The Art of Manliness - February 28, 2016


#179： The Science of Cheating -- How to Prevent and Deal With Infidelity

Hosted by
Brett McKay
#178： C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and the Inklings #180： Establishing a Modern Day Homestead and Unschooling

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 5 minutes

Words per minute

186.36

Word count

12,221

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

31

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so last year we
00:00:19.800 had a gal on the podcast named duana welts she wrote a book called love factually where
00:00:23.460 she talks about the scientific research of romance and she lays out all these great tips on what you
00:00:29.500 do to make a great first impression with women what attracts women to men what you can do to on
00:00:35.700 a first date to you know leave a good first impression and things you can do to have a
00:00:39.600 establish a good strong marital relationship all based on scientific research so if you haven't
00:00:44.720 listened to that show go check it out look for it on the podcast but i wanted to have duana back to 0.72
00:00:49.280 talk about some of the more uh the negative aspects of romance and in this episode we're going to get
00:00:54.580 into what the research says about cheating the influence of pornography in relationships
00:00:59.220 breaking up divorce what a death of a loved one the effect that has particularly on men
00:01:05.760 uh so it's get into the nitty-gritty in this show and just fyi if you listen to the podcast usually
00:01:11.200 with your young sons we get into some adult topics here so you might want to sit this one out
00:01:15.920 but without further ado duana weltsch love factually and the downsides of romantic relationships
00:01:22.440 all right duana weltsch welcome back to the show thank you very much brett it's great to be back
00:01:35.640 right so you were we had you on about it's been about a year i believe yeah uh we talked about your
00:01:40.980 book love factually and uh we got a lot of positive feedback about that pause podcast um and i think the
00:01:48.480 last podcast we we really focused on the positive aspects of getting a good relationship you know
00:01:56.080 what what women find attractive in men what men can do to um nurture a good strong relationship uh but
00:02:03.640 i think this time it'd be interesting to see what research you've come across about the rocky aspects
00:02:10.660 of relationship right whenever relationships aren't going well um so let's start off i mean i think
00:02:17.020 we're gonna let's get like right we're gonna dive right in and go to like the worst aspect of what
00:02:21.580 can happen in a relationship which is cheating uh yeah you don't mess around i don't mess around we're
00:02:26.960 gonna get right around because i think it's it's a question i mean it happens um but people don't know
00:02:31.940 like there's no what to do when that when they encounter that um so let's what does the research say
00:02:38.240 about cheating like why do men cheat uh why do women cheat are there different reasons why uh the
00:02:45.120 sexes will uh not be faithful to their partner well the first the good news there's a lot of research
00:02:51.740 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
00:02:58.540 to give my opinion i like to um give insight that's based on science and there is a lot of science about
00:03:03.860 all these questions so uh in some cases men and women cheat for the exact same reasons in other
00:03:09.560 cases the reasons are very different so i guess we could start with the similarities yeah that sounds
00:03:13.720 great the number one time that both men and women are going to cheat is a situation where later on
00:03:23.140 they say i didn't mean to have that affair this is the situation where you meet someone at work
00:03:27.800 or well it's usually at work because it's someone you meet almost every day that you feel attraction
00:03:34.340 for but you may be happily married and so you tell yourself you kid yourself really that oh i'm happily
00:03:41.680 married therefore i can flirt with this person at work a little bit and it's not going to create any
00:03:45.860 damage in my primary relationship my marriage and so you flirt a little bit and then um you gradually
00:03:53.020 stop telling your your wife about this other person at work you used to tell her oh you know janet and i
00:04:01.380 had this joke at work but now you find that you don't tell your wife about that anymore but you find
00:04:05.180 that you do tell janet lots of stuff about your wife and lots of stuff about your your life outside of
00:04:09.920 work and then eventually you realize hey i'm getting kind of close to the fire here um i better stop this
00:04:16.400 but i work with janet so i'm going to tell janet that i'm attracted to her and i have to avoid her
00:04:20.500 and what's really interesting about that brett is that men and women who do this they they tell the
00:04:27.160 person they're attracted to that they're attracted to them they usually do this as a maneuver to avoid
00:04:32.640 an affair but it actually contributes to having an affair um because once it's out there that i'm
00:04:38.920 attracted to you and you're attracted to me it gets much more tempting and so this is how um people 0.99
00:04:44.080 go from i had coffee uh at work to i had coffee away from work to oh my god how did my penis get 0.99
00:04:51.620 into your vagina and so that's actually the number one way that affairs happen for both men and for 1.00
00:04:57.640 women is kind of the accidental affair where um people gradually kind of unwittingly con themselves 0.99
00:05:05.960 into thinking that they're affair proof when they're really not interesting and i mean it and i guess
00:05:11.660 this would not only apply to work but like just uh i guess friendships right um inter intergen intersex
00:05:19.200 friendships yeah actually the most famous researcher on this topic has unfortunately been killed in a car
00:05:26.000 wreck i really wanted to i became a big fan of her work shirley glass and i started doing more and more
00:05:31.920 research about her and quickly learned that she had an untimely death um but she did a lot of research
00:05:38.040 about this and she actually had a book called not just friends which was about that very thing
00:05:42.140 that um a lot of times when we think we have an opposite sex friend we really don't have a
00:05:48.040 friendship happening we have a potential affair happening um i think she's a little hard line she 1.00
00:05:54.820 basically says don't ever ever ever flirt with your opposite sex friends i kind of think life would be
00:06:00.260 not very much fun if i never ever flirted with my opposite sex friends people really differ about that
00:06:05.060 opinion uh but she's correct in the sense that if you never even flirt with them it's very unlikely
00:06:10.680 you're going to wind up having an affair all right so she's arguing the the harry met sally
00:06:15.440 that the harry argument yeah and you know there's actually another scientist very much alive and very
00:06:20.860 young named april bleski who did research on um men and women and friendships and she found that the
00:06:27.440 whole harry met sally thing was exactly right when harry says no women can have male friends but men
00:06:33.200 they pretty much want to do you that's what the the research showed was that most women who say that 1.00
00:06:39.520 they're in a friendship with a guy really are just in a friendship and so they think they're flirting
00:06:44.800 with you but they're really not taking it seriously they don't mean anything by it um more than half the 0.92
00:06:49.900 guys in that study admitted that yeah if they could have sex with this woman friend that they would
00:06:55.440 but at the same time they usually valued that friendship too much to try to make a move without a clear
00:07:00.860 sign that it would be okay because um they're friends with the woman because they really like
00:07:05.280 her it's just that they also have a sexual interest so uh just be careful i guess the the advice there
00:07:11.960 maybe be careful with uh platonic intersex friendships understand that while your female 0.99
00:07:18.960 friend might think okay this we're just friends you might have a tendency to think well we could be more
00:07:23.980 than friends if there was an opportunity yeah um yeah exactly i i think a big message from the research
00:07:33.080 is don't hide behind your happy marriage it's not going to protect you um so you know i i'm very
00:07:40.400 happily married and frankly research indicates that most people are who most people who are married are
00:07:46.000 happily married and yet there's a pretty high affair rate and uh again some of that happens through
00:07:53.220 these accidental affairs where people of good character just kind of con themselves into not
00:08:00.320 seeing the signs that they're growing more distant from their partner and closer to someone else until
00:08:05.100 really they are either almost having a full-on emotional sexual relationship or they are actually
00:08:12.120 having it okay so if those are the the the similarities of why men and women cheat uh what are the
00:08:17.740 differences well um one thing that really bothered dr glass i don't mean that she had a moral judgment
00:08:25.860 against it but it she she kind of didn't understand it was that um she had assumed that men and women
00:08:34.180 would be more likely to have affairs when they are unhappy and she was half right women are more 1.00
00:08:39.880 more likely to have affairs when women are unhappy so uh lonely women make good lovers guys if you are
00:08:47.540 married or you have a serious partnership and you don't want cheating to occur from them it's really
00:08:54.040 wise to stay emotionally close to your partner because women who feel emotionally close to their partners 0.99
00:08:58.940 are much less likely to ever cheat um but the same cannot be said of men she found that men were having
00:09:07.460 affairs whether or not their primary relationship was happy and in fact she found that the happiest
00:09:14.660 partnership she studied the guys were having affairs some of them were actually using affairs to become
00:09:21.100 happier in their primary partnership because they enjoyed sexual variety and they felt like they were
00:09:26.060 just happier if they were getting that and so uh that was almost incomprehensible really to most women's
00:09:33.120 thinking because um really studies and i will say it right out my own experience uh both professionally and
00:09:40.720 personally confirm that um when women are happy they're thinking about that primary partner and
00:09:46.360 they're not really thinking about other partners interesting um so i mean any other reasons like
00:09:52.080 why so is it only when men are happier like is that when they cheat or are there factors that might
00:09:58.460 come into play that would even if they are happy right that would sort of lead them towards
00:10:04.480 having extramarital affairs uh yeah they're actually what i call cheating's five primary suspects when
00:10:12.480 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
00:10:18.920 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
00:10:24.960 travels a lot travel creates more affair opportunity and the single biggest predictor of affairs for men
00:10:32.080 is simple opportunity if he can have one he's more likely to have one notice how many political
00:10:37.320 leaders and rock stars and uh men of prominence routinely have affairs or get caught having
00:10:42.660 affairs they simply have more opportunity they're not worse human beings uh than most guys is how the
00:10:48.520 scientific thinking goes they just have the opportunity to act on um what is a a usual desire not all men
00:10:56.580 desire variety but most of them do per research not only in our country in this decade but in many
00:11:02.320 prior decades and in many other nations and many other kinds of culture from tribal to uh full-on
00:11:08.000 developed so um so that's one of them is mr globetrotter uh second one i've already mentioned
00:11:13.880 mr opportunity uh third one is mr experience he's the guy who uh has a tremendous amount of sexual
00:11:21.420 experience it turns out that guys with less sexual experience tend to uh dabble less in extramarital
00:11:27.460 affairs um and then there's mr history the guy who has had a lot of affairs in the past maybe with
00:11:35.380 another partner uh he had a lot of affairs he's not a real great bet for fidelity going forward um
00:11:42.740 so those are four and i just can't remember the fifth right now i'm sorry that's fine that's fine
00:11:47.360 well that's interesting so i mean what does the research say that about uh affair proofing
00:11:53.280 your marriage is it possible to affair proof a marriage or relationship yeah so um one of the
00:12:00.100 best analogies that i've read from a scientist named john gottman is that what we need to do to
00:12:07.320 affair proof a marriage it's kind of like burglar proofing a house you don't really burglar proof a
00:12:12.900 house any house really can be burgled but you you hedge on the side of safety right and so um
00:12:19.580 to affair proof your marriage you really you're going to err on the side of safety and you're going
00:12:25.520 to close the windows that exist between you and people you're attracted to and you're going to open
00:12:31.440 the door between you and your mate so what happens in an affair is this gradual process of opening a
00:12:39.080 door with you and an affair partner and closing windows that exist between you and your marriage
00:12:43.780 partner and what that means specifically is you start telling your affair partner more and more about
00:12:51.140 your intimate life and you cease telling your marriage partner these same details until it gets
00:12:58.800 to the point where you're really emotionally much more uh involved with your affair partner
00:13:03.600 okay so go ahead go ahead well so so what you want to do is reverse that process you want to notice
00:13:11.820 when you are attracted to uh someone and you're feeling tempted to tell them things that you could
00:13:18.540 not comfortably say in front of your mate and you want to not tell them those things you want to kind
00:13:23.860 of reach a point where you can catch yourself before you say things that your mate would disapprove of
00:13:29.800 or feel jealous about and you want to not say them and i've actually advised uh people who've written
00:13:35.040 to me at my blog um i've got an advice column that's based on science but it kind of reads like
00:13:41.180 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
00:13:45.860 the data that i'm giving you this advice based on and i've advised some folks who were in a work
00:13:52.040 situation where they were with someone who were they were very attracted to this these were women who
00:13:57.240 were writing to me actually they were very attracted to these men at work uh they couldn't
00:14:01.840 avoid them because they had to sit on committees with them or they had to be in work groups with
00:14:06.280 them and they said you know i read your articles on affairs and scared the crap out of me because 0.72
00:14:10.860 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
00:14:14.680 interesting thing is a lot of people who have those kind of affairs they don't want to it really
00:14:18.840 feels to them like it just happens um they said what do i do about this and really the way to
00:14:24.920 open the door with your mate there is to defang the issue by telling your mate there's this person
00:14:30.200 at work and i'm really attracted to them and i don't want you know i read this advice i heard
00:14:35.280 this advice about research about affairs and i do not want to accidentally get into a situation that
00:14:41.340 that compromises our intimacy i don't want to get involved with this person so that's why i'm telling
00:14:48.020 you i'm not telling you to warn you or to scare you i'm telling you about this person
00:14:51.260 so that um i can remain close to you and i'm going to talk to you about this and i'm not going
00:14:57.640 to talk to her about this right so yeah you don't want to talk to the person you're attracted to
00:15:02.000 exactly and and and then what i've also said to these folks again it's mostly women who've written
00:15:07.280 to me about this but science would indicate the advice would be the same regardless is uh i've said
00:15:13.140 and then you tell your mate um that you're going to minimize your contact with this person and the
00:15:19.580 kind of contact you have with this person will be all business all the time for example you're not
00:15:24.420 going to ask how their weekend was you're not going to ask how their kids were are and women have a 1.00
00:15:28.440 real hard time with that because they perceive it as rudeness and females are raised to not be rude or 1.00
00:15:32.640 to try not to be rude and so uh what i've said is if you really want to a fair proof your marriage
00:15:39.200 you can err on the side of being a little bit rude right you don't have to be super nice to
00:15:45.800 everybody you can you can be professional and courteous say please and thank you but don't
00:15:51.840 ask about his kids don't ask about his wife a lot of people do that too they think if i ask about the
00:15:57.520 wife we're not getting closer i'm not going to have an affair not true uh don't ask about his personal
00:16:02.680 life if he talks to you about his personal life change the subject he'll get the hint right right
00:16:09.620 this is great so i mean okay we talk about you know we're talking about closing those doors to
00:16:14.220 potential uh of infidelity but we what about like opening those windows that already exist
00:16:22.160 between you and your your partner between you and your spouse um because that's you know it's a
00:16:27.420 problem i think in a lot of marriages where it might be one of the reasons why people want to 1.00
00:16:31.860 stray because they just they don't you know they're like they don't feel the spark they don't feel the
00:16:34.940 chemistry that they once had um i mean is that just a normal part of a mature relationship that
00:16:40.260 you're not going to have the whiz bang fireworks uh that you had when you first started the
00:16:44.800 relationship and if so uh what do you do to manage that particularly for men where were you talk about
00:16:51.380 in your book they were kind of hardwired for variety and spontaneity and like novelty um how do you
00:16:58.420 i guess strengthen a relationship and keep keep the spark going even after years of being in a
00:17:03.520 monogamous relationship this is a great question you bring up a lot of really important things
00:17:08.780 um one of them is the idea that passionate love will last forever so i want to start by defining
00:17:16.200 how scientists conceptualize passionate love passionate love is the intense longing for union
00:17:22.920 with another and every word of that definition is vital it's intense it's a yearning and it's a
00:17:29.240 yearning not just for sexual union but absolute union where you know everything about each other and
00:17:34.960 you kind of your heart speed is one and that's what passionate love is and so um it turns out that
00:17:42.020 passionate love biochemically can only be sustained for more than nine out of ten people it can only
00:17:48.160 be sustained for six months to two years it's not going to last longer than that
00:17:51.880 but right now because of our uh emphasis on marrying for love and for no other reason but love i mean
00:18:00.440 i'll tell you you should marry for love but if that's your only reason your marriage is probably
00:18:04.440 going to fail so um right now though the cultural emphasis in the developed world is very much on
00:18:12.260 marrying for love and only for love with that being the only criterion unfortunately that means that
00:18:17.600 people are destined to some level of disappointment if that's their one and only foundation for the
00:18:24.520 relationship because what often happens um according to studies on this is that people begin to question
00:18:33.180 whether they married the right person the thinking goes like this i'm passionately in love with you so
00:18:38.760 we should get married we're married i'm still passionately in love with you so you're the right
00:18:42.280 partner uh-oh the passion is starting to wane you're not the right partner i obviously need to get a
00:18:46.720 different partner and if you do that if you divorce that person and you then repeat uh finding someone
00:18:53.640 based on passion i think you know what happens right right and this kind of ties into the research
00:18:58.840 you know speaking about marrying uh for a reason beyond love but you know the research says that
00:19:04.420 arranged marriages uh last longer than like marriages based solely on love and i guess it's because
00:19:10.860 there's something bigger that their the relationship is based upon yeah they're they last longer but
00:19:16.280 they're also a lot happier which is interesting to me the data to the extent we have data on this
00:19:22.340 and it's not a lot of studies but um the data tend to show that right at the beginning of arranged
00:19:27.860 marriages they are not as in love as people who chose one another in those same cultures which makes
00:19:33.900 sense because the people who chose each other went through a courtship and they know each other and
00:19:38.920 the people in the arranged marriages have often only met a couple of times so it makes sense that
00:19:44.280 the people who are more in love right at the start of these people um in the chosen marriages
00:19:49.520 but five years later that pattern has flipped where now it's the arranged marriage people who
00:19:54.540 are happy happier and 10 years later the effect has doubled with uh the arranged marriage people
00:20:01.460 becoming even happier than they were before and the chosen marriage people becoming less so
00:20:05.900 and really the the critical factor is how similar you are so definitely marry for love but you also need
00:20:14.580 to marry for similarity and kindness and respect if you have love plus similarity plus kindness and
00:20:20.080 respect plus you're hot for each other you've got the whole shebang you can go forward and know that
00:20:25.620 this relationship is very likely to last a lifetime and to be happy but even if you do all that to expect
00:20:31.240 eternal on fire passion is very unrealistic now i want to counter that with um some very long-term
00:20:38.920 major surveys here in the united states comparing married people to people in every other living
00:20:45.480 arrangement people who are cohabiting people who are widowed people who are divorced people who are
00:20:50.680 single and what they find is that the married people are the most satisfied with their sex lives
00:20:57.420 of any of them what's going on there why is that it's because most married well of course we don't know
00:21:05.980 for sure uh the data give us some glimpses um it appears that most married people um they understand
00:21:13.600 first of all really happily married people freely use masturbation to keep the spark alive in their
00:21:18.420 relationship unhappily married people think oh masturbation i don't want to do that i'm going to stay
00:21:22.860 away from that um but the happily married people seem to to kind of get it that it's kind of weird to
00:21:29.620 think that for the next 50 years you're going to have the exact same libido as your partner 0.98
00:21:33.140 and so whichever person has the higher libido if they need to scratch an itch they'll masturbate 1.00
00:21:40.340 and scratch the itch and if for example it's very common after a woman has a baby that she just feels 0.90
00:21:46.460 touched out tapped out for uh for a while after that maybe even for more than a year not that she
00:21:51.680 never has sex but she feels overwhelmed and so in happy marriages per the studies the guy will 0.91
00:21:58.200 masturbate in front of her and she may participate in that but if she's too tired to actually 0.93
00:22:03.100 have sex he doesn't take it personally and so the sex they do have is fantastic um and uh so couples 0.97
00:22:12.260 routinely happy couples use masturbation as a tool to maintain their sexual connection but another facet 0.88
00:22:19.400 of it found in these surveys is that when you ask people why did you have sex with your partner the
00:22:26.360 most recent time you had sex married people are the most likely to say that they had sex in order to
00:22:32.340 express uh love for their partner and that kind of sex it turns out people tend to find the most
00:22:38.940 fulfilling where it's a sex that's about uh more than getting off it's about uh emotional union as 0.58
00:22:46.020 well as physical union and they do say you know sometimes we just have dirty sex and it's just for 0.97
00:22:50.660 sex and it's just to get off but their most satisfying sex they say is the kind that is 0.52
00:22:55.200 there to express um that they really cherish and love their partner interesting so i imagine this
00:23:01.600 would require uh like conversation like to be open about it uh the differing libidas i mean is there
00:23:07.760 any research about like couples who keep like pornography use or masturbation use secret and they don't
00:23:12.960 like share that or is that something like couples should talk about or if they don't talk about it
00:23:16.660 can actually hurt the relationship it can hurt the relationship uh studies show that with as little
00:23:21.660 as an hour of watching pornography men not only feel less attracted to their spouse but they also
00:23:31.320 express less commitment for their spouse that's with one hour and that's those studies uh the first ones
00:23:37.380 were done back when you had to go to a video store and actually you know make some effort to get porn
00:23:41.560 and it cost you some money and of course we don't live in that world anymore you can get porn anytime
00:23:45.900 24 7 for no money at all and so um given that men do have an an inborn desire for sexual variety and
00:23:55.020 porn caters to that uh the vast vast majority of porn consumption is male women don't tend to watch porn
00:24:02.900 unless they are a trying it out like oh i wonder what that's about and they don't tend to watch it
00:24:08.940 habitually is what i'm saying or if they have a partner who says hey this will spice up our sex life
00:24:13.560 we watch porn together but uh the women who are surfing around for heterosexual porn just on their 0.99
00:24:19.180 own time to enjoy it and that's going to be far smaller than one percentage point of pornography
00:24:25.360 watchers so porn's really catering to a male fantasy women have fantasies too and what caters to that
00:24:32.900 fantasy is the romance novel i mean there's porn for women it's called the romance novel um and so we
00:24:39.200 know for sure from experiments not just correlational studies so experiments are superior they show cause
00:24:45.240 and effect we know that pornographic viewing causes less commitment to an attraction for
00:24:51.220 uh partners from men men are less attracted to and committed to their female partners after watching
00:24:57.440 porn even just one hour so um yeah it doesn't help relationships i mean i'm i gotta tell you i had
00:25:04.500 somebody so i've got a lot of reviews at amazon and most of them are super super positive but i
00:25:09.540 noticed one recently because you know authors do check out their pages i noticed one recently um
00:25:14.280 where a woman made a case for why i was conservative she started out with the year of my birth which
00:25:19.880 is one of the most liberal times in history i thought that was funny and um she went on from there 0.81
00:25:25.260 to say that basically my book wasn't science it's my opinion folks i'm extremely liberal
00:25:31.660 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
00:25:42.860 politics and my own values aside and really emphasize what the science is showing us and so while i would
00:25:49.280 here's what i would love to say to everybody it doesn't matter what you do with pornography or with
00:25:54.520 your genitals your relationships will all work out fine but that's really we've got lots of studies 0.72
00:26:00.840 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 0.86
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 0.97
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 0.96
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 0.65
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 0.50
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 1.00
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 0.82
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.59
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 1.00
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 0.98
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 0.85
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 0.73
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 1.00
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 0.94
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 0.99
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 0.96
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 0.81
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.51
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
01:04:54.340 manly
01:04:55.100 you
01:05:03.180 you
01:05:04.620 Thank you.