2: Say I did the work.
Speaker 1: I'm a survivor of eighteen years of therapy on and
Speaker 1: off over the course of twenty.
Speaker 2: Eight years, and.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of wisdom. I'm a woman of
Speaker 1: a certain age and I've got some wisdom for you.
Speaker 1: So let's go and look at the dms. Remember I
Speaker 1: will always keep your identity anonymous. You can DM me
Speaker 1: on any of my social media platforms. The handle is
Speaker 1: at doctor Wendy Walsh. Okay, Hi, Doctor Wendy says this listener.
Speaker 1: I just started seeing my ex of five years again,
Speaker 1: so that I mean you were together five years you
Speaker 1: were broke up five years ago. I'm guessing we were
Speaker 1: broken up for a year and a half. Oh no,
Speaker 1: so they were together for five years, then you were
Speaker 1: broken up for a year and a half. Got it
Speaker 1: While we were broken up. I was bi curious, it's fair,
Speaker 1: So on one drunken night on vacation, I ended up
Speaker 1: having a three way with a couple who are somewhat
Speaker 1: in our friend group. I see them maybe every couple months.
Speaker 1: All three of us knows it was purely physical because
Speaker 1: the girl was also by curious, and yes, I did
Speaker 1: things with the guy too. I'm wondering if I should
Speaker 1: tell my boyfriend because he knows them, and I feel
Speaker 1: weird about keeping him in the dark. But another part
Speaker 1: tells me that it would give him unnecessary anxiety about it,
Speaker 1: because to me, it was completely just an experimental thing
Speaker 1: of the past. Well, this is an interesting conundrum, and
Speaker 1: this is an excellent question. I want to start by
Speaker 1: talking about the by curious thing. First of all, if
Speaker 1: you believe the work of Kinsey and some of the
Speaker 1: more recent work of evolutionary psychologists, they would say that
Speaker 1: we are all kind of wired to be bisexual. Calm down, you,
Speaker 1: people who are homophobic and freaking out. Kinsey was one
Speaker 1: of the first sex researchers to look at not only
Speaker 1: people's behavior, but they're fantasies. Because he did his work
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties, fifties, sixties, and he asked people
Speaker 1: about their sexual behavior, what they did with who frequency,
Speaker 1: but he also asked them what they fantasized about. And
Speaker 1: he found he had a scale one to six right
Speaker 1: Kinsey scale, one being one hundred percent heterosexual in behavior
Speaker 1: and fantasy and one being one hundred percent homosexual in
Speaker 1: behavior and fantasy, and he found that most humans are
Speaker 1: actually around a three folks.
Speaker 2: So there you go.
Speaker 1: It's a big, long scale and a gray area. Not
Speaker 1: that you may act on it, but you may have
Speaker 1: fantasy material. There's nothing wrong with being curious now, whether
Speaker 1: it's a couple or an individual. When you enter a relationship,
Speaker 1: if you are socializing with somebody that you've had sex
Speaker 1: with before, you might feel this urge to be completely
Speaker 1: come clean and be intimate. My answer is for you
Speaker 1: to assess what it would mean to you a current relationship,
Speaker 1: because your real struggle is I want to have one
Speaker 1: hundred percent authenticity and honesty about everything in my relationship,
Speaker 1: but you also want to not hurt your partner. Or
Speaker 1: give them unnecessary anxiety. Now, the other piece is you
Speaker 1: have two potential loose cannons out there, the other people
Speaker 1: who may talk. They may have another drunken night and
Speaker 1: mention something. It's not fair to swear them to secrecy
Speaker 1: because their experience is their experience, and they own it,
Speaker 1: and everybody owns their own experience. My feeling is this,
Speaker 1: if it doesn't come up and there's no reason to
Speaker 1: bring it up, there's no reason to tell every single
Speaker 1: detail of your sexual background, especially because you're telling them
Speaker 1: to a heterosexual man. Now, there's research to show that
Speaker 1: men are more squeamish about hearing about female sexual history
Speaker 1: than we are women about hearing about a man's sexual history.
Speaker 1: That is also evolutionary programmed into us. It's not just
Speaker 1: about the sexual double standard. It is the fact that
Speaker 1: in our anthropological past, if men risked hooking up with
Speaker 1: a woman who liked to share her eggs with the team,
Speaker 1: then he might have ended up raising another guy's eggs.
Speaker 2: So therefore.
Speaker 1: He's sort of naturally not going to want to hear
Speaker 1: about even you know, as open minded as my fiance is,
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to hear. He doesn't want to hear.
Speaker 1: So my personal advice is to not bring it up
Speaker 1: unless you find it's necessary. Unless it's being brought up.
Speaker 1: If you start, you know, socializing with this couple more often,
Speaker 1: if they start flirting with you, if they make an
Speaker 1: allusion to what happened, you're going to have to come clean.
Speaker 1: If you and your partner might be having a conversation
Speaker 1: someday about past sexual experiences and he's sharing things with
Speaker 1: about him, okay, then it makes sense. But to bring
Speaker 1: it up for no reason, just to cause anxiety in him.
Speaker 1: I don't think you need to. Don't think you need to.
Speaker 1: If you guys disagree with me, please send me a
Speaker 1: DM because I know you know that I'm always about open,
Speaker 1: honest and authenticity, But this time I disagree.
Speaker 2: You disagree, you should tell him.
Speaker 3: I think that there's nothing more embarrassing than being in
Speaker 3: a couple with somebody, and then you're on the outside
Speaker 3: of an inside, an insider that everybody's aware of except
Speaker 3: for yourself.
Speaker 2: They're not close, she said, they might see them only
Speaker 2: every couple.
Speaker 3: They're in the same friend group, so they will see
Speaker 3: each other. And then this man knows that he slept
Speaker 3: with my girl, and I have no idea. I just
Speaker 3: want to know, you know, I just want to be aware,
Speaker 3: so there's no inside kiki or like you know, behind
Speaker 3: my back.
Speaker 4: I don't like that.
Speaker 1: I also want to wait till their relationship becomes more solid,
Speaker 1: because she said she just started, says for facts of
Speaker 1: five years, why don't we wait till they grow some intimacy?
Speaker 3: Then you had me around this man and you didn't
Speaker 3: tell me till two years after that you had sex
Speaker 3: with him because you wanted to wait to feel more secure.
Speaker 3: Now I don't trust you. That's how That's just how
Speaker 3: I operate. I don't know if I'm right, but that's
Speaker 3: just how I feel.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna say, pick your time, Okay, yes, but pick
Speaker 2: your time fair.
Speaker 5: That's fair.
Speaker 2: I think that's fair. All right?
Speaker 1: That was That was a prickly one, wasn't it. There's
Speaker 1: lots of opinions on that. Okay, here's another one. Hey, doctor, Wendy,
Speaker 1: have you been through a situation where you miss a
Speaker 1: guy the person who had a situationship with Oh, you're
Speaker 1: making a big assumption that I had a lot of situationships. Okay,
Speaker 1: I did, but we didn't call them situationships. Then we
Speaker 1: just called them friends with benefits, or we call them hookups,
Speaker 1: we call them booty calls. Actually in my day anyway,
Speaker 1: that you miss him so much that when he's back
Speaker 1: in the picture, you feel nothing but anger and resentment
Speaker 1: when you speak to him. Am I crazy? This is
Speaker 1: a weird thing. Okay, my darling. Here's what I want
Speaker 1: to say to you. I want you to call a therapist,
Speaker 1: especially a therapist who specializes in attachment, because it sounds
Speaker 1: to me like your attachment style maybe on the anxious side.
Speaker 1: And I have had that exact situation happened to me
Speaker 1: before that, even though it was a hook up, a
Speaker 1: booty call, a situationship of friends with benefit I became
Speaker 1: kind of attached. And then when they didn't reciprocate or
Speaker 1: they didn't provide the emotional intimacy that I craved, I
Speaker 1: was angry and I was often passive aggressive with them,
Speaker 1: even you know, when I was in a sexual relationship,
Speaker 1: doing weird game, playing weird games with them, because I
Speaker 1: was actually unaware of how angry I was that the
Speaker 1: relationship wasn't meeting all of my needs. And it was
Speaker 1: only through therapy that I learned that my reaction was
Speaker 1: related to my own attachment style.
Speaker 2: And I will say that it is very.
Speaker 1: Very common for women to not be able to adapt
Speaker 1: to a hookup culture or situationships because women's biology is
Speaker 1: unique and women are often their bodies get attached through
Speaker 1: hormones and oxytocin, and it's very difficult for them to
Speaker 1: have just a part time, one foot in relationship. So
Speaker 1: please reach out to a therapist because I want you
Speaker 1: to work through this the way I did. All right,
Speaker 1: when we come back, I got more from your social
Speaker 1: media if you'd like to send from my social media.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to send me a DM, the handle
Speaker 1: is at doctor Wendy Walsh. All right, you've been listening
Speaker 1: to the Dr Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 2: We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 4: You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
Speaker 4: AM six forty.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI
Speaker 1: AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1: Going into my dms on Instagram if you'd like to
Speaker 1: send me one, It is at doctor Wendy Walsh at
Speaker 1: d R Wendy Walsh. Okay, dear doctor Wendy. This man
Speaker 1: asked me out on a date and told me I
Speaker 1: can choose the restaurant. I chose a pricey place because
Speaker 1: that's where I eat. When I sent him the restaurant,
Speaker 1: he told me he was thinking more tacos and beer,
Speaker 1: not philet mignon. I told him we could change the place,
Speaker 1: but he stopped responding. I feel like he thinks I'm
Speaker 1: a gold digger or something. Should I pop up with
Speaker 1: tacos for him?
Speaker 2: No? So here's what you learned. You guys are not
Speaker 2: a good match. You see, this is how you learn.
Speaker 1: The beginning of any new relationship is all about eliminating
Speaker 1: those that are inappropriate. If you want to have a
Speaker 1: lifetime of tacos and beer, then yeah, chase him down.
Speaker 2: That's going to be it.
Speaker 1: If you're a philet mignon girl, it's not that he
Speaker 1: thinks you're a gold digger. He thinks you're.
Speaker 2: Out of his league, and that's okay. You can move.
Speaker 1: Along unless you're ready to be tacos and beer and
Speaker 1: fast food and get a little billy maybe some hips,
Speaker 1: all the fattening food.
Speaker 2: No, you know, if you make more money now.
Speaker 1: I also I want to sort of clarify something here
Speaker 1: that we right now in the mating marketplace have an
Speaker 1: oversupply of successful women. So you're gonna find ladies that
Speaker 1: there are a lot of women making way more money
Speaker 1: than men. So the words to the whys here is
Speaker 1: probably don't suggest the super expensive restaurants right away and
Speaker 1: just see where it goes. Because your idea of a
Speaker 1: power man might be a guy who can power a stroller.
Speaker 1: Right So maybe you learned don't do Philly Migno right away.
Speaker 1: He's not getting back to you, which tells me that
Speaker 1: he's lost interest, not because he thinks you're a gold digger,
Speaker 1: but because he thinks you're out of his league. Now,
Speaker 1: if you really, really, really really like him, then do
Speaker 1: what you said pop up with Takos.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Show up? Don't show up like at his house? That
Speaker 1: sound stockersh like.
Speaker 3: Well, when you're into somebody and you want to like
Speaker 3: prove you know, yep up, like you bring a cake
Speaker 3: or a pie.
Speaker 1: Or she knows she's going to see him, I guess
Speaker 1: she knows where she's going to see him, because I
Speaker 1: don't want to be stalkering him or anything. All right,
Speaker 1: dear doctor Wendy, I can't stop ruminating on my latest breakup.
Speaker 2: Oh I'm sorry about that. It's destroying me mentally.
Speaker 1: Oh. What are some healthy hobbies I can start to
Speaker 1: alleviate myself. Well, first of all, you need to go
Speaker 1: see a therapist because this kind of rumination is chronic anxiety.
Speaker 1: It could be related to attachment insecurity, something that happened
Speaker 1: early in life.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not your therapist, but I would say you need
Speaker 1: to see a licensed therapist to work through some of
Speaker 1: the stuff. From my own personal experience, having recovered from
Speaker 1: an anxious attachment style, having spent months and years decades
Speaker 1: of my life ruminating over lost men who I couldn't
Speaker 1: get back, I will tell you the number one thing
Speaker 1: that helped me was exercise. Yeah, just get to the gym,
Speaker 1: work out how hard, especially cardio, get those endorphins going.
Speaker 1: You'll feel so much better. That's what worked for me.
Speaker 1: All right, here's another one, Dear doctor Wendy, I need help. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for reaching out to me. I am new to
Speaker 1: this area and my first meaning new to LA or
Speaker 1: new to the area of dating. New to the area
Speaker 1: of dating as sind a person.
Speaker 2: What do you think they mean?
Speaker 3: I would assume new to the because I'm new to La.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, La.
Speaker 1: I'm new to La and my first connection was with ooh,
Speaker 1: a dangerous person. I want a restraining order. What are
Speaker 1: some other ways I can find safety and community in
Speaker 1: a new area.
Speaker 2: Well, I have to tell you something.
Speaker 1: I have gone to the police a number of times
Speaker 1: in my life to ask for restraining orders on people,
Speaker 1: often strangers, often somebody I might have had one date
Speaker 1: with when I was a young hot woman.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's when the stuff happens.
Speaker 1: And they were very clear that it's super hard to
Speaker 1: get a restraining order unless somebody physically assaults you, shows
Speaker 1: up at your house regularly and you can take pictures
Speaker 1: of them, they're et cetera. But if they're on public property,
Speaker 1: even then it's hard. Remember in the documentary on Netflix
Speaker 1: with the what's the name there?
Speaker 2: The Dutch baby, No no, No, the Duchess and.
Speaker 1: The Prince and Princess are up in Santa Barbara, the
Speaker 1: real life ones Harry and Megan.
Speaker 2: So Megan was saying when.
Speaker 1: She was on suits and dating him and she was
Speaker 1: filming in Toronto. The you know, thousands of people would
Speaker 1: be peering through fences and doing everything she said. In
Speaker 1: real life that would be having a stalker, but the
Speaker 1: police could do nothing because they were standing on public land.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It's very hard to get a restraining order.
Speaker 3: I have one.
Speaker 2: You do have one on somebody. I do.
Speaker 3: My ex boyfriend. He was he was not okay, he
Speaker 3: was dangerous, a dangerous person.
Speaker 2: Is he in this state? No, He's in New.
Speaker 3: Jersey, thankfully, and I don't think he can afford to
Speaker 3: fly to this state greatly. However, getting the restraining order
Speaker 3: was very difficult. It took a bunch of different the
Speaker 3: order chances. He violated it every single week. I was
Speaker 3: at the police department submitting that he violated.
Speaker 5: The only reason he.
Speaker 3: Got arrested was because he assaulted another man who I
Speaker 3: was dating. So it's hard as a woman out here.
Speaker 2: I hate to tell you this, my love.
Speaker 1: If you ask me how you can find safety and
Speaker 1: community when you're in a new area, it may simply
Speaker 1: mean if he knows where you live, moving, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: finding a new place, and you may be able to
Speaker 1: get out of your lease if you feel threatened, But
Speaker 1: you've got and You've got to find new friends through
Speaker 1: your work, through the gym, through other kinds of social connections.
Speaker 1: But you've got to get healthy people around you so
Speaker 1: that you can feel safe.
Speaker 2: That's so scary and a protector.
Speaker 3: You were able to break your lease if you were
Speaker 3: if you felt like your life was in danger, So
Speaker 3: hopefully California is the same way.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I broke my lease and it was no no.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a landlord and one of the things
Speaker 1: I do is criminal background checks on people because if
Speaker 1: you know, if you put somebody in your building and
Speaker 1: they do some violence on another, I think landlords might
Speaker 1: even be able to get sued because the bad person
Speaker 1: in there near there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so hard.
Speaker 1: It's you know, one of the most vulnerab groups in
Speaker 1: our society, our young females, and we need to rally
Speaker 1: around them and help keep them safe. And guys, you
Speaker 1: need to do that. Walk them to their cars, be
Speaker 1: nice to them, be the good guy. You are listening
Speaker 1: to the Doctor Wendy wall Show on KFI AM six
Speaker 1: forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 4: You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
Speaker 4: AM six forty Welcome back to.
Speaker 1: The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty,
Speaker 1: Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I've
Speaker 1: got married this weekend and it's very exciting. It's different
Speaker 1: depending on what your age is, the kind of partner
Speaker 1: you would choose. You know, I've always said a relationship
Speaker 1: is an exchange of care. That care can take so
Speaker 1: many different forms. It can be emotional support care. It
Speaker 1: can be intellectual stimulation care. It can be financial care,
Speaker 1: sexual care, domestic care, childcare. It can be all those things. Right,
Speaker 1: But as we get older, it gets real because when
Speaker 1: till death do us part is.
Speaker 2: Spoken, it's you know, potentially authentic.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So gray marriage is something that I feel, having just
Speaker 1: gone through, it is a sacred On the other hand,
Speaker 1: this is also a time of life for many where
Speaker 1: long term marriages culminate. I don't like to say fail,
Speaker 1: I don't like to say breakup. I like to say finish,
Speaker 1: the work has been done. I wanted to invite a
Speaker 1: guest who works with couples all the time, doctor Dana McNeil.
Speaker 1: She is an expert in relationships and she really understands
Speaker 1: that in our most intimate relationships, we all just want
Speaker 1: to be her. She's a therapist practicing in San Diego,
Speaker 1: Doctor McNeil, Did I get that right? You did, San Diego.
Speaker 1: Thanks for being with us. So let's talk about gray divorce.
Speaker 1: First of all, when we talk talk about gray divorce,
Speaker 1: we're talking about divorce over the age of forty five fifty.
Speaker 6: The forty five fifty ish, yeah, as we're starting to well,
Speaker 6: maybe stop coloring our hair, but we've probably all been
Speaker 6: gray for longer than that. But yes, that's typically and
Speaker 6: it's about thirty percent of the percentages of divorces across
Speaker 6: the board. So it is actually the highest percentage or
Speaker 6: of the population of divorce is people over fifty, more
Speaker 6: than any other age group. We are seeing that that
Speaker 6: is the area where we are getting more and more
Speaker 6: divorces occurring.
Speaker 2: So I read a statistic once.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is accurate when people banter
Speaker 1: around that fifty percent divorce rate. It doesn't apply to
Speaker 1: every marriage. But you only hit the fifty percent risk
Speaker 1: when you've been married more than twenty years, right, So
Speaker 1: if you're younger, you're actually more likely to.
Speaker 2: Stick it out.
Speaker 1: But it is, so let's talk about why at this time,
Speaker 1: what happens in people's individual development and what's happening in
Speaker 1: the relationship.
Speaker 5: There's so many reasons.
Speaker 6: I mean. The first is often if a couple has
Speaker 6: put all the focus on their children and now they're
Speaker 6: empty nesters, that phrase, which is we're finally getting our
Speaker 6: children to like get out and like move on.
Speaker 5: With their lives.
Speaker 6: Or they've gone off to college and we haven't developed
Speaker 6: our relationship.
Speaker 5: We've just put all of our focus, all of our energy.
Speaker 6: All of our time into taking the kids to soccer practice,
Speaker 6: going to rehearsals, getting their lives sorted.
Speaker 5: That's one thing that happens.
Speaker 6: Retirement happens if there's an age gap between you and
Speaker 6: your partners.
Speaker 5: Say maybe you married somebody that's five or six.
Speaker 6: Years older than you and ones ready to retire. They
Speaker 6: want to go have vacations, they want to go have fun,
Speaker 6: and you're still in your career, or you're a business
Speaker 6: owner and you're not ready to retire. That can create
Speaker 6: differences in the ways that you want to spend your life.
Speaker 6: There can also be differences in the way that you
Speaker 6: handle sex or the way that you approach sex, or
Speaker 6: maybe one of you has problems with sex or doesn't
Speaker 6: desire sex the same way that you did anymore, And
Speaker 6: so some couples are like, I'm sorry, I'm still in
Speaker 6: my sexual prime and I'm not going to be with
Speaker 6: somebody that doesn't put a focus on sex. There can
Speaker 6: be a lot of reasons, and one of the ones
Speaker 6: that I see a lot in my clients is that
Speaker 6: we have grown apart right, and there's a we are
Speaker 6: in marriages a lot longer than we used to be.
Speaker 6: If you think about like back in the day when
Speaker 6: we were pioneers, we were dying off at thirty years old.
Speaker 5: Now we're living well into our hundreds.
Speaker 6: If we do this right, and if you say, okay,
Speaker 6: your kids are gone and they're out of the house
Speaker 6: and you're fifty to fifty five, it's a lot of
Speaker 6: time left with somebody that you don't have any common
Speaker 6: interests with, that you don't enjoy spending time with. And
Speaker 6: one of the things that I see that's the most
Speaker 6: painful for me to see in clients is you can
Speaker 6: be on the couch with them and still fill alone,
Speaker 6: and that is devastating when you have time to think,
Speaker 6: I maybe got thirty good years left, and is this
Speaker 6: what I want to spend it with?
Speaker 5: With some that I can't even carry on a conversation with.
Speaker 1: So just to say that, because I've all always said
Speaker 1: that when they invented the words till death do us part,
Speaker 1: death was pretty imminent. And if you got married in
Speaker 1: the year nineteen hundred, the average length of that marriage
Speaker 1: was about twelve years. And so this idea that we're
Speaker 1: supposed to be to find our soulmate in our twenties
Speaker 1: and stay with them until our eighties is actually very rare,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And we're asking so much more of our partners
Speaker 6: these days. We are asking our partner to be our
Speaker 6: best friend, to be that person that wants to go
Speaker 6: shoe shopping with us, to be the sexiest person that
Speaker 6: I've ever met, and to still be hot and not
Speaker 6: be hanging out in yoga pants all day, even though
Speaker 6: we went through a pandemic together. To be funny, to
Speaker 6: be interesting, to be intell like we ask so much.
Speaker 6: We used to ask, like you have child bearing hips
Speaker 6: and you can plow a farm, you will do We
Speaker 6: ask so much more, and we are coming more and
Speaker 6: more to divorce, not because of the four big a's,
Speaker 6: which were alcohol, addiction, abandonment, abuse. Right now we're like, well,
Speaker 6: you're not as interesting as I likes, aren't have fun
Speaker 6: with you. So we're coming up with a lot more
Speaker 6: reasons to validate our reasons for divorce as well.
Speaker 1: And I would also add that women's economic rise means
Speaker 1: women are putting up with you know, their demands are higher.
Speaker 1: They're like, I don't really need you to pay the bills,
Speaker 1: so you've got to do all this other stuff now,
Speaker 1: and if you're not going to do it, I can
Speaker 1: go find somebody else.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they are wanting to have intellectual stimulation. They're wanting
Speaker 6: to be partnered. They want their partners to recognize that
Speaker 6: you know, this is and there's needs to be a
Speaker 6: quality in our relationships. And so it's no longer okay
Speaker 6: for a lot of my female clients to just in
Speaker 6: their perspective, carry the burden in their relationship, especially in
Speaker 6: emotional loads, for like taking care of the things that
Speaker 6: go into making a home a home.
Speaker 5: They're not okay with it anymore.
Speaker 1: I do want to say that great divorce isn't always bad, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're not looking at good and bad here.
Speaker 1: It's just sort of a phenomenon. But the pain you
Speaker 1: mentioned comes from probably when one person wants to keep
Speaker 1: the relationship.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's pain, or there's a lot of times couples
Speaker 6: are I've been letting you know four years that there's
Speaker 6: a problem and the other partner has sort of been
Speaker 6: having an affair with their job, so the mistress has
Speaker 6: been getting the best part of them for a long time.
Speaker 6: And then one person will just be like, Okay, I'm
Speaker 6: done and they're like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 5: I had no idea, And.
Speaker 6: It's like, well, you kind of were in denial or
Speaker 6: maybe you didn't know what to do with it so
Speaker 6: you didn't address it.
Speaker 1: And I hate to put a gender on it, but
Speaker 1: it's more often that men are blindsided by divorce.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, that'd be right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, is there a way to have a healthy, good
Speaker 2: gray divorce.
Speaker 6: Sure, I mean, if you still intend to try to
Speaker 6: have some sort of friendship and remember that, especially if
Speaker 6: you still have children together, you still do have a
Speaker 6: common value and you are modeling for your children what
Speaker 6: healthy couples ending looks like. Right, It doesn't have to
Speaker 6: be something horrific. You can do it with care and
Speaker 6: with kindness and with love and hopefully still retain your friendship.
Speaker 6: This is a person that's had a lot of milestones
Speaker 6: in their life with you, that have been with you
Speaker 6: some really rough times. And it's not that you're saying
Speaker 6: I don't care about you anymore. I just don't care
Speaker 6: to continue forward with you.
Speaker 1: We have to go to a break. But when we
Speaker 1: come back. You mentioned something children of adult divorce. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the other people who are involved in gray
Speaker 1: divorce and they include adult children, grandchildren and also new
Speaker 1: partners who you know, family holidays, what's happening for the future.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about this when we come back. My guest
Speaker 1: is doctor Dane McNeil in private practice in San Diego.
Speaker 1: We are talking about Gray divorce. You're listening to the
Speaker 1: Doctor Wendy Wall Show KFI AM six forty. We're live
Speaker 1: everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 4: You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
Speaker 4: AM six forty.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI
Speaker 1: AM six forty, Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. My
Speaker 1: guest doctor Dana McNeil in private practice in San Diego, California,
Speaker 1: works with a lot of couples and we're talking about
Speaker 1: gray divorce. Hopefully it won't happen, but if it does happen,
Speaker 1: just know it's very common, more common than one would think.
Speaker 1: All right, doctor McNeil, and we talk about the impact
Speaker 1: on adult children, whether they're in their twenties or thirties
Speaker 1: or even forties, what the experience is like for them
Speaker 1: when the family they've always known is now separated.
Speaker 6: You know, it's mixed. Some kids are like, I'm glad
Speaker 6: you guys did this. If you were staying together for me,
Speaker 6: you didn't need to write. I've seen you unhappy for
Speaker 6: a long time. I've seen you disconnected for a long time.
Speaker 6: It's time I appreciate that you stay together until I
Speaker 6: got on my feet. Please go live your best life.
Speaker 6: Some kids are not that way. They want you to
Speaker 6: continue to be that unit because when they come home
Speaker 6: on holidays, they want things to be exactly the way
Speaker 6: that they always were, and they want their parents to
Speaker 6: sort of be frozen in time so that when they
Speaker 6: need them, they have that appliance that they can turn on,
Speaker 6: which is going to the family home and having everything
Speaker 6: be exactly the same.
Speaker 5: So there's different ways.
Speaker 6: That kids show up, and a lot of it is
Speaker 6: how much you've been enabling your children to not have
Speaker 6: to deal with anything in life. I mean, if you
Speaker 6: haven't been modeling for them what healthy couple's communication looks like.
Speaker 6: There's the potential that this will catch them off guard
Speaker 6: and they don't know how.
Speaker 1: To respond to it right because they learn their relationship
Speaker 1: skills from their parents. It's funny you mentioned parents frozen
Speaker 1: in time, because we all have this fantasy that our
Speaker 1: parents are just sitting at home waiting for us to
Speaker 1: come back, that our bedroom will stay the same, that
Speaker 1: the food will be the same. I had the sad
Speaker 1: event that my mother died of breast cancer when I
Speaker 1: was thirty and she was just sixty.
Speaker 2: And I went to the.
Speaker 1: Funeral and they are all these young women and replacement
Speaker 1: daughters there and they say, oh, I never got out
Speaker 1: of the house unless your mother called.
Speaker 2: She was amazing. I loved her, And I was like,
Speaker 2: who are all these people? She had friends, She had friends.
Speaker 5: Except for sidea mime.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: But so that is part of it, is that children
Speaker 1: have to understand that their parents are humans and have
Speaker 1: all the same human needs, all right, let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about now. Not necessarily that the relationship breaks
Speaker 1: up because of an affair, but some people very quickly
Speaker 1: are comfortable in couples and they very quickly get into
Speaker 1: another relationship, and that can be very confusing, especially you
Speaker 1: had talked about earlier. If you spent twenty five or
Speaker 1: thirty years together, in every single family holiday together, what
Speaker 1: do you do now around the holidays and you have
Speaker 1: a new partner.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what you mentioned is statistically more often for men.
Speaker 6: The research shows that more often than not, men or
Speaker 6: in another relationship, if not mere within a year, and
Speaker 6: women are typically two, three, four five years, so there's
Speaker 6: a lot more distance. Women tend to want to get
Speaker 6: sorted and get their life and men are like, no,
Speaker 6: I can't be alone. I need someone to take care
Speaker 6: of me and plan my social events. And so I
Speaker 6: think having some honest communication about when is it going
Speaker 6: to feel like it's too soon, and maybe making an
Speaker 6: agreement as the original couple what feels like tolerable for
Speaker 6: men being conscious, I mean the male and the female,
Speaker 6: which which feels best for us? What do what do
Speaker 6: our kids want? And what's realistic for our kids?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 6: And maybe having like a family conversation. How do we
Speaker 6: want to break up holidays if it's uncomfortable? Does mom
Speaker 6: get Christmas Eve and Dad gets Christmas Day? With new
Speaker 6: partners being sort of creative and having some flexibility and
Speaker 6: ask telling your kids why it would mean so much
Speaker 6: to you if they were willing to help you do
Speaker 6: something for yourself, not just for.
Speaker 5: Them all the time in a loving way.
Speaker 1: It's hard for kids to get around their head around
Speaker 1: the fact that they're grown up now. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think when we're at our parents' presence, we always seem
Speaker 1: to be kids again. Yeah, and in that kind of
Speaker 1: demanding All right, before we go, some tips of advice.
Speaker 1: If you say that a good thirty percent of divorces
Speaker 1: happen over the age of fifty, is there anything people
Speaker 1: can do to prepare themselves? And by the way, I
Speaker 1: had a financial specialist on a few years ago, and
Speaker 1: she was saying that divorce actually takes place two to
Speaker 1: four years psychologically, two to four years before it's actually filed.
Speaker 1: And during that two to four years, men are hiding
Speaker 1: money and women are getting plastic surgery.
Speaker 7: Okay, all right, I more see that they're contemplating what
Speaker 7: life will look like they're oftentimes fantasizing about what it's
Speaker 7: going to be like to live by themselves and not
Speaker 7: have to pick up their partner.
Speaker 5: They've been looking at ads for apartments.
Speaker 6: And kind of like visualizing how much they can afford
Speaker 6: what their lifestyle will.
Speaker 1: Look like with They're going to get back on friends
Speaker 1: that aren't necessarily sure friends. Right. Yeah, I remember, like
Speaker 1: one of my friends, I knew she was getting divorced
Speaker 1: before she knew she was getting divorced, because I watched
Speaker 1: her Instagram change.
Speaker 2: I love every picture used to be always.
Speaker 1: Her and her husband, and then there were a lot
Speaker 1: of her alone and looking more sexy than a woman
Speaker 1: in her fifties should maybe on Instagram, and then a
Speaker 1: bunch of shots of her out with girlfriends all the time.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, that girl's had it for divorce, and
Speaker 1: lo and behold, it happened. But I knew it beforehand.
Speaker 6: Yes, a lot of mental preparation and rehearsal about what
Speaker 6: life is going to be like without them, and maybe
Speaker 6: also like how will I handle the holidays? They might
Speaker 6: have already had some thoughts about it. A lot of
Speaker 6: times when couples are coming in to separate in my office,
Speaker 6: the partner that is we call the leaning out partner
Speaker 6: that's already planning for the divorce, has already thought well
Speaker 6: about how they might want to do it and have
Speaker 6: some suggestions.
Speaker 1: So right, so let me ask you this as a
Speaker 1: couple's therapy, when couples come for therapy because someone has
Speaker 1: brought up divorce in your experience, is the divorce pretty
Speaker 1: much eminent? Are they come into couple's therapy really to
Speaker 1: try to fix the relationship.
Speaker 6: It depends if you're saying I want a divorce when
Speaker 6: you're in the midst of in physiological arousal because you're
Speaker 6: in a fight, That is not typically because you want
Speaker 6: a divorce. And I often say to my clients, please
Speaker 6: don't mention it when you're in the midst of being upset.
Speaker 6: If you've gone for like several long walks on the
Speaker 6: beach and you've contemplated and you want to come back
Speaker 6: and have a conversation in the backyard about how you
Speaker 6: can't go on, that's probably more real than I got
Speaker 6: mad because you forgot to put gas in my car
Speaker 6: and I want a divorce. That's just you're releasing energy
Speaker 6: and you're not handling it in a good way versus
Speaker 6: I've been thinking about this for a long time, so
Speaker 6: it's usually in the context of how it's been brought up,
Speaker 6: how responsive the other person is, like they are they
Speaker 6: taking you seriously because oftentimes I've heard you say this
Speaker 6: so many times.
Speaker 5: I don't even take it seriously anymore.
Speaker 1: Right, it shouldn't be used as a threat and a
Speaker 1: weapon or definitely the D word shouldn't come out. Any
Speaker 1: parting words for people who feel like their long term
Speaker 1: marriage is on the rocks. Any advice.
Speaker 6: About the pros and cons. Every relationship is going to
Speaker 6: have things that you don't like. So if these are
Speaker 6: deal breakers and you're okay with moving into relationship with
Speaker 6: its own set of problems, maybe this is the best
Speaker 6: thing for you.
Speaker 1: And sometimes change is good. Thank you so much, doctor
Speaker 1: Dana McNeil for joining me on the Doctor Wendy Wall Show.
Speaker 1: You guys are in the San Diego area, you can
Speaker 1: where can they find you? Do you have a website?
Speaker 6: Yeah? We also do intensives for people around the country
Speaker 6: that want to come travel and spend a few days
Speaker 6: with us. It's called therapy getaway. And then yes, we
Speaker 6: can see anyone in the State of California by telehealth,
Speaker 6: or they can come local to my office in San Diego.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thanks for being with us, and that brings
Speaker 1: this episode of The Doctor Wendy Wall Show to a close.
Speaker 1: It is always my pleasure to be with you every
Speaker 1: Sunday from seven to nine pm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a missus now.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to The Doctor Wendy Walls Show on
Speaker 1: KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always
Speaker 1: hear us live on KFI AM six forty from seven
Speaker 1: to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app.