#817 - Dr Anna Machin - The Evolutionary Psychology Of Love, Lust & Cheating 01:39:37

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Anna Machen. She's an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University and an author. Love is pretty fascinating. It's this odd cocktail of hormones and neurochemicals that can turn even the most normal person insane. What is it? Why did it evolve? And why do we seem to have no control over when it comes and when it goes?

Expect to learn what the evolutionary advantage of love is, the difference between love and lust, why women cheat and who they tend to cheat with, the role of genetics on who you find attractive, what the dark side of love looks like, whether dating apps have changed the way that love and attraction works, how certain types of love can be addicting, and much more. Anna is so great. Her first book, Life of Dad,

It was such a game changer for me in terms of sort of explaining how I see the role of men and fatherhood in a child's development. And she's back again. This next book is so great. Her insights about something that everybody knows sort of intuitively and poets and artists and songwriters have tried to get a handle on. But this time it's using evolution and psychology. And she's so great. There's tons to take away from this one. I really hope that you enjoy it.

Before we get into the episode, in case you missed my announcement on Instagram and on my newsletter, I am playing the Eventim Apollo, the old Hammersmith Apollo in London, which fits 3,600 people in on Thursday, the 28th of November this year. It is the only show that I will be doing in all of the UK or anywhere near Europe until 2025, and tickets are

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Nice to see you again. I really enjoyed our first conversation. We talked about dads, the importance of fatherhood. Today, your most recent book, Why We Love, I want to talk about that. Very universal, perhaps one of the most universal things that humans have got. Why did love evolve at all? Okay, so love evolved basically in the same way that most things evolved is because it aids our survival. So humans are arguably the most cooperative species on the planet. And they're the most cooperative species on the planet.

both in terms of the number of relationships we can keep going at once, which is about 150, in terms of the duration of those relationships that can last decades, and in terms of the very many different categories of relationships that we have. So we're very cooperative in

But cooperation is really hard. We all know getting along with our friends, with our family, with our co-workers can be a little bit stressful sometimes. And it would actually be much, much easier to be solitary. But we have to live in a group and we have to get along with each other to just survive. And so evolution came up with love, basically. It's kind of like a form of biological bribery at the most basic level. So it's a set of neurochemicals which motivate and reward you

for starting and then maintaining what we call your survival critical relationships so those relationships that are critical to you both surviving on a day-to-day basis but also passing your genes down to the next generation so at the most basic level that is all love is it's just this biological bribery to make us feel good about doing this really quite difficult thing are there any animals that don't have love are there any animals that haven't evolved that

It's hard to say because love is a really nebulous concept and it depends how you define it. I think we all have our own definition of love.

and it depends at what stage you define it. I think a lot of animals feel what we would call basic love. So all the mammals, for example, experience attachment. All the mammals are underpinned by things like oxytocin and dopamine. You know, all mammals have those sort of caring, nurturing relationships, particularly between mothers and offspring. So we would say all mammals experience love. What we get a little bit

hot in the head about is whether any animals experience human type love which is a little bit more complicated and what I find a little bit sad really is you know when we just assume all humans feel love so if I say to you do you know what love is have you experienced love you go yeah and I'd go okay um but with animals we hold them to a very high level of evidence and so do

To actually tell whether an animal experiences human-like love, you kind of have sort of a checkbox of five different things. So you do the experience of attachment. Is there neurochemistry? Does the neurochemistry involve beta endorphin as well? Beta endorphin is a more complex neurochemical. It's involved in human love, which we don't see in the lesser mammals. Do they grieve, which is the loss of love? Do they have friendships? So do they have relationships, which are nothing really directly to do with reproduction or passing genes down just for the hell of it?

essentially. And do they experience cognitive empathy? So there are different types of empathy. There's emotional contagion, which is just, oh my God, you scream, I scream. I have no idea why I'm screaming, but something scary. That's a lot of animals have that. There's emotional empathy, which is, I can see you're really upset.

but I don't know what to do about it. And then there's cognitive empathy, which is I can see you're really upset and I'm going to help you in the appropriate way, which is what humans have. So I think if we use those five things, then we can say, yeah, some higher mammals definitely do. So for example, cetaceans, the dolphins, the whales do. Gorillas, chimps do. Beyond that, it's a little bit tricky to say. Dogs might.

We're still not sure on the cognizance of empathy with dogs, but dogs certainly may experience human levels of love. There's a wonderful, effective neuroscientist, who unfortunately is no longer with us now, called Jak Panskep. And he spent his whole life researching love. And what he said about human love is he said, you know,

Love is like the cupcake and loads of animals have the cupcake. But what humans have done is they've over-decorated the cupcake. They've put lots of rubbish on top, which is mostly the cultural stuff we associate with love. But all that lovely decoration on top isn't actually necessary.

to experience love. We've just kind of overly complicated it. So I would say yes, a lot of animals experience love. I think keeping it exclusively for humans and setting this very high bar is maybe not fair, I think. Going back to the biological bribery, is this just a neurochemical motivation in that way? It's a motivation in terms of yes. So dopamine's involved and dopamine is the hormone of motivation.

It's also a hormone of reward though. So it's definitely, it involves the dopaminergic system, which is your reward system in your brain. And if you look at the activations that occur in love, certainly the dopaminergic circuit is there.

But it's more complicated than that because it involves things like beta endorphin, which is addictive. And that underpins long-term human relationships. You need something very, very powerful to underpin a relationship for decades. It involves oxytocin. Oxytocin isn't just about, they call it cuddle hormone, which kind of annoys me. But oxytocin is about orientating you towards social objects in your environment and

And it also acts on the amygdala to calm the amygdala so that you're more confident about building relationships. And serotonin's evolved. And serotonin is about obsessive love. So it's more complicated than just a motivation to go over there and chat to someone. It has this quite complex structure of different roles for different neurochemicals.

But it's bribing you or motivating you in one way or another to do things that perhaps without that soup of neurochemicals, you wouldn't go and do. You wouldn't sacrifice yourself in this way. You wouldn't care as much. You wouldn't be as vigilant. You wouldn't wake up at three in the morning to feed the baby, etc., etc. No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't because it's just really, really difficult. Because being social, as I'm sure you know, being in a group is actually costly to your survival.

It's very stressful being in a group. You don't get to do exactly what you need ideally for yourself every day. You have to coordinate with everybody else. You've got people who are constantly trying to stab you in the back or do one over on you. So you have to spend a hell of a lot of time monitoring everybody else to make sure that everyone's behaving. You exist in a hierarchy, which is going to dictate the access to resources you get. So if you're at the top, fab, you're going to get the best mate, you're going to get the best food, you're going to get the best shelter. If you're at the bottom, you're kind of screwed. So it's...

it's really really hard to do but humans mainly because we birth our babies so incredibly early we need to help each other particularly to raise our children and we talked about fatherhood before fatherhood's one of the things that started but we need we do need that village to help us raise our children and we need each other to learn everything we need to learn about our complex technological world so social learning is really important so we need each other to do that

So it's this balance. We need all these things from each other, but it's so stressful. It's actually quite costly. And it can be quite dangerous. You have to compete. You might not actually come out of it alive. So yes, it's at the most basic level. It's there to go. Here we go. I know it's really hard, but I'm going to give you all this lovely stuff and hopefully that'll make you feel better. Obviously, as I can hear people screaming, love is much more complicated than that. But that is the reason why it evolved in the first place.

What about the phases of romantic love? Explain the way that love and lust and all of the different systems work. Okay. So lust and attraction are two entirely separate systems. Lust is driven by a hypothalamus and it's associated with the sex hormones. And we kind of sometimes conflate attraction and lust in our minds. When we talk about attraction, most people think about romantic attraction.

Actually, attraction is a stage that starts all relationships. All attraction is, is being drawn towards somebody out of interest or out of desire or whatever it might be, simply because you like them. So attraction is a stage that you go through in your friendships. You go through it when you first meet your baby for the first time. That's a stage you go through. So attraction underpins all forms of love. Lust is only there in romantic relationships and it's a very separate area of the brain. So attraction is based in oxytocin and dopamine.

And as I said, oxytocin works to orientate you to social beings in your environment and kind of block out distractions. And it also quietens your amygdala, which is the fear center of your brain, which means that sort of the nagging, confident, sapping voices that can sometimes occur when you're thinking about striking up conversation with somebody. Those are quietened so that you feel more confident, you feel more chilled about doing this quite difficult thing. And dopamine is...

there to reward you certainly but it's also there to give you a bit of a kick up the bum because oxytocin is lovely but if you just have it on your on its own you probably wouldn't make any effort at all because it makes you feel really really chilled and so you probably wouldn't make the effort to go across the bar or the playground or wherever you are so we have some dopamine because it's wired into your muscles it's wired into your motor circuits to go come on you've actually got to go and do something

And the other important things about dopamine and oxytocin is they make your brain more plastic.

So particularly in the areas relating to memory and learning. And when you first meet somebody, think of all the stuff you've got to learn about that person, particularly if you're going to meet them again, you're going to recognize them, you're going to know their name, you're going to know what they're interested in, the sound of their voice, all these sorts of things. So your learning areas and your memory areas become more plastic, which means they're very open to change. And you do that very efficiently in those sort of first, second minutes. So you're being neurochemically primed.

To be a good, receptive friend. Yes. Yes. To take all of this on board so that you remember that person, essentially. And so that's what happens in the attraction stage. And attraction initially is entirely unconscious. So in the romantic sense, what we do is we take in lots and lots of sensory information from that person. And we're taking in that sensory information because what we're trying to judge from that person is, is this a good potential mate? Yes.

And so we're going to take in visual information about things like body shape, about facial symmetry. We're going to hear what they're saying, what the tone of their voice is. We're going to, if you're a woman, you're going to smell whether they're genetically compatible. So you men can't do that, women can. And you're going to take in all this information and it goes through this very complex algorithm in your brain. And what that algorithm is trying to test is, yeah, how valuable is this person as a mate? How reproductively successful are they going to be? And that's known as their mate value.

We all have a mate value on our head. It's kind of like financial value in the stock market. And we will be calculating that using the indicators we've looked at to work out, okay, how reproductively successful is this person actually going to be? And if they're a good bet, if they're good, then basically you kind of get the three cherries on the slot machine and oxytocin and dopamine floods an area of your brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is

incredibly unconscious, very, very deep. And it's simply there to start this, kickstart this process. And it's entirely unconscious. And that whole process of sensory intake, of algorithm chundering away, of oxytocin and dopamine, that's like nanoseconds of time. And then at that point, you know, hopefully you cross over and you say hello. But

At some point, that signal moves from the unconscious brain into the conscious brain. And we have kind of both things going at the same time where you start to consciously contemplate this person, thinking things like, oh my God, they've got lovely eyes, or actually their tone of voice is quite annoying, or do I agree with what they're saying? What my friends think, what my family think, all those sorts of things. And then attraction becomes an unconscious and conscious process, basically.

Dig into that genetic compatibility thing to super sniff a skill that women have that men don't. Yeah. Okay. So what that is, is there's an area of your genetic code known as the major histocompatibility complex. And that underpins the diversity of your immune response to disease. Rather bizarrely, some of the genes in that complex also underpin your sense of smell.

Go figure. And what women can do is they can actually smell how close a male's set of MHC genes are to their own. So if they're close to their own, they will not like the smell of that person because they're too close. It's suggestive of inbreeding. And actually what you want for your child is the most diverse immune response you can have. So you need your partner to have an MHC complex immune

as far away from yours as possible. And so what we find with women is they are able to smell that and they can tell. So it's really funny. You would never consciously know you're doing it. But sometimes, you know, women will say to me, I met him. He was perfect in lots of different ways. It was just something, just something that I can't put my finger on, but didn't work for me. And that's that. We think women can do it and men can't.

Either because they've evolved to do it or they've retained it. We don't know whether mammals can do it, obviously, because we can't really tell. Or they've retained it and men have lost it. Because for a woman, making the mistake of inbreeding is much more serious because she's then, if she becomes pregnant, going to be out of the game for nine months doing in our evolutionary past something very dangerous, which is be pregnant and give birth.

And so the risk to her of death is high. And therefore, you kind of have to be pretty sure that this baby that you're going to birth is going to be strong and it's going to be healthy, essentially. So we think women can do it and men can't for that reason. Is that why humans kiss as well?

Possibly. We actually don't know. Not all humans kiss in the romantic sense, actually. All humans kiss, but only 100% of kissing across the cultures occurs between mothers and children. So there are some cultures where you don't romantically kiss. So there's always been this massive debate about why did we evolve kissing? Because some primates kiss, but they kind of

They don't do it very consistently and they don't seem to do it in any particularly sort of regular context. So it's quite hard. So chimps, you'll see chimps kissing, but it's not really quite sure what they're doing. Some theories have been it evolved in mums and children to sort of pass masticated food. The other thing is that, yes, maybe it is something to do with getting closer to people and smelling them. Though having said that, you know, mammals, other mammals managed to do that without kissing. So why do we need to do that?

some people think it's something to do with testing the health of the person, tasting the health of the other person. Um, and something, some people say, yeah, it's just a really good bonding thing. Your lips have got a lot of sensory, um, uh, lots of nerve endings. And therefore by kissing you, you, you know, you might be increasing in terms of the bonding in terms of oxytocin and things like that. Cause it's touch. But do you know what? Nobody actually knows the answers to why we kiss. I think it's really interesting. The compatible, I think it was actually, uh,

Mr. Dunbar himself, who I read...

I can't remember what it was I was reading. I was reading something of his and he was talking about the evolution of kissing and why it was potentially. Then I think he posited maybe it's increasing proximity. It's allowing you to check for compatibility between immune systems. But yeah, it's so ubiquitous. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're right. I didn't realize that not all human cultures do kiss. No. But at least many do. Many do. And it's culturally something that, yeah, I would say probably...

80 85 percent of cultures kiss in the romantic context so it's certainly something that's there that don't do you know do you know any of the ones that don't i know that there are some in terms of there are some uh cultures in africa that don't and there are some cultures i think in south america that don't but we don't really know why they do kiss their children so i don't know why they don't but it's just not seen as as a as a sort of a sexual romantic thing

So it's definitely got a cultural undertone to it. And whether we've just all, you know, learned to do it, I don't know. Talk to me about the role of love in maintaining a romantic relationship long term and dealing with the vicissitudes and jealousy and concern and male parental uncertainty. Okay. So love is different, obviously, to attraction. It's a different set of neurochemicals.

And they are, as I said, they're unique to humans and some of the higher primates. So these are the chemicals that underpin really long-term relationships. Because oxytocin is great if you are quite a short-lived little mammal, like a little vole or a little mouse, which is the creatures that were studied to discover oxytocin in this context. But the problem with it underpinning long-term relationships is, first of all, it doesn't last very long. A hit of oxytocin lasts maybe...

30 minutes. And secondly, we grow tolerant to it. So over time, the hit of excitation you're going to get from someone is going to lessen and that's not going to underpin something in the long term. So we needed something that you didn't grow tolerant to.

The other issue with oxytocin is it's only released in any large quantities in relationships which are associated with reproduction. So that's in the mother-child, father-child relationship and in the sexual relationship. It's released, for example, in quite large quantities during orgasm and during sexual activity. It is released in friendships, but at a much lower level. And the problem with humans is actually the vast majority of our relationships in that 150 network...

aren't sexual, aren't reproductive, aren't with children. And so we need a chemical that's decoupled from reproduction to enable us to maintain those relationships. And that's where beta-endorphin comes in. And beta-endorphin was discovered actually in the primates. It's what's released when primates groom each other. And

all the primatologists out there will know that grooming isn't a utilitarian activity. It's not about hygiene. It's about bonding. So primates groom when they've had an argument, they groom to underpin alliances, they groom to make friendships. And beta endorphin is what's released. And so when we knew that, there's a group of Cambridge who discovered that, then Robin and I at that point were like, okay, well, this is much more likely candidate to be

the underpinning of human love than oxytocin is. And so we began to research the role for beta endorphin in human love. And we've spent many years doing that and done lots and lots of scans and things like that. And that's the answer is that beta endorphin is. Beta endorphin is the neurochemical of long-term love. It's your body's opiate. It evolved in the first instance as your body's painkiller. So it's what's released when you hurt yourself.

But over time, it's been co-opted into the social realm. And it's now what is released when you do something social. And there's lots of activities decoupled from reproduction that produce it, such as laughter, touch, exercise, dancing, singing, even having a hot curry, bizarrely. There's lots of things that release beta and dolphin. So it's really good for that social context that you can get it released from. And we don't grow tolerant to it.

over time. It remains a very potent chemical.

So that's what underpins human love in terms of neurochemistry. But obviously, there are many other things going on there. You've got the psychological elements of human love. So you've got things like attachment, but you've got lots of things around love languages and maintenance behaviors and empathy and trust and reciprocity and all these other things which sit in your neocortex. So human love is very complicated. When people say to me, what is love? I tend to say,

It's really hard to define. It depends what level of explanation you'd like me to answer that at. But what I will say is very broadly, it has two dimensions, which is what sets it apart. It has a biological dimension, which is the neurochemistry, the neural activation, the genetics, that kind of thing, the psychology. And then it has a social dimension. And that's all that cultural stuff. So that's religion, politics, society, media, education, family stories, that kind of thing. And that also impacts society.

how you personally would define love. How much has our conception of love been molested by culture, do you think? Quite powerfully. Culture can overwhelm biology quite easily. Culture is very powerful. And culture can tell you

to work against what your biology is telling you to do. Very definitely. There are many societies in the world where there are rules around acceptable love, which drive very strongly against our biological drive to experience love. So culture is very powerful. And it certainly does underpin a lot of how people define love.

So if you ask the question, what is love around the world, you will get some very different answers. I mean, we obviously in the West are kind of enthralled to the concept of romantic love, for example, if we look at it in that context.

There are many cultures in the world who don't believe in the concept of romantic love. For them, love between a man and a woman might be more spiritual. It might be more centered simply on the family. It might be actually seen as a form of self-sacrifice. In some countries, it's actually seen as being quite a negative thing, something to do with sort of unrequited love and kind of losing yourself in the other person. So it really does depend. The culture you've been brought up in, the rules you've been told,

about what love is and what is acceptable when it comes to love. Is love different, romantic love, different for men and women? Do men experience love in a different way? Do women experience love in a different way? It's a myth that this is amazing. Quite often I get asked that question and people say to me, well, you know, we've got all this thing that men are emotionally intelligent and da-da-da-da-da and all that kind of stuff. No, if you look at the averages...

There are more differences within the sexes in terms of how someone experiences romantic love than there are between the sexes. So if I put somebody in my scanner and nobody tells me what sex they are, I would not be able to tell from looking at the screen when we were doing a love experiment, for example. I couldn't possibly tell.

So the activations are the same. The neurochemistry is the same. What influences how individuals experience love is much more their genetics, which are not sex linked, their attachment profile, and a lot is to do with their upbringing. So all of that is much more influential than what your biological sex is. Now, some of that will be influenced along gender lines. We do...

tell stories differently to boys and girls about what love is. And there's a really interesting study that I created in the book, which was looking at school children and asking them at the age of five to draw a picture of, you know, romantic love and

all the kids regardless of their sex or gender, draw people happily holding hands and there's butterflies and it's all lovely and da-da-da. And then after the age of 11, when puberty's kicked in and maybe we've had a little bit of cultural gender bias coming on, then the boys all do pictures of big strong man looking after small weak woman and then the girls are still doing butterflies and hearts. The girls just didn't grow up. No, but it's really powerful. It's

It's really powerful what we tell boys they should feel when they're in love and how they should act when they're in love. But actually, if you look at their brains, they're no different. It's just very heavily gendered. What do you think is the subtext that we tell young males about their role in love? That they're the protector. That they're the protector and they're the rock.

And therefore you shouldn't really show emotion. You shouldn't become involved in, yes, the sort of emotional extremes of love. You should be very balanced, very controlled. And you are there to protect the female, essentially. And I think that's what we tell boys about love and that, you know, showing emotion, being upset by love or being passionate about love or whatever these things is important.

a female, a feminine thing to do. And to cry about love is a feminine thing to do. And I think that's the stories we tell. Because if you go to other cultures where they don't have those stories, men are very open and emotional about love.

not just love in the romantic sense, but love for their friends. You know, you will see, for example, in some Arab cultures, men holding hands and kissing each other. And it's all very passionate. It's all very out in the open and very emotional. And you would not see men, for example, in the UK doing that. Because that's not what we do. But it's not because they're incapable of it. It's because they've been told, you don't do that. You know, so love is pretty heavily gendered.

Definitely. Talk to me about the genetic upbringing and detachment contribution. Okay. So it's hard to say exactly what the balance is. As everyone knows, there's a very complex interaction between genetics and the environment, particularly when it comes to love, because the genes that underpin our social cognition and the neurochemistry I spoke about are metastatic.

many there's many of them even on the oxytocin receptor gene alone which is one of the major genes that influences how you experience love and how you feel you know there are 26 point mutations

on there that affect how you experience love or how you behave or for example how skilled you are at certain things to do with love such as empathy so in itself that's really complex and then you've got serotonin you've got dopamine you know you've got beta endorphin and they've also all got their little point mutations going on and there's probably many many more point mutations out there we haven't even found yet so it's very very complex some of them have more power than others

And some of them are what we call cumulative. So there are five point mutations on the oxytocin receptor gene, which impact how good you are at empathizing. That empathy, as I mentioned, cognitive empathy is one of the hallmarks of human love.

But how adept you are at it, how adept you are at reading people's emotions and meeting that need is partly under genetic control. And of these point mutations, there are five beneficial versions and there are five which means it's harder for you to do. So the more of the beneficial versions you carry, the better you are at empathizing, for example. There are other areas on the oxytocin receptor gene which are associated with your motivation to want to be in relationships.

And so some people carry a version where they're very motivated to be in relationships. They tend to have a lot of different relationships, friendships, family relationships, romantic love relationships. They tend to find them really satisfying. They're the kind of thing that grounds them and makes them happy. Whereas other people carry a version of that gene, of that point mutation, find relationships quite hard. They tend not to be that motivated to be in them. And actually when they're in relationships, they find them quite stressful.

I wonder if you could do a self-report for people. There must be an introversion, extroversion scale, or maybe you could just do a survey of, do you find time with people to be revitalizing or do you get your energy from being on your own? And then to match that up with this. Exactly. See if there's a genetic influence then. Exactly. Exactly. Because, um,

As I said, what the oxytocin receptor gene does is it orientates you to social people and it gives you confidence and makes you feel chilled. Now, what it sounds like with those people who find it difficult is that gene, it might influence things like the density of oxytocin receptors. So, for example, you just obviously don't have as many oxytocin receptors. So oxytocin just does not have the same effect on you.

So you are less motivated. You're getting less of a benefit. You're getting less of this lovely chilled feeling and less of the confidence. And that might be what's affecting you. And as you say, that might be associated with those personality traits of introversion, for example. So it's really interesting, the genetics. But as I said, there's a very complicated interaction with your environment because the reason why your environment is so influential on how you behave in relationships, how you feel, is because the environment

Human babies have a very quick period of brain growth after birth of about two years. And that's because we're born too early with a very incomplete brain. And the bit that's not complete is the prefrontal cortex, which is where your social cognition sits. And so that means it's very susceptible to the environment in which it's raised.

And we know that now looking at brain scans of children who are brought up in both nurturing environments and also in neglectful environments. So if you're brought up in a nurturing environment, you get very, very high connectivity. You get very dense gray and white matter in that area. If we look at your amygdala, it's small. It's not hyperactivated. So you're not constantly detecting risk, for example. You tend to have high circulating oxytocin. So you're kind of

You've got this wonderful foundation that you've been given by this nurturing environment to be able to do this. And this is largely independent of your genetic predisposition. Yes, this sits on top of it. Whereas if we looked at a child who maybe was neglected or even not neglected but had insecure attachments, intrusive parenting, all that kind of thing, then you can see kind of – well, in extreme cases, you get neuronal death.

So actually that person just does not have the density of grey and white matter in their area, does not have the architecture which is going to provide the foundation. They tend to have over-large amygdalas, which are constantly activated. They tend to have very high levels of cortisol, these sorts of things. So you can see the impact the environment's had.

And we know also that children who are brought up in those environments go on to struggle with relationships. They go on to have more risk of antisocial behavior, that kind of thing. Whereas children who are brought up in nurturing environments, there's much less risk of that. But having said that, I would have said maybe 10 years ago, if you'd said to me and my colleagues, attachment. So attachment is a psychological mindset to do with... Attachment relationships are very intense. They're developmentally significant.

Uh, they're marked by particular characteristics such as separation, anxiety, desire for proximity, that kind of thing. And they're quite rare, but they're very important. And your attachment profile is important in influencing how you behave when you're in love and how you feel. Um,

But we always thought that it was entirely environmental, that really how you turned up, because that's kind of how it looked, to be honest. Neglectful environment, much more like to have insecure attachment going into life. Nurturing environment, much more like to have secure attachment, be good at having relationships, all that kind of stuff. But then again, on the oxytocin receptor gene, a team not ours found acetyl genes, which are known as being differentially susceptible.

And what these genes are is they, or these point mutations, they influence how powerful the environment is on your attachment profile. So if you carry a version of this gene, which means that your environment is less effective in terms of altering your attachment profile,

If you're in a really nurturing environment, then that means obviously that the environment, you're not going to have the same powerful influence of it being secure. But what it does mean is if you're in a neglectful environment, that environment will have much less of an effect upon ultimately your attachment relationships when you get older, your ability to navigate relationships. And we kind of call them the armor-plated genes.

Because we would meet people who would come into the lab and I meet people at public talks even who come up to me and they've had the worst upbringings you've heard, like really awful. But they are navigating their social relationships so well, completely stable, completely secure, doing really well. And we used to joke, we'd be like, wow, they must have some amazing genes because there's something going on there. And this team found that. And they found that actually these people who carry these armor-plated genes, they are kind of protected from that environment.

And they can kind of sail through that environment kind of unscathed because they have these genes, which means, no, actually, these genes are more powerful than that environment is. So it's really, really interesting. And I think we will probably find more genes and more point mutations which are differentially susceptible because the more you dig into the genetics, the more complicated it gets. Well, it's this wonderful interplay between genetic predisposition and then environmental predisposition.

reinforcement, I suppose, especially given that the genes that you are given, presuming that you live in the household with your biological parents that gave you the genetic material that you're made from, they have...

on average, the traits that you have inherited genetically, but they manifest behaviorally. So if you have the genes for anxiety, you tend to lean toward anxiety in terms of your genetic predisposition, you're going to grow up in a household that is likely to behaviorally be more anxious. So you end up with this sort of very strange, ever-increasing... Yeah, and it's why problems cross generations. Partly because of that, though obviously we have to remember that

depending on recessive dominant genes, the fact you're anxious doesn't mean necessarily that that expressed itself in your parents. But that's why things cross generations, because if you live in an abusive household as a child and you build this architecture in your brain that's not particularly healthy and not particularly helpful, then that is the brain that's going to go on to raise your children.

And you're going to be that. You don't have the skills because your parents didn't have the skills. That is imprinted in your brain. You simply don't have the brain architecture. And then you're going to pass it on. And that's why a lot of people in this field work very hard to break that cross-generational problem and intervene. I certainly think from my generation's perspective, a lot of the guys that I talk to almost see it

from the ascended millennials job is to be the kind of breakwater or the breakpoint in between, you know, granddad was in,

the Falklands or Vietnam or something. And dad was a classic boomer parent who kind of didn't really do much of the self-work and didn't have access to the things maybe he would have done. If he'd had access to the School of Life and Deland de Botton's psychotherapy insights, maybe he true would have done the self-work and all the rest of it. But a lot of my friends and I think me too kind of see it as, all right, we have genuinely been given tools that allow us to kind of

make a big dam in front of a lot of patterns that I think have been passed down generationally. And how much of that has come from a genetic predisposition? How much of that has been reinforced by the environment that we've grown up in? Kind of doesn't really matter. You have, if you're able to listen to a podcast like this, you have the agency to be able to, okay, I'm about to have a kid. I've got nine months as a dad or as a mom.

Time for me to learn. I'm going to sit down. I'm going to read enough books. I'm going to do the self-work. I'm going to prepare to stop this

weird repetition, this sort of cycle that has continued to happen for God knows how long. And this is why one of my friends has a really great answer to the question, if you could go for dinner with four people alive or dead, who would it be? And he says that he wants to go with all four of his great grandfathers because he thinks that he would learn way more from being sat around them

than he would from being sat around Isaac Newton or Churchill or Einstein or someone because he wants to see where do I come from? And he would say, oh, that's that fear. That's the part of me that makes me really worried and concerned. That's the social anxiety bit coming through. That's the rebel in me. That's where that comes from. Oh my God, that's from granddad Tim or whatever. And I just thought that's such a cool...

a cool insight. It is. And it also shows the huge power of the human brain for change because that's one thing, because when I talk about this at talks and the impact of upbringing on brain structure and all that kind of thing, you always get people who are like, oh my God, you know, panic. It's determined and it's not because the human brain is hugely plastic.

And actually, if you do the work, sometimes it's much, much harder for some people. Sometimes it's a bit easier. It kind of depends. But you can change that pattern and you can change that pattern within yourself because the human brain is very open to changing if you give it the work. Getting back to romantic relationships, cheating. Why do men cheat? What's in it for them?

Well, why do men and women cheat? Same reason. They cheat because ultimately it's about passing your genes down the generations. So human males are in this position where we're in, in most societies, we're in like a monogamous structure.

And from a sort of genetic reproductive success point of view, that's quite constricting because, you know, you just have this one female and you're going to put everything into them and they're going to bring, you know, birth your baby. And that's how your genes are going to get down the generation.

But, you know, if you're looking at a chimpanzee male, he's there spreading it everywhere. You know, he's going to have a hell of much higher reproductive success than you are because he's in a multi-male, multi-female group. And he can just, you know, have sex multiple times a day and be the father to multiple, multiple babies at the same time. And so really that's kind of the way monogamous species deal with that problem is that they have affairs.

And we see it even in the most monogamous, you know, I used to work with a professor at UCL who studied gibbons, which is the monogamous primate.

And he was like, no, they're not. They are literally always sneaking away behind rocks to have sex with other partners who aren't in their monogamous period. Because that's, from an evolutionary point of view, that's how you're going to increase your reproductive success. Particularly if you're a male, because literally sperm is not worth anything. And if you're pretty damn sure that that baby can be raised without your input...

Great. You've got some genes there going down another family tree, as well as the ones that are in your committed relationship. For women, it's slightly different. And for women, the reason they do it, because obviously once they're pregnant, they're pregnant, is to get better genes.

It's just, you know, that's the evolutionary drive to be unfaithful is because you've obviously got this wonderful investing male here who's probably going to be a great dad. He's going to protect, provide, be nurturing, do all those wonderful, wonderful things. But hey, maybe his genes aren't so great.

So I'm actually going to go and have a fair over here with this person who's really good looking and I'm going to become pregnant with him. And in Nigel's world, the investing guy doesn't find out and they get the best of both worlds. I get some really cracking genes, but I also get somebody who's going to commit and raise this child alongside me. So from an evolutionary point of view, being unfaithful makes perfect sense because ultimately your job on this earth from evolution is to maximize your reproductive success.

It sounds like we're straying toward here is dual mating hypothesis versus mate switching. I know that this has kind of been up in the air. It was one way, then it was the other way, and now maybe it's going back another way. What's the current state of the literature? Have you got any idea where we're at, whether dual mating or mate switching is currently in ascendancy? I don't think we're... Because you get two very strong sort of schools of thought, really. I mean, I'm definitely, I think...

Maybe because I come from a primate behavioral background. I'm very much a dual mating person, I think. I don't think we've come down on either side. And it might be that they're both right and it's a mixed methodology and it depends on the individual because you will observe both in humans. So I don't think necessarily there's one answer or there's another answer. But ultimately, it's what works in your circumstances and in your environment at that time with the basis of your drive is to maximize your reproductive success. So how are you going to do that?

Does that mean that women on average tend to have affairs with men that are better looking than their current partner? On average, yes. They tend to go out with men who... So one of the major measures of genetic strength is facial asymmetry. So we are genetically programmed. If our genes were left to...

you know, express themselves in the phenotype in us without any environmental challenges, no stresses, nothing. We would be symmetrical. We're a bilaterally symmetrical being. But when you're in the womb, particularly and you're developing, they get knocked off course because, you know, your mom might be stressed. She might be ill, whatever it might be. So, so none of us are symmetrical, but some people are pretty damn close, right?

And those are the people who managed to go through all this environmental turmoil and still come out with, because the genes were strong, being pretty close to symmetry. And those are the people we tend to find most attractive. And what you will see on average with women is if you look at the facial asymmetry of their partner, you look at the facial asymmetry of the person they had the affair with, the person they had the affair with is more attractive, objectively. Yeah.

It doesn't mean that actually that person with the lovely close to symmetry face is actually the better mate because they're probably not. If we look at who people end up with, they tend to end up with people not who are extremely close to symmetry. They tend to end up with people who are a little bit more average because that tends to go alongside other things, particularly for men, things like provision and protection and all that sort of thing. But yeah, if you look at it on average, that's what women tend to do. What about the role of...

cheating among men given that we need to account for drops in testosterone as we learned last time when they get into a committed relationship when they get married and then especially when they have children so yes you know there is a sort of

chad to dad pipeline um that goes on from a testosterone perspective and that is going to reduce a desire for sexual variety i'm going to guess not entirely uh and not in all men into it probably but i'm going to guess that um

The sort of classic male Lothario that you may use an example of a single guy to then port across onto men that are married with kids. You're not quite talking about two different species, but you're talking about a little sort of splinter faction away from the original one.

Yeah, you are. Absolutely. But I think we need to be aware that whilst the evolutionary drive to cheat is based in testosterone, testosterone, yes, is the hormone of mate selection. That's what it's there for. It's there to help you select a mate and it's there to help you compete for a mate. There are other things that come into whether or not a man is going to cheat or not. One of those, for example, is his upbringing.

So was he brought up in a culture or in a family where cheating was something that men did? Was his father faithful? If your father's unfaithful, you are more likely to be unfaithful. So it's also to do with those cultural messages we get and also your upbringing in terms of, so it's not just testosterone that will drive you to have an affair. There are many other things that come into it as well.

I had a fascinating conversation a couple of months ago talking about mating ideologies over time. Mads Larsson, he's from some Finnish Swedish Scandi place. And he was just so great. And that really got me thinking about the biological and cultural mismatch when it comes to our sort of mating preferences.

preferences, that we have this sexual redistribution policy, which is one man with one woman. And that means that kind of in the best scenario, everybody gets somebody and that's good because it means that you have a populace, which is going to continue to reproduce. And you're not going to have a ton of upset disgruntled men running around, pushing over cars and setting fighter houses and doing stuff like that. And yet it seems like

at best, humans are serially monogamous and at worst are closer to chimps and bonobos and gibbons. Yeah, absolutely. And this is the problem. I mean, I write a whole chapter on it in my book under the title Exclusive because we have this, there are many, particularly in the West, yes, we have this monogamous model in society where it's one man or one woman or two people to the exclusion of everybody else.

Now, humans aren't actually, as in fact no species is, purely monogamous. We're just not. Monogamy is to a large part a societal construct that's been placed upon our biological behavior in a way to try and constrain it. Because if we all acted like chimps and we all just followed our biological drive and did whatever we wanted to do, it would be chaos.

And what a structured society, a civil society does not want is chaos. What we want is to be predictable. We want all the masses to be predictable so that the people in power can work out what you're going to do next.

And so one of the ways you can do that is you can put rules around relationships and you can formalize them with marriage and you can, you know, say lots of legal frameworks. So you, for example, you can't split up without going through the courts properly because we all have to keep control of everybody's reproductive relationships. So we can predict what's going on and everybody stays within their box essentially. And that's what monogamy is in most societies is it's just been placed upon us by society because as you say,

At least, you know, the rate of monogamy of, sorry, being unfaithful is high because actually that's more of our biological drive is to do that. And this is really interesting. I spoke to a lot of polyamorists for my book and polyamory gets a bad name.

If you ask a lot of people what they think of polyamory, they see it as immoral. They see it as people who have massive sex drives and can't control their sexual urges and all this sort of stuff. And it's corrupting. And actually, if you speak to them, they say, well, actually, what we're doing is we are acknowledging, it's very moral because we are acknowledging what humans do. And what humans do is they have, quite often, more than one romantic relationship at once.

So what we are saying is we're going to acknowledge that. We're going to say that this happens. We're going to be open about it. We're not going to creep around behind people's backs. We're going to put in place rules about being respectful of each other and rules about how we balance everybody's needs in this particular complex of relationships. And we're going to have open communication so that everybody knows where they stand. And so in a way, what they're saying is actually we are reflecting what for a lot of people is the natural state. Hmm.

And that is actually how we should behave. And so it's really interesting. They've created like paleo relationships.

Yeah, in a way. Yeah, they have. They've sort of said this is actually how most people behave, but most people pretend it's not happening and actually cause huge pain because they lie about it. And it's really interesting. And actually, I think particularly this younger generation are much more open about that. You know, there's a lot, this consensual non-monogamy idea about the fact that actually

A lot of people don't find being monogamous particularly natural, and they are fighting against their urge, their biological urge to remain within this quite constrained societal structure. And therefore, actually, I'm going to be open about that. I'm going to find somebody else who's happy with that and be with them and be with other people. And I think it's interesting. I mean, polyamory isn't for everybody. Obviously, it rears its head in terms of jealousy.

And jealousy is something that comes from the fact that humans do have to couple up for a period of time after you've had a child just to make sure that child survives. And that's where jealousy comes from. But for some people, it works really, really well.

What about the opposite of that, the aromantics? Aromantics are a really interesting group of people who have had a really bad press and are quite difficult to reach. I was really lucky to speak to a few for my book. Aromantic people, the view that people have on them is that they are very cold people.

Because they assume that when you say someone's aromantic, they don't experience any sort of love. And actually they do. They just don't experience romantic love. So they experience platonic love. Very much so. They have love for family, love for friends, love for community, love for their pets, love for God, whatever it might be. They just do not experience romantic love. And in most cases, they're also asexual. So they do not feel sexual attraction. And...

They are a fascinating group of people. We haven't done a lot of what we would call invasive scientific research in terms of genetics or in terms of scanning as yet on that particular population because they are very sensitive to being looked at in that way because they're nervous about how the results would be seen. But having spoken to them, it shows how obsessed we are with romantic love.

And we place it at the pinnacle. And we really think it's the be all and end all of everything. So somebody could have the most loving relationships in their lives, like a social network that's overflowing with love. But if you don't have romantic love, then you're a bit weird. And that's how they're seen. They're seen as a bit weird. And it's bizarre because they have things called platonic life partnerships, which is they will build a life with somebody. They will even have children with somebody, but it's based on platonic rather than romantic love.

And for me, it's very powerful because they tell us two things. First of all, how imbued our society is with romantic love, how difficult it is to live in a world which references romantic love so often when you don't feel it. That's hard. That's very exclusionary. And secondly, the fact that we think there's a hierarchy of love with romantic love at the top of it.

And that's the most effective love. That's the most powerful love. That's the one which is the best for your health and the best for your longevity and the best for everything else. And actually it's not. That's just some cultural rubbish we've been told and we've swallowed. Actually, there is no hierarchy. It's flat. And what we need to embrace as humans is how lucky we are to be able to love in so many different ways. We have so many different ways.

You did mention that there's kind of a hierarchy neurochemically between sexual relationships and father-child, mother-child, that those seem to be the most intense, at least when it comes to sort of what our body is providing us, or at least what our brain is providing us with. So...

I don't know, maybe that does seem to make sense a little bit that you would look at a friendship as a second class type of love. But it's actually, in terms of when we look at things like, it's very hard to compare people's feelings of love. So you would say to somebody, what's the most powerful love you experienced? And they will say, yeah, with my child, for example.

But then you'll say to somebody else who hasn't got children, you know, what's the most powerful love you've experienced? I'll say with my God. Now it's very hard to know whether those two things are anywhere the same, whether they're in the same ballpark. When we look at, and you can't really measure love from like the intensity on a scanner screen.

It doesn't work like that. It's not like a dose response. And you can get just as big a hit of beta endorphin, for example, from having a really good, I don't know, dance with your friends as you can from hugging your baby or whatever. So it's very hard to say that one is more powerful than the other.

The only argument you would have for them being more important is because they are the reproductive ones. They are the ones that evolution says maybe are the more important because those are the ones that are directly going to pass genes down the generations from reproduction and from raising your children. But when we look at things like health benefits...

um in terms of their their effect upon your longevity upon your life satisfaction it really doesn't matter what sort of love you have for those for those particular measures you know we do know that the relationships you have are the biggest factor in your mental and physical health your longevity and your survival absolutely but what sort of love that is doesn't seem to matter that much

Going back to the non-monogamy thing, sort of this battle that we have culturally and biologically, what's a beta marriage? I'd never heard of this before. It's like a beta test. So a beta marriage, this was an idea that kind of comes, rears its head every now and then. And it's to do with the fact that we never kind of expected to live this long, you know? So the idea that you would have a marriage and it would last 60 years, right?

People are like, oh, that sounds a bit. So you can have things called beta marriages, which is they're kind of looked at in two ways. Either they're like a practice marriage. They're like a beta test.

So you're going to run this marriage and probably you're restricted for like five years, 10 years. And then at the end of it, you can both walk away. There's no formal divorce. It's like a, it's like a, you know, yeah, a limited contract, you know? Um, and then you'll both walk away and maybe you've learned something about yourself or you've learned something about them, or you might renew it for another 10 years. Who knows? So, so some people see it as like a test. Other people see it just as all marriages should have break clauses, like a lease.

And like after five years, you should be able to go, no, it's not working. Let's just leave what we came with. No expensive divorce. I'm off. And that's a beat of marriage.

It all sounds a little bit cold and objective to me, to be honest, because the whole love is a neurochemical cocktail of passion and amazingness and you don't just suddenly switch that off one day and go, oh, it's absolutely fine, I'm just going to cut that now. But yeah, every now and then, it rears its head as an idea. It's the same, in part similar to what I think about surrogacy, that, you know,

being pregnant doesn't just make a child, it makes a mother. And just because you've been paid 70 grand to do this- Doesn't mean you cut it off, no. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Talk to me, you mentioned with appropriate scientific rigor and restraint and rationality today, kind of what

our ancestral setup for mating was, about how love actually appears in the human system. But phenomenologically, it doesn't feel like any of that's happening, right? You're carried away by this wonderful roller coaster of things. You're a mother, you've at least two kids maybe, but you've probably got more now. How do you, as someone who is swimming through the world of love at the moment,

How have you learned to blend some of the insights of the more kind of rational, cognitive, sterile learnings about love with what it means to be a human and to be in love and to feel it and to navigate it?

I think because actually the more, because people ask me quite often, because you study love, has it kind of lost its magic for you? Because you can kind of get, okay, I know exactly what's happening in your brain. First of all, I don't know exactly what's happening in your brain. Yeah, exactly. I mean, first of all, I don't. We probably know like 10% of what's going on. So first of all, I don't. Secondly, love is hugely complicated. I mean, really, really, really, really complicated. Highly multifactorial. So many different things that feed into it. Highly individual. Yeah.

like really individual. How I feel when I'm in love, how you feel when you're in love, probably not the same, you know, because there's so many things that factor into it. And the more I study love, the more in awe I have of it because it literally does infiltrate every fiber of your being and come into every aspect of your daily life. Even if you're not consciously thinking about it,

You know, you probably think about your family, you think about your friends, you do things for your family, you do things for your friends, they do things for you. You're cooperating with people all day long. You know, you're thinking ahead how to make somebody happy, you're planning things for the future, whatever it might be. And it infiltrates every aspect of our media, every aspect of our religions are based on love, you know, our politics, everything includes love. And so for me, it's a hugely important

or inspiring phenomena. And we are so lucky to experience it in the fulsome way that we do and in the spread of different ways that we do. And the fact that we have all this art and this literature and all these stories around love, we do that because it's so hard to put into words how amazing it is.

So difficult to fully say what it is. So I can reduce it to chemicals for you and tell you which genes are involved and show you the brain activation and say, but that's not it. That's just some objective measures of something which is nebulous, constantly changing, highly individual.

So, you know, people come to my talks, I think sometimes maybe they're a little bit lost because of love, because love in this century is quite difficult, particularly if you're young. And they think I'm going to give them a formula of, okay, if you do this and you do this and you do this, then this is going to happen and it's all going to be fine. No idea. There will never be a formula for love because while we can objectively measure bits of it, there's this massive bit, mainly subjective, right?

Don't know anything about it. And we probably won't ever touch it because it's impossible to measure. And that shows to me how phenomenal it is and how lucky we are to have it. So I actually don't get bored of it. The more I experience it, the more I am inspired by it. And I genuinely, genuinely do think it's absolutely phenomenal.

possibly the cornerstone of being human or at least one of the very important ones. Because we literally wouldn't survive. Our culture wouldn't be the same without it. We wouldn't be around without it. The relationships we build would be devoid. To me, it is actually everything. And that's kind of how I conclude the book. I basically say, what is love? Well, love is actually everything. Everything. If you don't have it, you live very much half a life. Definitely.

Talk to me about the dark side of love, how it can be used as a control. Yeah. So the problem with love, because we need it so viscerally and because it imbues every fiber in your body, that need, that absolute drive to find it, to keep it, means that it can be used against you. And we talked about animal love at the start. The only thing that definitely separates us from the animals is that we are the only creature that uses love to manipulate. Right.

So the fact that somebody needs our love, we will use to make them do stuff for us. Now, we all do that. We all probably at some point have said, if you loved me, you'd make me a cup of tea. Or if you loved me, you'd let me choose the color of the new sofa or whatever it might be. We have all done it. But there are really serious extremes of that. And

Because, again, things like beta endorphin is addictive, unfortunately. Some people seem to be more susceptible to that level of addiction, find it much, much harder to break.

So, yeah, it can be used to, you know, at the minor end, there's obviously jealousy and jealousy evolved as an emotion for the same reason as all emotions. It's there to aid our survival. And when kept under control, it is important because it draws your attention to threats to your survival critical relationships. And then you can act because you felt jealous and you can do something. But obviously in extreme cases, it's very dangerous.

You know, people use love to coerce, to manipulate, to abuse. And I think we don't talk about that enough. We don't talk about this dark side of it. Most human adaptations of which love is one are never 100% beneficial. There's always a downside. And for love, that downside is the fact that we use it in that way.

And there have been studies done by other people looking at abusive relationships and the role for love in abusive relationships. I personally have studied it in men and men who are victims of domestic violence or domestic abuse. And, you know, people always say, oh, well, there can't be love there because that's not love. But if you speak to the people who are within these relationships, they very definitely think there's love there.

Um, and quite often they will stay for love either because they see glimmers of love in that person and they love that person so much, or they think their love can rescue that person. I can change them. I can be the person who changes them. They will be different because I love them so much. Um,

And I don't think we talk about that enough because ultimately love evolved as a form of control. It's evolution's way of controlling us to make sure we reproduce and do this really difficult thing. But it's kind of gone a long way the other way. And yeah, we can use it to control other people. And that's not a nice side of it, I'm afraid. That's a very unique insight. What do male victims of domestic violence or abuse feel?

say about love? What's the sort of narrative and the story that they tell you? It's that story. Sometimes it's that they love the person so much they think they can change them, they think they can rescue them. So for some people, it's kind of like a, not a knight in shining armor sort of thing, but they do feel that this person is damaged in some way and I can rescue them. Sometimes they will literally talk about love being blind and

A lot of them had come out of the relationships when I'd spoken to them. They'd managed to end the relationships. And they would look back and go, I just can't believe I didn't see it. So there's like one guy who said he himself was violently abused, but his wife would also, for example, violently abuse her parents. So they'd be having dinner and suddenly she'd pour a pot of hot coffee over the mother's head and drag her out the door by her hair. And he would just sit there. And he was like, wow.

I mean, did I not think at the time that's really not right? So they will talk about love being blind and that they're just so overwhelmed by it that they don't see this thing in front of them. And sometimes it's not love for the partner. It's love for the children. Unfortunately, we live in a court system here in the UK where it's still very biased towards mothers and mothers getting children.

in custody battles and so a lot of them will stay because if they leave they are really worried the kids will end up with the mum a they won't be able to see the kids because the mum will use them as weapon and b the mum might start abusing the kids um so a lot of them will stay for that reason as well that's so interesting god what a what a wild i'd never even thought about the

The likelihood of someone who is a abuser in the home being abuser outside of the home as well. There's this for anyone who wants to read the housemaid, the book skip forward by about 90 seconds, but there's a really interesting story in this. So.

This woman is recruited to become a housemaid for a rich family. The wife of the family is a total bitch throughout the entire time, and the child is a total bitch throughout the entire time. She ends up being locked in the upstairs attic by the husband.

the housemaid gets locked in the attic by the husband. What it turns out is that the husband was doing this to the wife. The wife then found a attractive, uh, supplanta of her, basically someone who could come in and take her role, uh,

and that would liberate her and the daughter because this husband was super, super smart and whatever. And it's this sort of weird generational trauma thing. And then at the end of the book, the housemaid outsmarts the guy, causes him to do it. He like makes him pull his own teeth out, makes him lie with a big stack of books on his testicles for hours and hours and watches him on CCTV. And then at the funeral,

she sees the mother and obviously the son had pulled his teeth out. He'd done all of these things. And she sees the mother of the son of the husband. And the mother basically says,

Good to see that you finally disciplined him. I've been trying to do that since childhood. Wow. Yep. So she'd made him pull his teeth out during school when he was a child. Oh my God. And that totally made me think, I mean, it's such a good twist, even just describing it in 90 seconds. It's such a great twist. So,

Just a really lovely explainer of that lineage, you know, talking about how hurt people hurt people, this sort of pan-generational trauma thing that gets passed down. It's patterns, it's genetic predisposition. But I'd never considered it that, yeah, you'd have, you know, an abusive partner. Why would they, why would that stop? You know, it's going to happen to the dog. It's going to happen to the friends. It's going to be emotionally manipulative to the supermarket worker, to the people that they're in the office with.

Yeah. I mean, because some people, that is their personality. I mean, I talk about a personality in the book called the dark triad personality. A dark triad personality are people who are narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellian.

And there is good data now showing that people who possess that particular personality type are much more likely to be abusers because the way they retain people, the way they retain relationships is by, I mean, love scientists, but it's called, you know, costly mate retention behaviors, but basically through violence, through coercion, through abuse, through manipulation. And, you know, they are much more likely to do that now. But the question arises, why are those people like that? Why do they have that personality?

And if you look back at their childhoods, quite a lot of them are perpetuating abuse they had as children. So fascinating. Talk to me, what about this tension between female relationships and their romantic relationships? The sort of female-female thing and whether or not romantic love is the most important one in that scenario. Yeah, it's really interesting that. One of the first studies I did when I went to Oxford was to look at, compare romantic relationships and best friendships together.

And one of the things we found when we looked at women was that they are more emotionally intimate with their best female best friends than they are with their romantic partner. And that was clearly quite surprising because you're like, wow, because you think you think of like the most emotionally intimate relationship being the romantic relationship, maybe. And these women were like, absolutely not. You know, I keep my my deepest, darkest emotional vulnerabilities hidden.

for my friends, my female best friends. And that's really interesting. And I think what we're seeing with female best friendship is actually there's quite a revolution going on at the moment. And it has been for maybe the last 10, 20 years in terms of how important that relationship is in women's lives. When we're looking at demographic data, more women are remaining single and more women are choosing or aren't having children. And when

you that's your your life pattern then your survival critical relationships become something else and for most women they become their friends and and again i talk about it a lot in the book and i've done quite a lot of research on it because it's really fascinating because it's only really happened in the last 10 20 years because women can control their contraception

And also women don't have to now marry to be independent. You know, you go back to the- Financially liberated on their own. Exactly. So they're on their own. They don't need to marry for support, for financial support, for protection. And they certainly don't need to have children if they don't want them.

And so we're seeing women building these whole chosen families now of their friendships and their friendships literally being their survival critical little bubble. And that's, those are the people they rely on. And as I said earlier, you know, they, they, those relationships bring just as much benefit in terms of love as, as a romantic relationship or child parent relationship from an objective point of view. So it's really interesting that, that we are seeing this slight revolution of women being,

choosing their friends as their premier relationship in their life. Why is it the case that women show more affection or more love toward their friends and it seems like guys don't? Is that vestigial alloparenting stuff? No, it's not. I think it's very, very cultural, to be honest. As I said, if you go to other countries and you look at male-male friendships, they're not like ours.

I think we do bring up little boys to be quite restrained in their friendships. I think we've moved on a bit where men might hug each other now. They certainly still very rarely will you see male friends kiss each other. You won't see male friends walking down the street arm in arm. You won't see overt displays of affection, which you will see between women friends. But you go to other countries and you will see that.

So I think a lot of it is cultural actually, and it's not really innate necessarily. Female friendships are made in the bathroom trip together. That's what they are. And women, as I said, and it's that emotional vulnerability because one of the best ways to get close to someone is to be completely emotionally vulnerable with them. And that's what we, you know, that's what counselors or therapists will teach people who are struggling is be emotionally vulnerable and,

And because women do that with each other, it's a really, really tight bond. You know, you literally, I spoke to a lot of women for one of my studies and I quote some of them in the book about their friendships. And they will literally say, they have seen me at my worst times. They have seen me at my best times and they are still here and they will always be here. They don't judge me, you know, and we, and, you know, whereas my family do, for example. And I know that I can literally be anything, do anything, and they will be there for me.

Do you think there's something that men can learn from women when it comes to bonding and sort of friendship love in that case? I do think, and I think it has improved, but I do think men need to be more able to talk about emotional vulnerabilities and concerns and anxieties, because I think that's something that's still quite hard for a lot of men to do.

And we all have those. Just because you're male doesn't mean that those don't affect you. They do. And I think if we can come to a point where it is normal for men to do that and manage to do it without, you know, only taking two minutes and let everyone making a joke out of it, which is generally what seems to happen. I think that that's very, very healthy because, you know, men go through

A lot of difficult life transitions as women do, but I think they are taught to suck it up. You know, just suck it up, move on. Particularly when it's something like fatherhood or something like, you know, getting a partner. You are the rock of that relationship. You've got to be the one that's supporting and protecting and all that kind of thing. And you've got to be immune to everything going on around you. Well, of course you're not.

Of course, I mean, I followed enough fathers now to know how incredibly emotionally, practically, psychologically difficult it is. That transition is tough. Men take longer to transition to be fathers than women do to be mothers. And I think there's a reason for that. I read a study probably about a year ago now saying that on average, men say, I love you first. It's quite common for men to say, I love you first. And I thought, well, first off,

I thought back to my relationships and I think it was usually me as well. Almost always me, actually, I think I said that first. And I was like, okay, well, that's interesting. Why might that be the case? And I thought about the only person that I've had direct experience of, which was me. And I think a part of it is feeling like you should lead.

in one way I'm supposed to sort of forge forward this feels like the brave thing to do you kind of know both of you know already yeah but it's kind of on you to say it properly uh one ex-girlfriend it slipped out when she was drunk and then a couple of weeks later I was like okay well I guess we you know we both need to say this now um

But then I dug a little bit deeper into what the authors said, and it seems like this data is quite heavily skewed by couples who haven't yet had sex.

Oh, really? I was like, oh, fuck. Okay. But it was a nice theory for a while and it still may hold true. I don't know how much this is contributed to by couples that haven't yet had sex. But yeah, as you were saying, using love to manipulate sometimes for a variety of different goals. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm afraid, yeah, that's not a study I've ever done who said, I love you first, but

Yeah. There's going to be a lot of confounding factors there, I think probably. I've had this idea in my mind for a little while and you're the person I'm going to try and work it out to for the first time. So I've fallen in love with evolutionary psychology over the last sort of four years or so. And I think it's as close to a complete vision of how human mating works that we have. It's...

impressively survived the replication crisis. I think it and behavioral genetics, the two most unspeakable of the psychological disciplines, have actually managed to survive quite well, which probably says something. And also, you know, the manosphere, by whatever term you want to use that, I'm tangential to it, although I've never been a part of it. But there was

And increasingly, and this might be because I've been doing a lot of therapy and sort of emotional work over the last year or so, just sort of seeing a few holes, one particularly large hole, I think, that EP in particular misses and kind of the Manosphere does as well, given that it's downstream from it. Yeah.

When we're talking mating from an EP perspective, we're talking mate value, we're talking resource provisioning, we're talking fecundity and fertility and waist to hip ratios. We're talking the environmental security hypothesis and what's the economy doing at the moment and how's that impacting the size of the... All of this stuff, I do understand. And yeah, that's maybe the... That's like the nuts and bolts of what mating looks like from a human perspective. Yeah.

But what I, as of yet, haven't heard any EP stuff really dig into is the phenomenological experience of what it is like to be a human going through that. What does it feel like to fall in love with someone, to not be able to think about much other than them, to be worried about them not texting you? Or, well, that's my male parental uncertainty getting in. Or that's the alpha difference in our mate value. And you think, yeah, okay, maybe that...

is what's going on from a source code level, but it becomes sort of functionally pretty useless when it actually starts to imbue you with the feeling of being that person, of being the person that feels the feelings. And yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about recently and I'd love to try and... And maybe this can't even be explained academically. Maybe this is the

the place of art and film and music and, you know, dance and, and, and theater and stuff like that. Maybe that's where we need to go. Maybe poetry is the place that we need to go to, to try and explain those machinations of, of the person. But yeah, it's the, it's the first time,

Maybe the sort of new shine of my shiny new toy has worn off a little bit with regards to EP. Just that I love it. I love it so much, but I'm now starting to see the areas in which I wish that it could grow a little bit more. Yeah. I think the thing about EP, and yes, EP is definitely not a perfect explanation for anything. What it is, is it gives us a set of drivers which we can...

initially place over a human behavior and go, "How much of this human behavior can I explain from this set of principles based upon EP?" And a lot of those EP principles have come from observing animals and from comparative animal behavior, and I'm going to place those upon this human behavior. I think the thing about human behavior though is humans are phenomenally complicated things.

And we have so many different facets and our brains are so complex that I would be very surprised if any of us were completely driven by the explanations that EP gives, to be honest. I think it's a good starting point. I think it's a good basic starting point. But I think it's like the basis. And then on top of that, you have lots of other possible explanations. You have lots of other things that we can't even explain. That's the point. There's so much we can't explain about how humans feel.

Even that, how do you feel? I don't know how you feel. You know, you can't objectify that. And I think as humans, we always want to objectify everything and we want to be able to explain everything in scientific terms. And particularly something like love, you can't. And I think that's something we find it hard to accept because we've got these big brains. We should be able to explain everything. And also we don't like uncertainty. We don't like uncertainty. We like to know exactly why something is happening. But I think with something as complicated as love,

that's not probably ever going to happen. And I think that is why art and literature and a lot of those things help or exist because that's what those people are trying to do. They are trying to express how they feel.

So I can tell you exactly what the brain scan looks like. And I'll explain to you why when you're first with someone, you're obsessed and exclusive everything out. That's because your serotonin's dropped. I can explain to you why you're not very good at spotting people who aren't particularly nice at the start of a relationship. That's because love is in fact blind because part of your brain called the mentalizing area shuts down. I can explain all of these things to you, but that's not the experience of it.

And in a way, that's why I love love because actually I can't touch bits of it and that's good. So I think EP is a good place to start, but it's not like the Bible. Yeah. You know, it can't explain everything because we are more than that. Talk to me about the introduction of online dating, dating apps, dating

and modern mating culture and what you think that's done to love and attraction? Fundamentally, it's done nothing to love and attraction. So it hasn't changed any of the neurochemistry. It hasn't changed actually what we look for or any of those really deep-seated behaviors that we've had for a long time. What it's changed is the way we meet people.

And what it's kind of done is it's handicapped our brains to a certain extent, unfortunately. So I love the way Helen Fisher says dating apps shouldn't be called dating apps. And they shouldn't. They should be called introduction apps because that's what they are. You're not having a date on the app. They lull you into an idea that you can assess whether you're attracted to somebody by looking at a photo of them or maybe having a few texts with them. No, you can't. So they're really good for introducing you to people.

But beyond that, they really don't give you very much at all because your brain has evolved to be really, really good at this. And that mechanism we talked about earlier when you start assessing people, that's a really sensory experience. That's based on a lot of sensory information, which you don't get from a dating app.

The most you might get from, I think, Hinge, now you can record your voice. So you might get some information from someone's voice. But photos tell you nothing. Also, dating apps, you can just lie. I mean, we're really good in person at spotting liars. But we're not so great when it's online. Because again, our brains are handicapped. We don't have any of the indicators that we would use to tell. So...

They haven't altered how we actually choose somebody, but they've kind of made it a bit trickier in some ways, unless you set yourself some really strict rules, which is this is an introduction app.

I'm not going to try and assess whether I'm actually attracted to this person on this app. The only way I'm going to really be able to do that is to meet them. I mean, obviously safely, but that's the only way I can really, really do this. I'm going to limit myself to, I don't know, a certain number of texts or WhatsApp messages. And then I'm going to say, we're going to have to meet now because I can't possibly know whether or not I'm attracted to you. And I think that's the problem. I think a lot of young people in particular think that they are a really efficient way

of meeting someone. We're kind of a bit obsessed with efficiency, aren't we? And I think they think it's an efficient way to meet somebody, but it's not because your brain just can't do it. And also, you know what? Relationships aren't supposed to be efficient.

Things that are really valuable to you in terms of survival generally aren't efficient, aren't definitely time efficient or cognitive energy efficient. They tend to take time. Well, the effortfulness is part of the value, right? Exactly. And in the old days, when I was dating many, many years ago, yeah, you put effort in. You kind of tried to make yourself look reasonably acceptable. You went out to a pub or you went out to a club or whatever. And you made an effort to talk to people and get to know people. Yeah.

people. But now the fact that you can do it sitting on your sofa, it's incredibly low cost. You can do it while you're watching telly. The risk of rejection is much less because you're not being rejected face to face and the pain is less. The risk of intimacy is also much less. Yeah, exactly. And that's the problem because the reason you make effort in relationships is because they're very valuable. They are really valuable and you're supposed to. So it's in a bit of a

I wouldn't say it's a mess, but I think we kind of need to recalibrate what we think they do a little bit. Because again, people are quite, particularly younger people, I get a lot of 20, 25 year olds in my talks and they are just fed up, fed up of them, tired. They find them really quite difficult to deal with and they don't seem to feel like they're getting anywhere with them. So I think any design is listening. You know, you kind of have to

recalibrate or rethink what they're actually meant to be doing. And I don't actually think that the people who invented them are to blame. I think they had good intentions. I think they thought when they were invented, this is going to be a lovely way for people to meet, but they did not take into account human behavior. I don't think they talked to anybody who studied human behavior because humans will take something like this and go, oh, shiny new tool. I'm going to do something which is going to completely warp what you thought this was going to do. And they do. I mean, you know,

We get the stats coming in from Tinder where 35% of men like every single female they see because then they might actually get a match. And then that causes extreme mate choice because then the women go, Jesus Christ, I'm only going to like one because if I like more than one, I'm going to get like a million matches and not be able to have any time. So it's this extreme mate choices happening. And I don't think the designers thought that would happen, but that's where we are.

Wow, that's funny. And what about the contribution of my previous education institution of Love Island? How do you think dating shows have contributed to what we think of for modern mating and love? I don't know. The thing is, we all love a dating show because we're all obsessed with other people's lives. And that's human because, as I said, we live in a hierarchy and we spend our whole time being really interested in other people's love lives because in a way they affect the pool of our love life.

You know, you're getting with them, so I can't get with them. But actually, oh, it's looking a bit rocky. I might be able to get with them. You know, so that's why we love watching that. That's why we're really nosy. I think it depends on the data. I think some of them are quite transactional. And I think that's not very helpful.

A lot of them are obviously heavily based on looks. And looks are not as important in a long-term relationship as they are in a short-term relationship. So they kind of skew a little bit towards short-term relationships, I suppose. I don't personally, I know that some of my colleagues are like, oh, but actually I don't mind them that much as long as you know they are a formatted relationship.

program, which is very much, I mean, I worked on a dating show, you know that I worked on Married at First Sight and they are edited and they are interfered with by producers. So what you're watching isn't necessarily completely natural behavior. It's not the most unencumbered of what was going to happen. Yeah. I mean, for Love Island, which was, I guess, kind of a unique one because it was every 24 hours, there's basically CCTV,

hundreds of cameras placed around a villa. Every single thing that you do is captured. You have people listening to just your mic feed 24 hours a day, even when you're asleep. So, you know, this, yeah, it's, I mean, it's a level of supervision that Stalin could have only wished for. And I understand the concern that people have about the sort of molesting of those storylines. In my experience,

It's kind of like just thinking about a midwit meme. This person was a hairdresser four weeks ago. If they tell her to run this scene back with a little bit more emotion this time, please, Melanie. Melanie doesn't have that in her toolkit. What she can probably do is just act up to the camera. So everyone's like a bit more of what they were. But I think that you're actually probably pretty right on saying...

In some ways, it might teach young people, maybe not necessarily a representative example of how relationships work, but it teaches them about make-ups and break-ups and how people deal with disagreements and things like that. It just needs to be couched within dot, dot, dot, and this is not real life. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that's fine. You know, you're still watching...

human behavior it might not be you couldn't 100 guarantee it's all natural human behavior but you're still watching human behavior and yeah they're there as a source of entertainment but you know i think it's important that we do talk about our relationships and we do observe other people's relationships you know all of these things as you say are teaching things um

So I personally, you know, I don't have a problem with them and there are so many, but I think there are so many because we are fascinated by other people's love lives. Absolutely fascinated. Have you ever looked at parasocial love? Yes. Right. Tell me about that. So parasocial love is love for either a celebrity or, for example, a character on a film or a character in a book or something like that. And...

It's something which we're in the kind of foothills of studying in terms of the neuroscience of it. But obviously there's been quite a lot of work done. You know, it's what we would have called a crush if you're a teenager, you know, got a crush on a pop star or a crush on a film star. And what I find fascinating about it is several things. First of all, the neuroscience of it is fascinating. The fact that you can build a whole relationship in your head, an attachment relationship, having either barely ever had any interaction with a person or none,

I mean, that's pretty amazing that the brain can do that. And actually, I believe it's probably extrapolated from a religious love, which is the same kind of mechanism. And we used to think if you weren't a teenager, so in a teenager, a crush is important because it's developmentally important because it allows you to explore your sexuality. It allows you to explore sensations of love without being vulnerable, basically, because it's kind of all in your head. It's a bit of a fantasy. It can help you decide. And we know now, particularly with LGBTQ plus kids,

Particularly if you're in an environment or a community where there aren't many people who identify as you do, actually celebrities or characters in books who identify like that are really important attachment figures.

They're very developmentally important. However, the answer always was, but if you're an adult, oh my God, you have a psychopathology. There's something really badly wrong with you. You must be really weird. You must be really trying to fill a void in your world by fancying, I don't know, Barry Manilow or something. And actually what we're finding is that's not the case. The majority of people who have parasocial relationships have perfectly normal functioning social networks.

families, partners, all that kind of thing. But this person fulfills something in them, either as a fantasy figure or as an attachment figure or somebody who just shares similar interests to them. And obviously with social media, you're now kind of more in touch with a version of the person you fancy than you ever have been before. And it's not weird, actually. Parasocial relationships only really became a thing from about the 1950s onwards when people started regularly having tellies.

basically. So you were regularly in contact with these people. And of course, your brain doesn't understand screens. When it sees someone on a telly, it's like they're in the room with you. So these people are usually charismatic, good looking, rich. Of course, you're going to fancy them. Your brain's going, well, hey, perfect mate, go for it. So parasocial relationships aren't strange. It's just we have the brain capacity to add these people to our social networks and they can be really important. How funny.

The lineage between this and potential religious attachment seems really, really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And I do have to be careful. I am not saying the love of God is like the love of Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, yeah. Yes, okay. Yeah, religious love is fascinating because...

We have taken our ability to obviously love in person, which a lot of animals can do, and we can build a relationship with someone which is a fully attachment love relationship with someone who we will never have physical contact with. So that's pretty astonishing that we can do that. And if we look at the neuroscience of religion...

There's been some wonderful work done, not by me, by groups, for example, putting religious followers in scanners and asking them to have mystical experiences with their god. Particularly, there's been some good stuff done on Carmelite nuns, and they've had religious mystical experiences. And absolutely on that screen is the fingerprint of love. And what's really interesting also is the air of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which fires up when we are communing with a fellow sentient being, is also highly active.

So they are in love with a sentient being who is real and who they experience a full reciprocal loving relationship with and attachment. You know, I spoke to a lot of nuns, in fact, for my book and really wanted to talk to them about and see whether their relationships with God had all the hallmarks of love.

a human you know earth-based relationship so you know yeah what's the reciprocity did they have maintenance behaviors what did they bring to the relationship what did god bring to the relationship did they feel empathy with god did he feel empathy with them you know all these sorts of different things and they do they have fully functioning relationships and attachment relationships which provide a secure base and which are developmentally important to them so i just think

It's a phenomenal ability to have that kind of relationship. And for the people who experience it, hugely beneficial in most cases. It's a hugely beneficial relationship to have. We know that

And we know that it's not just, so the health benefits of having a religious relationship aren't just you go to church and there's a load of other people and there's a social network, which we don't expect. We know people who have personal prayer with God rather than what we would call ritualistic prayer with God. So you do it on your own. So rather than say the Lord's prayer, which is a ritualistic prayer, have personal prayer, which is conversations with God. We know that people who have conversations with God are much healthier than

have good mental health, good physical health, have all the longevity benefits because they are having a personal relationship with someone. And it's really powerful literature, actually. It's really powerful research, I think. That's so cool. It's so interesting as well to think that that

pathway that we have for building relationships with other people has been tapped into by religion and the ubiquity of religion independently arising in God knows how many different places across the planet.

always makes people think, well, you know, it must serve some sort of a purpose or else why would it? No, it completely does. Yeah, it completely does. Religion definitely serves a purpose. And this talks about, you know, it's this really wonderful blending of what happens when you have a cultural technology with an existing predisposition

in terms of the way that our psychology works and these two things just slot together pretty perfectly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I find it the most, of all the areas of love that I look at in one sense, it's one of the most fascinating, I think.

Because it's very powerful. Dr. Anna Machen, ladies and gentlemen, I love you. I love your work. I think that all of the things that you're doing are great. What can people expect from you next and where should they go if they want to keep up to date with your... Okay, so next I'm going to be shutting myself in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and hopefully writing my next book, which will be another book on dads, but updating all that. And then after that, I am hoping to do more work on Control.

The dark side of love, I'm afraid. But yeah, I've got a website at animation.com and I'm on Instagram and Twitter. So, or X as we're supposed to call it these days. And I post a lot of stuff up there, which you can always see what I'm up to. Hell yeah. I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.