The Surprising Science Behind Building Stronger Relationships
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Summary
Eric Barker has spent years sorting through what really builds better friendships, reignites love, and helps people get closer to others. And he shares these research-backed insights in his new book, Playing Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is Mostly Wrong.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast we've all heard
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by now just how important strong relationships are to our health and well-being but a lot of
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common advice and conventional wisdom out there about how to build strong relationships doesn't
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end up taking us closer to that goal my guest today eric barker has spent years sorting through
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what really builds better friendships reignites love and helps people get closer to others and
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he shares these research-backed insights in his new book plays well with others the surprising
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science behind why everything you know about relationships is mostly wrong eric shares what
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he's learned today on the show beginning with why we're good at figuring out someone's personality
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from the moment we meet them but bad at reading their thoughts and feelings and how to get better
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at the latter by making other people more readable as well as how to make a better first impression
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yourself we then turn to what makes friendship a unique relationship that makes us uniquely happy
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and the two costly signals that most develop friendship we also get into why friends we feel
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ambivalent about are actually worse for us than outright enemies we spend the last part of our
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conversation on how the modern age is both the worst and the best time for marriage and how the key
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to ensuring that yours is one of the happiest in history is maintaining positive sentiment override
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after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash relationships
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all right eric barker welcome back to the show it's great to be here man so we had you on back in
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2017 to talk about your book barking up the wrong tree the surprising science behind why everything you
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know about success is mostly wrong you got a new book this is plays well with others the surprising
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science behind why everything you know about relationships is mostly wrong so you're what
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you've been doing for for a long time over a decade is writing articles on your blog looking at these sort
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of these common ideas that we have about success relationships work and then digging into the research
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to show that well these common ideas that we have might not be true and here's some counterintuitive
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insights about it so what you've done in this book you've taken some like relationship tropes that
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we've heard over the years i mean it's just sort of baked into the to our our collective wisdom and
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try to investigate well are these things really true i mean the first one you look at is you can't judge
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a book by its cover and this is based you know basically the idea is that you can't judge your first
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impressions of people you have to give them a really thorough you know look at and chance to really get to
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know them so let's take a look at the research on whether or not that's true you highlight the fbi spent
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decades and like millions and millions of dollars trying to figure out whether they can judge a book by
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its cover whether they can profile people correctly has this investment paid off no serial killer profiling
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is basically pseudoscience if you give chemistry graduate students a chance to write profiles they'll write
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ones that seem just as valid as ones by professional profilers the uk looked at all of its profiling and
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said how often was this useful and the answer was 2.7 percent of the time and the reason an american is
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citing british statistics is because the fbi doesn't release that data so basically you know again and
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again it's been shown that just profiling doesn't really work and you know we it's it's basically no
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different than astrology and this is a problem that you know is kind of writ large is just our
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ability to read others whether it be profiling or just you know having a conversation with your spouse
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is very tricky and we the problem is that we think we're really good at it our confidence levels are
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way higher than our accuracy numbers nicholas epley does research at university of chicago and he found
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that 20 we can only accurately read the thoughts and feelings of strangers 20 percent of the time
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with friends we hit 30 percent and with spouses we hit 35 percent so whatever you think is on your
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spouse's mind two-thirds of the time you're wrong and the truth is it's we seem to have a pretty low
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ceiling for getting better at this you know there are things you know like motivation that can help us
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get better but what i found by looking at the research was what actually helps us really read the
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thoughts and feelings of others others better is not trying to improve our reading ability but to focus
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on making the other person more readable okay i want to talk about how we can do that but i want
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to reiterate this idea that we're not very good at reading people's feelings or thoughts i mean this is
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like the source of a lot of just contention in any relationship like you you think someone's thinking
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this thing and you get upset about the thing you think they're thinking about and it's probably
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they're probably not even thinking that no and this is this is huge it causes a lot of conflicts
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especially i get into later in the book i get into you know the issue of of marriage and it can become
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really difficult when we get overconfident about our ability to to read our partner especially in a
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long-term relationship as it goes on because we start making assumptions and once we start making
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assumptions we're not having a conversation with our partner anymore we're having a conversation with
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ourselves and it's really not that hard for that internal conversation to turn negative where we start
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making assumptions about our partner's motives what they did why they did and this is one of the
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things that you know that that accelerates kind of the entropy you know in a in a marriage or in a
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long-term relationship is not communicating as much not asking people what's on their mind but making
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assumptions okay so we're not good at thought reading the body language thing what does the research
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say about you know you can read someone's body language to see if they're sad upset interested in you
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what's going on there like unconsciously we we certainly get some information from that but when
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we consciously try to read body language you know it's really not that helpful or effective is what
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the research shows a lot of people love you know body language hey i'm a big fan of shrillock homes
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but uh truth is it's really not because the in the end we don't know if the person's shivering
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because they're nervous or they're shivering because they're cold you know so this is even worse with
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strangers because we don't have a baseline with strangers we don't know that oh they're tapping
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their fingers we don't know if that's because they're bored or if that's a nervous habit that
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they always do so it's it's trying to consciously read body language there's a reason why there's
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never been a rosetta stone for for translating you know body language because consistently the research
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shows that it's it's just not effective if we want to find something that's going to give us a
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better read on someone we're actually much better off focusing on the voice because when we can hear
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someone but we can't see them empathic accuracy only drops off about four percent when we can see
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someone but we can't hear them empathic accuracy drops off 54 percent so we actually get a lot more
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valuable information about what a person's thinking and feeling from their voice than we do from looking
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at their body that's interesting so something you point out though so we're not very good at mind
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reading we're not very good at reading body language fbi is not they're terrible at profiling
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yet at the same time like our first impressions of people are surprisingly more accurate than we
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think they'd be what's going on there yeah it's really interesting first impressions are kind of a
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double-edged sword because like you said we are surprisingly good generally about the 70 accuracy level
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in terms of sizing somebody up you know we can generally look at somebody like some of the
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fundamental personality traits for instance like you know how a person dresses how well groomed they
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are is usually very indicative of conscientiousness and on a conscious or subconscious level we we kind
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of we kind of get that and there's a lot of research in psychology on what's called thin slicing
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which is that if i see someone i can't hear it but i watch a video of say a teacher in a classroom
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just by watching that for a couple minutes people can usually predict just how competent that person
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is at their job but that's the thing is sizing people up in this sort of overall way those
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fundamental personality traits way like i said 70 we're pretty good at that but that's different
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than trying to figure out what's on a person's mind in the moment what their intentions are what
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they're what they're really feeling behind their eyes so there is that kind of distinction there
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but what's really critical with first impressions is like i said it's a double-edged sword in the
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sense that yeah we we are way above chance in terms of reading someone accurately in terms of
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getting a first impression on them overall however the other side of the sword is those first impressions
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tend to stick and if we're wrong we it's really hard for us to dislodge those inaccurate perceptions
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of that person and and that's where it's really tricky okay so there's two things we could talk
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about here one hand okay first impressions are you know 70 accuracy rate to me i think well i should
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be doing i should think more about my first impression because okay it's probably going to
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be accurate and it's going to be stuck in that person's head for a long time so i should probably
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do some things to manage that did you come across any research on whether it's possible to
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manage your first impression absolutely the thing here is that on one hand you know we we want to
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make a good first impression on the other hand you don't want to give an oscar-worthy method acting
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performance all the time and and from an ethics standpoint you don't want to be insincere so the
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best attitude to take is to not try and be someone you're not but to find the version of you that
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might fit best here because we all know that our personalities vary in fact research shows our
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personalities can vary widely uh depending on context we're all someone different with our
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spouse versus our boss versus our kids versus strangers and to actually sit there for a second
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and just think about you know of of the various me's which is the me that would be best for me to to
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present here the warm supportive person that i am with my kids the professional you know hard-headed
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organized person at work so you can present a positive impression without being insincere and
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in a very natural organic way by being the different me that is that is relevant here
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gotcha all right let's talk about our first impressions of others so generally we can kind
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of see okay someone's conscientious whether they're laid back whether they might be neurotic or open i
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mean you kind of get that but that doesn't give you the full picture of that person
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so you mentioned earlier that if we really want to get behind the person like what they're
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actually thinking and feeling kind of see who they really are we need to get better instead of that
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you know body language reading getting that person to open up more to us so we can find out more about
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them what does the research say about that how what are some effective ways to do that
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the first critical thing to think about is you're not going to be Sherlock Holmes we are not going to be
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able to passively just read people at a distance the issue is like i said our skills kind of have a very
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low ceiling now we can sharpen them a bit by getting more motivated research shows that on
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first dates people are more accurate people readers and the reason there is there's stakes
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there's something to be won there's something to be lost you know all of a sudden it's it's game day
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so your brain our brains are generally cost efficient which i consider a euphemism for lazy
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so our our brains aren't going to kick into gear if we don't feel like there's stakes here so you know
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get motivated think about what you have to gain or lose but beyond that absolutely you can't just
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passively read people you need to engage with them and what we need to think about there is not how
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we can sharpen our skills but how we can make the other person more readable and that means thinking
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more first about context you know if there's somebody you're trying to get to know or somebody
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you're trying to get a beat on you know meeting over coffee you know there's just not a lot of
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stimuli in that environment versus if i was to play basketball with that person you know i would see
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do they cooperate do they cheat you know how do they make decisions on the fly i'd get a lot more
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information because of what is affecting them in the environment you know the the other thing to think
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about is other people you know if you were only dealing with someone in the presence of their boss
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would you really think you were seeing you know the whole them no and the other thing that's
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really critical is is we need to stop playing it quite as safe with conversation topics you want
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to be a little bit more provocative a little bit more controversial because emotional reactions
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research shows are typically more honest you know people don't usually fake anger you know to get
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something a little bit more controversial to see somebody when they're reactive we're going to get a
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better read on what is important to this person what they're thinking about how they feel what they
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value so poking prodding a little bit is going to get us more honest reactions than talking about the
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weather no and you so there are some like lie detecting things we can do you're not actually
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detecting the lie you're just trying to you have to throw people off i like how you said you need to
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become a a friendly journalist right so like instead you're gonna you're gonna kind of interrogate this
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person you're gonna be barbara walters but you know a little but a little more friendly so i like
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you know one of the tips you give is you know ask unanticipated questions because people who
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who lie are kind of like those social chameleons they know the social scripts and they're just gonna
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if you just ask them the typical question they're gonna know the answer to give but if you ask them
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like something that a screwball question they weren't expecting they're gonna get well and it's
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gonna throw them off i mean exactly that's the critical thing here is that all the information we
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generally get on tv and stuff is that stress is is going to indicate lies and that's never been shown
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to be true and body language has never shown to into to be valuable in terms of that what does work
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is cognitive load basically we want to make them think hard in fact telling police officers to to think
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of the question when someone's talking to them instead of asking themselves the question is this
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person lying to switch to the question does this person have to think hard that notable that question
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notably increase police officers ability to detect lies and like you said unanticipated questions a
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study of airport screeners showed that they could only uh accurately detect lies in general like they
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only caught like six percent of lying passengers when they use unanticipated question that jumped to
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like 66 percent because the critical thing here is a liar can't be prepared for every eventuality
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everything you could ask so when you ask stuff that's unanticipated all of a sudden they're gonna have to
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think you know it's like it's like when your computer slows down when it's chewing on a hard
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problem and that you know again there's no big neon sign above their head that's gonna say lie
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but you're going to see a slowdown you're gonna see a wonkiness the example i use in the book is
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if you were a bartender and you you saw an underage person come in if you ask them how old are you
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they're gonna say 21 but if you ask them what year were you born they're probably gonna have to do math
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they probably didn't think about that now what year were you born is an exceedingly easy question
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for an honest person to answer but the liar is uh is gonna have to do math and that's gonna be very
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visible so unanticipated questions can be really powerful in terms of just making lies easier to
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detect okay so the answer to can you judge a book by its cover is it maybe the answer to can you judge a
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book by its cover in general is that we all judge people immediately unconsciously we make evaluations
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of people when we first meet them in milliseconds you know and we are always going to start making
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assumptions even with people we know about our friend's spouse about what they're thinking and
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the key here isn't don't judge a book by its cover because we're going to we always do the issue is
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we want to revise those judgments we want to we want we get the initial judgment and we don't want
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to stop there and slam the gavel down and make a decision about this person we want to keep
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hypothesis testing we want to keep listening and we want to keep revising those judgments so that
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they can be better and more accurate okay so the next relationship trope you look at is a friend in
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need is a friend indeed and so use this section to explore friendship and you start off the section
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kind of asking the question like why do we even have friends in the first place because you point out
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that you know they don't make much sense from an evolutionary perspective right you know friends
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usually aren't your family members so there's no advantage to us to invest in them right because it's
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not they're not going to help us propagate the species or propagate our family so what does your
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research found like why why have friends in the first place no it's like you're absolutely right from
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evolutionary point of view i mean friends now now people can help you collect resources to help your
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biological kin but that would just be transactional relationships that wouldn't be the deep warm loving
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friendships that we all we all want and so this and this was actually darwin called this his white
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whale darwin felt like if he couldn't solve this problem then maybe his theory of natural selection
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wasn't true he was worried about it and the crazy thing was when you read darwin's biography
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the thing he was most happy and proud about that he thought was more important in his life than
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anything other was his relationship to to his friend to his friend henslow so underneath it all
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you know it really is important to us and it matters and what it comes down to believe it or not because
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the truth is for me as a writer you know this this chapter was hard because there's not a lot of
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research on friendship friendship doesn't get the respect despite the fact that friends you know
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research shows make us happier than any other relationship that the word friend is used more
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than any other relational term in the english language including mother and father you know
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friendship gets the short end of the stick often and you know to really define it i was initially
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struggling i was reading this stuff and i'm trying to find a good answer and i ended up going back to
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aristotle and aristotle 2 000 years ago said that a friend is another self which is really warm and you
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know nice but just it just it it might be nice for a hallmark card but it doesn't sound you know true
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then i looked and believe it or not you know research the past few decades has shown that aristotle
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was right you know a friend is another self nearly at the biological level basically as we grow closer to
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someone emotionally the venn diagram of who they are and who we are in our brains overlaps if you put
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women in an mri scanner and mention their best friend's name the areas of the brain for self
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processing light up if i ask you hey is this trait true of you or true of your best friend it will take
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you longer to answer than if i ask you is this trait true of you or a distant acquaintance at the closer
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we get to someone close is actually a really good word we actually blur and blend our definition of
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self between us and our closest friends so it's kind of funny i i refer to it almost as like this
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lawyerly getting around darwin's trap is is why would i do things for people who aren't me and who
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aren't my kin well our brain plays a clever trick that basically well i can justify that if i believe
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that you are me and that is kind of at the biological level how empathy works and yeah as you said
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friendships is a weird relationship it gets talked about a lot it's one of the most rewarding
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things in our life but it's you said it's sort of nebulous right and i think one of the things
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that makes friendship so valuable is how the bonds of it are just so they're easy to fray right i mean
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because like a friend isn't you know usually you're not related to them so there's like no like blood
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responsibility right blood you know you know because they're not your brothers you don't feel any
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obligation you're not married to them so there's no marital obligation it's very it's just voluntary on both
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sides and like both sides equally have to be invested in the relationship for it to even exist
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and that is like no you're absolutely right what that means is that's what makes friendship in many
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ways so kind of the red-headed stepchild of relationships in the sense that you know it
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doesn't get the attention it doesn't have a contract or an institution or a metaphorical lobbying group
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pushing for its interest the way you know an employer a spouse or kids do but on the flip side
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the upside of that is that is exactly the reason why friends make us happier than any other relationship
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is because it's totally voluntary it's always a choice never an obligation if you don't like your
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friends they cease to be your friends if you cease to like your employer that's fine you can keep
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working there you can even cease to like your spouse for a while you don't have to like your kids
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but you have to like your friends otherwise you don't spend time with them anymore so friendship
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is you know always kind of stress tested and pushed if they didn't make us happy we wouldn't be friends
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with them anymore so friendship may get neglected but its fragility proves its purity it's like that's
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why it makes us so happy because if it doesn't it wouldn't be there we're gonna take a quick break
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for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show so what does the research say about what we can
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do to cultivate more friendships in our lives i mean here it's like like i said i was at first i was
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dealing with the dearth of research so immediately i turned to what most people would which be dale
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carnegie and what i found is that his book how to win friends and influence people most of what he said
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has held up like most of what he says is actually accurate the only thing he got wrong was that he
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said put yourself in the shoes of of another person and the truth is we are as we talked about earlier
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in terms of reading people we're pretty terrible at that we usually make wrong assumptions and it
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actually makes us worse at connecting with others but a lot of the things that carnegie talked about like
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finding similarity paying sincere compliments these are really powerful things the issue with
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carnegie though is that carnegie was writing this book as a tool for business people and entrepreneurs
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to make business contacts so it's generally pretty shallow stuff it's generally for the it's great for
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the beginning parts of a relationship but this doesn't build the kind of deep fulfilling friendships
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that that aristotle was talking about when he said another self to do that we need to move beyond
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these we need to send what economics calls costly signals basically we need to show people a level
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of investment and the two costly signals when it comes to friendship are time and vulnerability time
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is always scarce in fact research shows it is the thing that friends argue about the most by giving
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someone some of your time consistently that's a scarce resource you are saying you mean something to me
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it's a powerful signal and vulnerability you know there's something i was terrible at i'm trying to get
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better at now opening up you know talking about your fears and weaknesses you know this is information
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that could be used against you by putting that information out there with someone you are you're not
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saying you know shallowly saying i trust you you are demonstrating here is something that could be used
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against me i feel safe enough with you to tell you this and that's critical it's it's really
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what shows that you care and what usually produces trust most often is showing trust in others and
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vulnerability isn't just important for relationships it's also important for our health robert garfield
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at university of pennsylvania found that not opening up about your feelings your fears it prolongs minor
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illnesses it makes heart attacks more likely and it makes a first heart attack more likely to be lethal
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okay so the dale carnegie stuff can help you kick it off with somebody i think those are very useful
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tools there but then you're saying if you want to take it to the next level you have to invest time
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vulnerability into the relationship and the time factor is really important we've had uh jeffrey
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hall on the podcast he's a professor at i think the university of kansas where he's
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researched how much time it takes to make a friend yeah and it's made his research in the book yeah yeah
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it's a lot longer than you think okay and then and with the vulnerability thing you highlight there's
00:24:14.960
like some a list of questions i think the new york times published this a couple years ago and
00:24:18.800
it went viral where there's like 44 questions you can ask someone and it'll make you fall in love with
00:24:24.820
each other but you're saying you can use these same sort of questions to form a quick friendship
00:24:29.840
well not a quick but it'll help facilitate that vulnerability part of a friendship absolutely it's
00:24:34.940
just this issue of really getting to know someone and going past the surface details and you know a
00:24:40.880
critical part of it is just moving past facts and getting closer to feelings because you know facts
00:24:46.120
are nice but like just by reading somebody's resume you don't really get to know them you get to know
00:24:50.600
them much better by knowing what they value you know what scares them you know what they really want
00:24:56.440
in life what's meaningful to them you know this stuff is on another level and arthur iron has this list of
00:25:02.460
questions that's really powerful for building any relationship and in fact when he first did this
00:25:08.380
research you know and was first putting together the questions two of his research assistants fell in
00:25:13.520
love so this is this is very powerful stuff and and in the marriage section of the book you know i talked
00:25:19.420
about john gottman's research which which parallels arthur iron's research that really asking questions
00:25:26.480
to your partner about deeper more serious things like knowing how they like their coffee hey fine
00:25:32.440
yeah that's great but asking your partner big questions you know what does love mean to you what
00:25:37.300
does marriage mean to you what what is a happy life to you these are tough questions but when you get
00:25:43.180
those answers this is like getting the answers to the test you know it's like you really start to
00:25:47.780
realize oh well you know the reason why they get so upset you know with me is because they they see
00:25:53.760
errands as an expression of love doing household chores as an expression of love and when i don't
00:25:58.900
do them to them that means uh you don't love me oh i didn't see it that way and you wouldn't find out
00:26:04.580
that information if you don't ask them so once you ask those tough what does love mean you know you can
00:26:10.720
start to find answers and and routines that honor both of your visions of life and you can find kind
00:26:17.260
of a north star that works for both of you but we really need to like ask more questions of the
00:26:22.580
people that we we care about on that deeper level because this is this is what really builds you
00:26:28.380
know fulfilling relationships okay so a strong friendship that sort of that aristotelian ideal
00:26:32.980
of friendship where both of you are just you're edifying each other you just make each other better
00:26:38.560
you just enjoy each other's company that's the ideal has a lot of benefits to our emotional health
00:26:42.640
even our physical health but you said there's a type of friend that actually is terrible for us
00:26:48.080
and it's a frenemy and you actually highlight research that frenemies are worse than enemies
00:26:53.660
so how does the research define a frenemy and then why are they so terrible for us
00:26:58.460
this is work by uh julian holt-wonstadt at byu and yeah it's kind of surprising we think like enemies
00:27:05.940
are the worst but the the thing is that enemies are predictable basically that we know where we stand
00:27:12.980
with them with frenemies uh the technical term is ambivalent relationships is that we don't know
00:27:19.180
if they're going to be nice today if they're going to be in pain today we we don't know and that kind
00:27:23.680
of being uncertain kind of drives us crazy it actually increases blood pressure stress potential
00:27:29.560
for depression or heart attack because it's this we're always on edge and the crazy thing is well
00:27:36.400
two crazy things is number one 50 of your relationships are ambivalent relationships and
00:27:42.920
we don't see frenemies any less than we see true friends so it can be a really stressful difficult
00:27:50.340
thing to have to deal with someone where we never know what's going to happen next and and this this
00:27:56.220
is this really drives us crazy well any research on how to handle it like what do you just avoid
00:28:00.180
those people what do you what do you do well that that's that's the funny thing is that it sounds
00:28:05.340
like kind of like the pat easy answer is get away from them but the truth is that there's actually
00:28:10.880
really really valuable insight there because what she found when she looked at it was that
00:28:16.020
with many certainly not all but with many ambivalent relationships we can leave these people alone
00:28:22.020
and often people just don't do it we feel a level of guilt we feel bad about it about drawing
00:28:29.260
stronger boundaries so you know the truth is spending less time with these frenemies is a good
00:28:35.300
idea and it's more possible than you think we just usually don't try we usually feel some level of
00:28:40.340
obligation even if these people drive us crazy but beyond that i get into the research on dealing
00:28:45.920
with toxic personalities like narcissists and usually there are things we can do to try and connect
00:28:52.200
more emotionally better on an empathetic level with these people some people their empathy muscle
00:28:57.620
isn't that strong but if we emphasize like carnegie we emphasize similarity like friendship
00:29:03.840
we emphasize vulnerability or if we emphasize community the area we live in this can help people
00:29:09.980
open up a little bit this can help people be more empathetic that can help us build a stronger
00:29:15.140
connection and finally if that doesn't work then what we should do if we can't like for instance for
00:29:21.820
somebody maybe at the office where we can't avoid them and the empathy the the tricks aren't working
00:29:28.260
then the thing we need to think about is making it a clearly transactional relationship not that we
00:29:34.980
need to say that to them but we need to treat that more like a business relationship what are you
00:29:39.780
getting what do i'm getting what am i want and to try and avoid the more emotional aspects that are
00:29:45.100
stressing us out all right so again time and vulnerability that's gonna that can make even the
00:29:49.680
worst of enemies friends uh eventually all right so let's talk about the next trope and it's love
00:29:55.700
conquers all and use this as a springboard to explore romance and you start off pointing out
00:30:02.080
that the research suggests that our present age the modern age is the best and the worst time in human
00:30:08.880
history for romance so what's going on there how can it be both both the best and the worst at the same
00:30:13.480
time you know marriage basically started out like you had a lot of rules it's hard to get out of you
00:30:20.240
didn't even generally get to you know pick the person you were married to it was a fundamental
00:30:24.620
pillar of society and it was really important and really valuable and so it was really stable
00:30:31.780
but it wasn't necessarily happy for everybody and it really put the it put society before the
00:30:39.700
individual and it was during the enlightenment era when there started to be free markets and people
00:30:45.100
were making more money that they were able to have more autonomy and they were able to marry for
00:30:49.320
love and this made marriage much more fulfilling however it also made marriage far less stable people
00:30:55.080
started to get divorced and we saw that accelerate through the 19th century until the 20th century
00:30:59.620
where there were just dramatic dramatic shifts so what happened increasingly was marriage became far less
00:31:06.940
stable in the 80s the divorce rate reached 50 in the united states it's currently now at 40 it would
00:31:12.720
be higher except fewer people are getting married than ever and what's going on here this all sounds
00:31:18.960
really negative i actually have a warning at the beginning of this this chapter because a lot of
00:31:24.460
this is initially starts out negative but there is the upside the upside is that due to the new freedoms
00:31:30.020
due to the ability to to build a do-it-yourself marriage rather than having to follow the rules that used to exist
00:31:35.560
if you do marriage right if you put in the work eli finkel at northwestern has shown that basically
00:31:41.900
the happiest marriages of today are happier than any marriages that have ever existed you know on
00:31:48.300
planet earth and the thing here that's really interesting is that that kind of you know hurts our
00:31:54.540
very passive fairy tale visions of love but the truth is the research shows you know fairy tale visions of
00:32:01.460
love that actually harms relationships because people expect things to be easy the benefit of
00:32:06.560
today is that we have more freedom eli finkel calls it the winner-take-all marriage the self-expressive
00:32:12.620
marriage if you put in the hard work if you you know really work it out with your partner and do as
00:32:17.000
necessary you can have a super happy marriage happier than any that has ever existed but the problem is
00:32:22.820
we can't just rest on our laurels because in the past you know society enforced all these norms
00:32:28.020
and that that doesn't exist anymore but if you do the work you can be happier than anyone has ever
00:32:33.620
been well let's talk about what we can do to mitigate a bad marriage right just avoid the bad
00:32:38.720
and you say that one of the reasons that marriages go south is that negative sentiment override starts
00:32:45.500
taking place in the relationship what is negative sentiment override and how do you avoid it
00:32:50.160
uh basically uh this is some work by john gotman is that you know early love is totally passive
00:32:57.340
like it just hits us and you know this and it's one of the most wonderful feelings in the world
00:33:03.100
but we don't have to do anything you know we just we just fall in love we can't stop thinking about
00:33:06.900
the person they can do no wrong we idealize them the problem is that that almost inevitably declines
00:33:14.400
entropy kind of kicks in and that so you could call the idealization of early love positive sentiment
00:33:20.900
override the problem is over time that dies down if we don't put in the effort to keep those positive
00:33:26.700
emotions alive we don't talk to our partner to understand where they're coming from as we talked
00:33:31.200
about earlier you can start to make negative assumptions about your partner and what can happen
00:33:35.520
is that positive sentiment override can actually flip to negative sentiment override basically this
00:33:41.820
is instead of the idealization of my partners if my partner does something good they're wonderful
00:33:46.760
if they do something bad well they must be having a bad day it can flip to oh well the monster did
00:33:52.640
something nice for once what do you know where you start to devilize you start to assume that your
00:33:58.100
partner has negative intentions and it it basically it just it gets worse it gets worse and then eventually
00:34:04.280
it becomes the default this is just the death knell for marriages what we need to think about here
00:34:12.200
first and foremost is again that level of communication people think that complaining is going to lead to
00:34:19.020
fighting so we should i'm just not going to raise the issue and that's not true uh gotman has found the
00:34:24.200
complaining is actually a positive because you raise the issues you get them out there the negative is
00:34:29.600
when complaining becomes criticism when you make it personal it's one thing to say hey you didn't take
00:34:35.400
out the trash it's another thing to say you didn't take out the trash because you're a lazy idiot
00:34:39.340
the first works the second doesn't communication needs to happen sometimes you're going to fight
00:34:45.100
and gotman found that 69 of ongoing marital issues never get resolved now some people might be
00:34:51.700
intimidated by that but truth is that was true of unhappy marriages and happy marriages some things
00:34:58.720
are never going to get resolved we have to focus on the regulation of conflict not always the resolution
00:35:02.980
of conflict and what's really critical is talking understanding and then boosting the positive emotions
00:35:10.880
and what that means is doing fun and exciting stuff just like you did when you first started dating
00:35:16.280
well you call this this is how you can increase positive sentiment override or just keep it going
00:35:20.480
right so you're saying at the beginning of the relationship when you got the love chemicals in
00:35:24.040
your head like everything is great about this person it starts to wear off if you want to keep those
00:35:29.100
positive sentiment override going you have to be intentional about it absolutely they split couples into two
00:35:36.980
cohorts one went on exciting dates and the other one on pleasant dates and exciting one hands down as
00:35:43.600
one researcher said adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder and this is because of the the psychological
00:35:49.320
principle of emotional contagion what that means is that whatever context we're in the emotions that we
00:35:55.580
feel in their context we will come to associate with whoever we're with so if it's just another night
00:36:01.480
of netflix and pizza you can start to associate boring feelings you know with your partner
00:36:06.800
but if you go out you go to concerts you go horseback riding you go on roller coasters
00:36:11.260
if you do the fun things that you did when you first start dating you can keep those keep that ball in
00:36:16.920
the air you can keep those positive emotions and make those associations with your partner because the
00:36:21.360
thing is a lot of people think oh we did those fun things early on in the relationship because we were
00:36:27.620
in love but the truth is that the flip is also true you fell in love because you did exciting and fun
00:36:34.500
things together no and you got to be intentional about this we've had a therapist on the podcast
00:36:39.560
i think her name's martha i can't remember her full name but anyway she has this idea of marriage
00:36:44.820
meetings where it's a 30 minute weekly meeting to do with your spouse and you break it down by
00:36:49.640
appreciating them you talk about chores but then a really important thing is you have to plan for
00:36:54.060
good times so it's like this is like it's like good times with you as a couple good times as a family
00:36:59.900
and then good times individually and that like my wife and i have been doing that for a long time
00:37:04.560
and it it does like if you don't i think a lot of people think oh if a good you know exciting time
00:37:10.420
just kind of happens spontaneously it doesn't like if you want it to happen you have to plan for it and
00:37:15.920
make it happen this is all totally true uh shelley gable at ucsb did research and found that how a
00:37:22.680
couple celebrates is actually more important than how they fight that really matters it's not obvious and
00:37:29.340
always symmetric in fact you know we all know couples who might fight like crazy or a big girl
00:37:34.760
all the time and we wonder how they can stay together and stay happy and what gotman found is
00:37:39.520
that the raw amount of negative in a relationship doesn't mean anything what means something what
00:37:46.880
makes a difference is the ratio of positive to negative and he put at ideal is five to one as long as
00:37:53.680
there's five positive things for every one negative thing the raw amount of negative doesn't matter
00:37:58.860
because there's always going to be you know negative in a relationship in fact gotman found
00:38:04.200
if it ever hits 13 positives to one negative that's actually a bad thing too because what that is almost
00:38:10.160
always indicative of is that somebody is not talking about like what's going somebody's not
00:38:16.000
talking about their feelings somebody's not opening up about the negatives that they're experiencing
00:38:19.640
somebody's holding back and that's bad so you need to think about those positives because
00:38:24.420
like i said if you do enough positive good things a lot of the negatives just don't matter as much and
00:38:31.220
as gotman found you're not going to get rid of 69 of the ongoing negative things so very often boosting
00:38:37.400
the positive is actually the better way to go yeah so i like how you break this down into increasing
00:38:41.500
positive sentiment override first is rekindle and that's like just uh do exciting things that you did
00:38:46.300
when you're first uh dating right because those exciting things will help you fall in love or keep
00:38:51.860
falling in love then you have remind yourself of intimacy through love mats and that's just
00:38:55.880
reminding yourself why you this person's great why you you fell in love with them in the first place
00:38:59.800
and then you have renew your intimacy with the michelangelo effect what's that
00:39:04.000
this is a lot of people you know try to change their partner and a this is usually not effective and b
00:39:12.860
it's also bad for the relationship but there is some research and they that's they call it the
00:39:17.220
michelangelo effect where you can actually a you can effectively change your partner and b you can
00:39:23.340
strengthen the relationship and the distinction here is that usually when people try and change
00:39:27.380
their partner whether they realize it or not an aspect of it is selfish you're trying to change
00:39:31.780
your partner until who you want them to be and the secret to the michelangelo effect is to talk to
00:39:37.100
your partner again talking important and asking them about their ideal self who do they want to be
00:39:43.480
what do they want out of life and then helping encouraging and supporting them to be their
00:39:49.360
ideal self not your ideal version of them and this is incredibly powerful when you are a cheerleader
00:39:57.140
for your partner moving towards the person that they want to be it has very powerful effects it both
00:40:04.760
helps them become better and let's face it the majority of the things that your partner wants
00:40:09.560
you know are probably things that are a positive for you and a positive for the relationship and
00:40:14.520
this has been shown to work at any age you know anybody can benefit from this you know it's you
00:40:19.500
never want to criticize the failures or negatives of your partner in this process you just want to be
00:40:25.440
there to support and celebrate when they do start to do the things that are moving them in that right
00:40:30.460
direction and like i said this helps your partner become better and it also becomes a booster for the
00:40:36.460
relationship overall yeah i like that it's called uh the michelangelo effect because the reason why
00:40:41.940
it's called the michelangelo effect is that michelangelo said at one time something like every
00:40:47.680
block of stone has a statue inside it and is the task of the sculptor to discover it i saw the angel in
00:40:54.780
the marble and carved until i set him free and this idea actually reminds me of kant's categorical
00:41:02.680
imperative to treat people as ends rather than as means so you know your spouse they have their own
00:41:10.540
end like they're not just there they don't exist so that they're who you want them to be they're not
00:41:16.160
you know they're not just a means towards your own happiness they have their own end and so you should
00:41:20.980
help them towards their end towards their telos and in doing that by helping your partner become
00:41:26.600
who they're supposed to be that'll that ultimately you know ends up being good for you and the
00:41:32.280
relationship in the end okay so to increase positive sentiment override you do these three r's
00:41:38.780
you rekindle the relationship remind yourself of intimacy through love maps renew your intimacy with
00:41:45.620
the michelangelo effect and then you have a final r and it's rewrite your story again and again like
00:41:52.500
every couple has a story about the relationship and you have to keep talking about it and telling
00:41:58.320
that story to each other so it stays at the forefront of your mind yeah basically you want
00:42:03.000
to clarify it because like almost subtextually underneath it you have a story of what your
00:42:09.080
relationship is and your partner has one too and you want to make sure those are aligned because if
00:42:14.060
they're not this can be a really bad thing but most people will say i don't know i don't have a story
00:42:19.220
i don't know it's there you just haven't thought about it like what is how do you talk to yourself
00:42:24.480
about your relationship how it is how it's grown because the the most fascinating thing is that john
00:42:31.700
gottman the researcher his claim to fame is that he can listen to couples for five minutes and with 90
00:42:38.220
plus percent accuracy predict whether they'll be divorced in five years and the craziest thing that
00:42:44.200
that alone is mind-blowing but the craziest thing how does he do it he just asks them to tell the
00:42:50.720
story of your relationship and by that question and that question alone he is often able to predict
00:42:57.200
whether they divorce or not and the key thing here the key thing he looks for in terms of that story
00:43:02.920
is celebrating the challenges is basically does the person look at their marriage and say hey yeah we
00:43:09.840
dealt with some difficult stuff but oh my god you know we overcame that we worked together you know
00:43:14.780
it made us stronger it was really great as opposed to yeah we're dealing with some stuff i mean i guess
00:43:20.380
you know i'm at versus that couple that says like yeah we dealt with things sure but hey it's really
00:43:27.320
been great we really worked it out that feeling of growth is really critical growth self-expansion this is a
00:43:33.900
huge concept but thinking about your story talking to your partner about your story asking what the
00:43:39.480
story is now versus what the ideal story is and then again you've got a roadmap you've got a north
00:43:45.940
star this is really powerful for improving a relationship all right so does love conquer all
00:43:50.600
it sounds like uh it depends on what you think of love like how you define love love does not conquer
00:43:56.260
all but your love can you know that's that's the that's the issue here is that like i said the the math
00:44:02.580
isn't isn't always great if you look at it but if you do the right things if you avoid the negatives
00:44:08.500
increase the positives an individual relationship can really be made to work we we just need to
00:44:14.140
really put in the effort because with the incredible amounts of freedom that we have in the 21st century
00:44:19.460
that means the onus is on us to keep this institution stable well eric this has been a great conversation
00:44:26.240
where can people go to learn more about the book and your work the book plays well with others is
00:44:30.800
available on amazon other booksellers the url on my blog is a little tricky for some people so if
00:44:35.500
they go to eric barker.org eric barker.org they can check out my blog where i'm usually looking at
00:44:43.020
the research to find a way to make our lives better and the best way to keep up with that
00:44:46.160
is to sign up for my newsletter fantastic well eric barker thanks for your time it's been a pleasure
00:44:49.800
it was fantastic thanks man my guest today was eric barker he's the author of the book plays well
00:44:55.160
with others available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere make sure to check out our show notes
00:44:58.900
at aom.is slash relationships we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:45:03.620
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:45:14.700
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00:45:18.260
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00:45:45.300
remind you to not listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action