Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxsnk90VwCo
We are not a monogous species. It's a social construct. And I get attacked for saying things like this. But sexual monogamy from an evolution point of view is not a good idea. That's why we have a reasonably high rate of people who have extramarital affairs. So do you think we're all somewhat pretending to be monogous? Who do you think struggles with it more, men or women? And you said that there's not a difference in well-being and satisfaction between polyamory or monogamy. Absolutely not. How do we know this? Because we've done studies on it. And I've committed the last two decades of my life to understand the neuroscience of love. Dr. animation is the Oxford trained evolutionary anthropologist using science to decode attraction, attachment styles, love addiction, and now the crucial roles of the father. So, here's the thing. When we look for a partner, we don't know we're doing it, and it involves two very distinct areas of the brain. So, there's the unconscious stage. That's where you take in loads of sensory information about them. So, for example, if you're a woman, you can smell genetic compatibility. Wait, so men can't smell women, but women can smell them? You can smell them, but it's not going to give you any information about genetic compatibility. So, your brain is going to help you assess whether they're any good for you. If you get a good ping, certain chemicals, the very core of the brain take away the fear. It gives you motivation. Now, human love is so complicated. So, for example, the chemistry that underpins love is also involved in neurodeiversity. So, if I have ADHD or autism, how am I more likely to struggle in love? This is really, really important. First of all, Dr. Machan, why are you talking about fatherhood? The way our culture treats fathers is wrong. The myths we carry about fathers are wrong. Men have a very specific role in child development. And I wasn't expecting to find this when I first started, but it's fundamental for a child to thrive and survive and be successful. So, what we're finding is this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show
and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. Anna Machan, what is the the mission you've so far committed your life to? And and I guess adding to that, why I've committed the last two decades of my life to understanding human love and understanding human close relationships. Because as an anthropologist, I understand that love sits at the center of what it is to be human. If you strip everything else away and you just you've got your food, you've got your water, the next thing you need are your relationships, is your love. And we are so lucky as a species to experience love in quite a complex way with many different types of people and beings. And we know that it's like the number one thing in terms of your your health, mental, physical, your longevity, your happiness, your well-being. And I think we need to understand it particularly in a world where we're starting to get a lot of input in terms of technology and AI and the world is getting quicker. We need to go back to who we are really at our core and what love really is. is and and I suppose that's what I've I've given my life over to is to really explain to people who are you because your love is your identity essentially. And you use the word anthropologist there. What is an anthropologist? Okay. So an anthropologist is somebody who studies the human species. I'm an evolutionary anthropologist which means I sit at the scientific end of it. You consider sort of the cultural end or the scientific end. And I study how evolution has shaped us and also why things evolved. So for example, why did love evolved? Why did fatherhood evolve? Um, and I use lots and lots of different techniques, scanning and genetics and all these different things to be able to answer that question. I've got another book sat in front of me here which is I guess somewhat linked to love which is about fathers. Yeah. So, how did how did
these two things come together? We've got a book here about love and then we've got a book about fatherhood and you're you're very well known for talking on the subject of fatherhood. What what is the link? How did the link come to be and why why are you talking about fatherhood? We have the wrong idea about fathers. The way our culture deals with fathers, treats fathers is wrong. The myths we carry about fathers are wrong. The influence they have on their children and ultimately on our society is fundamental. So the link came because I had a child and like most couples who have a baby, you know, we talked about it. We were like, we're going to going to start trying to have a baby. Then we became pregnant, which was great. Did the pregnancy test together. Went to the antiatal classes, went to the scans, all wonderful. went in to have the baby and it didn't turn out how it was supposed to. I was very, very ill. I lost a lot of blood. My daughter was poorly when she was born. And afterwards, I was offered loads of counseling. Would you like a debrief? Would you like? And I was like, well, to be absolutely honest, I'm okay cuz I passed out. I literally don't remember anything. But my husband witnessed it all. And he basically saw a car crash in slow motion with two people in it who he loved very deeply. Um, and I completely understand why it was a very stressful information. But nobody explained to him what was happening. And so they mopped me up, took my baby, took her to neonatal care and left him in the room on his own. And I was breathing very shallowly and he was scared. And the cleaner came in and said and was cleaning away. And he just said um to the cleaner, do you think she's dead? Cuz I was breathing so shallowly. And the cleaner went, no, I don't think so, mate. I think they would have told you if she was dead. But after that, he couldn't talk about the birth. He couldn't imagine the birth. He couldn't deal with the emotions from the birth for a good two years afterwards. And he was really worried about having another kid. And this made me really angry actually cuz I was like, hold on, we went into this together and he's literally been discarded like he doesn't matter. And to me, he's fundamentally important. And then as our daughter grew, I saw the amazing bond he built
with her, how integral he was to her life. And so when I went back to university at Oxford to study and to do my work, I thought, well, I'm an anthropologist. Okay, let's look up what do we know about fathers in our society. And there's literally nothing. There was a lot of work on absent fathers. Uh, and their impact is is fundamental. We know that. And there was a lot of quite stereotypical work on young fathers, teenage fathers. Nothing on the majority of dads who whether they co-reside or not stick around. So I started with some really simple questions. uh what happens to a man when he becomes a father? Does he alter biologically, psychologically? How does he build his bond with his child? What's the nature of that bond? Does he have a role in child development separate to that to mom? Because when I started 20 years ago, the mantra was dads didn't undergo any changes. Uh dads did not have a bond like mom to their children. It was not as intense and it certainly wasn't an attachment relationship, which we all know are really intense, important relationships. And as an evolutionary anthropologist, I was like that that can't be right because human fatherhood is rare. We are one of only 5% of mammals that have investing fathers and we're the only ape now. For something that rare to evolve, it has to have had a purpose because it led to amazing anatomical social upheavalss. So that's what I began to do 20 years ago. I started asking those questions. I recruited my first group of 15 firsttime fathers when their partners were three months pregnant and off we went. So the question that's front of mind for me is is what is it upstream that made us devalue the role of a of a father? Where did that come from? Because fathers are somewhat seen as surplus a requirement I think. Where did that come from? It's cultural. It's entirely cultural because there are cultures in the world who don't think that and fathers are very very integral. So in fact one of the most hands-on fathers in the world is from the aka tribe in the Congo. They keep physical contact with their children for 50% of the day. They carry them around. They co-sleep. Not the mom. They co-s sleep with the with the child. They are the one that that carries the far the child through the jungle when they're hunting
and gathering. They are the one that sings to the child, reads stories to the child. They even and this is the bit that always gets the headlines. They even will offer a nipple to soo the child until the mother is ready to breastfeed. So, it's cultural. We have this idea that and it's partly it partly came very much from the Victorian period where fathers were seen to be disciplinarians and and providing the money and that was the Victorian idea of being a father. It's also to do with our with our with our politics in society for a long time. So women weren't able to go out to work and that's where we've remained till very very recently. But there's no biology behind that. That's entirely cultural. And I think also it's very much the case. Yes, women today we have contraception so we can control our our production of children. We can earn our own money. We can protect ourselves. We can look after ourselves. So actually in one sense you think well yeah what's the dad for? because I can do all those things which historically the father had to do when women's positions were different. But and we've sort of carried on with that and there's become this mantra of actually then we just we just don't need them. I mean I've even been to lectures where they've decided that the Y chromosome is going to become obsolete and that we really won't need dads at all even to conceive children at some point and which to me sounds ludicrous and that's where it's come from and we've embedded that and we embedded it in our media. So dads were always bumbling or useless or absent. you know, Daddy Pig is the ultimate bumbling, useless father, and we laughed at it. We think it's funny. Maybe the way that these these two subjects initially do sort of dovetail into each other, is when we think about the state of love and the role of men and women, you touched a bit on there when you talked about how women are earning more and more, so men are becoming a little bit more apparently obsolete in what they can offer to a monogous relationship. There were some stats that I was looking at before you arrived, and I'll read them out to you. The stats say that only 38% of single women are actively looking to date versus 61% of single men. Um, which is a huge gap. Morgan Stanley projects that 45% of
women aged 25 to 44 will be single by 2030. Um, in England and Wales, a record almost 40% of adults have never married. For women aged 30 to 34, the figure is now almost 60%. Which is the lowest ever. Women initiate roughly 70% of divorces, showing a greater willingness to exit marriages that are unsatisfying than men. And obviously, I think one of the points you were sort of touching on there is that women are now much more educated um as it relates to things like college degrees compared to men. There's this bigger picture around relationships and love that kind of sits in the background of this and women's rise in independence, which I think we could all agree is is always going to be a positive thing. But downstream from that is a clear issue in how we form monogous heterosexual relationships these days. And also like you know part of the reason one of many reasons I wanted to speak to you is I was I was thinking about my friendship group and the women that I know and more I spoke to a friend of mine a couple of couple of weeks ago and I I said to her like what like what are your goals and she said I currently have about 150 plants and I want to get to about 250 plants. I I said to her do you want you want to get married? You want to have kids? She went no interest in that. What I want is I want to get to the point where I have financial freedom. so I can buy a house and I want to get over 200 plants. Yeah. And this is it sounds kind of funny, but it's an increasingly familiar story that I'm hearing which is once upon a time the goal would have been get married, you know, have kids, build a life together. Now it's more individualistic. What's your thoughts here? What is the state of love at the moment? Well, it's definitely more individualistic. We've become a more individualistic society. So we are looking more at yes what do I want rather than what what in a way contributes to community which is what collectivist societies do women in the past had to get married you couldn't have children out of wedlock that was definitely not acceptable you had to get married because uh that's where your financial security was and that's what you did quite often those marriages
weren't based on love they were based on very pragmatic decisions about this is where I need to be so women have been freed from that they don't have to do that anymore the other thing to say is they've realized that romantic love isn't the only love in the box what we call their key survival critical relationship in many cases. So the relationship that's going to support them emotionally, physically, practically, all those sorts of things are their female friends, their chosen families and that's who they're turning to. And that's why we're seeing less and less women saying that romantic love is a priority or parental love is a priority. And in one sense, that's great because actually it's showing that all these loves are equal and I can I can love in that way. And I think that's wonderful in one sense, but yes, it does mean that we're turning away from that idea of long-term cohabiting companionship. And so when people say to me, for example, is marriage going to die? Are we going to end? No, I don't think it is. We will always, for example, have a ritualistic marking of a romantic relationship, whatever sex you are and whatever sexuality you are, I think that will always exist. But we're going through a bit of a sea change. We're also seeing it in older women, post-menopausal women, because it's only really very recently that we've got to a point where we have a long post-menopausal lifespan as women. Usually, you know, 100 years ago, if you got to 50, which is the age for menopause, the standard age, you were lucky if you were still alive. But now that period of time could be 20, 30, 40, even 50 years. So I think women post 50 and they there's been a massive uptick in post50 divorces instigated by women is they look at their partner and they think you were a great dad. I selected you when when that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to have children. I wanted to build fun. But I look at you now and I think but is this the person I want to do the next phase of my life with because that's a very different set of needs. And so we're seeing women actually looking no do you know what I'm going to start a fresh? I'm going to do something different. And it might be they look for a different relationship or they might be yeah they decide I'm
not going to have another romantic relationship. What is the difference that needs just out of curiosity? I want to make sure that my partner doesn't dump me when she hits 50. Okay. The difference is so when we when we are younger and we look for a partner for a romantic relationship we don't know we're doing it. There are two stages of attraction in romantic love. There's the unconscious stage which we share with all the mammals and then there's the the conscious stage which is very different. That involves your neoortex which looking at this is this big wnup bit on the outside. Human love is special because it involves two very distinct areas of the brain. So this is the limbic area of your brain. This bit in the center here, that's your unconscious brain. That's where your emotions sit, where nurturing behaviors sit, where attachment behaviors been. It's very evolutionarily ancient. It's been around for millions and millions of years. And this is where initially attraction starts. And what you do is you lock eyes with someone across a crowded room and you take in loads of sensory information about them. So you take in visual information. What do they look like? What does their body shape tell me about their value? How are they moving? Do they look healthy? If you're a woman, you will give them a good sniff. Um, and you can smell genetic compatibility. Wait, so men can can't smell women, but women can smell them. Well, you can smell them, but it's not going to give you any information about genetic compatibility. So, what what happens is a woman, the major hystocompatibility complex, what's that? It underpins your immune system. It's a complex set of genes. And bizarrely that set of genes also underpins your smell, your ability to smell your olfactory system. Okay? And in women they can smell how genetically close a male's MHC is major hystocompatibility complex. How close it is to theirs because you don't want too close because you don't want to breed. Also you want it distant because then your child gets a really lovely diverse immune system because they've got a diverse set of genes underpinning it. So you smell them. It's not a conscious thing. So people say to me, "Oh, but you know what about after shave? What about perfumes? Or it's not conscious. You do
not know you're doing it. And one of the things that will be fed into your limbic area is the result of that little test. If you're a woman, what what do they smell like? How do they know this? Have they tested this? Okay, we've tested this in several ways. There was the very famous t-shirt test which tell people love. Um where you make a load of men put on a very plain t-shirt. They're not allowed to wash. They're not allowed to use deodorant. Not allowed to do anything. Wear it for 24 hours. Then we put it in some ziploc bags and we went get some poor unsuspecting woman to sniff them all. And the idea is that the one she finds most attractive to sniff is the one which is genetically furthest away from her. And it does work. It works. When you genotype her, you can see that they are different. We don't have to do that anymore. We have very sophisticated genotyping technology now. If you really wanted to, there's a company in Switzerland that will do it for you. So you can spit on something, send it off with your partner, and they will tell you how close your major hystocompatibility complexes are. I'm just wondering why men didn't evolve to be able to do that. We think it's probably because the cost to a woman of getting it wrong and having a baby who is basically too genetically close is much greater than it is for a man because she is basically taking herself out of that opportunity to to reproduce for nine months plus the bit after to look after that child. And so that's a really long period of time. Whereas a man, it's not that costly. Okay. So you've taken in all that information from the sensors. It's all woring around in here. And what your brain is actually doing is your brain has got a very complicated algorithm which is working out the biological market value of the person in front of you. Now the biological market value is how likely that person is to be reproductively successful. Because from an evolutionary point of view, that's the whole point of your existence. Whether you want kids or not, guys, that's the point is you have to reproduce. Have some lovely, healthy kids, raise them to maturity so they can reproduce because we just want your genes from an evolutionary standpoint. We're not interested in you as a personality. And so you want somebody
who has got the highest likelihood of being good at that. And we can tell that from lots of things to do with how someone looks, the pitch of their voice, how they smell. What men actually do is they look at the waist hip ratio. You don't know you're doing it, but eyetracking experiments show that men do it. They don't know that it's completely unconscious. Wonderful studies been done with people walking down the street with we not mentioning to them what we're looking for. They're wearing eyetracking uh technology and what they do is the first thing they glance at even if they don't know it is the waist tip ratio before. For example, they will look at the face and what they're calculating is what that ratio is because we know cross-culturally the most attractive ratio is a 7. And that is actually a classic hourglass cross-culturally. Cross-culturally if we go and it's nothing to do with weight because some cultures like bigger weights than other cultures. Nothing to do with weight. It's to do with the ratio. And so if we were show if we show that ratio to different cultures, they will go it's that one. And the reason for that is there is a direct link between that ratio and for example fertility. So if a woman has that it shows she's got high circulating estrogen. It shows she's not near menopause because when we go to menopause we we get more of a male figure. It goes towards one the ratio because of the drop in estrogen and the and the buildup in testosterone. So we know that there's a link between 7 and a range of illnesses uh chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, certain forms of cancer. So actually what you're assessing there is how healthy how fertile is this woman? So, if I take myself off the market for a period of time, am I going to end up with some kids? And is she healthy to raise them? In those eyetracking studies, what do women look at? Women look at slightly different things. And for women, what's really interesting is it's not as visual. So, women look at the at the shoulder waist ratio. So, that's Yes, there we go. And what you're looking for as a woman is a triangle. So, nice broad shoulders, narrow waist. Okay. Okay. Now the ideal there is 1.6. What I will say before men rush off and
measure their weight is really only Olympic athletes have 1.6. 1.6 meaning the top half should be 1.6 bigger than than your waist. Okay. So if my waist is let's say 100. Yes. That's how bad my math is. Yes. This needs to be 160. 160. Okay. So my waist is 100. The top is 160. Yes. Okay. Okay. But that's actually really only Olympic athletes. Please everyone don't rush off and worry. Um but what that's showing is that shows certain things which are desirable in a male. Um so things like physical strength. So if you have a big upper body and a narrow waist, first of all, it shows you're not holding fat around here, which is a real sign of ill health for men. It shows you that you're very fit around here. It shows that you've got very broad shoulders. You are muscular. You are able to to protect and provide. It's a sign of reasonably high testosterone. Testosterone is linked to success in men. Okay? So it shows that I'm I'm a successful person in our society that's successful socially and successful financially. Testosterone is linked to success in men. Yes. Yes. Because it makes you very competitive. Okay. So we get all these things. You take all that in. You take in that visual information. You do your little algorithm in your brain which obviously you don't know is happening. If you get a good ping as in yes this person has a good biological market value. I like that. What happens is in the very core of the brain in the middle. So this is this is the very core of the brain here. There's a a structure in there called the nucleus cumbent. It's full of dopamine and oxytocin receptors that fires off, goes completely mad if we look at it on the screen. And dopamine and oxytocin flood that system. And the reason why they are important is in a way they are the hormones of attraction. So oxytocin lowers your inhibitions to starting new relationships. Okay? So it takes away the fear. And the way it does that is it quietens your amydala. So the amigdula is a tiny little structure down here at the bottom and it it's where fear sits and that's the thing that if you're not feeling confident has that monologue in the back of your head going okay you're just you're just not very good at this. You're going to walk across the bar. You're going to say hello and they're going to humiliate
you. So it quietens that area. We see less activity there. So you've got more confidence. Also oxtoin makes you feel quite chilled. It's quite nice. And then dopamine is also released because dopamine is your hormone of motivation. And if you just had oxytocin, you might be so chilled, you sat on the barcel and you did not move because you're having a lovely time. So dopamine is there to go, no, you actually have to go across the bar and you have to say hello. And so they work really, really well together. And they also work together to make your brain more plastic. So I have to ask you then, if I'm a single person, yes, and with what you've just told me about the brain, I'm trying to increase the probability that someone will be attracted to me and form a relationship to me. M what kind of behavior do I need to be embodying to cuz I want to I want to reduce the fear part of their brain so that they're they're more comfortable and I want that oxytocin and dopamine to be firing. Yes, absolutely. So quite often people say to me how can I hack my first date? So the way you can hack your first date is you can do an activity which releases betaendorphine and dopamine and oxytocin. The best one I have found which I I appreciate is a niche interest is some form of dancing in couples. ballroom dancing, you know, tango, whatever it is, because first of all, you're touching. So, you get released oxytocin and betaendorphine. They're both released by touch. You're moving around. As any gym bunny knows, exercise produces betaendorphine. Hopefully, you're not that great at this. So, you're going to laugh a lot because you're actually a little bit rubbish. Okay? So, you're releasing lots and lots of lovely oxytocin dopamine and betendorphine doing that. Then afterwards, you need to go and have a curry. Okay? Because betaendorphine evolved initially as your body's painkiller. That's stellar role it has. Over time it's been co-opted into our social uh sphere. But we know you have pain receptors in your gut. So if you have a curry, your gut gets a little bit irritated because it's a little bit spicy. So don't have a coma. And it produces and and we know that that will also help you help you feel more euphoric, help you feel more relaxed and help that
person be more attracted to you because they will also get a hit of it. So that that's your ideal date. I appreciate it's very niche and not everyone will want to do that, but there are ways and then I'm going to take her to the comedy store. Yeah. And have a really good belly laugh. A proper laugh produces beta endorphin. Okay. Yeah. Had we finished with the Well, so what you're doing, your biological market value comes out. As I say, you hit dopamine oxytocin. Your amydala quietens. You feel much more confident. You feel much more chilled. Dopamine motivates you to walk across the bar and off you go and you strike up conversation. And that is the way attraction works in all mammals. It's completely unconscious. So you don't know any of this is happening. What's different in humans is very quickly after that, particularly once they've opened their mouth, it all starts kicking off in the outer area of the brain. So your neoortex. So the major social area of the brain is here. This is your prefrontal cortex. And your prefrontal cortex is where all those social uh abilities sit, you know. So um trust uh reciprocity ability to maintain ability to abstract about your relationship or ability to daydream about what it's going to be and that's where all that sits. So we start seeing firing off here and what's really what's really important for human love is there is a connection between this area of the brain which is known as the striatum which is unconscious and this area of the brain the prefrontal cortex. So your unconscious brain and your conscious brain can work together in attraction and also this area of the brain at the back which is known as the mentalizing empathizing area of the brain. So we need to have empathy in relationships. It's the basis of love. So understanding someone's emotional state and being able to respond to it appropriately and also mentalizing. So mentalizing is mind readading. What's their intention? What are they going to do next? You need it for conversation. You also need it to spot a cheat because you need to check someone's intention. So the mentalizing area of the brain is important. The sad bit and I'll explain this in a minute is is unfortunately that bit shuts down a little bit which isn't very helpful but
we'll talk about that. So then as soon as they open their mouth you start to contemplate them consciously and what you contemplate consciously in terms of your attraction can actually override the unconscious bit. So you might have had this amazing feeling of, you know, lust and chemistry as you walk across the bar thinking, "Wow, this person's amazing. I'm feeling astonishing." They open their mouth and they say something to you which is just, you know, unconscionable or awful or they've got no sense of humor or they're really unkind or whatever it might be and suddenly that bit will step in and go, "Uh-uh, nope, this person is not for me." And that can override the biology. But that's why what we say and I always say the brain is the sexiest organ in the body because ultimately it's what you express with your brain that is going to really determine whether or not this love is going to go anywhere. And that's what you say. Because ultimately as humans the thing that makes us the most successful species on the planet is our brain. Not your shoulder waist ratio, not your waist hip ratio. It's actually your brain. Because you want your kid to have the most creative, flexible, funny, intelligent, emotionally intelligent brain they can have. And that's what you're looking for in a partner in the long term. So based on what you know about attraction and falling in love and all those things, what is like the worst thing one could say in terms of the themes, the types of things someone could say that would just completely put you off. So I think probably the absolutely worst thing you can say and this comes from a lot of data saying what's the most important is to say something unkind. So we know regardless of everything else, the one thing that people want in a long-term relationship is somebody kind. So something critical of somebody else in the room, particularly something crit I mean, you don't know what that person's interests are, but something critical about something that's very important to them. Don't be alarmed. The waiter, waitress. Yeah. Exactly. That's why how people treat I mean, personally, I find people who treat waiters enraging, you know, badly enraging. Um, that's why because it's a rare
representation of who you are at your core or they express a value which goes completely against a value that you have because we know in terms of long long-term compatibility, it's things to do with personality, it's things to do with long-term values or beliefs that are the most important things. So, let's say somebody said something horrendously homophobic or something like that or something racist, that's an immediate right. No, this person is not for me. What about Ix? Because I see seem to have emerged as like a it's so it's got a friend of mine who's she's never been in a relationship. She's um she's just 37 years old, 38 years old. And I remember one day she was like, "Steve, what am I doing wrong?" And I'm not listen I was never really a dater. So I have no right to to tell someone what they're doing right or wrong. But she showed me her dating profile. And in a dating profile she said to me, I said no to this guy and I looked at this guy he's like a he's like a stud. He's beautifully good-looking. was really really kind in the messages he had sent. She goes, "But if you look in the background of his photo, there's boxes on top of his wardrobe." And she was like, "So I said no." Right now, from an evolutionary perspective, you can go, "Okay, maybe he's living at his mom's house. Maybe he's just moved in. Maybe what? Whatever. Maybe he's not a settled person." But really, there is become a culture of women and men excluding each other based on extremely surface level things. Now I'm like, does that is that the preffrontal cortex doing its job or is that something else? It is the prefrontal cortex doing its job. I would say it's not doing its job terribly well. The ick is a really recent thing that was generated by social media. And this idea of narrowing in closer and closer and closer and what people like to call red flags and you don't get a lot of information from online dating because you don't get a lot of sensory information to help you make a decision. So people become more and more obsessive. What's in the image? What's in the image? What can I get about this person? And they start to become obsessed with tiny tiny things. What ultimately people find attractive is very very complicated. It's there are so many different things that feed into
attraction. Whether or not somebody has boxes on top of their wardrobe is very unlikely to be even vaguely important in terms of compatibility. I don't think they should be called dating apps. I think they should be called introduction apps. And that's actually what the great Helen Fcher said. She said they're introduction apps. They broaden your pool. They make more people available to you. That's it. You're not having a date on that app. You're not learning about that person on that app. You're literally seeing them for the first time. And as soon as you can get in the room with them and you can let your brain do what it's really good at, half a million years of evolution, that's what you should do because they handicap your brain. They give you very little information to go into that algorithm. You said something really interesting there which kind of dubtales into what I was saying about my friend who's never dated but is struggling in dating. I know a growing number of people that are going on like a hundred dates a year and having no luck. And just like mathematically I go surely there must have been someone suitable in that pool of 100 people a year that you've met. Yeah. What is going on here? It's two things I think. First of all, as I've said, it's the low cost of dating apps. So in the old days when I was dating, going on a date was a real investment of time and energy. So you would probably meet someone at work, you'd meet someone at a bar, you'd meet someone through a friend, which was a real blind date. And you'd, you know, spend your time thinking, what am I going to wear? and I've got to go somewhere with this person and spend some time with this person, probably some financial investment as well, get myself all ready, spend an evening with them. And that was how you were going to meet somebody. So, you invested time and you weren't going to do that unless you were serious, to be honest. Because otherwise, I'll stay at home. I'll do something else. I'll go to the pub with my friends. Whereas now, because we can do it, we can literally go on a dating app anywhere on the tube, while we're cooking dinner, while we're watching Netflix, anytime we want. It's low cost, low investment. I read a study that showed it was in a different context,
but it essentially showed that the amount you invest in something correlates to the amount that you appreciate the thing. Absolutely. They did this study where they let people into a boring um forum without having to pass any entry test and then they asked them how much they appreciated the boring forum and people said it's it's uh it's boring. Yes. And then they got another group of people, they made them go through this sort of rigorous test to get into this boring forum and then they asked them how much do you appreciate the forum. They said it's great. Yeah. I'm obviously paraphrasing there, but it just showed this link between the amount you invest in a process is the more you you appreciate it. And I think back to being I don't know 14 years old going on my first date and the the whole process of getting ready to go to the cinema and thinking about my outfit for 3 days and then going there and being nervous and I didn't have much money so this was like a big thing and then how much you know I almost felt like I fell in love with the person irrespective just because of the effort I'd put in I feel like I fell in love with them. So So yeah. So that's so so it's partly the low cost thing. It's partly because all those people that if you were doing it in person, your brain would filter out. Let's say there were 100 people in the room, your brain would quite quickly filter out most of them as no no no no no no maybe one or two might because you can't filter in that way on an app. You kind of take the punt on all these dates because you're like otherwise how else am I going to actually meet this person? you can't just have a casual chat by the coffee machine at work or you know meet them through some friends in the pub where you would do that assessment without really making that much effort whereas because on a dating app the only way you can meet that person is to actually go on a date with them and do all that you will end up going on a hundred to do that filtering process. So it's partly that as well and the last thing is the paradox of choice. Yeah. So, we are really, really bad at making choices when there's a lot of options. And the paradox of choice is very powerful in relation to dating apps because literally, particularly if you're good-looking and you get a lot of
matches, there's like a smorggas board of people out there that you can carry on flipping or you can make a choice. And it's our brains are not set up for that. You know, a 100 years ago when we were trying to find a partner, you would maybe have the people in your village who you grew up with to choose from. If you had a horse, you could maybe have the people in the next village or even a town. Wow. And that was who you chose from and it was a very small pool. Now you can go anywhere in the world, turn on your dating app and possibly have, you know, hundreds of people to meet and your brain can't do that. I mean, we can all think about it as well in the context of restaurants. If you go to Thailand, Yeah. they give you like a a catalog. Yes. The menu is a catalog. They're like, "We will make anything." Yeah. And you sit there for like Yeah. 45 minutes thinking, "Do I want fish, chicken, eggs?" But then you go to like a London fancy restaurant and there's like we do this. This is it. So that's why you end up with people who Yes. go on 100 dates and don't actually end up with anybody because they haven't had that opportunity to filter. Monogamy and polyamory. Yes. So can you define both of those words? And um the thing that I found really striking is I think I heard you say that satisfaction in either dynamic there polyamory or monogamy is roughly the same because I thought people in monogous relationships were supposed to be way more happy than people that are in polyamorous relationships. No, not at all. So monogamy is a relationship state where there are two people who are we okay we have to find two sorts of monogamy. There's sexual monogamy that is you are exclusive to that other person sexually. You have sex with nobody else and there is social monogamy and that is you live with that person exclusively. So within the UK, most people, let's say if they have children, are socially monogous. They live in a household with their children with two people in it. Whereas sexual monogamy, you can be socially monogous and not sexually monogous. So they're two different things. But monogamy, if we talk about it in sort of lay terms, is two people who are exclusive to each other in terms of love, in terms of sex, and in terms of possibly living
together. Monogamy itself is a social construct mostly. We are not a monogous species. There are in fact very few monogous species in the world. Maybe I think I read a book the other day. It says something like 0.002% of the animals on this planet are monogous because what you will see in the wild and what you see mostly with humans is social monogamy. They live together but we know that the infidelity rate is sits generally at around 50%. So 50% of those households are not sexually monogous. Um and in fact from an evolutionary point of view being sexually monogous is a really quite bad idea because um you are limiting yourself to a very narrow gene pool and that's why there are very few creatures in the world that are truly sexually monogous. I when I was doing my masters my professor studied gibbons. Gibbons at the time were known to be the monogous ape and he studied he did a really longitudinal study and he was the first to realize that no they weren't. They were all sneaking off and doing it behind the rock with somebody else but they were living together. But the female was going to find some better jeans somewhere else. This guy, brilliant parent, not great jeans. I'm going to go behind a rock and mate with this really good-looking gibbon over here because I'm going to get some good jeans and then he's going to raise the kid. And the and the guy is like, well, you know, I'm obviously going to have offspring here, but actually, you know, mating with another female is not particularly costly to me. So, I'll just go and do that over there and let's hope she can raise them on her own or maybe her partner will raise them for me. So, there are very few. So we have monogamy in in mainly in the west um because it's a socially prescribed form of organization and it was imposed because it is a form of control. It mainly sits in terms of rules particularly in religion but also there were many legal rules. For example in in Britain you can't be you can't have two marriages. You can't be a bigamist. And it's about making everybody control. Because if we if we all just gave in constantly to precisely what our drives were saying, there'd be kind of chaos. And those in power wouldn't be able to predict what anybody is going to do
because actually I'm just going to go I feel, you know, sexually attracted to whoever that is over there. I'm going to go marry with them, but I'm going to come back and live here, but then I've got a kid over there and it's it's all really really confusing. So over time when civilization first arose the more complex we got and as we started to live together in cities those in control were like okay I really needed to be able to predict what these lesser beings are going to do so I'm going to impose monogamy you can only live with one person and basically have sex with one person nobody actually ever only had sex with one person but we're going to look like we do and those are the rules and that's why we have legitim legitimacy rules about children and inheritance and all that kind of thing because it maintains control. So monogamy is yeah simply a social construct. It's not something that we've biologically evolved to do. And we know that part you know there are many countries in the world where monogamy isn't what is prescribed. How are those cultures getting on the ones that aren't monogous? Fine. What what cultures are those? So you tend to get so so for example in certain religions. So in certain forms of Islam for example men can have many wives. There are certain um tribes which exist within sort of South America and in certain areas of Africa where you can have many wives. For example, there are some um groups in Nepal in the Himalayas where we have what's known as polyandry. So one woman has many husbands. Um usually the reason why these different um groupings evolved like monogamy is it's something to do with economics generally. So for example in Nepal in these areas because they still have um male inheritance of land. If let's say we've got a family farm and there's five brothers if all of those five brothers split the inheritance then that farm would become uneconomic. You wouldn't be able to farm it and make money. So over time what's involved is one woman will marry all the brothers so that when they inherit the farm they will all get it will carry on passing down essentially. So if it goes against our evolutionary design to be in monogous relationships, doesn't that mean that there's a lot of people who are
struggling against their Yeah, absolutely. And that's why we have a a reasonably high rate of people who have extrammarital affairs. It's also why people who are polyamorous or indeed have open relationships say actually it's the more truthful way of being human because all they're doing is following their drives and they actually believe that it's more moral because if you put forward a monogous front and you have an affair, you are lying to people. You are keeping a secret from people you profess to love. Whereas if you're polyamorous or you're in an open relationship, you're actually openly saying this is my drive. This is the reality and I'm being truthful with everybody about it. you can enter a relationship with me or not on the basis of truth. And that's what a lot of polyamorous people particularly will argue is that they're really representing what is for most people an ancestral state. Polyory is difficult because unlike open relationships, open relationships such as such as swinging or or being open, we call them consensual non- monogamy. That's just based on sex. So you're not spreading your love relationship, that emotional investment, that emotional intimacy amongst more than one person. Polyamory is uh being open and having several sexual partners and also having several emotionally intimate relationships at the same time. And I think people struggle more with that because of the issues of of jealousy um and the fact that that goes quite strongly against even our social ideas about monogamy where we all sort of live in pairs. I've got a friend of mine that's uh secretly in an open polyamorous relationship basically where there's two couples and they are together. Yeah. So there's four of them basically. But they they don't talk about it publicly because of the judgment. Yeah. And I think maybe part of the issue is that judgment that that's for the polyamorous people I I've interviewed particularly for my book that was the major thing is that they were very happy in the relationship. The relationships were going really really well. But what was difficult was being open about it. Particularly with for example I'm talking to one woman who was like like older members of the family. So she was going to a family wedding.
She was and when she went to these occasions with this family, she could only ever take one of her partners. It always had to be the same partner because they had no idea the other partner existed because that would be very difficult for them to take. Also, we know from studies that have been done looking at people's attitudes to polyamorous people. It they are seen as immoral. They are seen as um unloving. They're seen as cold because they have this ability to love lots of many. They can't truly love anybody because they're splitting their heart between all these different people. Polyamorous people look at it the other way. As I've said, they actually think it's very moral because they're being truthful. Polyamorous relationships tend to be based on very open communication. That's one of the rules is that is everybody still happy? Is everybody still happy with where the boundaries are? Has anybody upset anybody else? So, it's it's very very open. And they also believe that and in some ways the support from this, you know, we are able to to love many friends at once. We're able to love many children at once. They say actually they don't split their their heart. It's not a zero- sum game that you get 50% and you get 50%. Actually, that each time they take somebody into their lives, their heart just gets bigger. Do you think we're all somewhat pretending to be monogamous? I think some people are happier with monogamy. We know that partly from a genetic point of view. Um, so there are some people, no, I don't think struggle with it, but I do think a reasonably significant number of people probably do. Who do you think struggles with it more, men or women? It really depends. Do you know something that one of the major misnomers in love research is that there is much difference that there's this major difference between men and women. There really isn't. There really isn't. It's more about who you are at your core. More about attachment style, personality, your life experience, your genetics, all these sorts of things are much more of a factor in whether or not you will be comfortable with monogamy or any of those aspects than whether or not you're male or female. And again, you said that there's not not a difference between
well-being and satisfaction levels versus monogous and polyamorous relationships. No, absolutely not. How do we know this? Because we've done studies on it. We've we've asked we've done we use the same satisfaction scales about, you know, um how satisfied are you in your relationship with various aspects of that relationship? And they come out as being absolutely no different. For what it's worth, babe, I'm I'm happy with our relationship. I'm more than happy being monogamous. I I find it to be a much much easier life. Well, the only thing polyamorous people say is you have to have a cracking Google calendar. Yeah. The time. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the first thousand days. So, you really believe that the first thousand days of a child's life are the most critical. Yes. And linked to this is the role of both the mother and the father. It's long been assumed that the father is surplus to requirements that they're not really that important. as long as they're, you know, in the stereotypical context. As long as they're providing for the family, they don't really need to be around. Is that true? And what do we need to know about how formative those first thousand days are for a child? Okay, first of all, no, it's not true. Um, h it's absolutely fundamental, I think, for a child to get some input from a father. I'm going to define father. In the west, we're a bit obsessed with the term biological father. And we always describe that as the real father. Even if he's not around, even if that child has been brought up by a stepfather, an adoptive father, what we call a social father, which is a grandfather, an uncle, a best friend, an older brother. When I say father, people assume I mean biological father. I don't. I mean the man or men who have stepped in and done the job. That is the father. So I want to make that very clear. essful. We know that young people who grow up without that input, the risks of having negative outcomes uh is much higher without having a male role model or some male role models in your life. We know that they are much more likely to display antisocial behavior. They are much more likely to turn to crime. They are much more likely to have addiction issues. They are much more
likely to have mental health issues. and their outcomes in terms of relationships going through their life with in other aspects of their lives are much more negative and there is a reason for that. So men have a very specific role in child development and I wasn't expecting to find this when I first started but I've looked at fathering around the world in many many different cultures and how men arrive at that role is very different. Um the the fathering role is much more diverse than the mothering role. It's partly because the mother's role is very tight by biology, by pregnancy, child birth, etc. Whereas men, we call it a facultative role. And what that means is it's much more flexible. It's much more open to responding to changes in the environment and adapting to them to help the family survive. And we see that all the way around the world. So dads do it lots of different ways. It really depends in your environment what the major risk is. So in our environment, you know, we don't really have survival risks in our environment, not to the extent that they do in some cultures. So as a dad in in societies where survival day-to-day survival is a is a problem whether it's a war zone or whether there are major major disease issues then a dad's role there is to keep that kid alive. If we look at other environments where survival is reasonably secure but economic survival is very on edge then in those environments we tend to see fathers again not particularly hands-on in terms of caretaking or nurturing. they are the um person in that kid's life who's going to teach them the skills they need to go forward and be economically successful. So if you live in a pastoral uh environment then they will be taken into the fields and they will be taught how to do that role and then they will be taken to the markets and they will be taught how to negotiate and build the social networks they need. And then in our environment where economics is reasonably secure comparatively survival is reasonably secure comparatively then we are social survival is important in our world. It really is who you know. But what I found regardless of how you were doing it was all fathers have one major major role and and it's a bit of a technical term and I'll explain what it is. They
scaffold the child's entry into the world beyond the family. And what that means is they are the parent when it comes to developing the skills, the neural connections, the biology, the physiology that enables you to leave your family and go out into the world and be successful, to thrive and survive. And it starts when a baby is born. So the attachments that a dad and a mom build to that baby are just as powerful as each other but they are different. So a mom's attachment is based upon nurture. And uh what we tend to say with a mom and child attachment is it's quite exclusive. So if you imagine um a mother her major role with that child is to nurture and protect. And so when she's with that child she will hold that child to her. It's very inwardlooking. With dads, they do nurture. Absolutely. They nurture. They do all that kind of thing. But they use that nurturing to build confidence in that child as a secure base, which is what attachment's about. And what they actually do is they turn the child to the world and they go, "Okay, you're safe with me. I am always here. But I'm going to give you a push and you're going to go out into the world and you're going to see what the world is like. And I'm going to be the person who gives you the resilience and gives you the social skills and gives you what you need to be able to do that. And you can always come back to me when it goes wrong." So what we say with a with a father's attachment is it's based on nurture and challenge. Mom is very nurturing. Dad is stimulation. I'm going to stimulate you and you're going to go and do something amazing. And and that is why you need fathers because those outcomes we have for kids who don't have an input from a father figure. The reason why they struggle with antisocial behavior is it's because dads are the ones that underpin social behavior. Pro-social behavior like helping, sharing, caring, emotional regulation and inhibition. You need to learn to regulate your emotions and inhibit them appropriately to get on in this world. You can't go into school and you cannot go into the workplace screaming your head off when you get angry. That's not how it works. We know that fathers when it comes to education, both moms and dads have a pretty equal input in terms
of academic success. But fathers have a greater role in instilling appropriate learning behavior, being in the classroom, taking in what's going on, cooperating with other people, cooperating with the teacher, not disturbing everybody else, that kind of thing. They are the ones that underpin that. How do they do that? Is it chemically or is it It's several things. It's partly chemical. So, we know that ch one of the earliest behaviors you will see a father do with a child from about six months on is a thing called rough and tumble play. Rough and tumble play. Okay? And men seem to be drawn to it. Not all men do it, and we'll talk about the people who don't find it comfortable, but most men when we just tell them to go and do something with their kid, they're not going to do some coloring. They're going to take the kid outside. They're going to throw it in the air. They're going to chase it around the garden. They're going to airplane it over their head. They're going to come in. They're going to bounce on the sofa. They're going to do a little wrestling. There's lots of shrieking. There's lots of energy. And we see pretty much all western fathers do that. And the reason for it is twofold. First of all, it's a very quick way of bonding with your child. Dads have to bond through interaction. They don't have the head start of child's birth, which is a whole tsunami of bonding hormones. So, they do it through interaction. And rough and double play is a really timeefficient way to do it. You you get a massive tidal weight of bonding hormones because it's because it's so physical. So you get betrayphin because uh there's lots of touch, there's lots of giggling. So all of these things release dopamine, betray, oxytocin. They bond you tightly to the child you're playing with and the child gets them as well. But also it's starting to underpin some teaching about social skills because the basis of all social um behavior is reciprocity is give and take. And when we play with someone, it only remains fun if that reciprocity is reasonably balanced. You learn empathy because you've got to work out, is this stuff fun for the other person or are they no longer enjoying this? Have I gone too far? You learn to deal with challenge. Rough and tumble
play can be pretty extreme. It can be a little bit painful. It can be a little bit risky. And so you're saying to the kid, assess the risk. Assess the risk. Here's the challenge. Can you deal with the challenge? And all of that underpins that child's neural development first of all, but also you're showing by example social skills. I'm saying reciprocity. But what's really interesting, and I love this piece of research, and this came out from a group in Israel headed by Ruth Feldman, who is a pioneer of neuroscience in terms of children and their parents. she um she found that dads and children have co-eolved to prefer to play with each other. Okay. So, when you're a parent, you will get a peak in oxytocin from certain behaviors you do with your child. You'll always get a bit of oxytocin because anything you do with them is probably very nice apart from maybe the tantrums. But if you're a dad, that peak in oxytocin comes from playing with your kid. And then when we look at kids when they the peak in um oxytocin release they get when they're playing with their dads again isn't when daddy gives me a cuddle which is nice but you know I don't get a big release it's when I play with daddy. So is that different to women? Yes. So women get their peak in activate of oxytocin released from nurturing their children particularly from hugging them. And kids get their peak in oxytocin when they interact with mom from mom's cuddles not from playing with mom. So naturally kids kind of gravitate towards dads when they want to have fun. And dad, that's the kind of thing he will choose to do with his child. Something that's um physical, something that's stimulatory. And that's what's really interesting. And that's in a way why dad's kind of got the moniker of, oh, you're the fun parent. You do all the fun stuff. But actually, play is fundamental to a child's development. Absolutely fundamental to their social development and also building that really critical bond with dad. If I was to have a baby now, how would my body, my my brain, my my body, how would it change? Okay, it would change in two ways. There's the biological changes you would undergo. So this is something that we didn't know about 20 years ago and I and other colleagues around the world have have looked into this and the
reason why we looked into it is because as I said very rare to have human fathering really rare 5% of mammals and the way evolution works is it generally doesn't cause a whole new behavior to evolve without giving you some sort of head start in being able to do it. And so over time, in the last half a million years, as fatherhood evolved, men's brains change, their psychology changes, their hormones change when they become fathers to to give you that that prep to be a parent. Um, so first of all, we see hormonal changes. The the most studied and I think probably the most significant is the drop in testosterone that occurs when you become a father. So you will have already experienced a drop in testosterone because you're in a long-term relationship. No, no, I haven't. Yes, you have. So, when a man enters a long-term relationship for a first for the first time, he will experience a drop in testosterone because testosterone is a really great chemical uh if you're dating because it makes you more competitive and it makes you more attractive if you if you're in a heterosexual relationship. So, it makes you more attractive. But when you start, you know, living with someone or being in a long-term relationship, we kind of need you to shift your focus from the horizon and looking for another date. and we need you to focus on that that one person because from an evolutionary point of view that person is going to be the person you have kids with and we'd quite like you to stick around and look after those kids. So that happens when you become a father for the first time it drops again and it can be up to 30%. So you lose a third of your testosterone and the reason for that again is we need you to focus in on the family. We we can't have you looking to the horizon for another mate. We need to focus because we know that children need input from just more than just mom to survive. This sounds all very monogous. I'll talk about it in a minute. Okay. So, this is so so you focus in on that child. Testosterone is also um when it's very high, it blocks the bonding hormones. So, dopamine and oxytocin in particular have less of an effect. So, the testosterone drops also to enable you to start bonding with that child because you are you are behind in terms of
bonding with that child because mom's gone through pregnancy in in most cases and given birth. So, she's had a head start. She's had a load of oxytocin, dopamine, and beta endorphin during the birth process. You haven't. So, so we need to like release those hormones as soon as we can. One of the ways we do that is testosterone drops. So, oxytocin and dopamine are more effective, which explains why some fathers say that they don't feel bonded to their child in the early stages or before. Yeah, I'll explain why that is as well in a minute. So, that's oxytocin, dopamine. We also know just generally from studies whether men are fathers or not, men with lower testosterone tend to be more motivated to care for children. So even if you're not a father, if we present you with a crying baby, men with very high testosterone, the reaction to that is mainly aversive, like okay, just take it away from me. And also they get quite frustrated. They find it quite quite difficult to deal with as a noise. Men with low testosterone tend to be more motivated to pick the baby up, try and soo the baby and deal with it. And and whilst it's a difficult noise to hear, they tend not to experience negative emotions in relation to it. That drop in testosterone is really really important. Over evolutionary time we think that people were probably socially monogous for a period of time which matched the period of time they needed to ensure that our child's going to survive. So whilst in our you know in our um culture it's like no you will marry till you die, you will be monogous till you die. In evolutionary history that probably wasn't the case. Fathers might have stuck around for probably at least until uh childhood which is between about 5 and 10. They might have stayed along into into the teenage years depending upon how difficult the environment was. And also this doesn't mean they weren't having sex somewhere else. So this is social monogamy. We also see changes in oxytocin rises. Uh if you live with your pregnant partner, it will start to rise in pregnancy as well your partners. Um, and that's there to make sure first of all that your bond to your partner tightens because you're about to introduce somebody new into your relationship and it's not going to be easy. So, we need that to be tight,
but it's also to start preparing you for after birth. We know that vasop prein also rises. Vasopressin is a sort of form of oxytocin, but in non-human mammals, it's associated with defense of the nest. And we think in in male humans, it's to do with protection and motivation to protect that child. And finally, we see an increase in a in a parenting hormone known as prolactin. And prolactin is only seen in males in species that have investing fathers. And prolactin again is a parenting hormone that motivates you to care. So you go through this massive change in hormones. A lot of men say they don't notice the drop in testosterone in terms of things like strength. So I get a contact by a lot of men saying, "But I I love weight training. Is this going to ruin my No, it's not. It doesn't do anything like that. Think of the number of Olympic athletes who have kids. You're fine." Um, what it does do is it it it increases your emotional vulnerability. So quite often with fathers, you will hear they're more empathetic after birth and also they find it harder to deal with emotionally difficult things particularly like on the news. Suddenly things on the news will make them cry when they never cried before. Will they ever get their testosterone levels back? Only if you don't have contact with your child. So if you don't have contact with your child, you don't have to co-reside with your child. These studies have been done across cultures including cultures where co-resident doesn't occur. Um, as long as you are in contact with your child, no, they won't because you you are still maintained in looking after that child. If you lose contact with your child, yes, they will go back up because the evolutionary drive is to then reproduce again. So, if I have a kid and then I stick around and raise the kid, assuming I stick around, my testosterone levels will never get back to the level it was before I had the kid. No, never. I mean that's slightly I mean I you know I'll love my future kid I'm sure I will say to dads because they do worry about and I understand why they worry about it because they believe very much that testosterone is the male hormone. It is and it isn't you know women have testosterone and it's it's one of the sex hormones. It's not it really isn't
associated with things like stress. You might find things like your if you have a tendency to aggression, you might find that drops a little bit and as I say, you become more empathetic and you become more emotionally vulnerable, but it's really it's not going to impact a huge amount physiologically in you. So really don't worry about it. And also you get the most amazing rewarding bond with your kid in return. So you drop the testosterone, but you get this astonishing bond. So it swings and roundabouts. You said earlier that if the father's not around, there's implications for teenage mental health. Yes. So because fathers underpin resilience through starting with rough and tumble play but carrying on through that child's life and doing stimulatory activities with that kid. They're the ones that underpin mental resilience. And obviously mental resilience is particularly key for mental health also because they underpin scaffolding the child's ability to operate in the social world. A lot of the disorders we see in teenage um young people are associated with social situations. So social anxiety, eating disorders, self harm, depression, loneliness, they tend to all exist within the social sphere. And because of that, that's why it's actually the relationship you have with your dad, particularly the attachment relationship you have. So if it's a nice secure attachment relationship, you are much less likely to suffer from those disorders and also particularly you know how much time your dad spends with you and inputs into you is important. So kids are really interesting. They measure their importance to their parents in different ways. If you say to them, "How do you know you're important to your mom?" They'll say, "Well, my mom does stuff for me. She makes sure I've got my favorite cereal. She makes sure that I get picked up from school and I can have my playdates and she, you know, makes sure my sports kit is washed." And I mean, it's all terribly gender specific. I do apologize, but this is this is the data. If you say to the kid, "How do you know you're important to your dad? He spends time with me." And we think it's probably cultural because in our culture, dads are still more likely to be out at work. So, the
precious thing you you have as a man is your time. And if I give my time to you as a child, particularly if I do something you're interested in and I accept you as an individual and say, "Yeah, let's be enthusiastic about what you want to do, then that is what underpins how you feel, how that how important that child feels, and that underpins their self-esteem." Because I talked about ketosis on this podcast and ketones, a brand called Ketone IQ sent me their little product here and it was on my desk when I got to the office. I picked it up. It sat on my desk for a couple of weeks. And one day I tried it and honestly I have not looked back ever since. I now have this everywhere I go. When I travel all around the world, it's in my hotel room. My team will put it there. Before I did the podcast recording today that I've just finished, I had a shot of Ketone IQ. And as is always the case when I fall in love with a product, I called the CEO and asked if I could invest a couple of million quid into their company. So I'm now an investor in the company as well as them being a brand sponsor. I find it so easy to drop into deep focused work when I've had one of these. I would love you to try one and see the impact it has on you, your focus, your productivity, and your endurance. So, if you want to try it today, visit ketone.com/stephven for 30% off your subscription. Plus, you'll receive a free gift with your second shipment. That's ketone.com/stephven. I'm excited for you. I am. I started my first business at 12 years old and then I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketeteer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you, our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design, and enhancing your products images, not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the
inventory. And if you're looking to get your business started, go to shopify.com/bartlet and sign up for a $1 per month trial. That's shopify.com/bartlet. We talked at the top of this conversation about how gender roles have shifted and how more women are college educated and more women are in work and they're climbing the economic ladder. This also means that mothers are more likely to be around less in such a world especially when we consider the way that the offices have been designed and the working week has been designed. Have you thought much about the implications of an absent mother? Because we talked a lot about the absent father. Yeah. But an absent mother or a mother who puts their child into into daycare or is working five five days a week. I must admit I haven't because I I don't study mothers. Mothers is a massive amount of work done on uh and I'm kind of filling the gaps in terms of fathers to be absolutely honest. The roles of a mom and a dad in a heterosexual relationship have evolved to kind of complement each other. So they don't mirror each other. They don't do the same thing. Um they complement each other. So what happens when we take one of those away for that child? There are two things to say to that. First of all, in most children's lives, we talk about single parent families and what we're talking about is a single parent raising that child. But actually, if we look outside that that particular diad, that particular couple, and we look at who else is inputting into that child's life. So quite often, I study it as obviously in relation to absent fathers, what we tend to find is that child has other people in their life who are men who input, even if the mom hasn't recognized it. One of the most powerful studies I read wasn't saying to a mom, "Where are the father figures in your child's life?" It was saying to the kid, "Who are the important men in your life?" And the kid would go, "Oh, my football coach or my math teacher or my mate John's dad or they often recognize father figures. They don't call them that, but they recognize men in their lives who they look up to, who support them, who the parents or the mom doesn't even think about. So that's the first thing to say. Secondly, we know with gay fathers where
a mom isn't in a caretaking role, the brain adapts. Okay. So, what happens if we put um a heterosexual couple in a scanner? Yeah. And we say, "Look, look at look at this video of your child." We see different peaks in activation in the brain. So, in mom, we see a peak in activation at the core of the brain here. Okay? Very ancient. It's partly there because mothering is as old as time. So, it's in the ancient unconscious part of the brain. This is where nurture is, attachment, risk detection, all those things you need to be able to do. Uh, and then we get that peak there. However, if we look at dad's activation, he does have some activation here. Obviously, he does. He's very capable of nurturing and protecting. But actually, the peak in activation is in the neoortex. This is this bit of the brain. This is the conscious brain. It's much younger. Um, and that shows you that fathering is younger. It's about half a million years old. And we see activation here in the social part of the brain. Okay. So this is the prefrontal cortex which is here and the orbital frontal cortex which is kind of above your eyes and that's where all your social skills sit your ability to do everything socially. And then at the back of the brain we have two areas at the back of the brain which are linked to empathy which is the basis of relationships and mentalizing. So that's that ability to know someone's intention. You need it just to have a conversation but you also need it uh to spot somebody who's going to maybe do you bad in some way, cheat, lie, whatever those sorts of things. Again important in the social world and his peing activations are there. Again, mom does have some peaks in activ some activation here, but it's not as intense. And that underpins those two different roles. So, dad's attachment is neo. Mom's attachment is very ancient and nurturing. If you have a gay primary caretaking father without a mother involved, what you see is you see both bits light up at the same intensity. So, he gets the dad activation obviously being a man, but he also gets the mom's activation. And what's really absolutely fascinating is if we look at that brain, there is a new a brand new neural connection between this bit of the brain here and this bit
of the brain here. So they can communicate. So is the is a woman not playing a unique role at all in raising? Well, arguably neither is a man because if we look in if we were to look in probably uh a gay woman's brain, we'd see the same thing. And it's not saying that they're not paying unique roles in a heterosexual relationship. They absolutely do. But what it's showing you, human children are incredibly difficult to raise. They are pretty much, apart from maybe dolphins and and a bit of an ape, um the most intense kid to raise because they're because they're born so helpless. Okay? And the only way a human baby can survive is if it gets enough input. So the human brain, the human parenting brain is astonishingly plastic and it will adapt to make sure that that child gets what it needs. And so where we've got one of the adults missing, mom or dad, it will adapt to say, okay, the remaining adult or whether even if there's two dads or two moms, that primary caretaking one, their brain will alter to make sure that kid start gets what it needs. It kind of goes to the top of what we were saying about do you need dads then? Because if you know, we talked about the role that dads play in play, but also I've read your research around the impact that a father has on um a kid's ability to speak. Yes. is better in children who had a father present. But if you could just have two women doing it, doesn't that mean that we don't necessarily need the father? It's not that you don't necessarily need the father. I mean, the same argument say you don't necessarily need a mother in a gay parenting relationship with the fathers. What it's saying is in a heterosexual relationship we get this complimentarity. We can't get that in a gay relationship. So what we've got instead is this slice to adaptation. Unfortunately, the studies haven't been done sufficiently on gay parenting, which is which is a massive omission. I'm afraid science always starts with heterosexual. Yeah. Um and narrows it down. Um that we don't know exactly whether for example a gay parent, two male parents, maybe there's a little bit missing because of a lack of female input or whether with two female parents is a lack of because there's no male direct male input. The
other thing to say is around these families you pro you know I can there are very few gay parenting families where there are no women involved at all and there are very few lesbian couples who have no male involvement at all. So we it's a very complex mess really in terms of what the inputs are. But I think the the the study that discovered this were just astonished at the amazing plasticity of the brain that that a man who did not go through pregnancy and childirth and is does not have this evolutionarily ancient instinct in terms of motherhood could actually adopt this role and we would see this activation. That's in a way the biggest takehome from it is that it will adapt in such a powerful way to make sure that child gets what it needs. So do we need fathers? Yes. Why? What is it that the fathers bring that can't be done by some other means though? Because we don't yet know first of all whether these adaptations in the female brain for example are enough because that research hasn't been done and secondly there are very few children who don't have a father actually if you look at their social grouping. Now it might not be a father who co-resides. It might not be a father who they see that frequently, but it could be, you know, and when we remember we're talking about grandfathers, uncles, teachers, coaches, whoever it might be. It might be a whole team of men who step in and out at different times. It's very rare that a child doesn't have any male input in their life. And that is what a father is. It's not your biological father. So, is it that we need a father figure around, but we don't necessarily need a father in the home? you do not have to co-reside. One of the things that drives me slightly around the bend is when people talk about absent fathers. Um sometimes the father is truly absent. Absolutely. But in some cases he's not. He just doesn't live there. And that's what we've got to be very clear about. You do not have to co-reside. And there are cultures in the world where co-resident is not the norm. And so it's about being in your child's life. You do not have to live with them. Are we getting more fatherless as a western society? It would seem so at the moment in terms of biological fathers. Yes.
Unfortunately, and that's one of the things that we really need to to focus on. I've recently become a trustee of a new policy unit which is the center for research into men and boys. And my role there is to look at the role of fathers, how we support fathers, how we support boys in having male figures in their lives. because we are seeing because divorce has become more culturally acceptable possibly because of longer lifespans and relationships aren't lasting as long. There's lots of reasons why we are getting more children who do not have fathers in their lives. It's also a major issue in the US. I you know I know you know Richard Reeves and I work with Richard Reeves on it and that is issue and that's why we have to start looking in a creative way about what a father is because those kids don't necessarily have their biological father in life but they need somebody and that might be encouraging links within the community. It might be helping single mothers identify those male figures within their environment and supporting those male figures and coming forward. It might be that we need more organizations like Lads and Need Dads which is an organization in the UK that provides male father figures, mentors to boys who don't have a father in their life. Is there anything better than a biological father? Yes, a father. There is. So even if it's a sort of a stepfather or if it's because you don't get to become a father indeed you don't get to become a mother just because you happen to conceive a child. So from a development perspective, it doesn't matter if there's no difference in biological fathers versus, you know, Dave who took took care of me because the changes we spoke about happen whether you're biologically related to that child or not because they happen through interaction. So any man who steps in and does the job well see the hormone changes, we'll see the brain changes which we we haven't spoken about, um we'll see the psychological changes, they will see them all because they happen through interaction. So you don't you're not as a biological father the moment you conceive that child suddenly get this mysterious ability to be a father. You don't it happens because you happen to be interacting and live and and and inputting into that
child's life. So no there is no hierarchy. It's are you doing the job? Yes I am. Are you doing it in a good and healthy and positive way? Yes I am. Okay. You get to be dad. So you really you're making the case for father figures. Yeah. in a child's life versus and and a and a child growing up without a father figure at all, yes, is going to have worse outcomes. There is a risk. They won't necessarily, but the statistics are quite powerful in terms of those outcomes. There was a study done recently in the UK by the Center for Justice called Lost Boys and that was looking at and and one aspect of that was looking at boys and their outcomes if they don't have a father figure and it is quite powerful in terms of the increased risk of having negative outcomes. So if you're in a lesbian relationship and you're so two women, are you saying that you really should make sure that the child is exposed to a father figure? Yeah, I would say that. I would say that. I mean, some people I get attacked for saying things like that and I'm not trying to say there are gender roles or any of those sorts of things, but we h children have evolved. The reason why human fatherhood evolved is because children evolved to be brought up by a group of people. And part of that group of people was a father figure. Now, as we see from cultures around the world, it does not have to be the biological father, but they have a father figure or a team of father figures. It doesn't have to be one person. It could be several people. And does that go the other way? If you're in if two men married, I would always advise that that that's how children to have those two inputs. So, find those women in your life and and ask them to step in and do that. And and another anomaly that we hear a lot is that it's particularly important for boys. Actually, it is critical for boys, but arguably it's kind of touch and go as whether it's more critical for girls. Um the data coming out about daughters and the impact that fathers have on daughters is pretty powerful stuff. And so it's it's not just that we need these father figures so boys know how to grow up to be, you know, positive
masculine figures, to be men, whatever it might be. It's also really critical for girls that they have a father figure around. What's the the data coming out regarding the dad daughter bond? So what we're finding is um daughters who grow up with uh a secure attachment to their father um they have increased abilities in or increased success in terms of academics in terms of education. They have increased career success. They tend to have much better me uh mental health. They tend to be much better at relationships. They tend to have less risky particularly sexual relationships. And they have just better well-being scores. And they are much more likely as I said to have stable good relationships in their in their older life in their adult life. When you think about society and how we're forming our relationships, especially around child rearing. Yes. What are we increasingly getting wrong here? I spoke to Erica Commisser. And she's very passionate about the detrimental impact of daycare, right? because she feels that the mother's plays a critical role in those first two years and then the father plays a critical role beyond from about two years onwards when the kid starts to get into that play phase. I would argue with her on that point but okay which point would you argue on the second point? Yeah, that is critical from the moment that child is born. Um and I I get quite upset when I get father s I met a father the other day at an event. He I think his baby was six months old and he was a he was a a dad worker this guy. He worked with dads. He was a he was a community worker who worked with with dads with older kids. He said, "Oh, I've had my I was like, "Congratulations." He went, "Yeah, but you know, I know I'm not particularly important until, you know, until baby's like, you know, at least 18 months, two years." So, I'm just changing nappies, but I know that I'm not I'm not really doing much. And I was just like, "Oh my god, I literally cannot believe this man is saying this, bearing in mind what he does for a living." I was like, "You are absolutely critical. From the moment that baby is born, you are critical." Why? Because the baby's brain is growing. babies are b so human babies are born months before they should be and the reason for that is because two anatomical anomalies we
are bipedal and we have an enormous brain at full size our brain is six times bigger than it should be for a mammal of our body weight it's highly encphilized so enphilization is all this folded and folded and folded so it's folded like this because we've got a ram it into our skull if you look at the brain of a mouse it's smooth so when we became bipeedal about fully bipedal about sort of 1.8 8 million years ago. Bipedal meaning two legs. If you look at at something that walks on four legs, like an ape, a chimp, who's our close, their their legs are quite wide apart, so their birth canal is really broad. Um, ours is really narrow because we've had to come in like this to to maintain being able to stand upright. So, if we tried to birth our babies when their brains were nearly fully grown, like happens in other apes, mom would die, baby would die, and our species would have died out a very long time ago. So, about 1.8 8 million years ago, we we reached a threshold where the brain had to do some growing after we were born. And the way that we dealt with that was we birthed our babies early. We selected to birth our babies early. And that's why they're so completely helpless. Because if you look at a chimp baby, a chimp baby's pretty mobile just after it's born. It's got pretty good motor function. It can hold on to stuff. It can do various things. Can't feed itself, but it can. Um whereas human babies, they can't do anything for themselves. They literally can't. They can't focus. They can't hold their head up. They can't move. They can't coordinate their limbs. They can't clean themselves. They can't do anything. And that's because they're born far too early. They should be in months longer essentially. So, we have this period of rapid brain growth after we're born. And because the main bit of the brain that's growing at this point is this massive preffrontal cortex, which is the social bit. Um, the environment in which you grow up is critical. And who is really important in the social bit? The dad. So from the moment your baby is born and this is growing, dad needs to be having an input because this is where it's growing. Mom is also obviously vital, but we have to have both parents involved or you have to have that input at that point. So these dads who believe
or people who believe that dad's only important after two years, I'm I'm sorry, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain develops and of child development because you need to start teaching that child by inputting into that child by by giving that sensory input in particular. Human babies need a lot of touch. They need a lot of smell. They need a lot of all that kind of thing. You need to be doing that as early as possible because this is growing from the moment it comes out. Is it fair to say that in that 0ero to2 phase, mothers are more important? No, because they do different things. They do different things. Mothers tend to be more involved partly because of um the fact that from a biological point of view, women give birth. Um if you're breastfeeding, they're the only ones who can do that. So we are tied in terms of um having to do that. The other thing I would say is also giving birth is a really really tricky thing to do and it's physically and emotionally utterly draining. So you need a period of recovery um and therefore you you are the one who's basically at home particester context a baby from the moment it's born generally in some cultures will be cared for by both mom and dad. It's only because we have this capitalist system where someone's got to go and earn some money that dads don't. So I wouldn't necessarily argue moms are more important. They are in a position from a biological point of view that they're going to be there. They are just going to be there. And in our system that means somebody else it doesn't have to be there and that's dad and he'll go and earn the money to support the family. But you they need the input from both. Is it fair to say then that the primary caregiver is the most important? And what I mean by that is the baby's going to form strongest attachment to the person taking most care of it and therefore its attachment style will be shaped by the relationship to that primary caregiver. It's really tricky to say because yes, primary caregivers are really important in terms of being most of the environment of development in those early days, particularly if this what we call I don't really like calling them secondary care, but the other parent is out and about and therefore
not present. The environment in which a baby grows isn't just about who's caretaking them, who's giving them a hug. One of the things I really always talk to parents to be about is your relationship builds that environment as well. So parents are actually babies are also actually taking on board the dynamics between their parents. And one of the things that I always um try to get into anti courses is preparing the parenting relationship because actually you need to build an environment which is as calm and as reciprocal and as safe as you can do for that child. And that means for example before you have a baby learning good conflict management style. You're going to have an argument. Okay? It's not about having an argument. It's about the reconciliation of that argument. It's about the resolution of that argument. So, it's about that. It's about understanding difference. You're going to parent in different ways. That can be really challenging to some couples. They find it very difficult. So, you prepare them for that. So, the environment is not just the primary caretaker. And that's what's fascinating about humans is human babies is it's a nap saying, it's a true saying are raised by a village. So, the environment of development isn't just the primary caretaken parent. It's everybody who's around that child as well. And in our in our world that might be family, that might be friends where we live greater distances from our family. So sometimes that's more professionals that have an input into that child's life. I guess I'm trying to figure out what's optimal in my relationship cuz I'm probably about to head into parenthood. Yeah. And I'm trying to understand, you know, I'm trying to understand how what I should configure my situation. Yes. In those early years um with my partner and me, we both work. Um my job is requires me to fly a little bit more than hers. um but just just because that's the way that I've chosen my my career to be. She spends more time at home but still very very busy, still flying around the world doing her own thing. So I'm thinking when that baby arrives, what should we based on everything you know about humans and human history and the human brain and everything that's interconnected? What's the optimal
optimal scenario for me and my partner? Do you know something? It's really hard because what I always say to parents because parents are really good at beating themselves up is happy parents make happy babies. So, first of all, you have to do what works for you and everybody's circumstances are different. And there are needs that everybody's going to have. So, yes, your baby has needs in terms of nurturance, in terms of support, in terms of building attachments, but your baby also needs a roof over their head, and they need food on the table, and they need all that, and they need whoever's caring for them to be healthy. So, it really depends upon what works for you. In an ideal world, somebody asked me the other day, because at the moment in the UK, we're having a lot of campaigns about paternity leave. Um, in the UK at the moment you can have two weeks, which is frankly laughable. Um, and the dad can have two weeks. The dad can have two weeks. Not if you're self-employed, but if you're employed, um, if you're self-employed, you're kind of on your own. We're trying to push the government to take it to six weeks, which isn't our ideal, but it's how far we think we might be able to push them. Somebody asked me the other day, what would be the ideal for a dad? I'm afraid I started at 6 months. Please, that would be lovely. In places like Sweden, the dad gets a year. Um because babies develop with different inputs from different people. I know you're in a heterosexual couple. So he your baby will need your dad's input and mom's input and they will need those in every whatever configuration works for you. So it might be that at some period particularly after child birth and stuff, your partner is going to have to have time off. She is not going to, you know, it's very hard to race back to work after you've had a baby. Some women manage it. I think they're astonishing. I certainly couldn't have done it. So that's fine. You go do that. but that she's going to need a period of time. But then are you in a situation where you can work a little bit flexibly? So is there is there a point where you can say okay you go and do some work and I'll take the baby for a bit and you switch that way. Now obviously if the mom is breastfeeding it's harder because
she is tied more to the baby. You can express milk as much as you like but it's quite difficult as a breastfeeding mother to go off on a work trip for a week. So so the first point there is really that she's probably going to need to take some time. She is going to need to take some time unless she is in a position where she really thinks that she is going to be capable of physically and psychologically going back to work. I've met women who do it, but it's really hard. Now, particularly when in those first early weeks, actually, she's going to need you or she's going to need someone to help her. My husband is self-employed. Um, my husband actually only managed to have two days of paternity leave before he had to go back to work. So, my wonderful mom stepped in. But, she's going to need somebody there. In an ideal world, as long as you were happy to do that, that would be you because your baby would really benefit from that. And then from there, you have to take it the way it works for you in terms of your career because whoever looks after that baby, it doesn't have to be mom or or dad. It can be a mixture of both. But but I'm able to make concessions. Maybe I'm I'm in a privileged position where I can make I can kind of design my life a little Well, from a from an ideal point of view then you will at that point try and be with your baby as much as you can and do that and do as many of the tasks with your baby you can because actually from your point of view as a man men the psychological changes that a man goes through when he becomes a father it's known as the transition to parenthood in most men who work it takes two years and one of the reasons it takes two years whereas in a mother it takes about nine months is because one of the factors in how quickly you transition to adopting that identity And how comfortable you feel with that identity is down to competency. How competent do you feel as a parent? Now many western dads, they don't get the opportunity to reach competency very quickly because they have to go to work. So they don't get to care for their baby. And that's one of the things we know that men who get that chance transition to parenthood much quicker because they reach competency quicker. They absorb the identity of being a dad quicker and that is better
for them. This transition to parenthood, is that a biological thing? It's it's underpinned by the biology by the by the um brain changes and hormone changes you're going to undergo. But it's a psychological state. So it's about configuring your identity and absorbing that particular new aspect of your identity into who into your sense of being and also feeling comfortable with that. We know men who struggle with that transition are much more likely to suffer from postnatal depression for example. And postnatal depression has a fundamental impact not only on your partner but also on your child. So, we want to be protective against that. So, she needs some time. Um, she's going to need me for supportive reasons in those early weeks. And then the more time I can spend with my child, the more I'm going to psychologically adjust to and the more and the quicker you're going to build your bond because as I said earlier, you build your bond through interaction and your your partner's going to have a head start. She just is because of pregnancy and ch and if she's breastfeeding as well, breastfeeding is really good for releasing oxytocin. You have to do it through interaction. And in those early weeks with a baby, they're very dependent. And particularly if your partner is breastfeeding, they're very mom focused because she is the source of food. And newborn babies feed for ages. So a lot of men say to me, I want to build a relationship, but I literally cannot find an end. So what we say is make something special. So make something that's yours. It could be bath time. It could be reading your baby a book. It's never too early to begin reading your baby a book. Or a really good one is baby massage. Baby massage is great because touch is is the biggest releaser of bonding hormones there are. If you massage your baby, your baby's getting all those lovely hormones and so are you. So, you're building that bond between you. You're close enough that so your baby's getting sensory input, particularly sense of smell. So, baby's vision is not great when they're born, but their sense of smell is brilliant because they're little mammals. So, they're starting to really get your smell and that's going to help them attach to you. We also know baby massage
is one of the only really good interventions that prevents postnatal depression in men. So, I love that. I just had this little flash in my head of all the babies that just got a massage because you said that. Yeah. And they're all blissed out. I mean, there's some brilliant videos on YouTube. Oh, if you want to learn, you don't have to go to a class. Watch. There's wonderful videos of baby massage and whole classes of men massaging babies. I mean, it's brilliant. So, you also want to be there because you need to build that bond. And the only way you're going to do that is interaction. And so, and as your baby develops, that interaction becomes easier because the baby will start babbling. They'll start smiling. in about six to eight weeks they'll start smiling and they'll start smiling at you. Um and that's just you know that's you can forgive them anything when they do that. Um and then they'll start you know really reacting when you come in being pleased to see you then they'll start giggling and then at about 6 months if you are a rough and tumble dad you can start doing very gentle rough and tumble play with them and and you can just take it from there. The interaction grows more and more and more. One of the things we have to prepare men for which I do a lot when I work with men uh during pregnancy is the delay in bonding. So, we have this idea that baby's going to come out and we're going to feel a flood of love and it's going to be it's going to be like, you know, shining, amazing, wonderful. That doesn't happen for women a lot of the time, but men find it very difficult because because they grow their bond through interaction. When the baby comes out, they they tend to have a recognition of connection. It's like, yes, that's my baby. That's my genetic baby. It's genetically related to me. I am a father. I will look after it. But it's very conscious. When I talk to my dads quite often when I visit them at two weeks, a lot of them are worrying about the bond because they're not feeling how they thought they would feel. They're looking at their partner who's had a head start and thinking, "Well, she's the gold standard of bonding. She's amazing at it. I'm failing. My baby doesn't like me. I'm rubbish at this." And that's not good
for their mental health. And what they tend to do is withdraw from the baby, which is the worst thing you can do. But then when I speak to them when at six months with the baby, they all say, "I love my baby deeply." and it's categorically different to how I felt at the start and that's because they've had to interact for that time to build that bond. Is it fair to say that the woman's bond comes more hormonally and the father's reaction comes more from interaction? Yeah, because you will get your hormones from your interaction. Whereas she has got her hormones mostly uh at the start from being pregnant and giving birth and breastfeeding. And breastfeeding. So she's getting lots of physiologically based hormones and she will also get hormones from interaction. Obviously she will, but she's ahead of you. You're going to have to massage that baby to go get You are really going to have to massage that baby or play with them. I guess that's the other thing you said. Yeah. You mentioned something before we started recording which was curious to me and I've never heard of before, which is you mentioned um love drugs. Yes. I've never heard of that before. Okay. I mean, what's that like MDMA or something? Yes. So, we kind of probably know just about enough about the neuroscience of love now, particularly the neurochemicals which underpin it, that should we wish to, we could finally produce the elixir of love. So, since we've written things down, we have been fascinated with finding the elixir of love. There's loads of ancient texts about potions that will make you fall in love. It's something that as humans, we've always wanted and it's partly because love is unpredictable and uncontrollable and humans really can't deal with that. We we like to know what is going to happen and we like to be able to control it as far as we can. So, wouldn't it be great if you could pop a pill or drink something which meant that when you went out on a Friday night, you were really good at either being like the the bell of the ball and attracting people or you could somehow get to be more attractive to people or if you were in or you could make someone fall in love with you or if you're in a long-term relationship with a struggling there was some pill that would help that long-term relationship.
And we are kind of at that stage now with the neuroscience where that would potentially be possible. And there are certainly research groups who are looking into what chemicals are already out there which kind of mimic that neurochemistry. Now there are two big ones that we already have. The first is oxytocin. Of course oxytocin is synthesized. We use it in child birth. It induces child birth. Um, and in studies where we wanted to work out the impact of oxytocin on social behavior in humans in labs, we squirt it up people's noses. You can squirt it up people's noses and see what oxytocin and what it does if you want to know in most people is it makes them more empathetic. It makes them more open to chatting to people. It makes them more sociable. It makes them more positive about the people around them from a social context. So brilliant. So one of the possibilities is you produce synthetic oxytocin and you sell it to people. And in fact, a few years ago, and I think they've taken it down now, there was a drug on Amazon and eBay called Oxy Love. It's a little thing like a like an eye drop thing. What it would do if you squirted up your nose is hopefully it would do what oxytocin does in the normal biological context. It would quiet your amydala. It would make you more confident. Uh it would make you feel more open to starting relationships. You'd be better at chatting to people. So, it's it's kind of like, you know, the you know, a couple of glasses of wine before you go out. makes you feel a little bit more confident. It would be a little bit like that. And that's one of the things they're looking into. The issue with it is that you cannot guarantee the outcome of using it. So what has been found is in the vast majority of people it does what it should. But there is a significant minority of people where it does exactly the opposite and it actually increases e basically what we call ethnosentrism, racism, bigotry. Because what happens is they become more tightly bonded to people they think are in their ingroup. But if they perceive you to be in their out group, they become more racist. So it makes you identify more with what you perceive to be your ingroup. Now until you can iron that out, that is not a drug you can
release onto the market because that is not something you want to happen. investigations seem to have shown that it's something to do with genetics that some people's oxytocin receptor gene is slightly different and it's those people who will get the um ethnosentrism result rather than the socially confident result. So that's a problem and you can't go any further with oxytocin until you are now that particular problem. The second one which is more encouraging from a from a scientific point of view is MDMA, ecstasy. And for many years, people have, you know, anecdotally reported who use ecstasy recreationally that it makes you feel overwhelming sensations of love. It makes you feel very bonded to everybody you're with. We know from from lab studies that people who take ecstasy on a regular basis actually become more empathetic over time. It actually seems to permanently alter something. So, it seems to be possibly something a bit like beach endorphin, which it underpins long-term love. Great. So they're engineering MDMA at the moment to try and find out what the dosage should be and how we could give it to people. And it's being used in marriage therapy in the US at the moment as a trial to see if it can assist in marriage therapy because a lot of people who go to marriage therapy are very entrenched in their position. They've lost empathy. They've lost the ability to see the other point of view. And so if you micro dose ecstasy, which I don't suggest anybody does without clinical support, you go into the session, it opens up your empathy and you make progress because of it. And there's been reasonably good results from marriage therapy in a clinical setting. The issue with MDMA isn't that it has different outcomes for people to be honest. Some people it works on some people it just doesn't. So you could take it for that reason and it just wouldn't do what it's supposed to do. Fine. The issue with MDMA is more around ethics because MDMA is a powerful drug and we don't know yet what its long-term consequences would be. For example, if you did take it for many, many years. The second thing we don't really know is what happens if you stop. So let's say you started a relationship taking MDMA. Um first ethical question, should you
tell the person you're in the relationship with? Secondly, what happens if you stop? You get to the point where for whatever reason you decide to stop. Is that love going to go away? And again, if you haven't told the person, you're kind of, if it does go away, mcking around with their life without them actually realizing that that relationship was based upon an artificial stimulant. essentially we have anecdotal um we don't actually know whether it would stop because we haven't done long-term enough studies anecdotally from the recreational community there have been stories about people who have started relationships whilst clubbing uh taking ecstasy particularly one guy who um used to go back to his hometown every weekend take ecstasy go clubbing met a girl but used to go away to work during the week so every time he saw his girlfriend in the first few months it was at the weekend they were both he he was on she wasn't and he fell fell in love with her and this was wonderful and they carried on and eventually they decided that actually no we need to stop this long distance thing she needs to move and and come with me we think this has got a future she does that trouble is during the week he's not allowed on ecstasy and quite quickly he realizes he doesn't love her now he has uplifted you know upheaval of her whole life now he didn't do that on purpose he did not know that that was what the impact would be but if that's the impact of a love drug we have a problem what do you do in relationships with power imbalances is what if you're in an abusive relationship and somebody gives it you without you knowing and keeps you in that relationship because of it. So there are lots of ethical questions. I think the issue with love drugs is they will probably come because they will be hugely commercially successful if they if they get a commercial license. When I do talks and I get to this bit before I've even mentioned what I I ask people to raise their hand and say if a drug could do this would you take it? 50% of the audience raise their hand and say yes I would. So then you tell them what all the problems are and you tell them what the ethics might be and at the end I say again would you take it at least sell 20% of the audience would. Now
because love and dating is such a multi-billion dollar industry if we get to the point where this can be commercially produced someone is going to make a lot of money and that's why I think it's probably on the horizon unless the rules are so strict that it's only in clinical settings and even then people get around rules. So that's the issue with love drugs. Um the other one is the SSRIs which are depress for depression. People who are on SSRIs realize that they um they reduce your emotional abilities. They reduce your libido. They reduce sensations of love. And so it has been suggested again that SSRIs are engineered in some way to help people deal with love trauma. So people who have experienced very bad relationships and not that you can forget it. Do you remember the filter eternal sunshine? I didn't say that. Right. Okay. It's about a guy who wants to wipe his brain in terms of a really bad relationship. And that's kind of what suggested this could do. SSRIs can't do that. You cannot wipe a memory, but they could maybe take away some of the salience, some of the negative salants. The issue again with that is that there are 72 countries in the world where homosexuality is still illegal. And we know there are certain uh this was a brilliant book called love drugs talked about a very extreme religious community which was giving young men who had had shown homosexual tendencies SSRIs to reduce their homosexual tendencies and that in itself is I believe ethically unacceptable and therefore again we've got to be aware that if we produce drugs what could they possibly be used for which is actually unacceptable and how are we going to deal with that as a as a population. So I think anything which comes into our intimate relationships like love drugs or AI or whatever, we have to have that conversation now because getting it wrong has profound impacts on our futures and on our health. Let's talk about attachment styles and monogamy and the neurodiversity components of this. So if we start with attachment styles, there's been so much said about attachment styles. Can you sort of give my viewers a overview of what attachment styles are and what we need to know about attachment styles as it relates to falling and holding on to
love? Okay. I think the first thing you need to understand is what is an attachment relationship? Attachment relationships are very rare in your life. Um, you will have had them with whoever brought you up, whoever cared for you, particularly in the first two years of life. That's particularly significant. You will have them with romantic partners. They're not all romantic partners. And you might have one with a best friend. They're very emotionally intense. We recognize them for several criteria. First of all, they're developmentally significant. So, attachment relationships have the ability to change your psychology. Now, as a child, they actually have the ability to change your your actual brain architecture as well, particularly in those first two years because babies are born without their brains fully developed. That's why they're so helpless. And in the first two years, your brain is growing very rapidly. and the environment to which you are raised is going to fundamentally underpin the architecture of your brain. So that's developmentally very significant. That first attachment relationship you have with your parents, parents, carers, whoever it has, whoever's bringing you up. Babies will attach to literally anybody who's meeting their needs to be honest. Um and that will fundamentally alter your brain and either in a good way or unfortunately in a less good way depending on how you're brought up. When you have a romantic relationship, what they can do is they can alter your psychology, particularly how anxious you are about being abandoned in that relationship and how comfortable you are with emotional and physical intimacy. Because I will tell you a story when I met my husband, I was very worried about him leaving me, him abandoning me. And I dealt with that by being monumentally clingy. And over time, we've been married for nearly 25 years. I became secure because he disproved my fear that he was going to leave and I am now secure. So he fundamentally changed my psychology. So they can do that and in romantic relationships there are four types of attachment relationship and we place you in one of those sectors based upon two different factors. The first is how anxious you are about abandonment. Okay, that's the first one. We ask you
lots of questions to work out how anxious you are about that. The second one is how much you want to maintain proximity. So again, we'll ask you questions about how close you like to be to the person, whether you maintain closeness because you're anxious, or whether you maintain closeness because you love intimacy, or whether you run away from intimacy at a rate of not. And depending on how you answer, we put you in one of four categories. So if you are not anxious in relationships about abandonment, but you are very comfortable with proximity, emotional, physical intimacy, then you're secure. And it's what it sounds like. you are very comfortable in your individuality. You gain huge benefits from being in that relationship but you don't need that relationship to exist to define you. The next one is people who are highly anxious about abandonment and crave proximity and that was me preoccupied. So they are very anxious about being left and the way they deal with it like I did was to cling to to maintain because if I keep an eye on you it's going to be okay. Then we have the two um avoidant attachment styles. So first of all, we have people who are very anxious about being abandoned but don't maintain proximity. They find intimacy very uncomfortable. And the reason for that, they're known as fearful avoidant people. And the reason they do that is the way they cope with the stress of possibly being left is they just don't have relationships because then I can't be hurt if you do that. And finally, we have dismissing avoidant. dismissing avoidant people are the smallest part of the population generally and they um aren't worried about abandonment but they also don't like proximity to be honest they're islands they're not that bothered about being in a relationship and one of the drivers for that might be that they're not very comfortable with intimacy but some people literally just not bothered can you be shades so could you could you is you know the avoidant category does that exist on a spectrum and the yes it does the reason I mean all attachments are a spectrum the reason Why we categorize them is typical scientists we like a category because when we've got a category we can do data analysis and we can decide the sorts of behaviors for
example that these four quarters perform or we can put somebody in one and help them change to another for example. Do you think the way that modern society is is breeding a certain group of attachment styles? Do you understand the question what I'm trying to I do. I think we are getting less comfortable with intimacy and I think that's partly because we are not as practiced at it as we used to be because we are not as we're not forced to be in close contact with a lot of people as much as we used to be. You can pretty much do everything from your sofa. You can work from your sofa. You can order food from your sofa. You can try and maintain your relationships with your friends from your sofa. You don't actually have to be in a room with anyone. after COVID there's a lot of data showing that people found it people are much less interested now in meeting up they kind of got used to being in that little bubble and even though they had the yearning of I don't have anyone with me they become much they became much more anxious about going out and actually seeing anybody and it wasn't just because they were worried about COVID we got out of the habit and if you get out of the habit you don't get any of the chemicals which encourage you to go out you certainly don't get any of the addictive chemicals like betaendorphine so you kind of go a bit cold turkey Turkey slowly and you just don't have that draw to go and see people anymore from a biological point of view and from a psychological point of view it becomes a little bit scary. So you just stay where you are. So I think we are seeing more avoidant behaviors in people than we used to. You talked about the role of dopamine in getting us to like you know get up and put our shoes on and get out the house. And obviously there's lots of things now at home that are giving us dopamine whether it's social media or it's pornography or if it's uh I guess you know there's other substances that give us dopamine and I wondered if that's if you thought that maybe that's playing a role in I think that is playing a role because we get that hit and dopamine is nice. It gives you a reward. The problem it has is on its own it has no bearing on social relationships or social
behavior. You need to have the full cocktail. So that's what I say to people about social media when they say you know but I'm getting a dopamine hit. It's like, yeah, you are, and that's great, but dopamine is very shortlasting. On its own, it doesn't underpin your immune system or your health in any way. You need the full lot. You need the full four social chemicals to get any advantage out of it. So, that is the problem. And I think people because we've heard a lot about dopamine think that that dopamine alone is going to make you happy and it's not. You know, earlier we talked about these people that go on 100 dates and maybe they don't have the true intention to actually form a relationship. Speaking sort of broadly, what what attachment style do you think those kind of people fit into? Those people are are avoidance. So they're either dismissing avoidant, which means um they don't have any of the anxiety associated with relationships, or they're fearful avoidance. So they they they avoid them because they're scared of being hurt. So when people talk about daddy issues or I guess you could say mommy issues where the father has abandoned that child at an early age. Do do you think generally those people have a higher probability of being fearful avoidant? They certainly have a higher probability of having an insecure attachment style because as I mentioned in the first two years of life when your brain is growing the environment in which you're being cared for is going to shape that brain. Particularly if for example a parent leaves during that time or even later on when it's still quite a sensitive brain that's going to impact how your brain grows particularly in that prefrontal cortex. So the bit right at the front here okay where all your social cognition is and it's going to have less gray and white matter in that area. Uh it's going to have less density of neurons and less of a high level of neurochemistry which underpins social behavior. And because of that, when you're an adult, you're just not as equipped to be good at relationships because your brain, you don't actually have the brain architecture to underpin it. So that's one of the reasons why we see people who grow up in that
environment being more insecure because they don't have the brain architecture or indeed the neurochemical the baseline neurochemical levels circulating in their body which is going to motivate and reward them for starting relationships. So they just don't have the equipment that people who maybe grew up in a secure environment do. So that's one of the problems. And so when people say daddy issues, partly what they're talking about is attachment style. It's the fact that I have this attachment style and I've identified I have this attachment style because my father left whenever I when I was however old. Now whether that's the entire reason, there are other reasons why people um behave the way they do and might not want relationships. There are genetic reasons. So there are lots of reasons why attachment styles can change. Oh, completely. And the way that they change is is it accurate to say someone gives you evidence that counteracts that's one of the ways and in one sense that's the easiest way because in a way I didn't know it was happening. I this happened long before I studied attachment styles. I think I was still chasing monkeys at this point but um so that's the easiest way is literally you end up with someone who's secure and over time they just get into your brain and they show you you are wrong. Other ways are being conscious about what your attachment style is and being conscious about how it doesn't work for you. There is no wrong attachment style. That's what I want to say. If it if you feel comfortable in your attachment style, brilliant. That's great. It's when it doesn't work for you that there's a problem. And so there I always think everyone should kind of keep an eye on what their attachment style is. Um I think it's quite an important thing to to to realize if you see yourself, for example, repeating the same things over and over again in relationships. So it gets to a certain point and you le it for example it's all getting a bit intense I'm now going to run away or you always end up pushing people away for example maybe because you're too preoccupied or whatever and it's good if you see that pattern if you are conscious enough to rec recognize that pattern then you can do work on yourself or you can ask your friends to help you
okay if you see me do this you need to flag it you need to tell me you're doing it again you need to step beyond that and it will need support you'll need emotional support either just from friends and family or you might need professional help there are attachment counselors who will help you or understand where your attachment style came from and they will help you do the work, okay, to shift. So, you can do it that way. Uh, and then obviously at the very extreme end of attachment disorders and they always need input from a professional. One of the things that I found to be particularly useful is vocalizing my attachment style to my partner and her doing the same back so that we can both kind of hold understand the other person even though it might not be us and we don't understand that clingy behavior or that avoidant behavior. vocalizing it in the way that you've said, not not just becoming self-aware, but like mutually aware has really helped us because I can now understand her behavior. She's she's much more on the I don't want to say clingy, but she needs that sort of reassurance and of my presence and Yes. And now behavior that I might have thought in the past was a bit irrational, I now understand more contextually. Yeah. And therefore, I'm able to be more empathetic and more and that's really important. It's really important to do that because you know we all attach in different ways and by understanding that it helps you as you say if someone's really clingy it can feel quite claustrophobic but if you understand actually that's especially if you're avoidant it's like triggering well it's really triggering and that's what we know we know there are certain attachment styles that work better together than others. So we know particularly a dismissing avoidant person with a preoccupied person. Yeah. That's really tricky to keep going. that is that is a long-term relationship which is if it can carry on is going to be very hard work and probably quite uh roller coastery I would say whereas you know if any of the of the insecure so I'm doing this because it's a grid any of the insecure attachment styles if you can find yourself somewhere insecure brilliant secure people are amazing because they will absorb all that stuff
because they're so secure in themselves whether you're clingy whether you're pushing them away they absorb it and they're good at it preoccupied and fearful avoidant that works quite well in one sense because the preoccupied person wants to stick with the fearful avoidant person and the thing that's really really troubling the fearful avoidant person is you're going to leave. So if you literally sit on top of them which is what you're doing if you're preoccupied then that's great in one sense because they will think oh okay they're literally not going anywhere because they're there all the time. Um so there are partnerships that work better and I do I agree with you. I think it's good to be aware of what each of within a partnership is because then you can understand some of the quirks and behavior. you can understand some of your reactions to that behavior. Neurodeiversity. In the last couple of weeks, I was thinking, it might be my attachment style, but it also might be the fact that I was diagnosed with ADHD, which I'm not sure if I have, but I was diagnosed with it. Um, I was thinking about how a neurodeiverse person might struggle in love and holding on to relationships because of their neurodiversity. Before we started talking, you said that roughly, I think 25% of the population are classified as neurodyiverse. If I have ADHD or autism, how am I likely or more likely to struggle in love? Firstly, because the big the biggie is that the neuroscience and genetics of love are very like the neuro the neuroscience and genetics of neurodeiversity. So the chemistry that underpins love is also implicated in neurodeiversity. Some of the areas of the brain which are activated in love are also involved in neurodeiversity. And that is why particularly with autism but also with ADHD the issues that that people who are autistic or ADHD have express themselves a lot in the social sphere because it's the same neurochemistry and genetics essentially. So for example the oxytocin receptor gene which has 26 point mutations on it which impact your social behavior um and and individual differences in social behavior. A lot of those are implicated also in autism.
Dopamine uh is implicated obviously in ADHD. Serotonin is implicated in ADHD. Those are both chemicals which are involved in in love, one of the neurochemicals of love. So there is some major crossovers between the two. There are several reasons why neurodiversity is difficult. For example, um the way the neurodeiverse brain works, things like executive function is different in people with neurodyiverse brains. What does that mean? Executive function is things like attention, uh emotional inhibition, and working memory. It's kind of the set of skills that allow you to operate within the world. Um that's implicate that's impacted in ADHD and in autism. The processing speeds and also the way that you process those particular three elements is different. For example, people with ADHD, their working memory generally isn't great. They find it difficult to recall things or hold on to things. Uh emotional regulation is difficult. So, for example, people with ADHD might build to anger quicker than people who don't have it. Um, people with autism tend to have quite extreme extremes of emotional experience for example and all of that is very difficult in a relationship because if you live with someone who has extreme emotional reactions or gets very angry and conflicts very quickly that's tricky to deal with. We also know things like sensory processing particularly in autism is affected. So that has two implications. First of all, when we're using all that sensory information in the attraction stage, so all that sensory information that's going into your limbic area, the sensory processing speeds in people with autism tend to be slower, but they also tend to be either hyper sensory, which means they feel all the senses very intensely, or they tend to have different experiences sensors, or they tend to have very low sensory experience. And all of that will impact, first of all, how that algorithm operates in your brain. It will also impact just simply things like the environment in which you might go on a date. So most people want to go on a date to a restaurant or a pub or a comedy club or wherever. For autistic people that's really hard to deal with. We also know unfortunately the people who are neurodeiverse are more likely to be in abusive
relationships and there are reasons for that. If we look at ADHD, ADHD is um a dysfunction in the dopamine system in the brain. So what happens is you release dopamine but it's re it's taken back up into the brain before it has enough of an effect. So what people with ADHD tend to do is they dopamine seek. They do activities which give them a hit of dopamine. Um so you know I have my daughter I hope she she should she doesn't mind my daughter's ADHD autistic. Um her dopamine seeking is shopping. She dopamine sinks by shopping because you get a lovely dopamine hit when you do it. But unfortunately start of relationships is a dopamine C. You get lots of lovely dopamine in start of relationship. So what you'll tend to find with ADHD people is they will go into relationships really quickly without really considering is this person right for me. So there's there's that impulsivity that comes with ADHD as well because they're getting that hit of dopamine at the start. We also know that for example if you are neurodeiverse you tend to mask a lot. You've got used to in life masking to fit in with the neurotypical world. What's masking? Masking is knowing the rules of the neurotypical world. So for example, autistic girls, the reason why autistic girls tend to be diagnosed later is they become very good at learning the social rules. So all those things that they would naturally want to do in a social situation, you know, be mute or not reciprocate properly or, you know, not say the right thing, they learn what the rules are. It's why they burn out generally is because they've spent their whole childhood studying it and going, "Okay, so in that circumstance I do this and in that circumstance I do this." And they hide the autism. Now, so not only is that incredibly stressful, but if you've got used to in life denying who you are, if you go into a relationship with someone, particularly if they're particularly dominant or they're abusive, you carry on denying who you are, denying that you have a right, for example, to be with someone who's kind. Mhm. Deny, you know, deny the fact that you have needs. And so, we know that people who mask find it much much harder to express what they want in a relationship. So it is it is really
incredibly tricky I think and you know we also have issues with empathy for example there's a myth particularly autistic people don't empathize that's not true it's unfortunately still in the diagnostic criteria and it shouldn't be the issue is is that um they empathize in a different way and um so either they are actually hypermpaths which means that they feel the other person's emotions so strongly that they shut down and so they don't actually respond to the person because they can't cope with the extreme emotional overload they've had. Or the other reason is they do empathize, but they empathize with a neurodeiverse brain. And there's been a recent study looking at this and saying actually if you put two new neurodyiverse people together and ask them to empathize with each other, they're brilliant. Two neurotypical people together, ask them brilliant. Ask a neurodyiverse person and a neurotypical person to empath they it's hard because the brain operates in a different way. So empathy is the basis of of relationships. So if you um are in a mixed relationship, neurotypical and neurodyiverse, that can be tricky because it can be very hard to empathize with the other person and know what their emotional needs are. On this point then if if we accept that people with ADHD, I've been diagnosed with ADHD so everything I say is within that context. um have higher impulsivity and they have higher novelty seek seeking behavior, novelty seeeking behavior and they have struggles with emotional regulation. Yes. And they have some executive function which is going to impair their ability to think about sort of like the stakes and foresight and all these things. Does that mean that people with ADHD are more likely to cheat on you? There's actually a study which um looked at this in 2015. It suggested that adults with ADHD were more likely to report infidelity than nonADHD peers. However, the effect size was not overwhelming. Yes, I I'm always wary of studies like that because first of all, if the effect size is not overwhelming, I think we have to be very careful of labeling neurodyiverse people as the problem in a relationship. Um, and I'm very aware of that. I do a lot of
training on this particularly for therapists. And I think we need to be aware that all relationships are a interaction between two people and they will each bring their issues. And I think the labeling of people with neurodiversity as the problem is is not on. We all whether we're neurodyiverse or not have to learn to adapt to the other person. And we have to educate ourselves about how their brain works, attachment, whatever it might be. And therefore, I need think we need to be careful. I think with ADHD, what we do know is people with ADHD are more likely to have many more short-term relationships because they get bored quite easily. They are also much more likely to undertake risky sexual behavior, cheating maybe um because they are that because of the impulsivity. So it might be I would want to see that study replicated many times before I think we say that's a that's a fundamental issue. And I would also question you know if it's got a very small effect size there's many other reasons why people cheat. So, do you know I think in part the reason why I asked that question is because again one of my very good friends um has struggled in this regard for many many years. He's approaching his 40s now and he's what what what part of the relationship is well it's not necessarily what he struggled with. It's what he loves. He loves as he says to me the chase. Yes. He says I love the chase. Yes. And when you when you really just love the chase and you maybe don't love the part after it as much you're not going to have a great relationship. and he got to I think about 35 36 years old and he was diagnosed with ADHD and it put the rest of his life in context and it was I mean of all the people that I know that have ADHD most certainly he fits the the sort of criteria and um he looked back through his old report cards and he look mapped the behavior that he had had in relationships. It was very impulsive. It was very very short term. He loves he goes on more dates than anyone I've ever met in my entire life because he loves the as he says the chase. And I I thought, you know, maybe there is a link there with his neurodiversity. Obviously, I would say there probably is. I mean, he's dopamine seeking. Yeah. Essentially, that's what he's doing
because the early stages, you know, when you get lot um when you get further into a relationship, dopamine takes more of a back seat. Um and come in. So, betray is the chemical of long-term love. Dopamine is much more in the background at that point. So, we get the major part of our dopamine hits in relationships at the start. And that's probably why he gets to a point where the dopamine starts tailing off. The oxytocin starts to tail off and beta endorphine starts kicking in and it becomes less exciting. That's when we move from passionate love to companionate love and it's just not as exhilarating maybe. So if you have a brain like that that's highly dopamine seeking. You're going to theoretically struggle to have long-term relationships. And we know that. We know that. I I recently um did a conference which was on women in ADHD and we had a workshop and most of the women in that room said I either don't have relationships or I struggle or I'm in a long-term relationship but it is a daily struggle to maintain it because it's so hard to keep your attention on that relationship to not look for the novelty elsewhere and also for the other person particularly if they're neurotypical to deal with. I mean, one woman said to me, "I'm always told I'm too much. I'm too much to go out with because of the impulsivity and the rushing around and the lack of attention and the lack of calmness and the need for spontaneity, I guess." Yeah. What can one do about it? I I don't like pushing drugs on anybody. And I think whether you take um medication for ADHD is a very personal decision. But I think if I the mantra I have is if your ADHD is fundamentally upsetting your life and you feel that then it's something you maybe need to consider. It's very difficult to do just off your own back. It's not a therapy issue. It's not you know an attachment issue. It's very likely to be a neurochemical issue. And that's the different thing. I would also say it's also about the people who you go out with. I've spoken to lots of couples which are mixed in terms of neurodiversity and neurotypical and it's about the person who's neurotypical really educating themselves about how the neurodyiverse brain works. So they have an understanding also about why is that person reacting like that? Why are
they doing that? And that's also really really important. I don't think we want to put the burden always on neurodyiverse people to change because I don't think that's really an acceptable thing to ask them to do. I don't think it's really any different from any relationship. The best relationships are ones where we take the time to really understand who our partner is. That's the way it works best. So you saying you and your partner talk about your attachment styles. That's really important. You're fundamentally making it clear that that's important to you and that your partner has an understanding and you're explaining your behavior. And I think that's important. I wonder how this dubtales into the subject of sex and novelty and spontaneity as it relates to sex. If you're a neurody divergent person or you just have a higher, you know, impulse desire, I guess, or impulsivity, need for novelty, you probably get bored of sex pretty quick, possibly. Yeah. I mean, it's not an area I study particularly, but I think yes, you probably do. And and we know that humans, some humans are genetically neurode divergent or not, some humans are genetically predisposed to like novelty more than others. It's part of the of one of the dopamine genes. And so some people yes they are more likely to seek out novelty and want for example yes a very varied sex life. Um but you know that's something you can have with one individual. You don't necessarily have to go out and you know if that individual is willing to to go down that route with you. It's not something you necessarily have to seek elsewhere. As it relates to all the work that you do and the future work that you're going to go on to do. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that maybe we should have talked about? Um two things. I really really want to emphasize the body of work which says that your relationships are the biggest factor in your health, your longevity and your well-being. And the reason why I want to emphasize that is because in a world of digital communication we have become much less good at nurturing our relationships much less good at impact inputting into our relationships maintaining our relationships in the way they should be
maintained which is in person. And that has consequences for our health. you know a wonderful study the first study of its kind in 2010 there have been many since by Julie Halt Lunstead she but she did a massive meta analysis which is lots and lots of studies coming together looking at the impact of your social network your relationships all those sorts of things on outcomes health outcomes things like the likelihood that you would have poor mental health the likelihood that you would suffer from certain chronic diseases the likelihood that you would recover from certain illnesses or how long it would take you to come back round after having an operation in terms of getting better and she found and it's been even more impressive since then that that your relationships are the biggest factor in your health, well-being and longevity above all else from don't smoke, maintain a good weight, do your exercise, eat your vegetables, all those sorts of things. Above all of that sit your relationships. So when we in this very healthconscious world where we have lots of health influences and all that kind of thing, we're still missing that point and we're still trying to do our relationships efficiently in this busy busy world. And I understand why. And the tools we've been given to do it are attractive. You know, they're attractive. We love a new shiny thing, humans, and they're they're great. But what's happened is we've we've forgotten who we are and how we need to do it. And our brains did not evolve with the shiny screen. Our brains evolved in a world where we all lived very very close together. And we need to kind of in a way go back to that if you want to f have that fulfilling life. So I think that's my first point. I think the second one is the role for AI. Uh, and you've probably talked about AI in so many different contexts, but AI in our intimate relationships, and I don't mean just sexually intimate, I mean emotionally intimate. So, any relationship you have based on love is something we need to talk about because there is work towards, for example, we know about AI chatbots already. Uh, and we know that there's going to be work towards having AI caretakers, for example, people who care for people, robots who care for people, or even, you
know, you could even possibly have a relationship. I'm not talking about sex bots, but I'm talking about a full relationship with a robot. Again, all of these things, we need to understand the implications and we need to have a conversation now because when you unleash these things, if you haven't had that conversation, it's very hard to put them back in the box. And we know already things like chat bots are out there and I'm not the sort to say something is entirely negative. So, chat bots have their place. They've been shown to be really, really good for particularly with people who have social anxiety or people who are, for example, autistic and want to practice being social. They're really good. You're not going to get any criticism from the chatbot. You're not going to get a funny face pulled or make them feel uncomfortable. It's great. You can have a good old and that's brilliant. It's when you replace real human contact. Absolutely. It's it makes the conversation feel a lot more comfortable and natural. Um, and you can really focus on the chat itself, distractions. It uh it definitely helps keep the vibe positive. Isn't it crazy how much that's progressed? Yeah, it is. But what scares me about it is that person talking to you there. Your brain at the moment because we haven't advanced enough in AI and maybe well knows that's not human. And because it knows it's not human, it's not releasing any of the positive chemicals that come with social interaction in your brain. And it's those chemicals that underpin your health, your mental health and your physical health. Be sure often underpins your immune system. So that's the problem. Your prefrontal cortex at the moment is not recognizing that as human. So it's not going to kick off anything. And that is the problem. Now maybe a robot, you know, an AI guy would say to me, "Oh, we'll get there." Okay, if you can get there, great. But at the moment, we're not. And we have people who are starting to build really strong attachments to these things. You can build an attachment to a chatbot. It's a parasocial relationship. Same as building a relationship to a celebrity you've never met, but you're not getting any of the positive benefits. So have them in their life. Have them as part of
your social network. if you want to spend time, but do not replace humans with them or even dogs with them. Um, care robots scare me because um again it's about replacing humans in a context which is very very complicated from a neuroscientific point of view. Care requires empathy. It requires um a thing called which occurs in very close human relationships again underpins our um immune system and our health known as biobehavioral synchrony. So bio behavioral synchrony, we won't have it now. I'm really sorry. We're not close enough. But you will have it with your partner. So when you're with your partner, if I were to observe you, your body language and maybe the gestures you use and the and your vocal tone and maybe the language you use would start kind of matching each other. We all know this from management training. You know, you match people to make them feel closer to you. Fine. It's what humans do. It makes us feel close to each other. But if we were to look into your body, you and your partner would have entered that room at different baseline levels of physiological measures such as your blood pressure, your heart rate, your body temperature. Okay? If you sat together and had a chat for five minutes, those would all come into synchrony. So your heart rates would synchronize, your body temperature and your blood pressure. And then if we were to look into your brain, two things would have happened. First of all, having come into the room again with different activation patterns in your brain, we would look in your brain and your activation patterns would be the same. So you would be perceiving the world in the same way. And finally, if we looked at your neurochemical levels, so we generally look at oxytocin because it's easiest to access. Again, we all have baseline levels of oxytocin. They're different from each other. You would have walked in with different levels. After 5 minutes, they would have synchronized. They would be the same. So what actually happens when you're with someone you're close to to develop that bond is you become one organism. You are literally operating as one being. And we think that's that in a way is the absolute fundamental basis of human close love and it's the fundament and you don't get that at the moment
with an AI robot. And I can't imagine it being easy because you need a wet brain and you need a circulatory system. This um this picture I have here which talks about the brain and love. What is that showing? That's showing that we can I'll throw it up on the screen but yes it's showing that we can't get the same depth of love as it relates to neuroscience that then we can from a human versus like a pet. Yes. So what's happening here? So we've got the different sorts of love. So we've got romantic love and parental love. Now these two arguably are the most intense forms of love. Okay? Uh that's why you see such amazingly complex areas of the brain lighting up. You've got a lot happening in the core of the brain here. This is the lyic system. And you've got happening neoccortically as well in relation to areas related to um social behavior but also things like empathizing, okay, and maintenance and trust and all those sorts of things. Love for a friend is from a neuroscientific point of view nearly as complicated as romantic love. But what it doesn't actually have which is really interesting is in romantic love the difference is we actually get some activations which mirror the activations you get if you're on an opiate. Mhm. That sort of addictive euphoric um sensation. You get that you get that pattern in romantic love. You don't get it in friendship love. You also don't generally get biobehavioral synchrony in friendship unless it's a really close friend. So friendship love is just less intense. It's a love but it's not as intense. I wouldn't describe this as love for a stranger. What you can see the reason why I say that is can you see how little unconscious activation there is? This is the limbic area. Well that's the same with the pet. So so we get we're not getting any unconscious nurturing attachment behaviors which you wouldn't expect to get with a stranger. with a pet. I'm surprised to look at this and I don't know where this came from because other studies have shown that pet love is very like parental love. Oh, really? Yeah. So, I don't know which study this is and I don't know what they looked at or how many people they looked at. So, that's interesting. But what I would expect to see more more actually here in the nurturing area
because we do know that um you can build an attachment relationship with a pet. So, it's very surprising that there's nothing there. The research you have there looked at the differences between friends, loves, pet strangers. Um, it's from Renee Atel cerebral cortex, a 2024 study. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. I mean, with science, you sometimes get different answers because you've done different methodology or you've got different populations. We tend to like to see things replicated for them to be converted. So, I'm a bit surprised by this. Also, in my book, I talk about some really good studies that have been done looking at dog human love. So I'm surprised by that. I'm not surprised that it's got quite a a bit of cortical action. I'm really surprised it has nothing in the limbic area because that's where attachment is. And love for nature. Um again this is really interesting because again this is this is the striatum and the amydala and this is where human love like to another sentient being would be. And again we've got nothing. So love for nature is a much more it's not a conscious thing but it's a much less emotional thing. It's it's different. And and we only really see patterns like this if you're interacting with another sentient being. And this is what kind of worries me about AI because if you did this with AI, you would probably get something like this. If you really loved your AI robot at the moment or your chatbot, you would get this. But you I would be very surprised if you got anything in the limbic area. And and and the studies so far show that we don't because you you don't develop that loving relationship and you certainly don't get anything in the prefrontal cortex. And that's the problem. Now AI might go on in leaps and bounds, but I at the moment when they talk about programming empathy, empathy is so complicated and particularly the empathy we have, we have cognitive empathy. Most animals have emotional empathy. So cognitive empathy is much more complex. It's very hard to do and the fact you can't get biobehavioral synchrony unless you have a wet system. And robots so far don't have wet systems. So that's what worries me. But it's going to come and we have to have that conversation.
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves the question for the next guest knowing not knowing who they're leaving it for. Okay. And the question that's been left for you, was there a moment in your career when you said to yourself, I have made it. Um I think I'm not good at doing that actually. I said to my husband the other day, I'm not good at celebrating when I do something. So I tend to go, what's next? um very human. I suppose one of the times I thought I probably had made it was when I started at the University of Oxford and I was working with Robin Dumbar and then I thought from an academic point of view this is like the pinnacle of where you can work with a team of people who are at the forefront of what they're doing. So I think that was probably a moment but I'm really good in retrospect at kind of rewriting that and going yeah but that wasn't good enough so let's go and do the next thing. So so if we look forward then sat here now What do you think the moment will be in your future where you think you've made it? Although you probably when you arrive there, you'll think, you know, there's another goal. I think it's partly to do with the spreading of education. I think if my next book reaches a lot of people and reaches enough people, I will think I've made it and I've done my mission to share what we know about dads because there's so much written and it stays in fusty old journals and nobody reads it. And I want to share that because it fundamentally changes how who dads think they are and how they do it. I get so many emails from people saying, you know, wow, I've read your book and it like legitimizes so much for me. It makes me understand what I'm going through or it makes me realize that I am needed. And I think if I can get a book that has a really diverse readership, then that will be the moment where I think yes, I've done what I want to do. And what is the um unheard plight of dads? Because you'll be on the receiving end of so many messages and emails and stuff. What if you could summarize how dads are feeling at the moment and why your work is resonating? How would you summarize if if you were
speaking as a dad, a dad who represents the average of the dads that contact you? What would those sentences be? It would be, I'm made to feel unimportant. I am made to feel like a secondary parent, like a bag carrier or the person who makes the tea. That's particularly in relation to like birth and antiatal stuff. So, it's all about them not feeling like they are important or that they're needed. and they are so wrong. Is the law slightly biased towards Do you know how why I asked that question? I was in a cab the other day and I got in this taxi in uh in London and the cab driver um spent about 30 minutes telling me that he'd been at a march in London for dads and that he had had his child taken off him, I believe. Mhm. and he was proceeded to tell me for the next sort of 20 minutes that the laws are unfair as it relates to dad's right to to see and take care of their kids. Yeah, you probably know the laws better than I do, but it is and we I've spent a long time and I'm still not there yet wanting to go into the family courts in Britain and inform them about this because at the moment they're operating on out modded um understandings that the primary person a child needs is their mom and therefore if there's any possible reason why dad they don't think dad is appropriate, whatever it might be, it might be that dad's living too far away or dad's job doesn't allow for it. They will not stick to the presumption of 50/50 custody and they will swing it all over in terms in in favor of mom, for example. And that is because they do not fundamentally understand how important that father is to that child. And that's because they've not kept up. They're literally they're operating on very outmoded completely culturally based, not evidencebased at all assumptions about who a father is. So he's right. He's absolutely right. And there are many men who are in that position. I get emailed all the time from men doing and all the time from people saying, you know, well, you come and be my expert witness, et and I can't I can't do it. I I don't have time to do it. But yeah, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how important fathers are, but that's just reflecting a wider cultural problem. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing the work you're doing because you're
certainly opening millions and millions of people's eyes. You've opened my eyes in a a bunch of profound ways, both on the subject of love, but also on the importance of fatherhood. And it is very easy to to believe the sort of broader social narrative that as a father you are surplus to requirements or you're some I don't know you're there to to pay for things or you're um less important in some way. But you know I've got a brother who's a year older than me and he's got three kids under the age of six and um he's really managed to design his life around being there for those kids. And I've seen both the impact that that's had on those kids and their development but also the impact it's had on him and the meaning he has in his life. and he's one of those fathers that um walked away from the corporate world and made a decision to prioritize the three little children that he's brought into this world. And it's really like kind of blew open my own I guess stereotypes and presumptions that I had about the role that I have when I become a dad. And now much of the reason I have these conversations and enjoy your work so much is because it's a further reminder that um the narrative I've believed around fathers being this you know kind of distant uh being that floats in and out in provides you blow it open and you blow it open from a anthropological perspective and evolutionary perspective and a neuroscience and biological perspective which I think is really critical and I think because of that there's going to be so many kids that have better development outcomes and so please do keep doing the work you're doing and I'm very excited for your upcoming book. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. [Music] [Music]