00:00:00Today I'm going to talk to you about one of my very favorite topics, which is romantic love.
00:00:05I'm going to make the case that romantic love is one of the best ways that human beings find the
00:00:10meaning of their life. Romantic love has been something that's been a major feature of my own
00:00:16life. You know, I try to eat my own cooking when it comes to true love and happiness. And in this
00:00:21regard, it's really gone well for me. I feel very fortunate. We've just celebrated our 34th wedding
00:00:26anniversary. We have three adult kids. We have four grandsons. And our communication has marginally
00:00:32improved over those intervening decades. Now, why do I tell you all of this? It's not because that's
00:00:36so extraordinary, not from people my age. They all have a weird story like that. But here's the thing.
00:00:42It turns out that that kind of story is less and less normal today. We're finding that there are
00:00:48fewer of these tales of sort of entrepreneurial romantic derring-do. And what's up with that?
00:00:55Well, that's what I want to talk about.
00:00:57Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love, meaning,
00:01:10and happiness, how you can find more of it using the big ideas in science,
00:01:14and how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to
00:01:19lifting people up and bringing them together using science and ideas. And I want you to have those
00:01:24ideas as well, because I'm not just a happiness teacher. I'm trying to be the leader of a movement
00:01:30of happiness teachers. And I need you in the movement with me. That's how we make a better
00:01:34world. Today, I'm going to talk to you about one of my very favorite topics, which is romantic love.
00:01:40I'm going to give a deep dive into the science of romantic love and how it's very, very important for
00:01:45finding the meaning of your life. Now, as always, if you have criticisms or ideas or questions for me,
00:01:51please do feedback. The email address is officehours@arthurbrooks.com, or put it in the
00:01:56comment section wherever you're viewing or listening to this podcast. As always, please like, subscribe,
00:02:02leave a review, and do stay in touch with all of us, because that's what we really care about is,
00:02:07once again, building this community. And that requires hearing from you.
00:02:11Well, back to the main topic today, which is love, specifically romantic love. I'm going to
00:02:18make the case that romantic love is one of the best ways that human beings find the meaning of
00:02:23their life. It's not the only way. In different episodes, I'll talk about other ways to find the
00:02:27meaning of your life. But as always, what I'm talking about here is a piece of this new book
00:02:34that I have on March 31st, 2026 called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness.
00:02:41Specifically, I'm going to be talking about a whole section of this book on romantic love and how this
00:02:44is the entry point. This is the first rung in the ladder toward finding the meaning of life. But of
00:02:51course, it's a hard one for a lot of people because romantic love is so mysterious. It seems so
00:02:57impossible to solve. Well, in point of fact, it is a problem that's impossible to solve. It's one that
00:03:03you only have to live with, that you have to understand quite intuitively. And I'm going to talk
00:03:08to you about exactly how to do that. I'm going to use science and ideas to talk to you about something
00:03:12that goes beyond science and ideas. That's the bottom line. And when you actually live in this
00:03:17particular way, including in the unpleasant parts of it, the breakups, the heartbreaks, the grief,
00:03:21you will find more meaning in your life. That's my promise to you today. Romantic love, that's
00:03:29our topic. Now, romantic love has been something that's been a major feature of my own life.
00:03:37You know, I try to eat my own cooking when it comes to love and happiness. And in this regard,
00:03:42it's really gone well for me. I feel very fortunate. When I was 24 years old, well,
00:03:48as those of you who know a little bit about my backstory, I was a professional classical musician
00:03:52in those days, all the way through my 20s. It was my gap decade, you might say. And I was playing
00:03:57on the road at one point in the summer of 1988. I was doing a concert tour, a chamber music concert
00:04:03tour with my quintet in the Burgundy region of France, playing classical music, chamber music
00:04:08concerts, different wineries, and, you know, at different schools and things, just a chamber
00:04:13music tour. And after one of the concerts that I was playing, I met a girl. I was 24 years, 25.
00:04:20I went up to her to talk to her because she, you know, smiled at me during a concert while I was
00:04:24playing. And that didn't happen all that often. And so I made a beeline for her to introduce myself.
00:04:29It turns out she didn't speak a single word of English, which is problematic because I didn't
00:04:33speak anything else except English. She spoke French, and Spanish, and Italian, and Catalan,
00:04:37among other things. And I learned through an interpreter, through a friend who was bilingual,
00:04:41that she actually wasn't French. She was studying in France as a music student herself, and she was
00:04:47from Barcelona, Spain. And so I did the only obvious thing, which you might think be to say, "Well,
00:04:54too bad. You know, maybe in another life, I'll actually be able to talk to you." I did what
00:05:00I should have done, which was I asked her out to dinner through an interpreter. And we went
00:05:03out to dinner and had a couple of dates. And then I went home from my tour, but I couldn't get her
00:05:07out of my head. So I called my dad and I said, "Dad, you know, I think I met the girl I'm going
00:05:13to marry." And he said, "Great, great. Can I meet her?" And I said, "Well, it's a little complicated.
00:05:20She doesn't speak a word of English. She doesn't live in the United States. And she has no idea
00:05:25that I feel this way." Which actually put some barriers in the way, but there are no barriers
00:05:28to a, you know, a red-blooded American 24-year-old. So I stayed in touch as best I could and set a plan
00:05:35to get to know her a little bit better. I didn't just set a plan. I set a strategy. I actually quit
00:05:40my job. I moved to Spain. There's a little bit between here and there. There was a year that
00:05:46went by during that. And she had actually come over to visit me in New York, and she had started
00:05:50studying English. So she took some initiative as well. But by the next summer, I had actually
00:05:55quit my job and taken a job in the Barcelona City Orchestra to try to, well, close that deal if it
00:06:01were possible. You know, learned how to communicate with each other a little bit. Took me about two
00:06:06years to close that deal, but indeed, we got married, just as I had hoped. And you might be
00:06:13wondering how the story turns out because that's kind of a quixotic tale, sort of like Don Quixote
00:06:18tilting at windmills. The music career wasn't long for the world. I moved on at age 31 to other
00:06:25things, but the marriage was a big success. We've just celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary.
00:06:30We have three adult kids. We have four grandsons. And our communication has marginally improved over
00:06:36those intervening decades. Now, why do I tell you all of this? It's not because that's so
00:06:41extraordinary, not from people my age. You talk to people in their 60s today, 50s, whatever,
00:06:46late boomers or Gen Xers, and they all have a weird story like that. But here's the thing. It turns out
00:06:53that that kind of story is less and less normal today. We're finding that there are fewer of these
00:06:59tales of sort of entrepreneurial, romantic, daring do. And what's up with that? Well, that's what I
00:07:06want to talk about. And I want to talk about how you can be more of an entrepreneur in your love life,
00:07:11even if you're 24 today, like I was back then. How you can think about your life as an enterprise.
00:07:18And the currency of that enterprise is love and happiness. Romantic love being the highest octane,
00:07:23kind of that fuel for your entrepreneurial journey, and how you can design your life by taking
00:07:29strategic risk in a way that perhaps the world has told you not to do. How the technology has
00:07:34discouraged you, but in point of fact, how you can get your life back, starting with the romance that
00:07:40you very likely want. So where do we start the story? We start the story with, well, how about a
00:07:47little bit of data? And I just made the assertion that that was more frequently the case, that we
00:07:52would have stories like this for people my age when they were in their 20s, compared to people who are
00:07:56in their 20s today. And that's not just an assertion. That's just not just an old guy saying, "Kids these
00:08:01days," you know, shaking my fist at the clouds or something. No, that's actually in the data is
00:08:06pretty clear. For example, and let's go back before my time in about 1950, 1949 to be exact, 79% of
00:08:13households in America contained a married couple. Today that's 47%. 79% to 47%. Something big has
00:08:20happened. You find that there's been not in a complete implosion, but a significant
00:08:26diminishment of the rate of people actually getting married. So you might think to yourself, "Well, yeah,
00:08:30well, sure. Thank you, professor, but people are living together without getting married." That's true,
00:08:35but it's not also true. You find that even cohabitation has fallen, especially over the last
00:08:42couple of decades. So since 1990, which is around the time that I met Mrs. B, specifically I met her in
00:08:501988, I got married in 1991, that the percentage of people unpartnered completely has risen among men
00:08:58by a third and among women by a quarter. Here's basically the way to think about it. Marriage is
00:09:04going down. Cohabitation is going down. People are even having less sex, not even hookups is what
00:09:09we're talking about here. In 1988, people in the 20s, about 50% at any given time had a sexual
00:09:16partner that was more or less regular. Today it's about 33%. So even that is falling. Okay, so I'm
00:09:22giving you all these data. Who cares? Well, I do because I think about love and happiness. Happiness,
00:09:28yeah, for sure. All this, less marriage, less being together, less romantic life, less romantic love
00:09:37is horrible for happiness. And it's a big part of, it's a symptom of, and it reinforces what we call
00:09:45in this show the psychogenic epidemic of unhappiness. Now, a psychogenic epidemic is an epidemic,
00:09:51meaning it's highly contagious. It's creating a lot of misery, but it doesn't have biological origin
00:09:56necessarily. Now, everything has some biological origin because as you all know, psychology is
00:10:01biology. But be that as it may, this is something that's really weird. It's not as if a virus or a
00:10:06bacteria has entered the population, has made people not fall in love, not be attracted to each other,
00:10:13not go out with each other. It's something psychogenic that's going on in our happiness
00:10:20that's related to the unwillingness or inability for people to actually find romantic love that so
00:10:25many people will confess that they want, but that just isn't there as much. Now, if in your own
00:10:33particular life, you do have a romantic love relationship, that's fantastic. I'm super happy
00:10:38for you, but you probably know somebody who doesn't. And if you don't, you probably or you might want
00:10:44one. And so let's demystify it a little bit. Let's talk a little bit more about the psychogenic
00:10:49epidemic because as we always do, let's use the science to understand our problem. And then let's
00:10:54actually get to some solutions. What I want to do today is to give you a protocol for actually
00:11:00understanding the experience of having real romantic love in your life. How do you get it?
00:11:06How do you keep it? You fall in love. How do you stay in love? Let's start off a little bit with
00:11:12a description of what happens to you when you are falling in love. And then that will give us an
00:11:17opportunity to talk about why it doesn't work right sometimes, why it might not have worked right in
00:11:22your life, why you've actually had the experience where you were falling in love and the other person
00:11:26wasn't or vice versa. This is a good way to understand, to demystify a lot of what seems
00:11:33like the most mysterious experience that we will ever face. And in point of fact, it sort of is.
00:11:37When we fall in love, there's kind of a four-step process that's happening in the human brain.
00:11:43The first step in the process is just basic attraction. And attraction is largely
00:11:48understood in the context of sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen.
00:11:53By the way, both men and women have testosterone. Both men and women have estrogen. You probably
00:11:59already know that. It's just that men have more testosterone than women and women have more
00:12:02estrogen than men. And there's a surge in the sex hormones when there's a basic attraction.
00:12:07That's not weird. That's not toxic. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the most
00:12:12normal thing ever. This is how we were evolved. This is a biological process. This is how
00:12:16homo sapiens actually identify each other as potential mates. That happens at the very
00:12:22beginning. That can happen as quickly as seeing somebody from across a room, as a matter of fact.
00:12:27But of course, it's much more intense when we're having a conversation with somebody who's
00:12:31attractive, which is why people want to go out on a date. They want to get to know each other.
00:12:34They want to see whether the attraction is real, which is to say they want to see whether or not
00:12:38there's an experience that they're having neurochemically, largely with the sex hormones,
00:12:42testosterone and estrogen. Now, this is very quickly followed by a second neurochemical step,
00:12:49which involves neurotransmitters, which get involved, specifically norepinephrine and dopamine.
00:12:55Now, you all know about dopamine. I've talked about it ad nauseum in the show about addiction and
00:13:00craving and desire and learning and wanting and escalation of particular behaviors and all that.
00:13:05But dopamine is just involved in so many types of behaviors. And indeed, it has a very big
00:13:11involvement in the process of falling in love, as does norepinephrine, which is a stress hormone
00:13:17produced in the adrenal glands sitting right above the kidneys. You say, "Wow, a stress hormone." Yeah.
00:13:22Well, if you've been in love before, you know it's unbelievably stressful, but it's unbelievably
00:13:25blissful as well. What is this actually doing to us? It's giving us a sense of anticipation and a
00:13:32sense of euphoria. So for example, you're falling in love with somebody or you just went on a really,
00:13:36really successful date or two with somebody, and you're saying, "I wonder if that person's
00:13:40going to text me." Well, the anticipation of the text is delicious and terrible at the same time.
00:13:48That's dopamine. That's dopamine that's actually in your brain saying, "Anticipation and reward.
00:13:52It's going to be great. If it happens, sure hope it happens." And then ding, and it's actually the
00:13:58person. And that's that little splash of euphoria as you actually hear from that person. That's
00:14:03norepinephrine. Now, all the things that I'm talking about here, this neurochemical cascade
00:14:07of falling in love... By the way, all of this, almost everything in neuroscience is not settled
00:14:12science. So it's not as if everything has been seen in the lab and there's no neuroscientist who
00:14:17disagrees with this. On the contrary, if you're a neuroscientist and you think this is too glib or
00:14:22something, let me know because I want to learn and we're all learning, we're actually getting better
00:14:26at this. But this is as close as I can get actually based on the refereed academic literature on this
00:14:32to try to turn it into language that ordinary people can understand with respect to the experience
00:14:38that they actually have. So that's step two, norepinephrine and dopamine that gives you
00:14:42anticipation of reward and a sense of euphoria. That happens relatively quickly, like within days
00:14:50of actually meeting somebody, sometimes even more quickly than that. And that's what makes you feel
00:14:55kind of addicted to the other person. And in point of fact, neuroscientists studying the brains of
00:14:59people in love versus those addicted to drugs find similar activity in the pleasure and pain regions
00:15:04of the brain. If you've been following the work all along, you know that I'm talking about the ventral
00:15:09tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, et cetera,
00:15:14et cetera, all those parts of the brain that are involved in pleasure and pain, which you get when
00:15:18you're actually addicted to drugs or gambling or you get that when you're in love too. I mean, look
00:15:23at the activity of somebody falling in love. You'll be like, oh my goodness, this is a methamphetamine
00:15:29addict. Oh no, it's okay. It's just somebody who's in love. And that's the reason that you feel
00:15:33addicted to the other person when you're in the early stages of falling in love. Okay, that's step
00:15:37two. Step three is where it gets kind of gnarly here, I have to tell you, because that's where we
00:15:41get a big drop in serotonin. Now, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that's implicated in the process
00:15:49of people experiencing clinical depression. Major depressive disorders, generally speaking, involves
00:15:56a big, big deficit in the synapse of serotonin. That's the reason that people who seek relief from
00:16:02their depression symptoms will take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so-called SSRIs.
00:16:07Prozac, for example, is the most famous variant of a whole family of these drugs to keep more serotonin
00:16:14in the synapse, which is associated with lower symptoms of depression. Well, guess what happens
00:16:19when you're falling in love in this third stage? Your serotonin tanks. Now, here's the interesting
00:16:24thing about this. And once again, all this stuff is contested, but this is really... I think this
00:16:30is an unbelievably useful way to understand what's going on here. You ruminate in sadness when you're
00:16:36depressed. You ruminate on another person when you're falling in love. Well, rumination is
00:16:43rumination. Rumination comes from ruminare, which is Latin for chewing the cud. That's what rumination
00:16:50is all about. So you can't get sadness and regret out of your brain if you're clinically depressed,
00:16:55feeling so crummy about yourself. You can't get that other person out of your brain. You're
00:16:58thinking and thinking and thinking about every little thing. And did I say the right thing?
00:17:02Was that a stupid thing that I said? And that little gesture that she did, does that mean that
00:17:06she doesn't like me? Does it mean she does like me? What does that mean? Well, that's the same kind of
00:17:10activity because your brain is working the same way. What's happening with rumination? You're
00:17:14imprinting something. When you're really depressed about something, your brain is literally trying to
00:17:20learn a lesson so that you won't make a mistake a second time. It can be really out of proportion.
00:17:25It can be really exaggerated, which is the reason that relief is so important and drugs for some
00:17:31people can provide some relief. But when you're falling in love, you want that other person to
00:17:35imprint on you because you're in the process of becoming pair bond mated with that person.
00:17:39I mean, you're potentially, this is it for life, man. So you better imprint in the right way,
00:17:44but it leads to all this kind of weird kind of ruminative, obsessive activity. Like, why did I
00:17:51just leave 10 voicemails in the last hour? Maybe I'm dating myself, you know, who leaves 10 voicemails
00:17:57now? Why did I send 100 text messages in the last hour? I'm so stupid, stupid, stupid. That's classic.
00:18:03That's classic for ruminating, low serotonin. So really, I mean, technically you should be able
00:18:10to look at somebody's brain and say, wow, really low serotonin activity, either they're clinically
00:18:15depressed or they're in the third stage of falling in love. Okay. That's one of the reasons that
00:18:20falling in love is a thrill and wonderful, but at the same time, really terrible. And you wouldn't
00:18:25want to stay in that stage for the rest of your life. You know, people would say, I just wish I could
00:18:29be in love like the early days with my spouse for the rest of my life. Are you kidding me?
00:18:34You'd need to be medicated if that were the case. So you could function at all, most likely,
00:18:39especially because of this third step. And last but not least, this is where we're trying to get
00:18:44in the weeks and months after falling in love. This last step involves oxytocin and to a lesser
00:18:51extent, vasopressin. These are neuropeptides in the brain that function as hormones in the brain
00:18:56that bond us together. Now, women have about three times as much oxytocin as men. And part of the
00:19:02reason for that is that women bear children and they need to bond to a brand new baby who doesn't
00:19:07have the slightest idea who even they are to the baby. And men also bond to the baby too, especially
00:19:13with eye contact and touch, which is why when your newborn baby is born, the guys, if you're going to
00:19:18be a dad and the doctor says, you want to cut the cord, say yes. And they hand you a kind of a messy
00:19:24baby, say yes, because you want to bond to the baby. That's really, really important. And it's
00:19:29a very beautiful thing. By the way, people when they have a newborn baby, it's like the 4th of July
00:19:34inside their head and they don't know what's going on. It's an unbelievable explosion of oxytocin.
00:19:38You also get a lot of oxytocin when you're in the process of falling in love with somebody,
00:19:42especially in this stage where you're bonding to the person. You're making somebody who you're
00:19:48not related to your kin. You know, I've talked in the past about the four pillars of happiness,
00:19:54the four habits of happiness that people engage in, faith, family, friendship, and work. Well,
00:20:00friendship and family. There's only one thing that falls into both categories and that's your spouse.
00:20:05That's your lifelong romantic partner. That person becomes another you in a very real way,
00:20:12but not related to you. Not supposed to be related to you. It's a taboo if they're related to you,
00:20:16but they become related to you in a way that really, really matters, which is that you're
00:20:19neurochemically linked in a pair bond that's supposed to last for life. Of course, it doesn't
00:20:25always last for life, but at least at the early stages, nobody's like, "Yeah, man. Oh, man. Oh,
00:20:30man. I want this to last for life, but I probably won't." That's not what people say, right? And the
00:20:35reason they don't say that is because they got the oxytocin pump on. Vasopressin, which is more
00:20:41prominent in males, by the way. That's less of the love link and it's more about loyalty and defense.
00:20:49So that's the reason that males have that a little bit more than females, as you'd imagine from the
00:20:54evolutionary biology. But the bottom line is men and women, they both get both and they're both
00:20:59really, really important such that the person that you're with is your mate forever. Human beings as a
00:21:05general rule, there's a lot of debate about this. Are we naturally monogamous? Are we serially
00:21:10monogamous? Are we non-monogamous? And there's no consensus on this except that if there is,
00:21:17it's that ideally almost everybody wants to be single unilaterally parabond mated. That's what
00:21:23people want. That's the ideal that people want. And so some would say that that's sort of the natural
00:21:27habitat for us. Doesn't always work out that way, of course, but that's the case. And that's certainly
00:21:32how you feel when you're falling in love. "This is it, man. This is going to be it for life." Or at
00:21:36least I sure hope it's going to be it for life. Now, the goal at this point is not the passionate
00:21:43love of steps one, two, and three. The goal is to get there together at the same time to the
00:21:50oxytocin level, the vasopressin level for deep connection and deep friendship. And this really
00:21:55is the goal of a successful pair bond mate. I mean, there's plenty of passion in 30, 40, 50 years,
00:22:06but it's deep friendship. That's the secret to a pair bond mate that lasts forever is deep
00:22:14friendship. That's what it's all about. And that has to do with this neurochemical bond where this
00:22:19person is your kin and is going to be your kin for the rest of your days. And when it doesn't happen,
00:22:25by the way, when you get the early stages, but not those late stages of kinship, that's when you get
00:22:31this deep, deep, deep disappointment. And that's one of the reasons that people can be just like
00:22:34madly in love. And then it doesn't work out. And a year later, they hate each other. What's up with
00:22:40that? And the answer is they didn't get to the friendship stage. The friendship stage has a
00:22:46particular coinage in the world of social science called companionate love. So there's passionate
00:22:52love, which are the early stages, there's companionate love, which is where you want to get.
00:22:56Again, plenty of passion in companionate love, but you want your companion. You want the person
00:23:00that you're walking into the sunset with, holding hands, the person you're going to be looking at as
00:23:05your closest friend, the person who is the other you as you take your dying breath. That's what really
00:23:09we're talking about with companionate love. I know it doesn't sound that thrilling. As my kids said,
00:23:14companionate love, dad, that's not hot. I mean, I get it. But that's just the term. And that's what
00:23:20we're talking about. When people actually don't get there, the disappointment from that can actually
00:23:23lead to real bitterness toward each other, as a matter of fact. Almost always the process is
00:23:29truncated, which is why there's so much bitterness in relationships that they don't work out. Now,
00:23:34why don't they work out? Frequently, it's because this neurochemical cascade that proceeds through
00:23:39very distinctive stages, people do it out of sync. They're not going through it at the same speed.
00:23:46So you can see how that's a problem, or that somebody doesn't go through the whole thing.
00:23:50And there's a real pathology with a lot of men. And again, this is a hypothesis. You can't really test
00:23:55this directly. But it's a pretty sound hypothesis nonetheless, that some guys, they can't get through
00:24:01all four stages. They can only go from sex hormones for attraction to thrill, right? One, two, stop.
00:24:09One, two, one, two. You've met guys like this, probably. Some women, but it's really quite common
00:24:15with guys. And these are a lot of guys who tend to be dark triads, by the way. And you know what
00:24:19that is. If you've watched the show for any length of time, I'll put a link here to the episode on how
00:24:25to spot a dark triad. And they tend to go... They're really attracted and they get a thrill, but they
00:24:30stop there because they don't fall in love. And so it's one, two, one, two, one, two. It's all about
00:24:35seduction. These are the worst guys that women typically get involved in, as a matter of fact.
00:24:41They just can't get through the whole neurochemical cascade all the way to a loving, committed
00:24:47relationship, which by its nature is companion at love with tons of oxytocin is how that works.
00:24:54So that's the way to understand how all this works. But it's also, it shows that when, for example,
00:24:59somebody tends to go through this really, really fast, they can scare other people off. And there is
00:25:04a phenomenon called hemophilia. I don't mean hemophilia. It's a blood disorder without the H.
00:25:10Hemophilia is a syndrome in which people fall in love almost instantaneously. And it tends to be
00:25:16more common in women than it is for men. And so women who fall in love really, really, really
00:25:21quickly, they often have problems because they're going like lickety split through this neurochemical
00:25:26cascade and guys can't keep up and the guys get scared off. So I would say that one problem is
00:25:33guys who don't get through the whole cascade and women who go too quickly through the cascade. But
00:25:37these are common problems that we see. And especially in the second case, if you're
00:25:41hemophilic, if you go too quickly, knowledge is power. This is not some sort of deterministic
00:25:47path where you're going to be stuck on this for the rest of your life. On the contrary,
00:25:50once you know this, the knowledge can actually help you slow this down and metacognitively,
00:25:56in other words, using your executive centers, decide on how you're going to behave,
00:26:00saying, "Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm doing that thing. I'm doing that thing. I'm feeling that thing,
00:26:05but I'm not going to do that thing, notwithstanding my feelings." And once again, how do you manage
00:26:09your feelings so they don't manage you? Go back to the episode on managing your emotions. And that's
00:26:14what you'll be able to use if you tend to be quite an hemophilic person. Hemophilic people are so
00:26:19emotive, they're so empathetic, they're so lovely, but they suffer. They suffer. And if that's you,
00:26:25then figure out ways to manage yourself. Go back to that episode and you'll see ways to actually
00:26:30do that. Okay, so there's lots of unbelievably useful information in this little primer on the
00:26:36neurobiology of falling in love, to be sure. But it's not just about neurobiology. Most religious
00:26:42traditions believe that there's a kind of a mystical sense in romantic love. I mean, in
00:26:48Hinduism, in the Bhagavad Purana, the authors elegize earthly love in the deity of Lord Krishna
00:26:58as a symbol of divine love. In other words, there's something divine about earthly love.
00:27:02It's a simulacrum. It's a model in the Hindu religion. It's a beautiful thing.
00:27:06In the Jewish and Christian Bible, "This is now the bone of my bones, the flesh of my flesh," said
00:27:12Adam about Eve. And you often think that it's like we become one flesh as kind of a reference to sex,
00:27:19but you know, it's one brain, man. And again, all the work that I've done talking about the
00:27:25hemispheric lateralization, the right hemisphere of the brain, this is really where communication
00:27:31happens between two people who are falling in love. And you know, after 34 years, I'm in love
00:27:35with my wife. I just am. And how do we communicate? We communicate beyond the level of just words. I
00:27:43mean, our language centers are in the left side of our brain, the Broca's area, and the Wernicke's
00:27:47area, and the left cortex. No, we're one pulsing right hemisphere, especially when things are
00:27:54working well. But even when they're not, even when we're fighting a lot, it's like, "Why are you so
00:27:59mad at me?" "I don't know." That's classic case of one flesh right there. Celebrate it. I mean, it's
00:28:06probably sometimes, but the whole point is that's the way it's supposed to work. That's the divine
00:28:11sense of what it is. Now, you might say like Brooks is such a romantic. "No, no, no, I'm a scientist.
00:28:16I'm both." Because when it comes to love, iron sharpens iron. The romance and the science,
00:28:23boy, did they ever meet up. This is also one of the reasons, by the way, when we get into the
00:28:26divinity of this thing, that people who regularly practice their religions, they have so much more
00:28:33success, generally speaking, in their relationships than those who don't. Now, again, I'm not saying
00:28:38that if you're not religious, you can't have success. I'm just saying that the odds go up
00:28:41if you do. Way lower divorce rates, way lower disillusion rates, and much, much higher levels
00:28:46of marital satisfaction. And Brad Wilcox, the University of Virginia, the Institute for Family
00:28:50Studies also shows that married couples, happily married couples who are religious, they tend to
00:28:56have a lot more sex than married couples who are not religious, which probably for secular couples
00:29:02sounds pretty surprising or it might, I don't know. Why is this? Because romantic love for really
00:29:09devout people in almost every religion, it's a manifestation of the divine. It's almost as if
00:29:16your marriage, your relationship, is an antenna to God. It's the craziest thing. And some of you
00:29:22watching will know what I'm talking about and some will be really baffled by this. But long married
00:29:27couples that have a strong religious faith, my faith or sort of any faith, they feel it's kind
00:29:32of like those old nuclear submarines where you'd have to have the first and second officers have
00:29:39a key to launch nuclear missiles. You have two keys in different parts of the sub, turn them both on,
00:29:45and then you can launch the missile. That's kind of how it feels like to have a connection to God,
00:29:50you need to have both keys turning is how that feels. And there's this really strong sense for
00:29:54a lot of religious couples that when I deny my spouse love, I'm denying her God's love.
00:30:00And again, if you're not religious, you're going, "That's crazy." But those of you who are
00:30:06religious, you'll know what I'm talking about. Einstein himself, by the way, who was not a
00:30:10traditional religious believer, but he was actually quite spiritual, the master theoretician of the
00:30:15universe's ultimate forces, he believed that it was love, romantic love, not science. That was how we
00:30:22would understand the meaning of the world and our place in it. The guy who invented the theory of
00:30:26relativity didn't say that these equations are going to help us understand the world and our place in
00:30:32it. It's romantic love, which was beyond his ability to articulate meaningfully. Okay. So what
00:30:39is it? What is love? What is love? You know, I should have defined it from the very beginning,
00:30:43but it gets back to good old Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Averroes and Maimonides and a lot of
00:30:50people in between would have defined love as to will the good of the other. Okay. So this might sound
00:30:57like I'm kind of getting off base here because I'm talking about a lot of sentiments, a lot of
00:31:01emotions, a lot of brain activity, and now I'm talking about the will, right? That the love is
00:31:06the will to go to the other as other. But that is actually the definition of what it means to be
00:31:12pair bonded with somebody. You know, if love, even romantic love, were just about a feeling,
00:31:18well, a feeling is evidence of love. It isn't love itself. The feeling of love is evidence of love,
00:31:24just like the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, kind of like happiness,
00:31:28kind of works the same way. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Well,
00:31:32the feeling of love is evidence of love. So love is an act of will and a commitment toward another
00:31:38person's good. They're good as them, is the way that that turns out. If love were just a feeling,
00:31:44man, I wouldn't have been married 34 years. I wouldn't have been married 34 minutes because
00:31:47that's probably when he had our first big argument. I mean, my wife is Spanish. Fighting is like a
00:31:54basic form of communication for them. So, yeah. So what is it? It's the will to go to the other.
00:32:00The trouble is that we don't have good vocabulary for it, especially in English.
00:32:04I mean, the fact that we got one word for love is pathetic, I have to say in English. You can love
00:32:10your wife. You can love your husband. You can love your dog. You can love your job. You can love the
00:32:15Red Sox. You can love Chicago deep dish pizza. But if you're loving all those things in the same way,
00:32:20well, there's some problems here. We need to talk. Obviously, you don't love everything in the same
00:32:25way. And we have a diminished vocabulary for the thing that we most want, at least most of us most
00:32:32want. Now, Spanish, which is my other language at this point, because Mrs. B and I, we kind of
00:32:36grew up together. And so we now speak a melange, a 50/50 melange of Spanish and English, a Spanglish,
00:32:42you might say. Spanish is marginally better for talking about love. It has two words that really
00:32:48mean that, kerer and amar. Amar is sort of deep passionate romantic love. Kerer is... It really
00:32:54means to love another person, to be sure, but you wouldn't use them interchangeably. You wouldn't say
00:33:00te amo to your sister. You wouldn't say that. You'd say te quiero, because I love you as a person,
00:33:07if that's how you express yourself, your sister. And that wouldn't be weird. So, differences, right?
00:33:13You know who got it right was the ancient Greeks. And I wish I could speak authoritatively about,
00:33:17I don't know, Sanskrit or the Dravidian languages of Southern India, which are so unbelievably rich
00:33:24in deep, deep psychology. I bet that they have great vocabularies in it, but I can't speak to
00:33:29that with any sort of authority. But Greek is unbelievable. There's seven words for love. Eros,
00:33:35which is romantic passionate love. Philia, which is brotherly love, or friendship, deep friendship.
00:33:42Agape, which is unconditional selfless love, including for the divine. Storga, which is between
00:33:50family members. Ludus, which is playful love or flirtation, which can lead to eros. Pragma,
00:33:57which means practical love and companionship. And philautia, which is self-love. And of course,
00:34:02all those things are really, really different, and they have a different verb for it, a different word
00:34:06for it in Greek for each one of those things. And this is really interesting, because it turns out
00:34:12that that's not just intellectual stuff. On the contrary, if we had a better understanding or a
00:34:16better vocabulary for different forms of love in English, we would be able to explain, for example,
00:34:21the friend zone, the dreaded friend zone. Sounds so nice, doesn't it? It's not nice, right? That's
00:34:26where two people are together and who could conceivably be fall in love, eros, mutually,
00:34:32but they don't. One has eros and the other has philia. One has passionate romantic love for the
00:34:40other and the other has friendship love. And that's just, it's sad for the one who, you know, philia
00:34:46is great. I love, I have tons of friends. I'm really glad they have philia for me, but I wouldn't
00:34:50want my wife to have philia for me. I mean, she does at this point because we have a deep kind of
00:34:54enduring love. On the contrary, we have all seven. That's what a long relationship is all about. But
00:35:00eros is the bedrock of it because we're husband and wife. This explains the mismatches that actually
00:35:06lead to heartbreak, as a matter of fact. Okay. Now, speaking of the Greeks, the reason I wanted
00:35:11to bring up the Greeks really is that the Greeks are the ones who help us understand this link
00:35:18between romantic love and the meaning of life and the meaning of life. And here's how it works.
00:35:23In Plato's symposium, which for those of you who haven't read it, Plato's symposium
00:35:28is really what it's doing. It's kind of, it's describing the words of Socrates. Socrates was
00:35:32Plato's teacher, but Socrates never wrote anything. So everything we know about Socrates's words
00:35:37actually comes from Plato. And so we don't know. I mean, did Socrates really say it? Was he taking
00:35:43dictation? Was he kind of working from memory? Probably working from memory. But the whole point
00:35:49is that in Plato's symposium, he tells the story of Socrates. When Socrates was recounting a time
00:35:55in his own youth, that he went to a prophetess named Deotima of Mantinea. Deotima of Mantinea,
00:36:02this prophetess, this really wise woman, and he asked her about love. How does love work? And
00:36:08it's this young guy and he wants to fall in love. He's really romantic and the whole thing. He says,
00:36:12"How does it work? How does it work, prophetess?" And Deotima of Mantinea talks to him about,
00:36:17describes to him what's called the ladder of love. Okay. Now, the ladder of love is something you can
00:36:22Google it if you want. In my new book, "The Meaning of Your Life," you'll get a bunch of stuff on the
00:36:27ladder of love. So I think it's awesome. And by the way, read the symposium on Plato if you haven't
00:36:32done that, because that's actually a really, really good use of your time, that talks about how
00:36:37romantic love leads to the deep meaning of life. It's the entry point. I'm not saying that falling
00:36:44in love instantaneously gives you the meaning of life. Here's how it works. The first rung of the
00:36:49ladder for most young people, most young adults who are most eager to fall in love, although don't
00:36:54get me wrong, I've met people in their 80s who fall madly head over heels in love. We're made to love
00:37:00because we're not supposed to be alone. Most of us aren't at least. That the first rung of the ladder
00:37:05is physical attraction to a single beautiful person. And by a single beautiful person, I don't
00:37:10mean who's objectively Madison Avenue on an ad beautiful. I'm talking about who in all the ways
00:37:18in their soul, their heart, and the way that they look to you in your eyes is a beautiful person.
00:37:25And your physical attraction to that person for all the things about them that make them who they
00:37:31are, that you have this, when I say physical attraction, that means you've got the attraction.
00:37:35And I described the neurobiological origins of attraction. You know how this works. That first
00:37:41feeling that you have is not, you're not an animal. You're not a dog. You're a human that's being
00:37:47initiated in the rights of deep philosophical meaning of what it means to be a human.
00:37:53That's really what Diotima of Mantinea was telling Socrates. Why? Because that is the first rung of
00:38:00the ladder, the second of which you need the first to get to the second. And the second is the love
00:38:06of the actual soul. So first you have the admiration of somebody's physical beauty, and then you have
00:38:12the love of their soul. So there was the initiation that brought you in contact with somebody, and then
00:38:19you can actually go deeper with the person. From that, only when you have a love of somebody's soul
00:38:24do you have an appreciation for something good that's not you. See how that works? It's like,
00:38:31so it's not all about me, me, me, me, me. And I have a, I know a bunch of grandsons at this point.
00:38:35And they're awesome. They're great, but they're littler, teeny tiny, they're babies. And like the
00:38:40most egotistical people in the world are babies. They kind of have to be to stay alive. Part of
00:38:45what it means to grow up and to become even an adult is to realize deeply in your soul,
00:38:52realize that as you looking out at a world of other beautiful things and beautiful people,
00:38:58the way that's initiated is by saying, wow, she's so stunning. And then to say, and she's got a
00:39:04gorgeous soul. And only when you appreciate the depth and beauty of somebody else's soul can you
00:39:09appreciate the depth and beauty of all of the good things in society that are not you. That's rung
00:39:16number three. From there, it's not just good things in society. Then you can go to the abstract and
00:39:22have a, and develop according to Socrates, a love of ideas of abstract concepts, that the love for
00:39:28things that are not you doesn't have to be limited to people and stuff. It's abstract ideas, which
00:39:34isn't easy. It requires maturity. It requires experience to be sure, but only from there,
00:39:40from the love of actual beautiful ideas, can you move to the love of what is most beautiful and
00:39:45what's actually meaningful in life. You can understand the meaning of your own life.
00:39:49That's the ladder of love that actually starts by looking at somebody across the,
00:39:55down the church pew or across the bar or in class and go, man, what a knockout. And then
00:40:03yada, yada, yada, as they used to say in Seinfeld, you know, four or five steps later,
00:40:07maybe a couple of decades later, you understand the meaning of your life, but you got to start
00:40:10somewhere. That's what Socrates' point. But that's one of the reasons that I find in my own research
00:40:16that people always say, how do I know the meaning of the life? And I would just spontaneously start
00:40:19talking about the love of their life, their soulmate, is how that actually works. So how do
00:40:25you do it? How do you initiate appropriately the neurochemical cascade, one that proceeds in an
00:40:32orderly fashion, more or less than the same speed that leads to companion that love can allow you to
00:40:39climb the ladder of love toward the meaning of your life? How do you solve the love depression
00:40:44that I talked about in the very beginning, looking at the data in your own life?
00:40:48Now, to begin with, to do this requires risk, taking risk. One of the characteristics that I
00:40:57find that's actually inhibiting falling in love the most, and this once again gets back to the
00:41:02literature that I look at every single day and what I write about, is that younger people,
00:41:07believe it or not, are actually less risk-taking than people were when they were young who are now
00:41:13my age. And this gets a lot to the work of Jean Twenge, a wonderful social psychologist at San
00:41:18Diego State University, who talks about how young adults are growing up much more slowly,
00:41:24and the way that she measures that is with risk-taking behavior. Now, some of it's pretty
00:41:28innocuous and healthy, like driving. Some of it's less healthy, like drinking and using drugs,
00:41:35which everybody says, "Oh, young people, they're drinking and taking drugs more than ever." No,
00:41:39wrong. A lot less, as a matter of fact. They're also less likely to fall in love. They're also
00:41:43less likely to have sex, and it has everything to do, she says, of a lower willingness to take
00:41:49personal risk. Now, risk is funny because there's bad risks and there's good risks, but risk in
00:41:56general is not an unhealthy thing. On the contrary, that's characteristic of being an entrepreneur
00:42:01with your life. And I don't recommend being an entrepreneur with your life by taking dangerous
00:42:05drugs and driving 100 miles an hour. That's stupid. But risks with your heart, another matter. That's
00:42:12the most entrepreneurial thing that you can do. Years ago, not that many years ago, I was giving
00:42:16a speech on Capitol Hill for a bunch of Capitol Hill staffers, people in their 20s. Now, for a
00:42:21little bit of background, Washington DC is the world's most dysfunctional dating market. I mean,
00:42:26it's everybody's climbing, and it's all about power, and it's just not a healthy way for people
00:42:31to fall in love, I have found. And so they were really deeply interested when I was talking about
00:42:37this topic. And I said, "Look, if you really want to be an entrepreneur, real entrepreneur with your
00:42:40life, give your heart away. Take a risk." That's the ultimate risk of putting at risk valuable
00:42:47resources in search of explosive returns. That's the definition of entrepreneurship.
00:42:51I thought it was clever anyway. A couple of weeks later, a guy comes up to me on a plane,
00:42:55because I'm always on a plane. And he says, "Professor Brooks." I said, "Yeah." He says,
00:43:00"I was at that talk you got on Capitol Hill about being an entrepreneur with my life,
00:43:04and to get my heart away and take a risk." And I said, "Yeah." He says, "And I can't get it out
00:43:07of my head." I said, "Yeah." He said, "So I'm on my way right now to tell a woman I've been secretly in
00:43:13love with for two years how I feel. I'm going to spill it." And I'm like, "Dude, it was only
00:43:21a speech. I'm not trying to ruin your life." I was kind of worried about that because I'm thinking,
00:43:26"Yeah, I mean, this could have consequences." And I said, "Here's my email. Let me know how it turns
00:43:32out." He said, "Okay." And I didn't hear from him, which seemed like not great. Well, I did see him
00:43:40some months later at a holiday party at the company that I was running, and he showed up. And he said,
00:43:46"Remember me?" And I said, "Yeah." And I said, "How did it go? How did it go with that woman
00:43:52that you were in love with?" And he said, "She shot me down. She wasn't in love with me. Not at all.
00:43:56She was in love with another guy. She introduced me to him. It was horrible." And I was very contrite.
00:44:02I said, "I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to ruin your life." And he said, "No, no, no, no." He said,
00:44:05"The reason I came is because I wanted to thank you." I said, "Thank me? For what?" And he said,
00:44:12"Because, you know, that was the thing I was most afraid of in my life. I mean, I just couldn't...
00:44:18I couldn't bear the thought of that happening. And it did. And I didn't die. And I'm not afraid
00:44:25anymore." You get the point, right? This makes you stronger. Now, to be sure, it is unbelievably
00:44:34painful to be rejected. I have studied the pain of social rejection. The dorsal anterior cingulate
00:44:40cortex of the brain is designed in the limbic system to make you hate social rejection. Even in
00:44:47little games when they put people in machines to look at the activities of their brains,
00:44:50and they simulate rejection by having a ball-tossing game that you're looking at on a screen, and two
00:44:57other people start excluding you from the game, it starts to feel painful in this dorsal anterior
00:45:02cingulate cortex of your brain. Imagine when somebody says to you, "You love me, but I don't
00:45:07love you." It's going to be unbelievably painful. It's intensely painful, as a matter of fact. And
00:45:14I've talked about this kind of pain in past episodes in the past. But here's the thing.
00:45:18That's how you learn. That's the only way that you learn. What do you learn? You learn about what went
00:45:24wrong. You learn that you won't die. You learn more what you're looking for. You learn that that wasn't
00:45:32the person for you, and why. That's why it's so critically important to get into the cycle of try,
00:45:37fail, suffer, try, try again. Now, I've got a lot of data on how long it actually takes
00:45:47for people to get over their heartbreak. And the answer is usually a few months, not a few years.
00:45:53It's very unusual that you have a breakup, and it lasts years and years. On the contrary, you will
00:45:57actually get over it sooner than you think. And six weeks from now, you'll be on a date with somebody
00:46:01else going, "I can't believe I love that loser so much." That's the typical thing that we actually
00:46:06find. But also, the learning that you get is really the big, big benefit from this. There's a really
00:46:12interesting paper on this, a 2018 study that looked at 160 daters who were in their 20s.
00:46:18And then they broke up around the age of 22, which is kind of the modal age to have your first big
00:46:24breakup of somebody that you're truly in love with, it turns out. And then ask them what they learned.
00:46:30And it turns out that those who actually believe they learned from their breakup, they had much
00:46:35higher relationship satisfaction subsequently and lower relationship conflict in their next
00:46:41relationship. In other words, learn, learn, learn, do the postmortem, figure out what actually went
00:46:46wrong, and you will benefit from this. But you have to fail as part of the process here so that you can
00:46:53get better. That means take a risk and be willing to fail. What do they learn, by the way? They learn
00:46:58three things. Here's what breakups teach you. Social cognitive maturity, right? That's like,
00:47:04"I know why I behaved like an idiot, and I won't do that again because I matured." Number two is
00:47:09romantic agency. "I know what I want now." And number three is coherence. You all know what that
00:47:15is because you've been following the show. That means why things happen the way they do. "I know
00:47:19why my last relationship failed, and I'm going to fix those mistakes in the future." You only get
00:47:24that from experience. This is why people, they tend to do best in marriages, for example, after
00:47:31they've had a few breakups. Not 50 breakups, not 200 breakups. We're talking about a few breakups.
00:47:38It's kind of like a mature startup is the way that that works. A couple of false starts along the way.
00:47:43Mature startups, not mergers. Certainly not hostile takeovers. Anyway, I'm not going to press that
00:47:50metaphor. All right. That's number one. Take more risk. That's the first of the protocols of how to
00:47:58fall in love and stay in love. Number two, don't look for your body double. Look for your compliment.
00:48:06This is really important. Now, I'm really interested in how technology is affecting how people
00:48:14fall in love and stay in love. 62% of long-term relationships now are starting on the apps.
00:48:20That's kind of how people meet. I talk to young people, and I say, "Why don't you just go up when
00:48:23you're having a drink after work? Go up and talk to somebody," because they're like, "Because I don't
00:48:27want them to think I'm a serial killer." Yeah. I mean, society is very complicated, and how people
00:48:33meet actually changes. I've got a lot of thoughts on that. It's very important, if you can, to meet
00:48:38people in real life. Usually, that's actually not in a bar. That's around common interests,
00:48:43whether it's a running club or church or whatever your thing actually happens to be. But probably,
00:48:48for those of you who are watching this and you're in the dating pool, you're probably using the apps
00:48:52because most people aren't. What should you be looking for? The answer is not somebody who's
00:48:57exactly like you. One of the problems with many of the apps, the apps are getting better at this,
00:49:01and I'm very bullish on what the apps are going to be able to do. I'm not anti-technology.
00:49:05But what they've often done in the past is allowed you to curate your dating profile to
00:49:10eliminate everybody who doesn't have a lot of overlap with you beyond just some basic values.
00:49:17We vote the same way. We listen to the same music. We want to go live in the same city. We work in the
00:49:22same industry, everything. And pretty soon, you're looking in the mirror, and that is truly not hot.
00:49:29I hope that's not hot to you. Why is it that more and more people often say, who curate their dating
00:49:36profiles very, very studiously and in a very careful way, that they get a lot of dates but
00:49:42they don't have much attraction? And the answer is because there's too much compatibility and not
00:49:46enough complementarity. Complementarity is difference, and difference is hot. That's really where it comes
00:49:51down to. And again, this is a neurobiological phenomenon. Famous study. Many of you have heard
00:49:57about this. This is the Wedekind et al study in biological sciences, an old study, 1995.
00:50:03This is the famous T-shirt sniffing study. And what it was was, in a nutshell really quickly, is that
00:50:10guys on the college campus, these experiments always use undergraduate dudes because
00:50:16they'll do anything for 20 bucks. They had to wear a T-shirt around for 48 hours, working out, going to
00:50:22class, no showers. And then they would take those T-shirts and put them in shoeboxes and drill holes
00:50:26in the shoeboxes. And undergraduate women who didn't know them, or they didn't know who they were, there's
00:50:31no identifying characteristics in the boxes, had to sniff, I know it's gross, bear with me, sniff the
00:50:37T-shirts and say who's most attractive simply on the basis of the smell. What do they find?
00:50:42That those who are immunologically most dissimilar from them, the women, were most attractive to them.
00:50:49Now there's a reason for this. This is called the MHC, the major histocompatibility complex.
00:50:53You know, based on smell, you don't know. It's an indication to you because your brain
00:51:00knows so much more than you're consciously aware of. Who is dissimilar enough from you such that if you
00:51:05hypothetically have offspring, who's going to have a wider immunological repertoire? You want people who
00:51:11have different defenses than you. That's what the major histocompatibility complex actually is,
00:51:17which you ascertain through the olfactory bulb in your brain, among other ways of ascertaining that.
00:51:23You can do it through sight and a lot of other ways as well. The bottom line is this. More different,
00:51:29hotter, right? But we're not curating for that when we're spending too much time looking for the body
00:51:35double. We're very narcissistic as creatures, I get it. But the more narcissistic you are and the more
00:51:40that you're picking your dating partners as opposed to somebody who actually loves you and said, "I'd
00:51:44be the perfect person for her." They're not saying it's just like her. They're saying it's enough like
00:51:49her and then enough different than her as well. That's principle number two of the protocol.
00:51:54Look for difference, not just similarity. Number three, don't fear breaking up.
00:52:02Don't fear the breakup. I've talked about this a little bit before, but if you're paralyzed
00:52:08by the possible pain, you won't do what you need to do. So this really is tied to step one of the
00:52:14protocol. You know, if you're going into business and you're horribly, horribly afraid of having a
00:52:20mishap in business, you're gonna make bad business decisions. Now, if you're not afraid at all,
00:52:24you're also gonna make bad business decisions. But all of us are a little bit afraid. I'm not worried
00:52:28about that. But people who are paralyzed by fear almost always make non-entrepreneurial decisions,
00:52:34and that's fatal when it comes to romance. Don't fear. Now, let me be a little bit more specific
00:52:41about this. Have courage even if you do feel fear because that's really what it's all about.
00:52:47Feel the fear and act anyway. Say, "Bring it on. Bring on the risk." When a relationship dissolves,
00:52:57that they have a tendency to rate mental pain at a pretty significant level. It's slightly more
00:53:05than three on a one to seven scale of mental pain severity. People have actually looked at that,
00:53:10measured that, but it falls. It falls much faster than you think. Your brain is designed to make you
00:53:18think that when you're in pain, it's never gonna go away. The reason for that is because your brain
00:53:22wants you to avoid doing things that are painful to you. These things are threats. But you know beyond
00:53:28your just basic troglodyte limbic system that there's lots of things that you need to do,
00:53:33and that means you need to understand that whereas your limbic system is saying this pain is permanent,
00:53:38it's lying to you. It's transient. And therefore, you will walk into a situation in which there is
00:53:44possible pain. What do we know about that three on a one to seven scale? It goes down on average by
00:53:52about 0.07 points on that scale each week. So if you're a 3.5 in pain after a breakup on average,
00:54:00you can expect to feel a little bit better each week, where after six weeks, you're gonna feel
00:54:04less than half as bad about it. And by that point, less than half as bad is a pretty normal level of
00:54:09pain in your life, and you're probably gonna be dating again. And that's within six months. Okay,
00:54:13now one of the quick way to deal with this, by the way, really interesting literature that talks
00:54:18about how mental pain is affected by taking acetaminophen in Europe. If you're in Europe,
00:54:23that's called paracetamol. The brand name in the United States is Tylenol. And it turns out that
00:54:28it has an impact on this. Now, I'm not recommending you do this. See your healthcare professionals,
00:54:33but extra strength Tylenol, it tends to lower heartbreak. You know, don't take more than it
00:54:39says in the label folks, obviously, to do that. But that's an interesting thing because once again,
00:54:44psychology is biology. Okay, now I've gone a long time on this. I'm gonna go more on this. As a
00:54:49matter of fact, let me go back to where I started, which is the love of my life, my wife, Esther.
00:54:54She's the person on whom I'm gonna be laying my eyes as I take my dying breath. This is really
00:55:01a big part of who I am as a person. We've grown up together, you know, through music and
00:55:07graduate school, having kids, career changes. We've moved 20 times. We're like, you know,
00:55:14wanderers, but together. You know, we always joke, "Look, if you leave me, it's fine, but you gotta
00:55:19take me with you." You know? And so I want you to meet her because we're gonna talk about this
00:55:23together. And we do this a lot. We work with couples. She does it more differently than I
00:55:27do because she's actually... Her graduate work was not in behavioral science like mine. Hers was in
00:55:33philosophy and theology. And so we're gonna get together and talk to you a little bit about how
00:55:38we talk together as a couple, two couples that are just getting together or in some various stage of
00:55:45falling in love or staying in love or getting married. And you're gonna see how she thinks
00:55:49about it. Okay. Now, a couple of quick emails and then we'll say goodbye. Linda Bittner
00:55:55by email. Thanks, Linda. I know people arrive at decisions differently, but I don't know if there's
00:56:01a right or wrong way or if there are patterns or types of decision-makers. What can you tell me
00:56:07about this? There are different kinds of decision-makers. Now, I've done work briefly
00:56:12and there's a lot more coming on hemispheric lateralization of the brain where the right and
00:56:16left hemispheres do different things. There are some people who are more right hemisphere
00:56:20decision-makers, which is to say they rely more on intuition and gut than their decisions. There
00:56:25are some who are more left-side decision-makers, which is that they rely more on data. Men tend to
00:56:31be more data-oriented and things-oriented in their decision-making, women more on intuition and on
00:56:37their gut. Obviously, the best way to do it, I hope obviously at this point if you're a fan of the show
00:56:41is you gotta use both. And if you're a natural left-side decision-maker, rely more on the right,
00:56:47consult more your gut. Think more that way and vice versa is the way that I think about it. But those
00:56:52are the two ways to do it and neither one is actually better. One of the things that the best
00:56:56couples, the most successful couples do is that they wire their hemispheres together so they can
00:57:02make smart decisions based on each other's point of view, and especially true if they're more different,
00:57:08not more the same. Tom Fitzsimmons by email, "Quick question on the wellness front." This is a good
00:57:15biology one. "I've been using cold plunges as a coffee replacement." Why choose between them, Tom?
00:57:22Anyway, "39 degrees in the tub for two minutes." Tom, you're a tough hombre. "First thing in the
00:57:26morning and I'm loving the effects." A lot of people do. "I'm curious what your take is on
00:57:30cold plunges and what the data actually say." Worth it? We're overblown. People love it just like you.
00:57:36Phenomenal. The reason that you like it instead of your coffee is because it's actually doing
00:57:40a lot of the things that coffee does, most specifically it's spiking your dopamine and
00:57:44your cortisol, which is a stress hormone produced in the cortex of your adrenal glands sitting above
00:57:50your kidneys. Great, but there's no long-run studies yet. Very, very few studies are actually
00:57:56tracking even beyond a few months versus sauna, which is very, very well studied and extremely
00:58:02beneficial and totally safe. I'm not saying that cold plunge isn't safe. I'm just saying that it's
00:58:08not very well studied. And so you do it and you like it and that's great, but we don't know if
00:58:14long-term exposure to spikes of cortisol have effects on aging. There's a lot that we don't
00:58:19know yet with respect to elevated cortisol. So proceed with caution, proceed with your eyes
00:58:23open and as always, be your own lab. Well, that's it. We've come to the end. Let me know your thoughts
00:58:30on this or anything else. Office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify,
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00:58:48life to learn more about everything I've talked about today and everything I'm going to be talking
00:58:51about in the next few weeks. And in the meantime, as you're waiting for my book to come to you,
00:58:56have a great week. Spread these ideas, lift other people up in bonds of happiness and love,
00:59:00and I'll see you next week.