#110 Alex DatePsych - Marriage, Divorce, and Body Count

0 (0s): Divorce rates have actually fallen specifically in higher educated groups, which you see the red pill community saying the opposite, that if you marry a highly educated woman you're doomed. 1 (9s): People without any education are basically much more likely to get divorced. Bachelor's degrees a little bit less likely, master's degrees, a little bit less likely, PhD even less likely to get divorced, 0 (18s): Someone was laying out. Basically what a lottery win it is if you have a man that is at least six foot is making six figures, is not currently married and then is also attractive, it was like 1% women 1 (32s): Rate male pictures and male just attractiveness, just a picture like really low. So it doesn't do it for most women. Just to see a picture of a guy, even if he's a conventionally attractive guy, especially if he's an average guy. The more profiles that a woman views, the more likely she is to reject him and swipe left. 0 (46s): Traditional roles actually aren't traditional. It was more egalitarian like there was more of a blend of roles and like, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that. The late 1 (54s): Modern period or the middle, the middle ages, that sort of thing. I mean you would've men and women just working in fields all together all day, they're 0 (1m 1s): Trying to convince men either A, don't get married 'cause it's a scam and you get, you're gonna end up paying Alimony for the rest of your life. She's gonna take everything. You're gonna be homeless. But it does seem to be a little bit dangerous to tell women that you shouldn't have any kind of financial contribution. You could 1 (1m 18s): Have been spending that time going to school, pursuing a career, getting an education and making your own money, but you've been a housewife for the last 25 years. You have no skills. There's 0 (1m 27s): Also a very real consequence of not being able to divorce and that is women killing themselves or being constantly beat or children getting beat. Hello everybody. You are listening or watching Chatting with Candace. I'm your host Candice Horbacz. As always, I'm gonna give you a kind reminder to hit that like and subscribe button so you don't miss any episodes and it helps us with the algorithm. This week we have Alex DatePsych joining the podcast. He runs some incredible polls. He has a lot of research on relationships, attraction. He's constantly fighting the incel and the red pill community, which I applaud and really think is amazing. 0 (2m 10s): This conversation does not disappoint. We get into confidence, long lasting love, divorce, social constructs within relationship breaking social con constructs. I cannot wait for you guys to listen to this. I hope you like it as much as I like having it. Please help me welcome Alex Alexander, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to finally have you on this, by my fault alone has been really hard to get scheduled, but I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Well 1 (2m 44s): Thank you for having me on. I've been looking forward to it as well. 0 (2m 46s): So I was just like going through your recent interview with Chris Williamson and the timing of it I thought was really interesting 'cause I just started reading this book. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's called The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Kuntz. 1 (3m 1s): I've never read it. No, I'm not familiar. 0 (3m 3s): Oh my gosh. So I, I was reading a couple mom books and then they often retrieve like where they're getting their opinion or data and they'll reference other books and unfortunately like a lot of the spiritual mom books tend to lean woke. So you have to like kind of read it and like say what's for me, what's not for me? And they suggested this book and I don't know why I bought it because it's, it's just not my typical cup of tea. And I actually almost donated it. It's like this thick and I was like, this is probably all just gonna be propaganda and just I, it's a waste of my time. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna crack it open just to see a different perspective. And one of the things that she mentions in the book is divorce rates. 0 (3m 45s): And I was like, oh I've gotta get into this because in the episode that you did with Chris Williamson, he mentioned a Jeremy Boring tweet, which was insane. It was basically that the manifestation of evil often shows up in women and women are to blame for all of this Divorce and no fault divorce is the like the crumbling of society and relationships as we know it. So according to some research from her book, she was saying Divorce, Divorce rates have actually fallen specifically in higher educated groups, which you see the red pill community saying the opposite, that if you marry a highly educated woman you're doomed. So 70% of people who married for the first time in 1990 were still together for their 15th anniversary up from 65% in the seventies and eighties. 0 (4m 33s): So we hear that Divorce is running rampant and that women are to blame. So what have you seen in, in your work, in your research? 1 (4m 40s): Oh yeah, absolutely, that's that's correct what you said there. So I've run some STA statistics from a nationally representative data set. I think it was the national survey of family growth. But I have the Stats up there and yeah, exactly as you said, you have a basically a linear relationship between educational level and a lower likelihood of divorce. So people without any education basically much more likely to get divorced. Bachelor's degrees a little bit less likely, master's degrees, a little bit less likely, PhD even less likely to get divorced. Pretty similar for men and women. So yeah, kind of what the red pill says on that. The idea, you know, that kind of a college educated boss babe is going to divorce you or something like that. Not true at all. 1 (5m 21s): These are, you know, that's very protective of divorce is having an education. You should probably see it as a green flag if you know men don't pay a lot of attention to things like that women do a little bit more, but maybe men should pay more attention because yeah, I mean if you don't wanna get divorced, selecting someone who has a higher educational level, really good predictor of of staying together there. And as you said as well, yeah, divorce rates, they're a little bit down. Marriage rates are also a little bit down. So probably some of the people that would've gotten married and then gotten divorced are not getting married now. But yeah, overall it's not such a, a bleak picture in that sense. 0 (5m 54s): So with marriage rates being down, is that taking into consideration that people are marrying way later than they used to? So like late thirties, early forties and I think in this book as well, it was saying if you get married in your fifties, which some people are doing now, which has kind of been unheard of in the past, that if you're, the later you get married the even less likely you are for divorce. So if you are for example in that 50-year-old group, it's almost Im it's almost not going to happen. Like you're pretty much in that marriage for life. 1 (6m 23s): Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of another thing perhaps contrary to a lot of the red pill narrative that they say get married really young to you know, someone with little experience traditional, I mean yeah if you get married you know in your early twenties your divorce risk is much higher than getting married in your mid thirties for example or later in life like you said. So yeah, probably people change a little bit, they're more aware of what they want, they're more emotionally stable. That's one thing that occurs with time as people get older. So yeah, getting married a little bit later. Also associated with a lower likelihood of divorce and yeah, so kind of different things there to consider. Contrary maybe to that more traditional narrative. 0 (7m 3s): So with women having more of a preference, I don't know if it's just statistically significant or not, but with women preferring high, higher educated men, does that balance out if the man let's say didn't go to university but is an entrepreneur or just more financially successful in an alternative way, even if it's blue collar, does that kind of like curb that that rule that women want and at least a partner that has as much or more education than she has? 1 (7m 30s): I mean to some extent it would, you know, if, if there's any signals of status and the idea there is, you know, of course it's called hyper gmy, this idea that women would prefer to select for someone who is higher in socioeconomic status and there's different kinds of status signals and status cues and one of the very robust status cues and signals in western society and really across cultures. Dr. David Buss, he did a really big study on this status signals across cultures and two of the big ones that make the top 10 list across pretty much every culture are related to education, going to a good school and having a college education. So I think it can kind of balance it out but at the same time I think that there's still a really robust status signal there just from having, you know, a degree. And so that's something I think that people are gonna wanna see that I should say that women are gonna wanna see is you know, a man that can kind of match them or that could be a little bit higher across different kinds of status signals. 1 (8m 19s): But yeah, it's always a little bit of a give and take so it can kind of balance out there. 0 (8m 22s): So do you think when we're making these decisions and mate selection and it's something like you're looking for something that you don't realize is maybe from an evolutionary standpoint providing certainty and protection and like a safe partner choice, do you think that most people are aware of this, like this underlying driving factor or they're just kind of mindlessly saying like this is important to me when they want a big six foot 200 pound man that also makes at least a hundred thousand and went to Yale and they have this long list that they real that it's kind of coming from more of this survival standpoint that we might not necessarily need anymore? 1 (8m 58s): Yeah, I think it's probably a little bit of both because yeah, if you use like an example that you just said like went to Yale, so obviously Yale didn't exist in an ancestral environment. So a preference for like a Yale graduate specifically is going to be something new and conscious that people are aware of as a status signal. But I think that desire for status is really rooted in our ancestral past and especially a desire for protection a man who can protect, so you said a man who's, you know, six two or something like that, big guy or something, you know, that signals an ability to protect as well. So those are the kinds of things that I think are rooted unconsciously in our ancestral past. But then on top of that we have kind of those things manifested in a very conscious way. So like six feet for example, I want a man who's six feet in Europe, it's a little bit different. 1 (9m 39s): It's 180 centimeters, which I think is about five 11 or something like that. So why because six foot's a round number, 180 is a round number. So there's kind of that idea like I want a tall guy but like these specific rules kind of can vary by, by culture. 0 (9m 54s): I forget the statistics but someone was laying out basically what a lottery win it is if you have a man that is at least six foot is making six figures is not currently married and then is also attractive, it would, it was like 1%, it was something abysmal. And yet almost all of these women, this is their, at least what they say out loud, what they want from a partner and then they come across what could be a potential excellent match for them. But he's five nine or he's five 10 so immediately can't, can't build a life with that person. And Esther Perel is like this relationship coach that I really, really love her content and she talks about building a love story versus a life story with somebody. 0 (10m 37s): And I see that a lot with the younger generations. It's they want this love story and she says you can have that with almost anybody even for a night you can have this really epic passionate love story even if it's only for a couple of hours. But to build a a life story with someone is a lot more difficult and a lot more rare. So you kind of have to look at long-term relationship. What are you, what is the goal of that and is it always gonna be fireworks and hot passion and just like this, just like more like primal attraction versus all of the things that go into sustaining a relationship. And I think that's where Apps get a little bit tricky because you're not taking into account chemistry of being in person. 0 (11m 18s): Like even with interviews like this for example, it's, it's always going to be second best to like if you were sitting in the chair next to me, there's a lot that's nonverbal that's not going to be picked up as on a screen like it would in person. So do you think that the Dating Apps are having like more of a negative rea like consequence to dating or is it just the next evolution that's that's just gonna happen like it's it's out of our hands? 1 (11m 44s): Yeah, I mean in a practical sense it's probably out of our hands 'cause it's there and it's really difficult to roll technology back and kind of take it away. But does it have kind of a negative thing? I think it's a little bit of both. Both because certainly it expands the mate pool and people who do well on Dating Apps, maybe they have an expanded mate pool, they can meet people more easily that they otherwise wouldn't have. Okay. So there's kind of a good side but we know at the same time that Dating Apps just don't work for a lot of people. And like you said, I think for women especially they miss a lot of cues that might make them attracted to a man that they wouldn't, if it's just a picture we know for example that women rate male pictures and male just attractiveness just a picture like really low. So it doesn't do it for most women just to see a picture of a guy, even if he's a conventionally attractive guy, especially if he's an average guy, just like a picture very often is not gonna do it. 1 (12m 28s): We know on Dating Apps as well that there's a serial swiping effect so the more profiles that a woman views, the more likely she's to reject them and swipe left. So there's kind of that overload of choice there. So yeah, the Dating Apps probably do increase selectivity and we know, you know, that women have evolved to be much more selective and mate selection than men have. So combine those two things. Yeah, I think it's really common, you know, that women can go on a dating app, have you know, hundreds of potential matches and like zero of them at all, which you know, can make men very frustrated like why don't I get any matches? Everyone is kind of, I guess black pilled so to speak on these Apps at this point. But yeah, there's some things that are good about them, some things that are bad. 1 (13m 7s): But there's definitely an effect there that that I think is very frustrating both for, for men and women with these Apps. 0 (13m 14s): So I have this friend and he, he's a great guy, like awesome, like just one in a million kind of guy and just very shy, not the type that's going to approach a woman at a bar. And he was single for such a long time and it was so annoying to me 'cause I'm like, you are such a good catch, like you just have to get out there. So I finally convinced him to go on an app and I don't know what I'm talking about 'cause I've never been on one of these Apps so I don't know what it's like out there, but I'm like, if you can't approach women in person, this is the next best, best thing. 'cause then you don't have that immediate, I guess like you got like embarrassment or like the pressure 'cause it's, there's like a buffer between like the act and the response. 0 (13m 55s): So I hired a professional photographer to get pictures and he was mortified so he thought I was gonna like dress him up in a bow tie and like make him pose for problem. I was like, no, no, no like lean into who you are. Like he's a hunter, he's like a blue collar. So he got his truck, we got his bow and we just took like very candid pictures, put them online, he found his wife in a week, no joke. And now they're expecting their first baby. So I know that there are some really good stories and there are, there are some uses for it but it's like just don't fall into the trap of swiping and maybe like lower your standards a little bit. Like is this person a good person? Is there chemistry versus trying to take out your tape measure and measure the guy, you know what I mean? 0 (14m 37s): Like that just seems kind of silly to me. 1 (14m 39s): Yeah and I mean you said that he had professional pictures done, which I think is probably really important because if it's just a picture, the picture has to be really, really good. And we know that women are very, very picky with these pictures. So it's kind of like, you know, if you swipe through a lot of profiles on Apps, I think especially male profiles, you will see men take a selfie in a mirror. There's toothpaste on the, they're so bad. Yeah, they're so bad. There's toothpaste on the mirror and everything. And it's like, with something like that, what do you expect? You know, and I haven't seen any research actually that kind of has controlled for that. Like how good are these pictures? 'cause a lot of it could just be that the pictures just aren't, aren't great to begin with. 0 (15m 13s): Yeah I think it's, it's kind of a double standard for men because there's either a terrible photo of him holding up like a dead animal and I'm like, that's know your audience. That's probably, you can say that you hunt without that being the picture or it's a guy really trying to be sexy and for some reason if a woman does it, it's like it's usually hot and it's perceived well. But if a man's trying to be sexy you're like ooh no. Like that doesn't work for me. If there's like a lot of obvious effort for me, at least for me it's a turnoff. 1 (15m 43s): Yeah and actually it's interesting because the animal thing, I ran a a survey on dating at deal breakers and that was, it wasn't a really high one for women but it did make the list. It was one of the things that women don't like to see as kind of the dead animal. And yeah, I I I don't even think that's just excluding certain women that don't like hunting. I think it's just that kind of picture that's like maybe you don't wanna see a dead animal. 0 (16m 3s): Yeah, no. Like there's conflicting things I'm trying to figure out if I'm attracted to you and there's also this dead fluffy thing in the photo. It doesn't, it's not working for me. So I, I found this thread today when I was just like scrolling through Twitter and it was talking about confidence and it was interesting 'cause it said confidence is sexy and lut, it's a woman and we're always told to be confident that like, you know, walk into your room, shoulders back, like head up direct eye contact, lemme see if I can find it. And this woman was using AI to kind of make the argument. So she was showing what a lot of men are generating for like AI girlfriends and that kind of a thing. And she says a timid pretty girl who's sexually forward because she's overwhelmed by lust is the character out of a male fantasy. 0 (16m 50s): So if you're looking at these images of a a girl, usually it is consenting and engaging but there's also like a little hint of shyness or like timidness trepidation whatever. And it's that combination that men find really attractive and not that Victoria's secret boss babe where she's like strutting and like very alpha. I don't know if you have any research on any of that. Like if men find the more like alpha woman attractive or if there has to be like a little peppering of timid trepidation there. 1 (17m 21s): I think I know the account you're talking about. I like that account actually. Yeah, once you said the ai it just followed it said the AI images I had, I had an idea of who you're talking about but yeah there it's 0 (17m 29s): Undead at yeah undead auto something que yeah, 1 (17m 35s): Yeah, yeah there's a, you know there's a lot of research that indicates okay femininity is attractive to men both as far as physical signals of femininity and behavior. And so, you know, we don't associate aggressiveness, assertiveness dominance or anything like that with Behavioral femininity. So I think this is frustrating for a lot of women who are more assertive maybe who don't necessarily want to be a boss babe, but who do wanna be kind of an independent person that men often just don't really value those things as far as Attractiveness is concerned or or seeking a mate, they're not always negative traits. You know, I think sometimes they can be good in a, in a female partner but they, they aren't things yeah that tend to stand out toward men. So we did actually run a survey on this and we looked at self-rated masculinity and femininity and also preferences for masculinity and femininity in a partner. 1 (18m 22s): These were correlated pretty well at 0.5, which is you know, moderate correlation but pretty large for what you see in psychology that men who see themselves as more masculine, they prefer a much more feminine woman. Women who see themselves as more feminine similarly prefer a much more masculine man. So you kind of see that preference for polarity there typically that the more feminine someone is, the more they're gonna prefer kind of that masculine guy and vice versa as well. 0 (18m 48s): So if you have a woman that's more in her masculine, she's gonna want a more submissive mate. 1 (18m 53s): Yeah, probably. Or perhaps a more egalitarian mate. It's hard we didn't look at that specifically but well yeah it would be something kind of like that you know, that that the less someone identifies perhaps is stereotypically masculine or feminine, the less they're going to prefer those roles or those behaviors or traits in a partner. 0 (19m 14s): And then what were you categorizing as masculine and or feminine? Was it like certain attitudes or belief systems or actions? So it 1 (19m 21s): Was, it was a little bit of both. We used a traditional masculinity and femininity scale and we also just asked a single question like how masculine do you see yourself, how feminine do you see yourself? So in the scale it asks about like a belief in traditional roles and a belief in similar things. Similar kind of to that traditional roles and behaviors as well as I think physical traits. 0 (19m 43s): So the traditional roles is interesting. This was also in that book the way we never were, so she was arguing that traditional roles actually aren't traditional. So that what kind of emerged in the late, I think 19th century or I'm sorry early 19th century when production and services moved outside of the home and prior to that it was more egalitarian, like there was more of a blend of roles and like I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that. Furthermore there was, there is a theory that hunter gatherers, right women have been the primary gatherers. So we were providing something, we weren't just staying at home with the children, we had a responsibility to contribute to the tribe. And in some tribes they say that women were also participating in the actual hunting. 0 (20m 27s): So there wasn't such a clear cut boundary between men and women and what the rules were for the house because even the idea of a nuclear family is relatively new, right? You we were more tribal for a very long time up until industrial times and farming et cetera. 1 (20m 42s): Absolutely, yeah. Much of what we think of as traditional roles or you know, within the last a hundred years or something, they come kind of coincide with that impression of the man works and the woman stays at home. But I mean for most, you know, of western history, men and women both had to work. If you, you know, were to look back to the late modern period or the middle, the middle ages, that sort of thing. I mean you would have men and women just working in fields all together all day. And that's something you see in rural areas, agricultural all around the world that women are, you know, farmers that a large portion of of agricultural production is is conducted by women and that sort of thing. And similarly like you said in hunter gatherers, female hunter gatherers are doing things all the time. There are sex differences in hunting when women tend to hunt, they tend to hunt small game or they trap with nets and that kind of thing. 1 (21m 28s): Men, men are still kind of almost exclusively the large game hunters but the calorie and food production by men and women actually very, very similar even if men are hunting larger game occasionally because yeah women in that situation, they have to do things all the time. If you have to survive you have to work and the men and the woman has to work. And only very recently has economic conditions in the west been good enough, you know, that it's like one income can do it and the other person can kind of stay at home and be domestic. 0 (21m 53s): Yeah and I mean that is alluring, you know, especially as a woman I see these super like almost like characterized versions of traditional house makers and you're like wow that seems lovely. Like she's beautiful, her makeup is done, she's wearing this dress and she's baking and taking care of the kids and the chickens and she always looks perfect, not a hair out of place and her husband's just out and he's just providing and she doesn't have to worry her pretty little head about anything and you're like, you can get lost in that daydream. And then you see these like mail tra accounts and they're like, I want my wife to sit at home and raise the chi. Like right, just like do nothing. 0 (22m 34s): And they, they're trying to convince men either A, don't get married 'cause it's a scam and you get, you're gonna end up paying Alimony for the rest of your life. She's gonna take everything, you're gonna be homeless. But it does seem to be a little bit dangerous to tell women that you shouldn't have any kind of financial contribution because if something does go south, like you are at the whims of however the divorce court plays out. And I was trying to look up some statistics because all you really see online is the women get Alimony forever and she'll take everything. But there was where, let me see if I can find it. It was from routers I think and they said that basically Alimony almost doesn't happen anymore because it just seemed socially unacceptable. 0 (23m 21s): About 25% of the cases there were about 25% of divorce cases in the 1960 and only 10% today and some as low as 8%. And since the Supreme Court ruled that it can't be biased to one gender or the other, that women now have to participate and women don't wanna pay it, they almost have more of a aversion to it than men. So they are trying to do a, a lot of Alimony reformations. So I guess in the studies that you've seen or polls that you've done, like who has the worst outcome for divorce? Or does it seem to be pretty fair? 1 (23m 58s): Yeah, I made a thread on Alimony as well and it's exactly as you said, you know, that it's not that common that people receive Alimony now the marriage typically has to be long, the wife has to be older and that sort of a thing. And often Alimony doesn't last all your whole life. It's usually only for a few years at this point. So typically what happens, and this is very consistent across the research, is that after a divorce, you know there's some division of assets but women tend to enter a period of poverty for about five years and then they kind of return to baseline. So economically women almost always do worse than men following a divorce. And I think a lot of men don't see it that way. And I can, you know, certainly understand that that point of view because it's like, you know, imagine you're in a situation, you're the one earning all of the money and you've paid for everything and all of that and that's the way that you see it. 1 (24m 41s): Even though you know finances are shared, you're married so technically it's belongs to both people. Then you get divorced and you have to split everything. And so of course the perception is gonna be like she took half of the things but the man's the one with the job, he's the one you know that is able to just continue earning that kind of income. Now he doesn't have a second person to provide. So men tend to get back on their feet really, really fast after a divorce. But imagine if you're a woman like you said and you have no other opportunity, you've lost basically that opportunity cost, right? You could have been spending that time going to school, pursuing a career, getting an education and making your own money, but you've been a housewife for the last 25 years, you have no skills, you are just thrust out into the world in this economy, right? 1 (25m 22s): And you're then you're in big, big trouble. So I think a lot of women know that and they see that and they're postponing marriage. That's a big reason why marriage is being postponed. Now they're later in life they're saying I gotta go back to school, they're doing all these things 'cause they realize like something could happen and it's not even necessarily a divorce that could happen. You know, he could die, anything could happen, you know? Yeah. He could lose his job, whatever. 0 (25m 43s): Absolutely. Yeah. It just seems like we are getting told one side of the story, there was this other statistic I saw that was real. So I again like I kind of was like, oh man, you know I have two boys so I can really sympathize for like the male perspective a lot and maybe sometimes that's a blind spot for me. Especially when it came to divorce. I had someone on the podcast like ages ago and he was talking about how, how awful the system is for men. And I'm not saying that there aren't really horrific outcomes, like obviously there are, but when it came to the passing of the no-fault divorce, we hear that that is the reason that we see an uptick in it. And we've kind of covered that there is no uptick to begin with and basically women are just divorcing because they're bored or they think that they can do better and it kind of vilifies the female perspective. 0 (26m 32s): And I found a study that said for the first five years following the NOFA adoption, they follow, they followed several states and the rate of suicide from wives dropped from dropped about eight to 13% and then the rates of domestic violence were reduced by 30%. So that's a win, that's a, that's a win for everyone. And it's a perspective that not a lot of people are talking about is there. There are short, there are people that quote fall out of love or cheat or think that they can do better on both sides. Like there are men and and women that are you know, making these claims. But there's also a very real consequence of not being able to divorce and that is women killing themselves or being constantly beat or children getting beat. 0 (27m 14s): So I think that, I don't want the government telling me I can't leave a contract. That's kind of scary. So it's coming from the side that preaches small government but at the same time you want the government to say who you're in relationship with is kind of odd. 1 (27m 29s): Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, it's interesting looking at the reasons for divorce because there's a lot of discourse in all of these spaces as well to talk about women initiate more divorces, which is generally true. I, I wrote, I had a really big review that I did on reasons for divorce who initiates more divorces and, and so that's something we see women initiate more divorces but the discourse can't just stop there because it's like why do women initiate more divorces sometimes, you know, if someone asks for a divorce it's because the other person did something. And that tends to be kind of what we see in the literature. Something we know really robustly across psychology is that men engage in more antisocial behavior across the board. So men cheat at rates about twice as much as women do. Men are much more likely to abuse substances. 1 (28m 10s): Men typically, you know, are more likely to engage in domestic violence. Although there's some research that indicates it might be kind of similar I think because people you know, tend to select assort belief for, for violence. If you have a couple that's aggressive, often they're both aggressive. But those differences, those sex differences in basically antisocial behavior can explain a lot of kind of the reasons for divorce initiation, kind of the difference there, why we see women initiating more. And additionally, if you look at beyond who initiates the divorce, which is often measured just by asking couples like who asked for it first, if you go beyond that and you ask did you both want the Divorce? Then you see agreement is really, really high and the top reason, you know, cited kind of for Divorce is just like we weren't feeling it anymore basically like, like we just weren't compatible at that point. 1 (28m 53s): So it's very often the case that when it finally gets to the point of divorce that both people are pretty on board with it, even if one person wanted it more or initiated it. Both people usually kind of see the cards and they know like this isn't working and they're ready. 0 (29m 6s): Is there, is there one sex that's having a better post-divorce outcome romantically? Like is someone more fulfilled in the next relationship or finding a long-term relationship after Divorce? 1 (29m 18s): So I think, I think the research on that's actually kind of mixed, I think men are more likely to experience loneliness, a few mental health problems following the Divorce for the period of about two, three years after. But yeah, the research really isn't super clear on who is doing better. I think women might tend to do a little bit better single in general, you know, which is kind of supported by the research that if you look at male and female singles, women who are single tend to report being happier with it. Many, many more women who are single say I'm single by choice and that sort of thing. So women seem to maybe need a man a little bit less than than men kind of need a woman. So I think maybe that kind of contributes as well. 0 (29m 54s): That's interesting. The idea of leaving a relationship because you're not feeling in love seems a little bit like a trap, especially if it's a committed one. I was reading it was re recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheel and in the beginning of the book he talks a lot about like the Neuroscience behind like a couple things like mob mentality falling in love, that kind of thing. And it was interesting with the neurochemistry, he was saying that that lasts like seven months of where you get like this perfect cocktail of like butterflies and excitement and just, you can't keep your hands off of each other. It's, it's biological, it's not, it's probably both. It's biological and maybe spiritual and something else, but there is a lot of biology behind it. 0 (30m 35s): And that shelf life is usually about seven months to a year. So when that goes away and then that is your, like your baseline, you're like, if I don't have that, then that must mean that there's something wrong with the relationship. I think that that can set you off into a trap and then you add the stressors that come with long-term relationships, like bills moving kids health, et cetera. Like the list goes on and on. So that kind of compounds onto each other and then you get into the neurochemistry of emotions and feelings and states. So if you're in a negative place, you're saying to your brain, this is what we're doing and that keeps on repeating. So then you keep on being agitated with your partner and keep seeing everything from this low that you're at and you, unless you do a very conscious pattern interrupt, it's almost like you're at the whims of chemistry at this point. 0 (31m 23s): So it takes a lot of work to even be able to recognize that like a lot of meditation to say I'm not this, these thoughts, right? And say we are gonna do something different. Like I feel like shit right now or I'm really mad at you right now but I'm choosing to do something else. Do you have, like, have you seen any research or protocols or anything that can kind of reestablish that bond within the relationship? Like that intimacy, that connection, that falling in love feeling? 1 (31m 51s): Yeah, I'm not sure if I've seen anything that can reestablish that falling in love feeling, but yeah, what you said is, is is correct that typically across the research, this is a short period, you know, on sternberg's triangular theory of love, a lot of good research on this typically called passionate love or infatuation romantic love. And it is that feeling like you described butterflies and all of that and yeah you know this can last you know, seven months in some people it can last their whole life. So, so there are individual differences here that in some relationships with some people they can just continue feeling that way. It's probably a little bit less common for some people. It lasts, you know, a little bit longer, three to five years. But it does fade and at that point the relationship needs some kind of bond there where people, you know, are still kind of invested and committed. 1 (32m 32s): And I think a lot of that is gonna come down to a deliberate choice. How, how well do people get along together, how invested are they with their day-to-day behaviors? Are they doing things to reestablish and reaffirm that bond? And, and I think, you know, this is kind of where the realm of like coaching and therapy and all of that does well and a lot of the researchers not really focused on this, but you know, things like going on regular date nights, doing things that are romantic deliberately to kind of cultivate that. Because even if you know, you don't feel necessarily that extreme passion that you did, you know in the first three months you can still love that person. You can still be very, very committed and want to be with them. And and related to that, you know, people don't break up from long-term relationships, marriage or not lightly. 1 (33m 14s): They usually have to get to a point where they feel pretty pretty bad. It's not just frivolous. So maintaining that, even absent, you know, like extreme feelings of passionate love, I think it's not that difficult if people want to and they're putting forth the effort to do it. 0 (33m 29s): So there's this recent article by Thomas se Seger, he's one of the founders of the Roko Forge Cold Plunges. And he was saying that if you do a cold plunge with your partner and you're making sure that you have skin to skin contact, whether it's your, you know, knees or hands, feet, whatever, touching and you do eye gazing, I forget how long it was. I wanna say it's at least a few minutes that it can actually start to kind of recreate some of that neurochemistry. I haven't tried it yet 'cause I hate being cold, but I thought that that was really interesting. And then for people that are risk takers or really like something that's maybe a little bit more avant-garde, I wanna say it's maps that's doing some of this, but they all do couples therapy with MDMA and I know some people that do that every anniversary. 0 (34m 17s): So every wedding anniversary they'll do m like an MDMA ceremony together to reconnect. And I heard that it's very, very helpful. So there, there are ways that people are trying to figure it out. 1 (34m 31s): Yeah, and I mean, you know, there's a lot of research as well that indicates that when couples are more in love, they do make more eye contact, they kiss more, they touch each other more, they cuddle more and all of that. And we know that there's always a bidirectional effect with behavior and feelings and psychology and all of that. So it's, it's kind of like research that shows just making yourself smile, just a fake smile will actually kind of boost your mood. You know, you can make someone smile for a minute and then ask them how happy they are and they'll rate themselves a little bit happier than the, you know, control group that's not smiling. And I would think, you know, things like that, like maintaining eye contact, all of that could be a similar effect. It's like, do the things that you would do if you were in love and then c, those might actually make you feel like you're in love again. 1 (35m 11s): You know? And it doesn't hurt to try it. Right? 0 (35m 15s): No, 100%. And that gets into the libido gap, which if everyone is honest, we know it's there and we know it's fast. I think the tricky part is a admitting that, and for some reason we, we attack men when it comes to the li the libido gap. We're like, you are just a horn dog. All you want is sex. Why can't you just figure it out out? Don't you dare watch porn to get yourself your needs in that way? And with, instead of saying, well maybe women should also have the conversation of raising their floor instead of men having to lower theirs. Like somehow you have to be able to have an honest conversation that yes, our desires are different but both people are responsible for bridging that gap. 0 (35m 57s): It's not just one person. And there's this author and she's like this powerhouse of a woman, her name's Alison Armstrong. And she really encourages women to stop vilifying men and to lean into their feminine. And she says to women, if you are having sex only when you want to, it's not enough. And basically you start to starve the relationship because for men that is a vital part of connection. It's not as frivolous as just getting off. It's, that is how I feel connected to this person. That's how I feel love and bonding to this person. So instead of like making him out to be a dog, it's like no, this is a need, a real need that he has. And if you as the woman are only quote, allowing it when you want, you're kind of dooming the relationship. 0 (36m 38s): And then that's when you, I think everything kind of steamrolls into that. We're not in love anymore. Well when was the last time you had sex? That's gonna absolutely play a role into like how loving he is to you as well. And it's not out of punishment. It's like the connection's not there. 1 (36m 52s): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the libido gap, one of the most well replicated things in evolutionary psychology. It's interesting, there are some people that they kind of deny that in everything because it's manifest across so many different things. But yeah, I think what you said was really important that men feel connection and love through sex. That's one way that men do. And I think perhaps a lot of women don't realize that and it's kind of tricky to recommend someone you know, have sex even if you don't want to. And because that, you know, that could be very aversive for some women. It depends probably how they feel about their husband in that moment. If, if they get to the point where it's like, that grosses me out, I really don't want to do that, that that is so bad for the relationship at that point. It's not an if, it's just a matter of like when that relationship is gonna end. 1 (37m 34s): So I think maintaining sexual frequency is really, really important. And yeah, again, across the research relationship satisfaction is very closely associated with sexual frequency, you know, and again, is that because people who are more satisfied wanna have sex more probably. But again, bidirectional, if you get people to have sex a little bit more, try a little bit because some people wanna have sex but they're tired, they work or something like that. And it's not like, oh I'm grossed out by my husband or I'm grossed out by my wife. It's just like, I don't have time for it. I'm tired today or whatever. They could reorganize things and prioritize that a little bit more. They might find, you know, that that's very, very helpful for them. Certainly, you know, we know that sex has an effect on bonding hormones as well. Vasopressin in men, oxytocin in women, that sort of thing. 1 (38m 14s): Cuddling after sex as well. So these are important things that people can do to kind of maintain that connection for both men and women. Yeah, 0 (38m 21s): There was this relationship coach and I was trying to find her name 'cause I hate not giving credit where due, but she, and if someone wants to find it, she's one of Layla Martin's coaches. But the way that she was describing it was, if you, if you have a child, if you have a toddler, a small kid, and you are too tired, you worked too much, you are angry, you are whatever they misbehaved, quote, misbehaved, would you withhold food from them? Would you say you don't get to eat today. I'm, I'm exhausted, I have too much to do. I need to relax. Or you threw paint on the wall, you don't get to eat today. She's like, that's what it is for men. So if you're looking at it like, I'm too tired, I whatever, try to reframe it in your minds like that. 0 (39m 6s): And then it's not something that you just do as like a, a de like a delicacy. It's not like a treat, it's, it is foundational. So for me that's been really helpful to just have that reframe. And it sounds really exaggerated, but I think again, if we are doing an honest inventory of our relationship, it's like the, the worst ar the worst times of my relationships where when there was long periods without intimacy and then it just gets worse and worse and worse. So it's like at some point, even if you don't necessarily want to, you're not super excited, you're like, this is needed, this is needed to reconnect and just making that decision without having your ego involved in it. 1 (39m 44s): Yeah, exactly. And I think something you said there is interesting, if people are using sex as a punishment withholding sex or they're using sex as a reward, I think that's probably really bad as well, that sex should be something that happens, you know, because both people want to, or they're putting forth the effort, but if it's like, oh, I'm only gonna give you sex if you do these certain things, or oh, you did something bad so now I don't wanna have sex. You're just pulling people apart. I think, you know, well pulling yourselves apart in the relationship, so to speak. Kind of another interesting point there is you can find a lot of relationships that have nothing keeping them together except for sex, which I think is a testimony to how important sex is that the relationship can exist and persist for a long time based almost exclusively on sex. Because sex is a really, really strong bonder. 1 (40m 25s): It will keep people together even when everything else is bad. Even when there's, even when it's not bad, there's no connection, there's nothing in common. Oh, but the sex is good. So they're together for many, many years until finally maybe that's not enough. But yeah, that's probably a testimony there to how powerful sex is as far as keeping people together in that sense. 0 (40m 42s): Have you done any polls with sex? Sex, like sexual, like sexual appetite in aging? So for example, there's this idea that women don't want sex or don't want Casual sex. And the study that was referenced, the initial study that ended up being pretty flawed based off of critics was they went to a college campus and they asked all the men, they had a picture of like a random girl and she was attractive, would you take this girl home and just have Casual sex with her? Almost every man said yes. Then they picked a random guy, good looking, gave it to a bunch of college girls, would you have Casual sex with this, this random guy, almost all of 'em said no. They're like, oh, see, women don't want Casual sex. 0 (41m 22s): Well they're like, well of course, like you have to take into account that men are bigger, stronger, and it's a security risk like that is, there's a huge safety factor there. So they said if you take a man that they know there's no real, like there's no commitment, but that they know and find attractive. Almost universally, all of the women said, yeah, of course I would. So there is this idea that women don't, we don't want sex, we just want to be wifed up and that's it. And we have no sexual desires. But this study actually showed the opposite. It's as long as there is trust and safety that Casual sex is on the table for women. 1 (41m 54s): Yeah, the the, the picture thing is interesting. So that's part of a line of research that began in the eighties by a couple of researchers named Clark and Hatfield. And in the original studies they had attractive men and women just go onto campus and ask people like, Hey, will you come home with me at night? And yeah, men being approached by a woman, you know, most of them have said, yeah, sure, and and zero of the women did and this is something that's been replicated over and over. But yeah, like you said, variations of this experiment. If you ask the women, you know, if there was a variation that said, you know, I have a friend, I really trust him, he's very attractive, would you go home with him? More women say yes at that point. If it's an attractive friend or someone that they know more, say yes. So there's an element there that's, like you said, fear, security. If a woman feels secure, she's more likely to do it. And if a woman knows the person, if she trusts him, perhaps if there's already some kind of bond there, someone that she already likes. 1 (42m 39s): So those can kind of increase it there. There's still other research that indicates, yeah, women probably like Casual sex less typically across the whole li bele gap. That makes sense. There's the Orgasm gap as well that, you know, in Casual sexual encounters, very few women actually experience an Orgasm. The more they date that person, the more Orgasm frequency increases to the point they get into a committed relationship. And that tends to be where women report the highest sexual satisfaction, having more orgasms and everything. So there's a question as well as to what extent Casual sexual encounters are intended to be one night stands or one-off for women, or to what extent women would date those people and be like, okay, so Casual sex for a lot of people is, you know, an entry to a relationship. It starts out as like, okay, we've been on two dates, we're having sex, but I would keep seeing that person. 1 (43m 21s): I would keep dating them. Maybe I want something more at that point. 0 (43m 26s): So I guess sexual attractiveness, there's this idea, especially in the red pill community, that once you are past the age of 25, you are no longer desirable. Your worth as a woman is completely gone. There's no value to be inherited. But then you look at porn and I mean that says a lot about what people are consuming and milk porn is always number one or number two as far as the most consumed viewed content. There's also this argument made, and this one's by Layla Martin, and she talks about the idea of the 40-year-old plus woman not being sexual is actually such a Myth because that in like historically speaking, especially before contraceptives, that was the only woman that could have consequence free sex. 0 (44m 12s): She was the only one that had the freedom to have sex purely for pleasure without the risk of pregnancy. So it's interesting because I haven't heard it talked about that way, but they obviously like there's a, a contradicting opinion on that. So do you think that like most men find women unattractive after a certain point? Like obviously it's going to dwindle, like there's an 80-year-old that's gonna be super, super rare that anyone wants to be attracted to that. But what does that kind of bell curve look like? 1 (44m 42s): Sure. So if you ask men to rate pictures of women, and this has been done across a few studies, or if you just ask men to report, like what is their ideal age gap? I did a survey on this just recently, I think it was last week then yeah, you see men, you know, kind of picking women in their mid twenties and something like that. But I think what happens is people take this as like an average and they say, okay, here's an average age preference. And then they tend to apply that to everyone. And you know, that's something called the ecological fallacy. The idea that you can take an average of a group and then apply it to individuals. At the end of the day, we like attractive people, you know, so someone who's not attractive at 25 is not gonna be attractive at 25. Someone who is still attractive in their mid thirties, you know, she's a hot woman, mid thirties, she's gonna be a hot woman to everyone else. Men are not gonna, you know, she's not gonna have a problem finding a guy. 1 (45m 24s): So it's very individual in that sense. Yeah. You know, you can compare groups and say, okay, women on average are more attractive at 25 than 35, but whatever, we're not averages, you know, every individual is is very different. You know, attractiveness varies a lot. Some people, you know, and I, and I think, you know, if people are very unattractive in their twenties, they're gonna struggle in their twenties, they're gonna struggle up through their thirties. If someone is really hot in their twenties and they maintain themselves into their thirties, they're not gonna struggle at any point really. 0 (45m 51s): No, I mean like look at Giselle who's in her forties or J-Lo who I think is like 53 now. Like she, they age has nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing on in certain examples like those, and everyone's gonna say they're outliers. They're outliers. Well they exist, they're real living, breathing people. So you're gonna tell me that anyone is gonna see J-Lo walk into a room like, Ew, she's 50, get her away from me. Like people be clawing to get close to her. So yeah, I think like strictly putting someone's value at like an age or, I don't know, it just, it makes no sense to me. I'm like, there's beautiful women that remain like beautiful for a very freakishly long time. It's not necessarily cut off at a certain thing and you don't just turn to dust. 1 (46m 30s): Yeah. And, and both stated and revealed partner preferences, which means what men and women say they want as far as age goes and what they actually pick. They're pretty small and they're, they're very close, the two. So you know, most people end up with people who are close to their own age. So you know, you kind of, in the red pill, you also have that discourse like, oh, men are at their highest value at 38. And it's like, oh yeah, then why aren't 38-year-old men dating women who are 22? Right. Women who are 22 don't want men who are 38. They want men who are very close to their own age. So people are picking partners close to their own age regardless of what they say. You know, like, oh, a woman, you know, at 22 is the hottest or whatever. Yeah. I mean you can say that you know, until you're blue in the face, but at the end of the day, you're probably gonna date someone in your own environment who's close to your own age. 0 (47m 13s): And that's probably the healthiest outcome. Or like has the most successful outcome too. Like if you see those really big gaps, they tend to think that those are a lot more temporary. If you see a 20-year-old with a 60-year-old for example, that's they have an arrangement and that arrangement's probably temporary. 1 (47m 27s): Yeah. If you see huge gaps, then you start to wonder about that called the beauty status exchange there. Like what kind of exchange is going on. Typically, you know, research on age gap shows that like they're not a lot different from other relationships, but if you do see something like that where it's like someone who's 60 and someone who's 20, you know, then you kinda wonder like yeah there probably is something going on there that's not like mutual attraction. 0 (47m 48s): No, and I mean as long as it's all agreed upon, I have no issue with it. Right. Like do your thing to both of them. And it's funny because everyone will, you know, demonize probably the girl mostly like gold digger, but he's also using something too. He's using something that's way more valuable than money, which is time. And especially if she wants kids eventually. So there's an agreement and if as long, as long as both parties agree, like do your thing, right. Like I don't care. I hope you're both having fun. 1 (48m 12s): Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting kind of the, the use of time. I think a lot of people haven't thought about that, but I think there's an author whose name is Mike or Mark DeGeneres who talks about that and says, you know, kind of these large age gaps can kind of monopolize women in their youngest years and then if they break up it's like, wow, maybe they missed an opportunity to date someone who was more committed to them, who they were more attracted to close to their own age in that sense. 0 (48m 35s): Yeah, that's definitely something to take into account, like into very serious account. So speaking of breaking social contracts, I loved your thread when there was someone who was just like vile and hate, like hating. It was like they had like four different pictures of adult actresses or OnlyFans girls that then they, they committed the sin of falling in love and getting married and having a family. And this pisses people off more than almost anything on the internet. Internet where they can justify like really vile comments to either like the women or even their children slash babies, which is bananas. What about this? 0 (49m 16s): It's like you, you don't want us to be a whore and then once we are a whore, you can't be anything but a whore again, if you, you know, you say you're doing something else, well no, you have to go do this one thing 'cause you, you committed to it. It's, you're not allowed to evolve as a a person and you're not allowed to have a change of mind or lifestyle or values or whatever. Like that's what we should, we should want from everyone is constant growth, constant evaluation. Who I am now I hope is not who I was 10 years ago. That would be a travesty. Like I want to grow constantly be growing and like self-evaluating. So you get punished for doing the thing that they wanted you to do from the beginning. Like what is that about? 1 (49m 56s): Yeah, it's probably because that punishment is intended to be a threat to prevent that behavior in the first place. So there's an element of punishment there and kind of a revenge fantasy there, you know, so a lot of these, these social restrictions on promiscuity are intended to prevent that behavior and to kind of regulate the sexual marketplace. So when people see that those aren't working, I think they get upset. And I think for a lot of men, on a very personal level, it's a revenge fantasy. So it's kind of like, okay, very promiscuous women. The idea is like, okay, you can be promiscuous but no one's gonna love you. No one's gonna want to be with you. And then they see these women who are very promiscuous, they're in porn or whatever, they're conventionally attractive, they get to their mid thirties and then they marry and they settle down and it just kind of goes entirely contrary to that revenge fantasy. 1 (50m 38s): So, so they hate it and it's like, I think this is related again to kind of what we said about attractiveness. It's like at the end of the day, these are very famous people. They're conventionally attractive, they're not gonna have trouble finding someone you know, and probably someone that they like who then you know, a guy who probably is also similar in attractiveness to them regardless of what they have done. You know, these guys that are upset about it, they don't have to date that porn actress, she wouldn't date them anyway. So it's kind of like, it's neither here nor there. But yeah, the idea that they're gonna, you know, have a lot of trouble finding a mate or something because of this history, it doesn't seem to be the case. Especially for, you know, these very famous kind of porn actresses. They're gonna find someone. Yeah. 0 (51m 16s): Yeah. And it goes against the narrative, like this massive emphasis on body count. And I mean even before internet was huge or social media was huge, that was always kind of a conversation. But there was always a very different kind of person that asks how many people you've been with. It comes often in my experience from like an immense amount of insecurity. 'cause you're trying to like measure yourself up to whoever else that other person was with whether I was asking a guy that was always at my lowest point, that was when I was, you know, 18, 19, 20. And I cared a lot because I was like, I, how am I gonna compare to her? What does she look like? How like was she more fun? Like do you like her more? It was all like this very neurotic like insecurity. 0 (51m 56s): And I think it's the same with men too. It's just more of like this like territorial thing, like that is mine and then you have people believe it or not, that have a different perspective a more, a more, I would say like evolved perspective about like what is relationship and what, what is this person is like this a good fit for me? Is she gonna be a good mother, a good wife? Like is she the same person that was making those decisions however long ago? And I think some people are approaching it with nuance and the Riley example was really great 'cause people really go after her. Candace Owens has gone after her a couple times and she's obviously beautiful. She's obviously extremely successful financially. Her husband is also extremely good looking and financially successful. 0 (52m 40s): I think he's like a professional stunt man. Yeah. And like she has a beautiful baby. Like there is nothing to get mad at unless you're just jealous that you don't have those things and they, you know, say things about him like he's a simp, you go on his profile for two seconds, like that is a man's man. He's doing like 80 back flips off of a building Like you, there's nothing to to kind of criticize there. So to me it says like, yes, for some people body count is absolutely going to matter and they're going to have deal breakers. But for other people they look at it from a different perspective. It's like, well what are the conditions of the relationship now? Is she going to be faithful now? Is she right? What are the expectations of the relationship? Are we gonna be monogamous, monogamous, poly, whatever? Like these are conversations people are having and they're not emotionally attached to the past. 0 (53m 24s): Like there's no retroactive jealousy. They're just kind of looking at, at the relationship from a futuristic standpoint. Which to me seems a lot healthier. 1 (53m 31s): Yeah, yeah. I've done done a little bit on body count as well. Yeah. Just like you called it at the end. I was gonna say that's called retroactive jealousy. That's exactly what it's because people compare themselves to past partners and, and what I found when I did the body count research, I was looking at, you know, what kind of men prefer virgins And it was men who were younger a little bit lower and make value themselves. Men who had fewer sexual partners themselves. So these are probably gonna be men who are a little bit more Insecure about it. I asked, you know, men and women both like, do you even ask about half of men and women? They don't even ask. So it doesn't seem to be the case. You know that a lot of people care, some people care, some people care more. There is, you know, a body count preference for people who do ask, which is, you know, typically a little bit lower. But at the same time there's, you know, the body count deal breaker tends to be really, really high as well. 1 (54m 17s): So looking at something like that, it doesn't seem to be something that most people are really, really rejecting partners for. And the men who seem to care the most about it are probably the men. Yeah. Who are gonna be a little bit more Insecure about that. Right. Because you know, security as a man kind of comes with increasing, you know, value, whatever that may be to some extent. Which also kind of comes with age. You know, men who accumulate more sexual partners, they cared less and less about body count as well. So it's kind of like, yeah men, you know, get to that point and it's, it's like, well I've had sex with a lot of people. Am I gonna worry about it that much? Those men probably not. 0 (54m 52s): Oh that's interesting. I would expect the opposite because that's, again, maybe it's just my feed and the algorithm is just giving me like a whole bunch of just like bad takes. But it's these men that are saying that they can kind of devour whatever that whatever they want. But the woman is supposed to be virginal, like constantly virginal. She's never allowed to be the Madonna unless it's with him and that's it. And to me I'm like that's not fair at all. Like what? I don't understand that justification. If it's even then sure that makes sense. But if you have one person that thinks like sexual promiscuity is okay on one end and not the other, to me that's like mental gymnastics. 1 (55m 27s): Yeah. And in my research and in past research as I didn't do men and women view promiscuity in a mate kind of similarly, men and women both view it negatively. So there is kind of that discourse out there that you know, men say, oh you know, I'm, I'm a key that can open any lock is a master key, a lock that can get opened by any keys, a should be lock, that kind of a thing. Men seem to think that women are going to view high promiscuity in men positively, but women don't. Women tend to view it about as negatively in men as men view it in women. But men view high promiscuity in other men really positively. It's like this really, really robust status cue that men signal to other men. It's like I can get a lot of women, I've had sex with a lot of women and we know that men lie about this a lot, that men exaggerate their count a lot. 1 (56m 10s): And I think that's something as well that we see and a lot of this online discourse where like I can just run through a bunch of women but she has to be a virgin. The men saying that probably are not men that are, you know, having a lot of sex well partners because we know that those are the men that care less. Right? Those are probably men that have, you know, kind of that double standard but that are probably not acting out that double standard. You know, they're probably low body count, low low success with women themselves. 'cause we know, you know, higher body count, higher success with women is associated toward more open attitudes toward promiscuity. Men who benefit, you know from promiscuous environments tend to be more supportive of it. They tend to care less about those sorts of things. 0 (56m 49s): Yeah. And what's interesting, do you follow Ala at all? Yeah. So she did a study, and I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but she does some really like out there studies and she has a huge sample size for most of her polls. So one of them was talking about conventional sexuality and relationships and expectations and kind of monogamy and then everything other than, and there's this idea that it's just debauchery and you know, well to do respectful people are always monogamous. And in her poll it was actually kind of the opposite. It was the more successful you were. Like if you were in the top 1% of earners for example, that you would be more likely to have some kind of atypical sexual relationship. 0 (57m 33s): So these people are swinging, they're going to orgy parties, they might be Polly, they might be monogamish, but there's the highest concentration of like atypical relationships. The more success successful or artistic that a person is, which kind of goes against the narrative that you know, these people, there's something wrong that they are mindless consumers. Which is I guess kind of the origin of the word whore. So even from like a theological standpoint, it, it didn't have to do with sex. Like that's just the more, more visceral visualization that we can have. And it really, it really engages people. So we use sex a lot when we use the word who, but horror was actually a consumer, it was like a mindless consumer that isn't contributing. 0 (58m 15s): Like you're not providing any value, you're just take, take taking until you, you're full and then you start taking again. So there's this idea that you are, you're reckless and you have no basically no control over your, your wants and desires. Which is I guess based off that poll, like it raises some questions because I think that to be in the top 1% of you know successful people doesn't mean you're a good pers person. I'm definitely not saying that. But it does say that you have some kind of internal locust of control. You do have reservations, you are calculated like you're not necessarily like risk takers not the word I'm looking for, but 1 (58m 54s): Well maybe 0 (58m 54s): Like you're not reckless. 1 (58m 57s): Yeah. It could be risk takers. Yeah. I mean associated with risk taking. Yeah. That's associated with entrepreneurship and success as well. You, you tend to see higher risk taking behavior in people who are highly successful and also people who are very unsuccessful criminals and that sort of thing. So it can kind of go either way. But yeah, I would think, you know, high openness would be something associated with that seeking novelty and perhaps also just having the ability to do it right, the ability to experiment more and and all of that more time perhaps 0 (59m 22s): More time. Yeah, that's interesting. And it's funny because I'm not gonna say names, but there are plenty of people that are on the right side of politics that I know they're not, they're not what you think that they are, you know what I mean? It's just, it's just not as socially acceptable. So they very much present a more traditional lifestyle or relationship and it is not always what it seems folks. 1 (59m 44s): Yeah, yeah it's, it's it's out there. All of the fetishes. I remember there was some other research that indicated okay fetishes, we tend to see them in higher classes and also in lower classes. So it's kind of a u-shaped curve there. And I'm not sure why that is, except again it could come down to novelty seeking and, and and risk behavior and all of that. So that might be kind of why, why that exists. Whereas people who are much, much more conventional perhaps they're less likely to excel at things but they're also more likely to do kind of a middle of the road as far as their own personal social behavior as well. 0 (1h 0m 17s): Well to pivot, because I know we are coming up on time, there was one poll that you reposted and I saw it kind of going viral on TikTok and I wanted to get your opinion on it was the, the University University of New South Wales and it was looking at child Predators and this was alarming. So it was one in six that reported having sexual feelings towards children. One in 10 Australian men have sexually abused a child. One in 15 reported that they would have sexual interactions with a child under 14 if no one would find out. And the men that have done this reporting of having these feelings or acting on them were more likely to be married, be high income and work with children. 0 (1h 1m 4s): So what is happening in Australia is this, I mean this is all like self-reported, is this isolated to their what? Like what is happening? Because that is terrifying as a mother. 1 (1h 1m 16s): Yeah, it was pretty alarming. And so this was a, one of the largest studies done to date on this also a nationally representative survey. So it gives us kind of a good picture of, you know, the actual demographics in Australia. Some people criticize this because they said, oh well this could be counting people who are 18 who like someone who's 17. But even excluding that, you know, we see these statistics that are very alarming. Like, like would do something sexual with a child who's 10 to 12 in this, you know, 5% would do something with a child who's 12 to 14 again 5% in this. So these are very large percentages of men that are just admitting, you know, and when you have something like this where it's an admission, the actual numbers are probably higher as well. You know, because of that social desirability bias. Some people are not gonna want to admit that even on this survey. 1 (1h 1m 58s): So yeah, I mean this apparently is, is is pretty common and I think a lot of people don't realize the extent to which a lot of people harbor kind of a dark sexuality within them in that sense and have these, these really, you know, disturbing desires and, and all of that. I'm not sure, you know, what more can be said about that except that yeah, it's, it is very alarming in that sense that, that it seems to be so high. 0 (1h 2m 21s): Well I guess do you think that there's an uptick in it or do you think that we just now have the resources that we're doing polls that we're finding these numbers like a ballpark figure? Is it, is it like, is it new or has this kind of always existed at this rate? 1 (1h 2m 38s): Yeah, I would, well we can't know for sure with the, with the polls 'cause obviously that's gonna be something new. I don't personally, I would be surprised if it's an uptick. I would think even, you know, at, in modern history right now, you know, we really suppress these things, this you know, sex with children and all of that. If you look to someplace like Afghanistan and you see what happens in social conditions where people are allowed to marry children, people do it. You know, there's a lot of men who are like, okay, I'll do it then. So you know, we're, we're in a pretty good spot in western society that we teach people, you know, from a very young age. Like you can't do that. And that's something that does shape sexuality and sexual expression. We know like this is very, very inappropriate, you know, that will actually shape people's desires down the road, you know, in other environments where, you know, if you were to just let people do whatever they want, would we see this expressed much more? 1 (1h 3m 25s): Yeah, unfortunately probably we would. 0 (1h 3m 29s): Whoa. Yeah that is terrifying. 'cause it's like some people have this narrative that like it's a kinda like a boogeyman that this, this doesn't actually exist. And then there's people on the other side, which it's like if you are, if you're gay then automatically are a predator, which we know is, is nonsense And ala did it a recent study and again when we talk about the polls that she does and they are out there, she did one on pedophiles, so she had over 10,000 self-reported pedophiles take a poll, which is, I would assume probably one of the largest, if not the largest ever done. And it's where, where was I going with that? 0 (1h 4m 8s): Shoot, I just lost it. I hate when that happens. Oh basically that the, the most likely to offend. So going back to like automatically thinking that some because someone's gay that they're going to harm a child like is nonsense and that's really anti antiquated like thought pattern. But the most likely to offend was actually someone that reports themselves being non-binary. And I found that to be obvious. It was like, that seems right to me because A, I don't really think it's a thing. I think that it's like narcissism with a different name and I think if you are in a position where you're going by that and you're really being forceful to get into certain spaces, like to me that's a red flag. 0 (1h 4m 57s): But I think what where we get into trouble is you have certain accounts that like are really demonizing anyone that is living an alternative lifestyle. And blanketly saying like, groomer, groomer, groomer. Well if you call everyone a groomer now you don't actually recognize when it's actually happening. So I think we have to have polls like this to see like yes it's real, but no it's not everybody. And I'm really looking forward to the results of that poll. 'cause I think it could be really preventative, like hopefully it can help save a lot of children from being harmed. But it's like what do you do with this group of people now? Right? It's not everyone that has these attractions are acting on it. 0 (1h 5m 37s): Is it, are they born that way? Is it trauma based? Is it a mix? I think when I talked to her recently she was saying it's kind of 50 50, so about 50% it is like an immense trauma that they had and then they're kind of replicating that and then another, it's just that's how they came in, which is even more disturbing and you like don't wanna believe that because then it feels like there's less control over it. Like there's less that we can do as a society to protect the children. 1 (1h 6m 5s): Yeah, it probably is 50 50. So that's a very broad rule across Behavioral, genetics, personality psychology, the 50 0 50 rule that about 50% personality, which includes sexuality and all of that is heritable. So yeah, there probably is some of it that is people are born that way and, and that is disturbing because you know, that's not an excuse for highly antisocial behavior and you know, this applies to antisocial behavior across the board, like crime antisocial, personality disorder, that sort of a thing. So you have people you know that are born with these extreme paraphilias, they're essentially dangerous. We know, you know, that pedophilia is basically untreatable. You don't cure these people either. So then you're, oh wow, you know, you're left with a question, what do we do with these people? 1 (1h 6m 46s): You know, they report that they have these feelings, some of them don't act on it, but they could. And some of them are. And you know, they're really, really highly likely to re-offend, you know, pedophiles really highly likely to re-offend as well. So we're really in a tricky position, like how do you deal with these people? Lock 'em away forever. They, you know, they've experimented with drugs that like lower their libido a lot. But I mean, yeah, it's, it's a difficult situation like, like what is to be done in that sense? 0 (1h 7m 12s): So they did used to do the chemical castration and that doesn't work. Right. 1 (1h 7m 16s): I don't recall if that works or not. I mean, I don't know for sure. I think it's still used in some places. I'm not sure where, and I'm not sure how, I think Florida, yeah, I so too, yeah, I, I think maybe outside of the United States as well, I'm not sure how effective it is. It seems like if you could just completely knock someone's libido out, it has to have some effectiveness there. But I, I don't know the extent of it. 0 (1h 7m 37s): Yeah, I don't either. Yeah, it's, it's one of the darkest, darkest like disorders or acts as le at least as a mother. It's like, well you want an answer, you're like, well what do we do? And then you also don't want it to be like minor minority report where someone hasn't done something and then you have, you know, like preemptive jail. That doesn't seem right either. So yeah, it's really tricky. So I, again, I look forward to her research coming out on that. And I know people say that she's not a researcher, well she has a lot of information and she's very rigorous with her results. Yeah, I think she does. And she is not scared to ask really, really outlying questions. 1 (1h 8m 15s): Yeah, I think, I think there's a future for research like that, independent researchers doing things like that because a lot of those questions, they're not gonna get published. You might not even be allowed to ask them if you try to run them through an institutional review board and through a university or something. So, you know, there's a lot of questions that are sensitive that they won't even let you ask at this point. So people like a doing this is really, really important. Something you mentioned as well that was interesting. So like non-binary people are more likely to have this. Sure. So we see that paraphilias cluster together, you know, that if someone has one kind of fetish, they're more likely to have other kind of fetishes. If someone you know has some kind of paraphilia like, like pedophilia, then they're more likely to have others as well. It's not a one one correlation. So certainly you can't just look at everyone who's non, non-binary like you said and just be like, groomer, groomer, groomer, you know, but those things do kind of cluster together. 1 (1h 8m 60s): So it's kind of like, yeah, you wanna be aware of that perhaps without stigmatizing every single person and yeah, it's just makes it a very complex situation altogether. 0 (1h 9m 8s): Yeah. And ironically she said that trans women were the least likely to be a pedophile out of like all of the groups. And that again goes against a lot of those anti groomer accounts 'cause they kind of single, single focus on the trans stuff. But according to her poll, they were the least likely to offend a child. And I was like, whoa, that's interesting. And again, it speaks to the value of these polls because it can have really uncomfortable conversations based off of actual data. So it really opens a lot, a lot of dialogue that maybe wouldn't be open regardless. And I think one of the polls she did was talking about like the difference in the expectation of social, the, I guess like the social tolerance when it came to the gender of the victim. 0 (1h 9m 51s): So if it was a boy, it was, it's okay. Like if it was a woman predator and a boy, it's like, it's fine if it was a male and a girl, no-no. And if it was a male and a male, like whoa, that seemed to be the worst one. But I guess wouldn't there, wouldn't the harm be kind of the same for like the gender of the victim? Like if it was a girl or a boy, like how, why do we have this idea that boys aren't going to be traumatized from a sexual predator just because it's a woman? 1 (1h 10m 21s): Yeah, and I mean a lot of men will say that when you hear, you know, something like a teacher had sex with a student who's like a 16-year-old boy, you will see in the comments a bunch of men that are just like, nice. So, so you know, that's an experience a lot of men have. They think if I was 16 and that happened, it wouldn't bother me. And there's research on that as well that has looked at boys, you know, teens between 15 to 17 or so, and girls at that age that have had sex with an adult and the women do report like this was much more damaging for me than the boys do. So there could be a difference there. You know, perhaps men and women do experience it differently, but it could also be that men don't realize, you know, how bad that is. You know, that like if they're a young man or something, they're having sex with an adult and it's like, you know, maybe they didn't experience it as as subversively. 1 (1h 11m 5s): Yeah, it's kind of controversial in that sense sense as well that men and women could experience that differently. But at the same time it almost doesn't matter because we need, you know, we need rules like this to say okay, you know, if you start to minimize that, you know, I think, you know, like, like a high age of consent is really good. We need like hard rules in society just to say like, you cannot do this. Right. You know, simple, simple as, 0 (1h 11m 27s): Yeah. And I would also think that maybe traditionally that men haven't been taught to feel their feelings or it's, it's emasculating if you do so they might even have certain feelings that they won't even recognize themselves, let alone verbalize to a professional or a pole or what have you because it, it takes whatever masculinity that they even have that they have left away after being victimized by this. But there, I forget, there was this Netflix, I wanna say movie, and it was based off of a true story and it was like the typical, you know, female teacher in her mid twenties and she had an affair with a 16-year-old boy I believe. And it became like this really to obviously toxic dynamic between the two of them. 0 (1h 12m 11s): And he thought he was consenting, he thought he loved her, he thought all of these things she ends up, I think she ended up doing some jail time but not much for it. And then he kind of realizes later after he got married and had children, what damage that did and what precedent that setting forward for his expectations of romantic relationships. Like that power dynamic is just off and it kind of leaves that boy in this position of constantly like chasing and wanting and being Insecure and not feeling like he's enough. It's, it is really dark and I know that people are like, oh yeah, nice. Especially if she's hot, but oh my god, if that ever happened to one of my boys, like I'd end up in the cell next to that woman. Like absolutely not. 0 (1h 12m 52s): There's gonna be a huge consequence whether they realize it or not. And then it would take a lot of time to undo and that just seems like a, an unfair double standard. 1 (1h 13m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. And and I think definitely as a mother of two boys, you see the potential damage that could do and the boy, you know, at 16 he might not see it. But I think, no, I think you can kind of see that and you know, people, even as young adults, 18, 20 or whatever, having a relationship with another young adult, they reflect back on those when they're 35 and they think, my god, that was damaging, that was horrible. And it, you know, yes. And, and so people don't know, you know, the extent to which a bad relationship is bad for them, especially at a young age, people make terrible decisions at a young age. 0 (1h 13m 31s): Terrible decisions. Yeah, your brain's not done. And then they say the last, the last pers the last thing to Discover water is a fish. So when you're in the thick of it, it's like no one can tell you any different, you're just absolutely blind. So I guess it goes to just reestablishing or establishing a solid relationship that way. Maybe they'll take your your opinion with some weight 'cause Oh my god. Yeah. Terrifying. 1 (1h 13m 54s): Yeah. 0 (1h 13m 56s): Well I don't wanna keep you, I know it's very late in your part of the world. I wanna thank you so much. This has been amazing. Can you tell the listeners where they can find you, how they can support you, any projects you're working on, all that good stuff? Sure, 1 (1h 14m 9s): Thank you. I had a great time coming on. So yeah, I run the website date psychology.com. I'm on YouTube, Alex dot DatePsych and Twitter or X now DatePsych. And that's where to find me at. 0 (1h 14m 19s): Awesome. And I'll link everything below. And again, thank you so much and I hope you have a great night. Thank you. And that's it for this week's episode of Chatting with Candace. Before you go, if you could leave us a five star review wherever you are listening or watching, I would be eternally grateful and I will link our guest information below. Please give him a follow and give him all of your love and support for being on the show. And oh, lastly, yeah, of course. Plug myself. If you wanna support the podcast, you can go to Chatting with candace.com, sign up for Patreon, or click that little link that says Buy me a coffee. Everything goes right back into the podcast, into editing guests, getting them in here, all that good stuff. 0 (1h 15m 2s): I think that is all of my housekeeping. Thank you so much and I'll see you next week. Bye everybody.