#179： The Science of Cheating -- How to Prevent and Deal With Infidelity
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, we discuss what the research says about cheating, the influence of pornography in relationships, the dangers of pornography, and the death of a loved one. We also discuss why cheating happens and how to prevent it.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so last year we
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had a gal on the podcast named duana welts she wrote a book called love factually where
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she talks about the scientific research of romance and she lays out all these great tips on what you
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do to make a great first impression with women what attracts women to men what you can do to on
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a first date to you know leave a good first impression and things you can do to have a
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establish a good strong marital relationship all based on scientific research so if you haven't
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listened to that show go check it out look for it on the podcast but i wanted to have duana back to
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talk about some of the more uh the negative aspects of romance and in this episode we're going to get
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into what the research says about cheating the influence of pornography in relationships
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breaking up divorce what a death of a loved one the effect that has particularly on men
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uh so it's get into the nitty-gritty in this show and just fyi if you listen to the podcast usually
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with your young sons we get into some adult topics here so you might want to sit this one out
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but without further ado duana weltsch love factually and the downsides of romantic relationships
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all right duana weltsch welcome back to the show thank you very much brett it's great to be back
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right so you were we had you on about it's been about a year i believe yeah uh we talked about your
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book love factually and uh we got a lot of positive feedback about that pause podcast um and i think the
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last podcast we we really focused on the positive aspects of getting a good relationship you know
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what what women find attractive in men what men can do to um nurture a good strong relationship uh but
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i think this time it'd be interesting to see what research you've come across about the rocky aspects
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of relationship right whenever relationships aren't going well um so let's start off i mean i think
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we're gonna let's get like right we're gonna dive right in and go to like the worst aspect of what
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can happen in a relationship which is cheating uh yeah you don't mess around i don't mess around we're
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gonna get right around because i think it's it's a question i mean it happens um but people don't know
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like there's no what to do when that when they encounter that um so let's what does the research say
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about cheating like why do men cheat uh why do women cheat are there different reasons why uh the
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sexes will uh not be faithful to their partner well the first the good news there's a lot of research
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on this so i have a lot to say that's not my opinion on the matter um which i prefer you know i don't like
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to give my opinion i like to um give insight that's based on science and there is a lot of science about
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all these questions so uh in some cases men and women cheat for the exact same reasons in other
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cases the reasons are very different so i guess we could start with the similarities yeah that sounds
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great the number one time that both men and women are going to cheat is a situation where later on
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they say i didn't mean to have that affair this is the situation where you meet someone at work
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or well it's usually at work because it's someone you meet almost every day that you feel attraction
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for but you may be happily married and so you tell yourself you kid yourself really that oh i'm happily
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married therefore i can flirt with this person at work a little bit and it's not going to create any
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damage in my primary relationship my marriage and so you flirt a little bit and then um you gradually
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stop telling your your wife about this other person at work you used to tell her oh you know janet and i
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had this joke at work but now you find that you don't tell your wife about that anymore but you find
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that you do tell janet lots of stuff about your wife and lots of stuff about your your life outside of
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work and then eventually you realize hey i'm getting kind of close to the fire here um i better stop this
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but i work with janet so i'm going to tell janet that i'm attracted to her and i have to avoid her
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and what's really interesting about that brett is that men and women who do this they they tell the
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person they're attracted to that they're attracted to them they usually do this as a maneuver to avoid
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an affair but it actually contributes to having an affair um because once it's out there that i'm
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attracted to you and you're attracted to me it gets much more tempting and so this is how um people
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go from i had coffee uh at work to i had coffee away from work to oh my god how did my penis get
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into your vagina and so that's actually the number one way that affairs happen for both men and for
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women is kind of the accidental affair where um people gradually kind of unwittingly con themselves
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into thinking that they're affair proof when they're really not interesting and i mean it and i guess
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this would not only apply to work but like just uh i guess friendships right um inter intergen intersex
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friendships yeah actually the most famous researcher on this topic has unfortunately been killed in a car
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wreck i really wanted to i became a big fan of her work shirley glass and i started doing more and more
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research about her and quickly learned that she had an untimely death um but she did a lot of research
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about this and she actually had a book called not just friends which was about that very thing
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that um a lot of times when we think we have an opposite sex friend we really don't have a
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friendship happening we have a potential affair happening um i think she's a little hard line she
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basically says don't ever ever ever flirt with your opposite sex friends i kind of think life would be
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not very much fun if i never ever flirted with my opposite sex friends people really differ about that
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opinion uh but she's correct in the sense that if you never even flirt with them it's very unlikely
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you're going to wind up having an affair all right so she's arguing the the harry met sally
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that the harry argument yeah and you know there's actually another scientist very much alive and very
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young named april bleski who did research on um men and women and friendships and she found that the
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whole harry met sally thing was exactly right when harry says no women can have male friends but men
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they pretty much want to do you that's what the the research showed was that most women who say that
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they're in a friendship with a guy really are just in a friendship and so they think they're flirting
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with you but they're really not taking it seriously they don't mean anything by it um more than half the
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guys in that study admitted that yeah if they could have sex with this woman friend that they would
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but at the same time they usually valued that friendship too much to try to make a move without a clear
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sign that it would be okay because um they're friends with the woman because they really like
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her it's just that they also have a sexual interest so uh just be careful i guess the the advice there
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maybe be careful with uh platonic intersex friendships understand that while your female
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friend might think okay this we're just friends you might have a tendency to think well we could be more
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than friends if there was an opportunity yeah um yeah exactly i i think a big message from the research
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is don't hide behind your happy marriage it's not going to protect you um so you know i i'm very
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happily married and frankly research indicates that most people are who most people who are married are
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happily married and yet there's a pretty high affair rate and uh again some of that happens through
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these accidental affairs where people of good character just kind of con themselves into not
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seeing the signs that they're growing more distant from their partner and closer to someone else until
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really they are either almost having a full-on emotional sexual relationship or they are actually
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having it okay so if those are the the the similarities of why men and women cheat uh what are the
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differences well um one thing that really bothered dr glass i don't mean that she had a moral judgment
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against it but it she she kind of didn't understand it was that um she had assumed that men and women
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would be more likely to have affairs when they are unhappy and she was half right women are more
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more likely to have affairs when women are unhappy so uh lonely women make good lovers guys if you are
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married or you have a serious partnership and you don't want cheating to occur from them it's really
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wise to stay emotionally close to your partner because women who feel emotionally close to their partners
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are much less likely to ever cheat um but the same cannot be said of men she found that men were having
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affairs whether or not their primary relationship was happy and in fact she found that the happiest
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partnership she studied the guys were having affairs some of them were actually using affairs to become
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happier in their primary partnership because they enjoyed sexual variety and they felt like they were
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just happier if they were getting that and so uh that was almost incomprehensible really to most women's
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thinking because um really studies and i will say it right out my own experience uh both professionally and
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personally confirm that um when women are happy they're thinking about that primary partner and
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they're not really thinking about other partners interesting um so i mean any other reasons like
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why so is it only when men are happier like is that when they cheat or are there factors that might
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come into play that would even if they are happy right that would sort of lead them towards
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having extramarital affairs uh yeah they're actually what i call cheating's five primary suspects when
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it comes to guys they're kind of the usual suspects um i'm not sure i'm going to be able to remember all
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five at once on the spot but i'll try uh one of them is what i call mr globetrotter he's the guy who
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travels a lot travel creates more affair opportunity and the single biggest predictor of affairs for men
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is simple opportunity if he can have one he's more likely to have one notice how many political
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leaders and rock stars and uh men of prominence routinely have affairs or get caught having
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affairs they simply have more opportunity they're not worse human beings uh than most guys is how the
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scientific thinking goes they just have the opportunity to act on um what is a a usual desire not all men
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desire variety but most of them do per research not only in our country in this decade but in many
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prior decades and in many other nations and many other kinds of culture from tribal to uh full-on
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developed so um so that's one of them is mr globetrotter uh second one i've already mentioned
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mr opportunity uh third one is mr experience he's the guy who uh has a tremendous amount of sexual
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experience it turns out that guys with less sexual experience tend to uh dabble less in extramarital
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affairs um and then there's mr history the guy who has had a lot of affairs in the past maybe with
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another partner uh he had a lot of affairs he's not a real great bet for fidelity going forward um
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so those are four and i just can't remember the fifth right now i'm sorry that's fine that's fine
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well that's interesting so i mean what does the research say that about uh affair proofing
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your marriage is it possible to affair proof a marriage or relationship yeah so um one of the
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best analogies that i've read from a scientist named john gottman is that what we need to do to
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affair proof a marriage it's kind of like burglar proofing a house you don't really burglar proof a
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house any house really can be burgled but you you hedge on the side of safety right and so um
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to affair proof your marriage you really you're going to err on the side of safety and you're going
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to close the windows that exist between you and people you're attracted to and you're going to open
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the door between you and your mate so what happens in an affair is this gradual process of opening a
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door with you and an affair partner and closing windows that exist between you and your marriage
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partner and what that means specifically is you start telling your affair partner more and more about
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your intimate life and you cease telling your marriage partner these same details until it gets
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to the point where you're really emotionally much more uh involved with your affair partner
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okay so go ahead go ahead well so so what you want to do is reverse that process you want to notice
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when you are attracted to uh someone and you're feeling tempted to tell them things that you could
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not comfortably say in front of your mate and you want to not tell them those things you want to kind
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of reach a point where you can catch yourself before you say things that your mate would disapprove of
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or feel jealous about and you want to not say them and i've actually advised uh people who've written
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to me at my blog um i've got an advice column that's based on science but it kind of reads like
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dear abby on science it's doesn't have a lot of jargon it's just here's the advice and here's where i got
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the data that i'm giving you this advice based on and i've advised some folks who were in a work
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situation where they were with someone who were they were very attracted to this these were women who
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were writing to me actually they were very attracted to these men at work uh they couldn't
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avoid them because they had to sit on committees with them or they had to be in work groups with
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them and they said you know i read your articles on affairs and scared the crap out of me because
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now i'm afraid i'm going to have an affair with this guy and i really don't want to and that's the
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interesting thing is a lot of people who have those kind of affairs they don't want to it really
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feels to them like it just happens um they said what do i do about this and really the way to
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open the door with your mate there is to defang the issue by telling your mate there's this person
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at work and i'm really attracted to them and i don't want you know i read this advice i heard
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this advice about research about affairs and i do not want to accidentally get into a situation that
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that compromises our intimacy i don't want to get involved with this person so that's why i'm telling
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you i'm not telling you to warn you or to scare you i'm telling you about this person
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so that um i can remain close to you and i'm going to talk to you about this and i'm not going
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to talk to her about this right so yeah you don't want to talk to the person you're attracted to
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exactly and and and then what i've also said to these folks again it's mostly women who've written
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to me about this but science would indicate the advice would be the same regardless is uh i've said
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and then you tell your mate um that you're going to minimize your contact with this person and the
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kind of contact you have with this person will be all business all the time for example you're not
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going to ask how their weekend was you're not going to ask how their kids were are and women have a
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real hard time with that because they perceive it as rudeness and females are raised to not be rude or
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to try not to be rude and so uh what i've said is if you really want to a fair proof your marriage
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you can err on the side of being a little bit rude right you don't have to be super nice to
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everybody you can you can be professional and courteous say please and thank you but don't
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ask about his kids don't ask about his wife a lot of people do that too they think if i ask about the
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wife we're not getting closer i'm not going to have an affair not true uh don't ask about his personal
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life if he talks to you about his personal life change the subject he'll get the hint right right
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this is great so i mean okay we talk about you know we're talking about closing those doors to
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potential uh of infidelity but we what about like opening those windows that already exist
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between you and your your partner between you and your spouse um because that's you know it's a
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problem i think in a lot of marriages where it might be one of the reasons why people want to
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stray because they just they don't you know they're like they don't feel the spark they don't feel the
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chemistry that they once had um i mean is that just a normal part of a mature relationship that
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you're not going to have the whiz bang fireworks uh that you had when you first started the
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relationship and if so uh what do you do to manage that particularly for men where were you talk about
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in your book they were kind of hardwired for variety and spontaneity and like novelty um how do you
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i guess strengthen a relationship and keep keep the spark going even after years of being in a
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monogamous relationship this is a great question you bring up a lot of really important things
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um one of them is the idea that passionate love will last forever so i want to start by defining
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how scientists conceptualize passionate love passionate love is the intense longing for union
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with another and every word of that definition is vital it's intense it's a yearning and it's a
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yearning not just for sexual union but absolute union where you know everything about each other and
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you kind of your heart speed is one and that's what passionate love is and so um it turns out that
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passionate love biochemically can only be sustained for more than nine out of ten people it can only
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be sustained for six months to two years it's not going to last longer than that
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but right now because of our uh emphasis on marrying for love and for no other reason but love i mean
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i'll tell you you should marry for love but if that's your only reason your marriage is probably
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going to fail so um right now though the cultural emphasis in the developed world is very much on
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marrying for love and only for love with that being the only criterion unfortunately that means that
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people are destined to some level of disappointment if that's their one and only foundation for the
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relationship because what often happens um according to studies on this is that people begin to question
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whether they married the right person the thinking goes like this i'm passionately in love with you so
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we should get married we're married i'm still passionately in love with you so you're the right
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partner uh-oh the passion is starting to wane you're not the right partner i obviously need to get a
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different partner and if you do that if you divorce that person and you then repeat uh finding someone
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based on passion i think you know what happens right right and this kind of ties into the research
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you know speaking about marrying uh for a reason beyond love but you know the research says that
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arranged marriages uh last longer than like marriages based solely on love and i guess it's because
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there's something bigger that their the relationship is based upon yeah they're they last longer but
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they're also a lot happier which is interesting to me the data to the extent we have data on this
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and it's not a lot of studies but um the data tend to show that right at the beginning of arranged
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marriages they are not as in love as people who chose one another in those same cultures which makes
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sense because the people who chose each other went through a courtship and they know each other and
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the people in the arranged marriages have often only met a couple of times so it makes sense that
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the people who are more in love right at the start of these people um in the chosen marriages
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but five years later that pattern has flipped where now it's the arranged marriage people who
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are happy happier and 10 years later the effect has doubled with uh the arranged marriage people
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becoming even happier than they were before and the chosen marriage people becoming less so
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and really the the critical factor is how similar you are so definitely marry for love but you also need
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to marry for similarity and kindness and respect if you have love plus similarity plus kindness and
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respect plus you're hot for each other you've got the whole shebang you can go forward and know that
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this relationship is very likely to last a lifetime and to be happy but even if you do all that to expect
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eternal on fire passion is very unrealistic now i want to counter that with um some very long-term
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major surveys here in the united states comparing married people to people in every other living
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arrangement people who are cohabiting people who are widowed people who are divorced people who are
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single and what they find is that the married people are the most satisfied with their sex lives
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of any of them what's going on there why is that it's because most married well of course we don't know
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for sure uh the data give us some glimpses um it appears that most married people um they understand
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first of all really happily married people freely use masturbation to keep the spark alive in their
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relationship unhappily married people think oh masturbation i don't want to do that i'm going to stay
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away from that um but the happily married people seem to to kind of get it that it's kind of weird to
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think that for the next 50 years you're going to have the exact same libido as your partner
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and so whichever person has the higher libido if they need to scratch an itch they'll masturbate
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and scratch the itch and if for example it's very common after a woman has a baby that she just feels
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touched out tapped out for uh for a while after that maybe even for more than a year not that she
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never has sex but she feels overwhelmed and so in happy marriages per the studies the guy will
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masturbate in front of her and she may participate in that but if she's too tired to actually
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have sex he doesn't take it personally and so the sex they do have is fantastic um and uh so couples
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routinely happy couples use masturbation as a tool to maintain their sexual connection but another facet
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of it found in these surveys is that when you ask people why did you have sex with your partner the
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most recent time you had sex married people are the most likely to say that they had sex in order to
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express uh love for their partner and that kind of sex it turns out people tend to find the most
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fulfilling where it's a sex that's about uh more than getting off it's about uh emotional union as
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well as physical union and they do say you know sometimes we just have dirty sex and it's just for
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sex and it's just to get off but their most satisfying sex they say is the kind that is
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there to express um that they really cherish and love their partner interesting so i imagine this
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would require uh like conversation like to be open about it uh the differing libidas i mean is there
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any research about like couples who keep like pornography use or masturbation use secret and they don't
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like share that or is that something like couples should talk about or if they don't talk about it
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can actually hurt the relationship it can hurt the relationship uh studies show that with as little
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as an hour of watching pornography men not only feel less attracted to their spouse but they also
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express less commitment for their spouse that's with one hour and that's those studies uh the first ones
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were done back when you had to go to a video store and actually you know make some effort to get porn
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and it cost you some money and of course we don't live in that world anymore you can get porn anytime
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24 7 for no money at all and so um given that men do have an an inborn desire for sexual variety and
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porn caters to that uh the vast vast majority of porn consumption is male women don't tend to watch porn
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unless they are a trying it out like oh i wonder what that's about and they don't tend to watch it
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habitually is what i'm saying or if they have a partner who says hey this will spice up our sex life
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we watch porn together but uh the women who are surfing around for heterosexual porn just on their
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own time to enjoy it and that's going to be far smaller than one percentage point of pornography
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watchers so porn's really catering to a male fantasy women have fantasies too and what caters to that
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fantasy is the romance novel i mean there's porn for women it's called the romance novel um and so we
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know for sure from experiments not just correlational studies so experiments are superior they show cause
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and effect we know that pornographic viewing causes less commitment to an attraction for
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uh partners from men men are less attracted to and committed to their female partners after watching
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porn even just one hour so um yeah it doesn't help relationships i mean i'm i gotta tell you i had
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somebody so i've got a lot of reviews at amazon and most of them are super super positive but i
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noticed one recently because you know authors do check out their pages i noticed one recently um
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where a woman made a case for why i was conservative she started out with the year of my birth which
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is one of the most liberal times in history i thought that was funny and um she went on from there
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to say that basically my book wasn't science it's my opinion folks i'm extremely liberal
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um so i mean you know extremely so and uh what i try to do with my work is i try to to put my own
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politics and my own values aside and really emphasize what the science is showing us and so while i would
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here's what i would love to say to everybody it doesn't matter what you do with pornography or with
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your genitals your relationships will all work out fine but that's really we've got lots of studies
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that really counteract that it's just not true and so i'm not going to say that it is when it's not
00:26:06.080
pornography is not helpful to relationships what's interesting though is people perceive that it is
00:26:11.040
they will tell you uh well you know it makes me um desire my partner more but what the studies really
00:26:17.980
show is that it does the opposite it has an eroding influence interesting that's interesting stuff
00:26:25.240
um okay so we've talked about why men and women cheat um why um how we can fair proof for marriage but
00:26:34.520
let's say we've done all this let's say an affair happens right someone commits infidelity let's say
00:26:39.600
it's the guy because we actually had um some a few people email us with this problem like i i had an
00:26:45.380
affair with my wife uh she found out um but i really want to keep the marriage going because i really do love
00:26:52.040
her just you know i had a a misjudgment and i did this thing terrible thing so what is there any
00:26:58.160
research out there about what a man should do if he had an affair if he wants to keep the the
00:27:05.160
relationship going yeah actually uh there is research fortunately for us dr glass didn't just research
00:27:12.500
how affairs happen she researched how to prevent them and also um how to recover from them which is the
00:27:18.560
main part of her work was a fair recovery and one of the most surprising things about um her work was
00:27:26.440
she really found that people didn't fully recover unless they admitted to the affair that they had
00:27:31.400
had see i was always one of those people who said oh if you ever have an affair you better not tell me
00:27:35.660
i'll kill you if you put me in the position of having to deal with something you did that i didn't
00:27:38.860
anyway i'm wrong that's actually what i love about science is how often i am wrong because because a
00:27:48.860
lot of the cultural things that we're currently told just um they're not very helpful and this
00:27:53.440
is one of them that we're told that uh we should hide it let's say let's say that you want to stop
00:28:01.380
having an affair i got a letter from a guy who wanted to stop having an affair and he felt like he just
00:28:05.620
couldn't do it without his wife knowing but when he talked to a therapist about this i mean he really
00:28:10.940
agonized about this and he talked to a therapist about this and the therapist said oh no no no no
00:28:15.560
no you got to live with that guilt on your own you just have to stop the affair you can talk to me
00:28:19.080
about it uh he talked to a couple of his really close friends about it and then he wrote to me
00:28:24.000
and uh i said well you know the research says you need to confess to your wife even if she doesn't
00:28:29.540
catch you the first step is admitting that you are having an affair or that you have had an affair
00:28:35.420
why is that an important step i mean what what what what's what why not telling uh what what is
00:28:44.560
that why is that important step it goes back to the concept of having a door open or closed between
00:28:51.300
you and your spouse and uh glass said that moving forward with recovery without admitting to the
00:28:59.480
affair was like waxing a dirty floor it it made it where one of you was still constantly engaging in
00:29:07.420
a deception by not letting the other one of you know the full truth about the relationship
00:29:11.900
it kept you emotionally distant from the person that you have chosen to be emotionally close to you
00:29:18.920
know for a lot of men um men tend to be per the science more emotional than women more not less
00:29:25.780
there are many many pieces of evidence that lead to that conclusion but the important thing here to
00:29:31.300
note is men are more emotional but they're usually more emotional with one person their wife with
00:29:37.620
everyone else they really work hard to um maintain some distance some professionalism some level of
00:29:45.400
hierarchy they don't really let let it all hang out with almost anybody but their wife look at how
00:29:51.260
people react after a spouse dies women's dominant response to the death of a spouse is to go on with
00:29:57.660
life while feeling sad but they go on men's dominant response is death so uh and that's not just an age
00:30:06.720
thing it has to do with how socially connected women are as opposed to men women tend to have a lot of
00:30:13.040
social connections and men tend to have just that one so when a man has an affair and he doesn't tell
00:30:21.080
his wife about it effectively he's cut himself off at a really basic level from the one person that
00:30:28.360
he wants to remain close to and this man was in a torment i felt really bad for him because he knew
00:30:33.720
and he had had one of those accidental affairs by the way he actually felt trapped by the affair
00:30:38.560
partner he felt like she was going to tell his wife or tell his kids he was terrified of what she
00:30:43.820
might say or do he really didn't love her he loved his wife and he wanted to be in an exclusive
00:30:51.180
relationship with his wife again and he did not know how to go about it and so um the first thing is
00:30:57.100
maybe in the company of a therapist maybe you know in the company of if you have a church or a synagogue
00:31:04.820
or a mosque or whatever go in front of your religious leader but you need to admit that to your
00:31:10.780
partner that you've had an affair that's the first step and then um you're going to have to acknowledge
00:31:17.640
your fault in the matter unfortunately sometimes when people get caught not just men but women
00:31:24.300
the temptation is great to blame the other party but we have to really acknowledge our own fault in the
00:31:35.140
matter so that healing can begin because there's going to be a rift in your marriage and what
00:31:40.760
research shows is that rift can become the end of your marriage or much more commonly i'm happy to
00:31:46.880
report it can become the beginning of a much better marriage than you had before about two-thirds of
00:31:51.440
marriages do survive an affair and this is how they do it so uh the third step you're going to need to
00:31:56.980
take is really really tough for people to get their heads around your wife is going to reach a point
00:32:03.520
where she wants details she wants to know things that you just think oh my god this is going to make it
00:32:08.920
so much worse i don't want to tell her this she's going to want to know things like well okay uh that
00:32:14.060
time that you started to say one name before mine during sex were you thinking about her she's going
00:32:18.900
to want to know things like um what positions did you use with her she's going to want to know which
00:32:25.600
specific hotel on which specific days she's going to want to know you know that time when i tied your
00:32:31.880
tie this way but then you came home it was the other way had you had a tryst with her that
00:32:35.360
afternoon she's going to want details and dr glasses and others research show that you must
00:32:41.740
give her complete and truthful answers to her questions for detail and you have to answer these
00:32:48.820
questions for as long as she's asking them if she's asking them for a year you have to give these
00:32:52.740
details for a year is i mean is that about building the trust again i mean what what's what's going on
00:32:58.440
there yes um i know that many of us have been lied to by partners before i certainly have and if you
00:33:07.500
think back to times when you yourself were lied to in any substantial way you'll notice that you don't
00:33:15.080
just feel angry at that partner you actually feel angry at yourself you go through a period of not
00:33:20.980
trusting yourself because uh some of these clues were in front of you and you didn't process them
00:33:28.060
correctly right so you go through anger and self-blame and in order to trust your partner and yourself
00:33:33.240
and thus heal the relationship you have to have information that helps you reform and clarify the
00:33:41.440
truth of what was happening during the affair no so we've talked about if a guy cheats but like what if
00:33:48.300
a guy gets cheated on uh is the same thing yes same thing this advice so it's interesting men and
00:33:56.460
women do have markedly different psychology in courtship and they do have some different psychology
00:34:02.800
around affairs but not about affair recovery um and actually so there are a couple more things that
00:34:08.420
you would need to do um i know this is going to sound weird but you do have to give up your affair
00:34:15.080
partner completely there are there are people male and female who try to recover from an affair while
00:34:21.440
continuing to see the affair partner and you can't do that i know that sounds obvious but really
00:34:27.160
for a lot of people they're in love with both people we kind of have an idea that you can only love
00:34:33.820
one intimate partner at a time but unfortunately it's truer to say that you can love more than one
00:34:41.140
intimate partner at a time it's just that it usually causes a lot of really painful confusion
00:34:45.580
if you do so you can do it but usually the the emotional fallout within yourself and and externally
00:34:54.860
with your relationships is very difficult but when you give up the affair it actually you're going to
00:35:01.280
go through a period of grieving and your partner is not going to like that because she's going to be
00:35:06.260
thinking why don't you just love me it's going to be very it's going to be hard for her to forgive you
00:35:10.400
for loving this other person because sometimes the guy loves his affair partner and it's hard for him
00:35:15.420
to give her up but he has to do that and this leads to the final two things that either a man or a
00:35:21.720
woman would need to do um it's helpful if you get a therapist where you can do some of this in front
00:35:27.660
of that therapist and make sure you get one who gets it that you have to talk about the details of
00:35:32.420
the affair because before dr glass's research everybody all the therapists thought oh no we
00:35:38.480
don't want to talk about the details and after her research some of the therapists read science
00:35:42.500
and they realized oh that's going to be a really important part of recovery so you need a therapist
00:35:47.080
who gets it that science is important and that yes we're going to be discussing the details and we're
00:35:52.140
doing it in front of the therapist so that the situation remains somewhat controlled and doesn't spin
00:35:56.580
into hatefulness um and then the final thing is uh guys and any women listening to this who've had
00:36:04.700
an affair you are not your partner's permanent punching bag after this it's you're going to have
00:36:11.440
to make up a lot of stuff but you're not it doesn't mean that because you made a mistake that they get to
00:36:15.960
verbally or emotionally or physically abuse you for the rest of time that's not how this goes
00:36:20.800
they're going to have to make a decision to either work with you on um on recovery or if they can't
00:36:28.640
handle that they're going to have to make a decision the two of you to cut the relationship
00:36:32.680
it but going forward it's not acceptable for anyone to be unkind and disrespectful to their mate
00:36:38.860
there there are ways to do this and good therapy can help you but a lot of a lot of people who've
00:36:44.160
cheated because they fear their the reprisal from their partner they fear the anger they may even
00:36:52.680
fear abuse a lot of people who've cheated really want to just kind of say i cheated but i'm not doing
00:36:58.760
it anymore let's just go on like before and that's not going to work not only are you going to have to
00:37:03.440
share details but you're going to have to live a completely open life going forward so that you can
00:37:10.060
rebuild trust completely open and what i mean by that is your spouse has access to your phone records
00:37:16.260
she has access to um your voicemails she has access to your online account you're not erasing your
00:37:27.360
history um you you're going to have to live as if you were living in a glass box and she has total
00:37:32.920
access to see what you're doing pretty much 24 7 if you know you've got a deal that you call
00:37:39.580
every day when work begins and when work ends and in the middle of the day at lunch to check in
00:37:44.000
then you're going to have to do that it's it's not the kind of thing where i know it's really
00:37:49.660
common for example with alcoholics to say i told you i quit drinking why do you need proof you can't
00:37:54.020
do that that's that's not trust trust has to be earned is there a certain point though when that
00:37:59.540
stops or is that something like you have to do for the rest of your relationship it stops when your
00:38:04.940
partner wants it to stop it's not you know if you broke something you have to fix it i mean i think
00:38:13.520
that's a concept most guys can get very easily they most guys get it you know i got a man up i broke
00:38:18.560
something i got to fix it you got to fix it it's not fixed until the client says it's fixed right
00:38:23.240
right it's the client in this case right and and for both you know whether you've been cheated or
00:38:29.920
i guess when you've if you've been cheated on i mean is there is there a certain point where
00:38:33.140
you can't like use the affair like as a like hanging over their head right sort of like as a
00:38:39.880
manipulation tool like well you did this to me and so like you have to like do this now yeah you
00:38:45.880
really you really shouldn't be doing that at any point and that brings that it's really interesting i
00:38:50.420
knew a person who this happened to um i'm going to be a little vague in just in on the off chance
00:38:58.240
that anyone connected with her would be listening to this i always change up some details so anyone i
00:39:03.840
talk about is not identifiable but uh her husband went away to war again i'm changing some details but
00:39:12.040
the flavor is the same her husband went away to war and when he came back um she they went i guess to
00:39:22.320
a prenatal checkup and her medical records were laying out on a table and he looked at them and
00:39:29.220
saw that she had had an abortion while he was deployed and that's how he found out about her
00:39:34.480
affair she hadn't done any of these steps you know and in fairness this was long enough ago that nobody
00:39:41.280
knew that you should do these steps she just kind of thought what a lot of people think after an affair
00:39:45.760
which was oh holy crap i've made the biggest mistake of my life i can't ask my partner to deal with
00:39:51.300
this i'm terrified of what his reaction might be so i'm just going to go on as if it never happened
00:39:56.000
and i'm just never going to do it again but he found out well you know what 15 years later when
00:40:02.120
they had like three or four kids and it would seem like they were happily married every now and then
00:40:08.000
he would be super ugly to her about this and she finally said make a choice i've lived a transparent
00:40:17.520
life for as long as you needed me to i've never cheated on you again i have thoroughly repented
00:40:22.640
of what i did and if i could go back and undo it i would go back and undo it but i can't we now have
00:40:29.120
15 years of my doing what i should have done all along and i love you very much and i want this marriage
00:40:38.000
to work but i have decided that if you cannot control your temper about this and if you continue
00:40:43.640
using me as an emotional punching bag on this issue i am leaving you and he decided to control
00:40:49.160
his temper and stop using her as his emotional punching bag and they are still married and it's
00:40:55.300
been many more years okay so that i'm sure that i imagine that's really hard for the person cheated on
00:41:01.640
everything every oh yeah everything about an affair is hard and everything about an affair is hard
00:41:09.880
really for everybody if they love their partner there are kind of what i call the profligate
00:41:14.940
cheaters the people who just they feel entitled to get some on the side they don't have any remorse or
00:41:19.780
regret but that's not most people most people male and female really feel like oh i screwed up here
00:41:24.760
really i really wish i hadn't done this and um so it's really hard on everybody all right well so we
00:41:31.900
just we hit we went through some really heavy stuff there yeah it is but it's important because i think
00:41:36.960
it's stuff that happens and uh no one really knows what to do in that situation so it's great
00:41:41.460
that there's some research out there on how to how to how to navigate that so you know stay on this
00:41:46.100
whole idea of like relationships going bad we'll kind of get a little lighter we'll not talk about
00:41:51.560
uh extramarital affairs um but let's say uh you're in a dating relationship or it could even be a
00:41:59.860
marriage let's start with dating because it's a little it's not as entwined not as emotionally
00:42:03.560
uh intense let's say you're in a relationship you're dating someone and it's just not going
00:42:10.640
well i mean how do you know when it's time to sever the relationship and how do you do that in a way
00:42:17.440
that's tactful yet you you completely make a clean break um well really um there there are five signs
00:42:28.180
when it's definitely time to end a relationship and guys if you have any of these five signs
00:42:34.200
just get out and this is when you're dating um i want to emphasize this when you're dating not when
00:42:40.120
you're married when you're married there's a higher level of commitment and there's a longer history
00:42:43.240
presumably and there are more reasons emotional and otherwise that you would want to really look
00:42:49.000
at it closely but if you're just dating and uh you are thinking about ending a relationship
00:42:55.880
here are the five circumstances where you would end it one of them is simply does the pain outweigh
00:43:01.700
the pleasure i'm sorry but you know what dating's supposed to be fun if you are in more pain than
00:43:05.580
you are in pleasure just no people are usually on their best behavior when they're recording if the
00:43:11.860
best behavior is making you miserable this is a green light just get out of there um another one is
00:43:18.040
if she lacks even one of your must-haves so one thing that i think we talked about in our first
00:43:23.460
interview brett yeah i did was making a list of must-haves it's really necessary to do it one of
00:43:28.680
the reasons is that it keeps you honest if with yourself must-haves are exactly that there are
00:43:35.360
qualities that even if she had 99 other qualities that you adore if she didn't have this one you would
00:43:41.460
have to break it off because you know that you can't have a marriage or a long-term relationship
00:43:46.120
going forward if she doesn't have this thing so if she lacks even one must-have no matter how sexy
00:43:52.520
and wonderful she is you need to move on um i've seen this you know i have clients um and about
00:43:59.660
about half my clients are men half are women usually and i've had both men and women clients who have
00:44:06.860
said to me um you know i really i think i'm falling for this person i really want this to work but and
00:44:16.400
they'll list something that we've worked out is a total deal breaker for them it might not be a total
00:44:21.500
deal breaker for you but it is for them and uh they start to tell themselves well but i'm falling
00:44:27.840
in love with them so that justifies it unfortunately i think our divorce rate shows that love alone is
00:44:33.640
not enough you really do have to have similarity and you certainly don't want to go in with the
00:44:37.860
deal breaker but the the problem with that is that we tend to feel like love is really rare and so
00:44:44.440
when it comes along we have to overlook everything love is love is wonderful but it's actually very
00:44:50.300
common excuse me in all likelihood you are going to find someone else to love but it needs to be
00:44:56.800
someone where you don't have a deal breaker so no matter how much you like her or love her if she
00:45:01.860
lacks a must-have you need to break it off don't waste more time the third condition is related to the
00:45:08.040
if you don't love her enough or she doesn't love you enough uh i've seen men and women alike who've
00:45:14.480
really agonized about this they either are much more in love than their partner is or their partner
00:45:19.800
is much more in love than they are one of the most important findings in relationship science in the
00:45:30.900
past maybe decade can be summed up this way people vary widely in their capacity for love
00:45:40.980
some people simply have a much larger capacity to reveal all of themselves to another person and to
00:45:49.360
be emotionally present and desirous of physical and emotional contact and some people have a much
00:45:54.820
smaller capacity to do that and it's really important to match on that capacity if and it may be you
00:46:00.940
know i mean sometimes somebody loves you and you just don't love them back and maybe you have a great
00:46:05.420
capacity for love just not with that person either way whether it's a capacity issue or whether it's a
00:46:11.320
mismatch with this person it's time to let go you know no one ever says thank you for settling for me
00:46:17.040
don't be settled for and don't settle for them and then finally uh if your intuition if your gut
00:46:24.160
says that this is the wrong person it's fine to move on um one way to tap into your your gut level
00:46:32.780
i find it interesting that science actually backs intuition as a real thing but it really does
00:46:37.500
intuition is kind of your knowing without evidential proof it's the right side of your brain which is
00:46:44.780
unconscious weighing in on your decision making and it's there to save your life and it's there to
00:46:50.380
save your emotions so um one way to tap into your intuition is with a very simple exercise the coin
00:46:58.240
toss you decide that heads is one choice to stay together maybe and tails is the other choice to
00:47:05.100
break up and then you go ahead and flip the coin and what i want you to do is in the middle of the
00:47:09.520
toss notice what your gut told you it wanted what was your hoped for outcome that tells you whether to
00:47:17.420
stare go okay well then how do you how do you end it that's always i think really tricky for a lot of
00:47:22.820
i think anyone um because you know you don't want to hurt the person's feelings um but at the same time
00:47:29.360
you want to make sure it's clean because there's that that risk where like well you know you know you
00:47:34.120
try to let them down easy but like you leave those doors open for the relationship to continue
00:47:37.980
so how do you end a relationship tactfully but cleanly yeah i'm glad that you have a an assumption
00:47:46.060
behind the question that it's important to end the relationship tactfully and cleanly because
00:47:50.060
not everybody shares that assumption but um it's accurate you really do need to do that
00:47:55.340
you know there's not a lot of research on breakups there's there's some since i wrote my book there's a
00:48:00.880
little bit on it i did some of my own research in order to address this in my book uh and the new
00:48:07.240
research indicates that yes that's what other people think too um first of all people want you to break up
00:48:15.020
with them in person um unless you live very very far away from each other or it or there's some
00:48:24.220
reason to fear the other person a lot of women are afraid of being attacked most men aren't physically
00:48:29.800
afraid of their female partners so unless you're actually afraid of this partner if you've dated more
00:48:35.440
than a few times you need to initiate the breakup in person um it's helpful if you have something to do
00:48:41.880
within an hour after initiating the breakup so that you can get up and leave you don't want to be stuck
00:48:47.740
there with somebody who's maybe crying and upset and you can't be responsible both for causing someone
00:48:53.960
else's pain and fixing it guys you know men men really get a bad rap um a lot of popular writing would
00:49:03.600
have you believe that men really don't care about anybody but themselves and that they are emotionally
00:49:08.080
callous but actually the reverse is true if you even look at what little boys are doing when they
00:49:13.820
play if you look at what men are thinking of when they think about war men are more likely to endorse
00:49:21.200
violence but it's violence in the service of heroism men want to save the world and they specifically
00:49:28.740
want to defend and help people they love and even if they're breaking up with someone that they no longer
00:49:35.140
love or where they know that an ending needs to happen and maybe they never love this person
00:49:40.340
most men are still pretty decent human beings and they don't want to hurt this person and for that
00:49:44.860
reason studies my own study in this other one um they show that um guys try not to have the breakup
00:49:54.800
conversation they like to fade out and just never call again not out of some malignant meanness but i just
00:50:01.000
don't want to hurt her unfortunately men and women alike agree it hurts them far more for you to fade
00:50:06.160
out they just don't like that they want a clean think about how that felt when it happened to you
00:50:12.000
i mean it's definitely happened to me you'd much rather have a clean ending but when you deliver that
00:50:17.340
clean ending do it in a venue where you can get up and leave they can't stay over at your house or
00:50:23.080
something and where you have something to do within one hour after the initiation of the discussion so
00:50:28.100
you're going to invite the person to meet your talk with you and then you're going to have to leave
00:50:32.060
within an hour so it can't drag out and what you're going to say and this is what my uh research
00:50:37.820
participants in my own my survey was not scientific meaning that it didn't represent every adult in the
00:50:45.060
united states um it just represented the people who took the survey and they may not be accurate but
00:50:50.420
larger surveys since then indicate yeah this is what people want what people want is the following they
00:50:55.400
want you to say something kind about them and the relationship and then they want you to follow
00:50:59.960
it up with a statement that reflects a poor match here's an example of what you could say
00:51:04.960
angie i really appreciated a lot of things about our past year together um i've really felt
00:51:16.280
at times a lot of love and passion but i am going to have to break up because i just
00:51:23.780
i hate doing this but i just don't feel the way that i need to feel to go forward
00:51:28.320
what you're doing there is kind it's also honest you are stating the truth that you have had a
00:51:35.740
positive history with her and you're also stating the truth that you don't feel the way you need to
00:51:40.020
to go forward i mean that's the truth regardless of what the details are you might not feel the way
00:51:44.420
you need to feel because she hates your mother and you don't want that kind of relationship you might
00:51:48.740
not feel the way you need to feel because she only likes sex once a month and you can't imagine
00:51:53.440
living like that i mean there could be all kinds of reasons that you feel that way but the bottom
00:51:57.120
line is you don't feel the way you need to feel to go go on there are other ways to say that you could
00:52:01.800
say i just don't think there's we have enough in common to continue um but you keep the emphasis on
00:52:07.500
your thoughts and your feelings because that's unassailable also you don't leave the door open for
00:52:14.800
uh you don't say something like i'm just not ready for a relationship right now now this isn't about
00:52:20.940
what you're ready for right now it's about whether you want this person and if the answer is no don't
00:52:25.900
leave them hanging don't give them any hope that you're going to reconcile okay and what do you what
00:52:30.540
how do you do if uh the person you're breaking up with starts saying things like well you know
00:52:34.760
i can change or maybe we can work on this like how do you uh just like keep like broken records saying
00:52:40.680
no i mean what do you do yeah that's yeah yeah well done brett exactly broken record that's exactly
00:52:46.120
it so i had a guy i talk about him in my book um when he came to me to consult about this he this guy
00:52:52.260
he's this mountain of a man and he was shaking and crying because he didn't he didn't see a way to go
00:52:59.600
forward with this woman but they'd been together i forget how long something like three years maybe
00:53:03.900
longer than that and he knew that she was going to be intensely upset at having three years of her life
00:53:10.120
gone to a relationship that didn't result in marriage he was really fearful of it but he said
00:53:14.320
i can't marry her i just can't do it and i don't want to waste any more of her time but i feel really
00:53:18.560
stuck i just don't know how to go forward and um so yeah he he wound up having to write down what
00:53:29.060
he was going to say he kept it real short and he showed it to me and he said something along these
00:53:33.900
lines he had a little bit more padding up front about what had been good about the relationship
00:53:37.540
but then he had it written down and that guys you can do that and take it with you and he did
00:53:42.460
he took it with him he took his piece of paper with him he arranged to meet her at her house he
00:53:47.240
arranged to have something to do within an hour and he arranged to be a broken record she and we role
00:53:53.240
played he and i i came up with every objection i could think of that she would make like you wasted
00:53:58.700
three years of my time how could you even think about this and what he said over and over was
00:54:05.880
her name and then like i'll say that her name was i don't know tamra it wasn't her name i don't
00:54:11.760
remember her name but uh he said tamra you're right and i'm really sorry but i i don't feel
00:54:18.640
enough of a connection to go forward i'm really sorry but it's just the way it is and he said that
00:54:24.400
for an hour until she had exhausted all of her arguments and and then he left okay it ended it
00:54:33.840
it did although even then he you know after three years he had a really strong connection to her even
00:54:39.600
if he didn't want to marry her they had a good sex life they had uh they had a lot of friends in
00:54:46.400
common by then and he said you know i'm tempted to keep seeing her sometimes and that just doesn't
00:54:52.140
work rip the band-aid off dudes don't peel it slowly break up break up right this leads into
00:54:58.620
my next question uh nicely so what's the research say say about getting back into dating uh after
00:55:06.520
you've ended a long-term relationship and i guess here i'm going to focus on uh like if you've been
00:55:12.300
married and uh you get divorced uh or your spouse dies um because i think it's it's really it's a common
00:55:19.740
thing like what do you do after you've been with this one person for 10 15 20 years they're gone
00:55:27.260
and we talked about how that can affect men uh more than women in a lot of ways as a partner
00:55:33.960
yeah but what's the advice for men on getting back into the dating game men really grieve in a more
00:55:42.020
protracted solitary way than women do um and so and it can be physically damaging for them and like
00:55:53.340
you said we already covered that um to tell you the best thing going forward i'm going to start with
00:55:58.800
may west and end with science may west uh for those of you who don't know she was kind of an american
00:56:06.840
um i guess she was a prostitute in the 1800s and she used to say the best way to get over someone
00:56:14.000
is to get under someone new and words of wisdom your words of wisdom from may west i'm telling you
00:56:22.580
and she was right it turns out that uh major large studies by e mavis heatherington and others surveys of
00:56:34.580
um adjustment to divorce that these surveys and studies took place over a 20 years span of time
00:56:41.700
meaning that dr heatherington met couples as they were divorcing she interviewed them she interviewed
00:56:49.360
their children and she interviewed them their children and any new spouses for a period of 20 years
00:56:56.400
annually so a very deep data set a very rich data set and there was more than one study where she did
00:57:01.800
this and uh so she's been very clear in her conclusion that the single most effective thing
00:57:08.680
that men and women did to feel happy again was to get another good relationship really the cure for an
00:57:16.540
old relationship is a new relationship and it's so funny because again what we're told culturally is
00:57:22.940
kind of the opposite right you're supposed to go through this period of being alone you need to just
00:57:26.360
be by yourself for a while and heatherington and others have just said no that's wrong no
00:57:30.380
doesn't work that way you don't feel better and then find a partner you feel you find a partner
00:57:35.340
and then you feel better but i mean is this just apply to divorce what about uh someone who a widower
00:57:41.260
for example yeah so um men have two dominant responses to the death of their spouse um these are the two
00:57:50.200
most common responses one of them is to die within one year that's what happened to one of my
00:57:55.740
grandparents he died i was just over there looking at his gravestone two days ago and uh he died 11
00:58:03.360
months after his wife died and the whole time after she died every time you would see him he looked
00:58:07.580
shell-shocked he looked um they were a very sweet couple you know they were always holding hands i
00:58:13.200
remember being a little girl and seeing them always with their arms around each other and he just couldn't
00:58:18.020
believe she was gone and you know he kind of even lost his memory he would say things like
00:58:23.200
or he was just fixated on this he would say it's been eight months and three days since helen was
00:58:29.500
gone he just didn't have anything else he thought of men's dominant response therefore one of them is
00:58:36.440
death the other one though is much healthier it's to get remarried almost right away and you know it's
00:58:43.280
funny because societally we still think that men are heartless sob is for getting remarried right away
00:58:47.640
but that's often a man's only lifeline into intimacy very few men have genuinely intimate
00:58:55.960
relationships with other men unless that man is gay in which case he has a genuinely intimate
00:59:01.240
relationship with his partner but um men tend to have one truly intimate relationship and when that's
00:59:08.360
gone even if it wasn't a very good relationship men are kind of emotional camels you know they can take
00:59:13.240
that whatever was good and kind of carry it through the desert of the relationship and persist with
00:59:18.300
that relationship even when things were bad it's one reason why uh women are much likelier to end a
00:59:24.120
relationship than men are because men will hang on to the good seed the good kernel of the relationship
00:59:28.660
and persist when that relationship's gone even to death even for someone he adored um men usually
00:59:36.700
function much better if they get remarried within a year and it's interesting because i sometimes hear from
00:59:41.080
women who have been approached by a man who whose wife recently died and they say but his wife only
00:59:46.840
died two months ago so i said no to him i told him he needed more time and i said you know what he's
00:59:51.320
going to go marry somebody else this year you just said goodbye to a catch all right so here's the
00:59:57.820
question i have how do you deal with i mean this could be whether uh you marry like whether you've um
01:00:03.960
lost a spouse and you get married again or say you marry someone who is a widow um to their first
01:00:12.140
uh husband like how do you deal with like because that's interesting dynamics like you have you're
01:00:17.680
going into a relationship with a deep deep relationship history with someone else yeah um i mean is there any
01:00:24.200
research about that like you know navigating the new relationship and with consideration of this
01:00:30.420
history that this person's coming bringing into this relationship is that does that my question
01:00:34.800
make sense yeah it does make sense and it's a great question um there are some gaps in research
01:00:40.880
and there are also just some gaps in my own knowledge base someone might have um i wish i knew
01:00:46.520
everything brett but i don't someone may have done studies on that i don't know if they have i will
01:00:51.980
say that the people i've known personally through my and again this is not science here this is me just
01:00:58.400
being a person saying hey people write to me with their problems they tell me how they're solving them
01:01:03.140
and and i have friends too and what i have seen from friends and from people who've written to me is
01:01:08.620
it's very necessary for the new mate to allow for a certain reverence for and love for the old mate
01:01:16.500
forever you're gonna have to understand that this relationship was solid and lovely and that
01:01:23.340
um in many ways that's actually what makes this person a good catch for you this guy was faithful
01:01:30.680
and true to a woman until she died there's a lot to be said for that guy and if you want to be treated
01:01:38.020
that same way part of the cost of that is to honor his connection so um i have known some young couples
01:01:44.700
where uh the husband or wife had died and this person had found another partner and what they
01:01:53.200
have told me these people who are remarried after being widowed or after being uh widowed what these
01:01:59.600
people have told me is i specifically looked for a partner who would understand that i still cherish
01:02:04.880
the partner who has died and in fact one of them um married his this was a young couple the young
01:02:14.360
woman died and the husband within a year started dating her best friend and he wound up marrying her
01:02:21.960
best friend and he told me that he had gotten some flack about this i think i can imagine people
01:02:27.240
getting like what in the heck oh yeah there were people who refused to go to their wedding you know
01:02:31.420
there were people who were really angry um there were people who were creeped out and told him so oh
01:02:36.320
gross she's taking over it's you know like this movie about the roommate who takes over the other
01:02:40.820
person's life i don't like it and so he had to deal with all this crap and he he wrote to me and he
01:02:45.320
said but you know duana the thing is she's the only person who will love my former wife as much as i
01:02:51.220
do it's interesting they were friends all their lives and i have since heard he was young but i've since
01:02:57.280
heard from older people who have said the same thing they've said that my uh my former wife's best
01:03:04.780
friend has some things in common with her and also she never questions my abiding love and loyalty for
01:03:12.240
my first wife because she loved her too very interesting well duana we've been at it for
01:03:17.920
about an hour we've hit on some really deep heavy topics here yeah today was not light brett it was
01:03:24.320
not light no we weren't talking about what to do on our first date how to make the sparks happen but i
01:03:30.080
think it's i think this is really a productive conversation um but before we go where can people
01:03:34.260
learn more about your work well they can find out more about me and my work uh a lot of places amazon
01:03:40.500
is probably the place most people go um because i've got an author page there my book is available
01:03:46.120
there in e uh ebook paperback and audiobook format or you can find it on itunes or audible
01:03:53.640
uh i take clients that i see via skype my clients are usually not from my um from where i live so i
01:04:01.620
take clients via skype you can also visit me on my website which is lovesciencemedia.com and you can
01:04:08.320
see all the stuff i've been doing recently and write to me and i will keep your letter confidential if
01:04:13.360
i ever share anything about your letter i will change the identifying details so nobody can figure out
01:04:18.480
who you are not even you all right well duana welch thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
01:04:22.600
it's been delightful thanks so much i guess it was duana welch she's the author of the book love
01:04:27.200
factually you can find it on amazon.com and you can find more information about our work at
01:04:30.980
lovefactually.co well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for
01:04:39.320
more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
01:04:42.340
artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy the podcast and you've gotten something out of it i'd really
01:04:46.180
appreciate if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher help get the word about the show as
01:04:50.420
always i appreciate your continued support and until next time brett mckay telling you to stay