Friendships are a central part of the lives of both men and women. But from personal observation, you’ve probably noticed that the dynamics of male and female friendships aren’t always the same. You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what’s behind them.

While there’s still a lot of facets of friendship that haven’t yet been researched, Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. Today on the show, she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they look for in friends. We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends’ flaws than women do, why men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Banker’s Paradox
• Joyce Benenson’s research on “Males’ Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers”
• Jaimie’s research on women’s interpretation of disgust faces
• Jaimie’s study: “Friendship Jealousy: One Tool for Maintaining Friendships in the Face of Third-Party Threats?”
• AoM Podcast #229: How Men and Women Socialize Differently
• AoM Podcast #360: Understanding Male Friendships
• AoM Podcast #726: What’s Causing the Male Friendship Recession?
• AoM Podcast #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?
• AoM Article: How Not to Be Disappointed With Your Friends

Connect With Jaimie Krems

• The Social Minds Lab at UCLA
• Jaimie’s faculty page
• Jaimie on X

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Brett Mckay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Friendships are a essential part of the lives of both men and women, but from personal observation, you probably noticed that the dynamics of male and female friendships aren’t always the same. You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what’s behind them. While there’s still a lot of facets of friendship that haven’t yet been researched, Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. Today in the show she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they look for in friends. We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends flaws than women do. Why men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/Krems. All right, Jaimie Krems, welcome to the show.

Jaimie Krems: Thank you for having me.

Brett Mckay: So You are a social psychologist who researches friendship, but you do it through an evolutionary lens. How’d you end up doing what you do?

Jaimie Krems: Well, I studied classical archeology and, translated Latin. It was like solving a puzzle. Thought that was cool. Booked bands, played poker, living in Philly. And then I let myself get bored and found books by Steven Pinker. And I thought, oh my God, I’m not alone. Other people think about the world and the mind like this. And I came to evolutionary psychology. Worked in Rob Kurzban’s lab at Penn, Robin Dunbar’s lab at Oxford, and Neuberg and Kenricks at ASU. And I thought, this is the way to make the world make sense. As for what I study, it’s in part because two of my best friends had a 26-page, two-hour G-chat just about how much they hated me. And I found it, ’cause one of them was a moron and did it on my computer. So I wanted to understand friendship dynamics for quite some time.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, friendship dynamics amongst women, particularly. A lot of your studies are on what friendship dynamics look like with women, but you also in the process look at how it differs from men and That whole thing about finding the G-chat about how your friends hated you. If you have a sister, you probably encountered this as well. I remember growing up, my sister, there was, something like that happened. She found out that this girl that she thought was her friend was just dogging her. It was terrible. It was devastating. It was not nice.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, I cried so hard. My friend that I was on the phone with, I was crying to her. She couldn’t understand a damn word I was saying. Now I completely understand. Oh, like their parents never loved them. They were jealous. That’s fine. They’re still unhappy today. I sometimes go on Facebook and check. And so, yeah, thanks to them, I get to work at UCLA.

Brett Mckay: There you go. Okay, so I wanna talk about your research on how men and women socialize and form and manage friendships. So let’s start with this question. From an evolutionary perspective, why do men form friendships?

Jaimie Krems: So I don’t think that we can really pull apart why men and women do these as to two totally separate things. So the function of friendship seems to be about social insurance, and that’s for both men and women. So John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have a really great idea that friendship solve the problem of accessing resources and other support when people are most in need. So if I asked you, Brett, you’re a bank, you have some money to invest in, one person, would you rather invest that money in sort of a Ryan Gosling in the beginning of in the beginning of the notebook or a slick suited rich Ryan Gosling and crazy stupid, love.

Brett Mckay: The rich guy, the slick. That’s what I’d probably invest in.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. And that’s what banks do. And so the paradox is that people in need often don’t get what they need. Banks invest in the rich folks and people invest in those likely to repay it or reciprocate. But we need help when we’re in need and friendships might be the way that we solve this problem. These relationships where another person has a stake in my continued welfare means that when I am in need, they’ll invest in me. And so I survive helping them when they eventually face their own times of hardship because I have a stake in their continued welfare.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, Tooby calls this the banker’s paradox. So it’s when you’re most in need of help, people are least inclined to want to invest in you because people want a relationship that’s more benefit than cost. But if you already proved yourself to be a valuable friend, then people they’ll stick with you because they see value in continuing the relationship. So it’s worth incurring that cost. All right, so friendship builds our credit for hard times. Why isn’t family enough support? Like, why not just rely on grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins?

Jaimie Krems: That’s a great question. Some people do think that friends act like family. A related explanation, the alliance hypothesis of friendship, suggests that it’s more about having support in conflict. So on this view, friendship is in part the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support for future agonistic conflicts and fights. And so in a conflict between two of my friends, I should preferentially support the friend who’s more likely to support me in the future, helping that person win their conflict and survive to support me another day. Whereas our siblings might be around to do that, our parents and our grandparents will eventually die and likely die before we do. So we might need to generate more kin, generate more other folks who have a stake in our welfare, who are going to maybe be at the same life stage as us and live longer than our elderly kin.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So friends are insurance. It’s just social insurance for us.

Jaimie Krems: That is the general idea. There’s some idea that women’s friends act as sort of kin replacement given a long history of patcher locality. So men stayed in the same place, women left their community and married someone else and went to that community. And so being without family, women really needed to replace those kin. And that might be why their friendships are so close. By contrast, men may have been sort of co-fighters in intergroup warfare and group defense. And so they benefit more from the numbers. And that’s really where it differs. But even then, friends can act and probably do act as social insurance. Among hunter-foragers in South America, for example, illness, injury, it’s inevitable. And it would have been in our evolutionary history. And so you can imagine that looking at these folks, when they do get ill and injured, they might often die. They’re less likely to die if they have good friends.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So generally what social psychology has found is that women’s relationships or friendships, they’re more intense in their didactic. Usually it’s just like one-on-one. Men’s friendship networks tend to be, they’re larger and they’re looser?

Jaimie Krems: Exactly.

Brett Mckay: They’re not as close. So yeah, kind of flesh that out. Why the difference between how those friendships manifest themselves?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah. So you’ll hear me say this a lot, but we don’t have a good answer to this. We don’t have an agreed upon this is why. It could have to do with the function of what men’s friends do versus what women’s friends do. So men’s friends are co-fighters. They help one another in intergroup warfare and group defense. They can help one another gain status. Women’s friends tend to be more along the lines of alloparents. They might help raise one another’s children. So part of it could have to do with function. Part of it could just have to do with function and the time constraints of group structure. So because women spend so much time, or maybe have to spend so much time, creating any one friend and investing in those really close and like you said dyadic intense relationships, they don’t necessarily have time to spend on a lot of other friends. So it could be that the way that women’s friendships work, being close and dyadic like that, force the fact that they can only have so many friends, whereas men are allowed to put more eggs in more different baskets.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so just to recap there, men have that looser larger, they want a lot of friends who are just kind of buddies, chums, it’s the intensity of the relationship is not going to be as much as women who prefer the close dyadic relationship ’cause women are looking for an alloparent. And I think it makes sense if you argue, okay, well, the reason why men form these clubs or gangs or coalitions, if it’s to fight in war, if one buddy dies or gets eaten by saber toothed tiger, it’s like, well, I guess replace him with another guy who can do the job. If a female friend, like an alloparent, you’re trying to replace your kin, if that person goes away, that’s a problem ’cause you can’t, it’s hard to replace.

Jaimie Krems: Not only is that person hard to replace because you must have built up a lot of trust to put this tiny packet of your genes that we call our offspring in their hands, they can also be dangerous to replace if you lose them not through death. So because women’s friendships are so intense and emotionally open and so on, we talk a lot of shit. Much more than men do, we talk about people we don’t like, what we don’t like, how much we don’t like them. And that information can be ammo for the friend that we told. And that could be very dangerous if the friendship ends as well.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so it’s kind of like you’re afraid that they’re going to blackmail you. Like you got information on them and they got information on you and you wanna keep the relationship together because you don’t want them talking about you if it goes south.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, and honestly, that’s kind of a difficult situation to be in because for women, this kind of self-disclosure is almost required to ratchet up the closeness of the relationship. And then if the relationship dies, that same self-disclosure can come back to bite them.

Brett Mckay: It’s interesting. So on average, I mean, okay, it sounds like that’s a big cost. That’s like a reputation cost. For women, is there a greater benefit than cost in female friendships? Like is it worth it to have female friends?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, you had Joyce Benenson on, she’d marshal the evidence and say, nah, I don’t think so. She’d say that female friendships are probably on average costlier than beneficial and costlier than beneficial than in comparison to males. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think that there can be a lot of benefits from female-female friendships, protection against predators, protection against male coercion advice and guidance, especially in friendships where two women are not necessarily at the same life stage and we don’t really study those friendships very much. So I do think that there are benefits, but I could just be blinded by the fact that my own best friendship is a lifeline.

Brett Mckay: Let’s talk about some of the other differences between men’s and women’s friendships. What about the length of friendships? Are there any differences between men and women and how long their friendships last?

Jaimie Krems: So the data right now suggests that women’s friendships, or really girls’ friendships, are shorter lived. So girl-girl versus boy-boy. We don’t know what this looks like across the lifespan. It could be that, your adult wife’s friendships are going to be just as long-lasting as yours are, but in girlhood, she would have experienced more best friends than you did. We also don’t know what this looks like across cultures, and we also don’t know the average time to unfriend. We don’t have sort of a survival analysis of male and female friendships, or cross-sex friendships. But what I can tell you is that if you ask a room of even awkward scientists, tell me about a time that you lost a friend, all of the women’s hands shoot up and they want to tell you about this acrimonious split they had and this horrible person that they’re no longer friends with. And the men sort of act like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, like, lose a friend. Do you mean like, we don’t talk anymore or? So there does seem to be a difference even in how people, at least in my generation and those folks older than I am, have experienced friendship loss.

Brett Mckay: That tracks, ’cause I look at my own life, I can’t think of any friends that I’ve lost because of some kind of acrimonious dispute, something happened. They just kind of rusted out, like, we moved or we just, our lives went in different directions and this contact went away. It was nothing, no hard feelings. When I talk to women I know, they’ve all got stories of like, oh, I had this roommate and she did this and we were best friends, but we’re no longer best friends anymore. And like, that does not compare.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, hard feelings. And we do move more than ever now. That is something that might affect both men’s and women’s friendships and the ability to stay friends. And so that’s interesting to hear that that’s really what did some of your friendships end.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I would say that’s what did most of them end. Either I moved or someone else moved. What are the theories? Why do, with the research we’ve done, I guess it’s just been done on girls, maybe young women, why do their relationship tend to be shorter lived than men’s friendship? Like what are the theories?

Jaimie Krems: So there’s sort of these paradoxes in female friendship the way that I see it. One paradox is that female-female friendships are at once like the paradigm of friendships. Girls are so close and emotionally intense and open and affectionate with one another. This is how all friendships should be. Versus other folks say female-female friendships are actually an impossibility. There’s so much, they’re rife with actual envy and jealousy and hatred that they can’t ever really be friends. The second paradigm is that they are so emotionally intense and close and open, but we also know from the data that they’re fragile and shorter-lived. The third is that they seem to be strictly egalitarian. There are these rules in friendships among women that, or at least girls, that you really can’t strive for higher status than me. You can’t compete against me. So they’re strictly egalitarian and non-competitive, but in reality, there’s a lot of competition going on there.

I mean, the term relational aggression, which some people often use as indirect aggression or social aggression, was really coined to be able to characterize the kinds of aggression that takes place characteristically in female-female relationships. So it could be that they are unable to tolerate the sort of everyday issues in friendships, the turbulence that men are more likely to look at and either not be bothered by or reconcile from. And in fact, there’s some really cool evidence suggesting that male-male friendships are more likely to experience issues and get back together than female-female friendships. As to why that happens, again, the best idea that we have right now is that insofar as women’s friendships need great trust because of a long history of evolutionary functionality, of alloparenting, so we have to really trust this person to be able to take care of our offspring and our future offspring, we don’t brook any turbulence. Whereas among men, yeah, he might be a dick, yeah, he might have run over my bike, but in the end, more is better than fewer because we might have to come up against this other coalition.

Brett Mckay: Speaking to the tolerance that men have for their friends, for their foibles and the intolerance that women have, I think Joyce Benenson did a study on roommates and she found that men and men roommates, they just tolerate each other like, yeah, the guy ate my Cheerios and I was pissed for a little bit, but then I just got over it. Women, they’ve got a bigger problem with that.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, the emotional reactions there kind of suggest that women often see other women, even their friends when things go awry, as the other woman’s mere existence is costly. And I think Joyce would trace this back to a sort of behavioral ecology idea in our primate ancestors that every extra female added to the group could, take my mate, could mean that I’m carrying this infant and now I have to walk further for food. They’re costly to me. Whereas every extra guy added to the group doesn’t cost other men in the same way and provides a benefit in group defense.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So that’s interesting. So women, I mean, tell me if I’m wrong on this, women, even their best friends, women might still see them as a potential competitor.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. At least in the women that we’ve studied. So that’s typically college students and then in developmental psychology. When we talk about men’s and women’s friendships, we can compare men and women. We can compare some women to other women and some men to other men. But all of this relies on having data. One of the problems in this area of research is that we have a lot of good data from girls and boys because people are interested in studying friendships in girls and boys. But as soon as girls and boys grow up, they hit puberty and they can have romantic relationships. It’s as if researchers flee for the romantic relationship hills and just want to study those relationships. So we don’t have great data beyond some young adults and certainly not in, say, mothers or in older adults. We’re starting to get them, but we don’t have great data on male-male, female-female friendships across the lifespan for me to actually tell you this is what’s going on.

Brett Mckay: Interesting. It would be interesting to get that data because I think you could theorize that maybe some of the conflict among college aged women, underlying that even unconsciously could be competition for mates. And then later in life, when each person is married they secured, each secured their mate. Maybe friendship tension goes down. So are there studies being done on that today? Like looking at friendships, how they change over the lifespan?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, if you went to the big social psych conference of any talk about a relationship, seven out of 10, they’re gonna be about romantic relationships. Fewer than one out of 10 on average is gonna be about friendships. This is starting to change at UCLA. We’re starting to change this. We’ve developed the UCLA Center for Friendship research. There are multiple faculty that want to understand friendship and solve the problems of friendship, but it is not a well studied phenomenon. Not nearly as well studied as you’d imagine it would be. Certainly.

Brett Mckay: Do men and women today look for different things in potential friends? And what would evolutionary psychology tell us about that.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so a lot like the research on mating or romantic relationships, we often talk about the things that are different between the sexes. I should emphasize the fact that the biggies, the things that everybody wants in friends, they’re the same kindness, intelligence and so on. I’ll also note that in my lab we’ve actually figured out that that doesn’t hold the way that you might think it does. So we want our friends to be really kind. And we don’t want our friends to be mean. Except not really. We want our friends to be really kind to us, less kind to other people than they are to us. And sometimes we even want our friends to be more vicious than they are kind when they’re behaving toward people we don’t like. And that does hold for men and women. But at the same time, yeah, men and women also face some sex specific challenges.

And to the extent that their same-sex friends help them solve those challenges, then men and women should look for different things. So what we’ve found is that women tend to look for friends who provide emotional support, intimacy and useful social information. They also tend to rate intrinsic traits like being supportive, trustworthy, and respectful more highly in friends than men do. Whereas men tend to prioritize male friends, physical formidability, high status and wealth, their sort of Wingmanship or ability to afford access to potential mates as really important compared to women. And they also rate instrumental traits more highly than women do. Traits, like being able to provide material benefits.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so dudes prefer competent dudes, dudes with skills with high status that can help them out. So hunter gatherers wanted male allies who were big and strong men today still respect strength in each other. But today guys wanna be friends with a guy who can help them fix their car. Or maybe they have a large professional network maybe they can help you find a job, start a business, meet women, et cetera.

Jaimie Krems: They do. And there’s some preliminary data that suggests that even the way that men and women use their friends kind of reflects this. So women will use their best friend as a study buddy, as a wingwoman, as a, you name the challenge. They’re gonna take their best friend with them. Men kind of use the right guy for the job. They have one guy for studying, one guy for wingman, one guy for the basketball game.

Brett Mckay: That’s interesting. That makes sense. I’ve seen that too in my own life. It’s like this. So completely anecdotal, but I’ve got, I don’t have a problem with having a friend. This is my weightlifting friend and this is my church friend and this is my, I don’t know my book friend. I have no problem. And I think when I look at the women in my life, they want a friend who can do everything.

Jaimie Krems: So this relationship scientist, Eli Finkel talks a lot about how in the modern US in particular, we put so much pressure on our romantic relationships to do everything for us and even take the place of our friendships. And it’s kind of the way that the data suggests women are thinking about their friendships. They want one best friend to be a Swiss army knife.

Brett Mckay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So men, large group of friends, looser, they look for friends that are competent who can do things for them. They help them out. Women typically tend to have close didactic, intense, emotionally intense relationships. I’m curious, is there any research on male best friends? So like, men tend to have like a large group of friends they go to, but men have best close didactic relationship with one of those friends every now and then. Is there any research on that?

Jaimie Krems: So we often include male best friendships in our studies, if only to look at the differences between male, male and female-female friends. And there’s some developmental work on boys friendships. But what I think you’re asking is more about research into sort of the potentially distinct qualitative nature of male and female best friendships. And there we really haven’t paid attention to men as much as we have to women. And in fact that attention is sort of doubly small so to speak, because we’re not looking at adults friendships. What I can tell you anecdotally is that, so again more than ever people are moving. And when couples move later in life, which happens a lot in academia, there are a lot of women who essentially try and find play dates for their husbands. They would just like him to have some friends. Put him on a kickball team, sign him up for a film thing, go make a friend. So I feel less bad about working and going to my friendships and tending to all my friends. We don’t know why it’s harder for men to maybe make friends in later life as it seems to be. We have no idea ’cause we haven’t paid attention yet.

Brett Mckay: Just listening. Why is it hard for men to make close friends? I know a lot of men might join a club or like a CrossFit gym and they’ll have maybe some superficial relationships and that can be fine. Some guys might be fine with that. But for the guys who want a closer friend, I think it’s just harder for guys because they might have less time than some women because they’re working and then they’ve got family responsibilities and then they’re doing kid stuff. We had Jeffrey Hall on the podcast. He’s at the University of Kansas.

Jaimie Krems: Oh He’s in Kansas. He’s a great dude.

Brett Mckay: He’s done this research on how long it takes to make a friend. And it just takes a long time. I forgot the number, but it was just a really long time.

Jaimie Krems: 200 hours.

Brett Mckay: 200 hours. When you think about that when you’re in high school, in college it was easy to acquire that 200 hours ’cause you’re with these people at school every day. And then you got to hang out with them after school doing your extracurricular activities, hanging out on a Friday night, to get 200 hours with somebody. That’s really hard when you’re a working adult.

Jaimie Krems: I mean, it could be, but let me say this. People, especially young folks, spend a ton of time on apps trying to find people to have sex with or date. We don’t spend the same amount of time trying to find our friends.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. That’s true. That’s a good point. Okay. So dudes can have best friends. We just don’t know a lot about it because there just hasn’t been a lot of research on it. So that’s, if you are a podcast listener and looking for a PhD project, there it is. Go for it.

Jaimie Krems: Come here to UCLA. We are the world leader in studying friendship. Me, Matt Lieberman, Carolyn Parkinson, Naomi Eisenberger. We want to understand what the heck is going on. So Come support our research, be our grad students. Figure this stuff out with us.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. So something else the research has shown about male and female friendship is that it tends to be homosocial that is, men are friends with men. Typically women are friends with women typically. Have you done or have you come across any research on heterosocial friendships? So like when men and women are friends with each other?

Jaimie Krems: So we’re doing some of that work in my lab. There is not a lot of great work on this. There’s some work by Hannah Bradshaw that’s really cool about guys girls. So what do people think of women who are primarily friends with men? Women don’t like them. There’s some cool work on the way that people pick their cross-sex friends. So for men in particular, it might be the case that when they’re looking for friendship, they’re sort of looking for backup mates. So they want the same thing in their prospective girlfriends as they would in their female friends. So there is some work there, but this is another place where we don’t do it. I’ll say part of the reason that we don’t is honestly that, and in, in much of my work I specify same sex friends because I don’t want there to be a presumption of romance or future romance.

Brett Mckay: Okay. That makes sense. So we gotta find out if is, is Harry right and Harry met Sally? Can men and women be friends?

Jaimie Krems: I mean I think that’s probably easier when men are already investing in their offspring and especially if they’re friends with a woman who’s investing in hers. There does seem to be a sort of fundamental trade-off that people face in investing their energy in mating and parenting. And so the more that you are investing your energy in things like parenting, maybe you are not going to be on the prowl or on the lookout. And it could be easier to be friends. But yeah, that will remain a question that people ask forever. I don’t think we’re even close to solving it. I just think people will automatically say Absolutely not. And absolutely. Of course. What kind of sexist are you that you don’t think women can be friends with Men?

Brett Mckay: Well, going back to this idea of why men and women would choose to be friends with each other. So men, they might be friends with a, a woman as a backup mate. So, well if I can’t get this one girl, then maybe I can go for her. But I think some other benefits of having a female friend, like a female friend could give you like advice on how to approach a potential mate. She could have an in with she’s like the friend of the girl that you like. And so you can figure out like, well what should I do to get, I don’t know, Jennifer to like me. That that could be useful.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. I mean they likely have knowledge that the other sex doesn’t have, including the very specific knowledge that you’re talking about. Does Jennifer like me? Some other folks have talked about that women can potentially be the people that men talk to about their emotional lives. That’s a possibility as well. But folks like Amanda Rose would question whether or not men even want to engage in that kind of emotional talk or benefit from it. Just because we know women want to and seem to benefit from it doesn’t mean that men want to and/or benefit from it. So it’s another place we need to be really careful about telling people what to do with their friendships. Not that you are, but a lot of people try to.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. We’ve been alluding to this throughout the conversation. Sometimes when we approach friendship, even academically, we view the female idea of friendship as the ideal. So it’s like, well friends should disclose things and be really intimate with one another emotionally. So all even men should be like that. And it’s like, well maybe guys don’t want that. Like, what’s going on there? Why do we, why do you think we put female friendship as the ideal of friendship?

Jaimie Krems: I mean, that’s a really great question. I don’t think we always have. Certainly I should say so. Aristotle would talk about friendship and he’d just focused on men ’cause he didn’t really think women could be friends. And other researchers have put forward this idea that well women can’t really be friends with each other ’cause there’s always this underlying competition or envy or hatred. So now we more often see something different that women’s friendships are privileged. We see that in movies, we see that in books. And honestly, part of me wonders if that’s not just because that’s what sells. Women are the ones who are buying books. And so we write about female friendships. When men’s friendships are featured it’s Sam and Frodo or Jean and Finnis. This is a long-winded way of saying, yeah, I wish I had an idea. I really don’t know. And it would be kind of lovely to explore the media landscape of male-male and female-female friendships to show what are people even putting out there and consuming. Maybe that’ll help us figure out what it is that people are trying to say our friendships should be. I don’t think that’ll really answer the question of why do we tell people to be like women’s friendships.

Brett Mckay: Jean and Finnis? That’s from a separate piece.

Jaimie Krems: It is. Yeah.

Brett Mckay: That’s my wife’s favorite book she loves that book.

Jaimie Krems: Really? No Way. Yeah, that’s one of my favorite books as well.

Brett Mckay: Going back to male female friendships. So these are heterosocial friendships. Okay. So men might be friends with women because they’re a potential backup mate or a female friend might help him secure a mate. Why would women want to be friends with men?

Jaimie Krems: So there are a few reasons, and we even see this in some non-human primates. So folks like Franz Dal have written about this. One is for protection. So if I’m worried about the coercion or physical attacks from other men, or I’m a woman, I’m worried about that from men. Having another woman might not necessarily be as effective in protecting me from that male’s physical aggression as another male in my corner. So that’s one reason is that we get some of those benefits. But the same way that you said, well men might want to have women friends because women have access to information that men don’t. The flip side is true as well. Men might have some information about even simply their friend group that the women won’t have in that larger social network.

Brett Mckay: One thing I’ve heard anecdotally why some women like to be friends with dudes is they’re like, well there’s just not the drama. Is there any research about that?

Jaimie Krems: So I would say that there is, but it’s only tangential. So Joyce Benson’s work on that. So a a six month female-female friendship is gonna have more issues and fights and sort of more turbulence than a six month male-male friendship. And part of this is related to the research on how women aggress. So I can roll my eyes at you. I can say, oh, it’s so brave of you to wear that. I can say when I said we’re all going for ice cream, I didn’t mean you Brett [laughter] There are these somewhat more subtle ways of aggressing than punching one another in the face. And women tend to aggress like this aggress in ways that are more subtle and sometimes covert. So when a woman is talking to another woman, it’s almost like there’s a secret language behind the words that we can decode. In fact, I have some work on this with respect to disgust faces, women tend to make disgust faces at other women they don’t want around. Men don’t tend to do this. Women tend to notice, or at least infer that other women’s disgusted faces directed maybe at them, maybe not means that that woman is gonna try and avoid me. And the more worried I am about having friends, the more I think that that woman’s disgust face potentially at me. It makes me sad and unhappy.

Brett Mckay: I wanna talk more about female aggression. We talked about this idea that the female friendship is like the best, it’s the ideal. ’cause it’s close, it’s intimate, you’re being vulnerable and that somehow women are less aggressive. But like the research shows that women are just as aggressive as men. They just do it differently. Talk us more like what does female aggression look like with each other?

Jaimie Krems: So first I should say that we’ve been sadly loose with our language and research about this and given people the idea that women don’t punch, they only gossip, which is not entirely true. And given people the idea that when men aggress they punch, they don’t gossip, which I think we all know isn’t true. So what’s really going on here is that women are way more likely to use tactics of aggression that we’d call indirect aggression, social aggression or relational aggression than they are to use physical aggression. Those tactics of aggression are really characterized by hurting other women where it hurts, which is in their relationships. So yes, there’s the exclusion and the sort of asides that you say it just loud enough to make the other women overhear how much you hate her. But really what indirect aggression is often aimed at doing is harming other women’s relationships or even potentially precluding other women’s ability to form relationships because we say what a horrible friend she is, how selfish she is that she has an STD and you shouldn’t date her.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So the indirect stuff. So it’s basically like, I mean if you’ve seen mean girls, is it like that? Is that, is mean girls?

Jaimie Krems: It really is. Yeah, And it… Think, I haven’t seen that movie in a long time, but there are a lot of instances of aggression among women that many men might not even realize were acts of aggression. And it’s not to say that men don’t do that as well. They certainly do. They certainly gossip. They certainly derogate one another and try and harm one another’s reputations. Women seem to be attuned to avoiding the costs of engaging in competition and aggression toward other women. So they do it in ways that is more likely like implicature, deniable, kind of the same thing when you’re like, Hey, officer, is there a way we can take care of this ticket here? So no one can point out that was a bribe. That was aggression. You’re trying to hurt me. Let’s coordinate and hurt you.

Brett Mckay: What’s going on there? Like what are the theories? Why do men prefer the direct conflict and women prefer the indirect social conflict?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so I don’t know that I’d say women, men necessarily prefer direct conflict that they’d rather punch each other than gossip.

Some of our data suggests that if another person pisses a man off, the most likely thing he is to do is nothing. After that, then maybe he’ll avoid the guy or exclude the guy. Punching is pretty low on the list. Granted, that’s in modern America. So everybody’s more likely to do nothing than avoid, unlikely to punch. Women really are much more likely to use indirect aggression than direct aggression though. And the logic, and this is some work by Anne Campbell called Bjorkqvist, is that women are really attuned to avoiding the costs of aggression. So they don’t want to engage or start physical aggression, and they don’t want to engage in aggression that is overt and can end up in retaliation, that would, kind of physical retaliation. In fact, Anne Campbell studied girl gangs and found that, yeah, when there’s physical aggression its among women, it starts because somebody maligned somebody else’s reputation. So why don’t women, or why are women so attuned to avoiding the costs of physical aggression? Again, this is Anne Campbell’s work, but some of the ideas are that women are more expensive, so to speak.

We have these large, expensive gametes. We have a high possibility of having a child if we want to, versus men’s sort of small, cheap gametes, their sperm, and it’s harder for men to find a mate than it is for women to find a mate. So we really don’t wanna ruin our ability to pass on our genes. That’s one idea. And that seems to be the idea that is taken hold the most, is that women are trying to avoid aggression ’cause we’re potentially more fragile, but much more than that, we’re more expensive.

Brett Mckay: Does that change throughout the lifespan? I guess there probably hasn’t been research on that. Does that change when you’re 50, 60, 70 years old?

Jaimie Krems: I mean, it should. If it’s about protecting your reproductive potential, or if you’re a mother, I should have said part of what Anne Campbell also says is that women avoid aggression that could be physical or lead to physical aggression, because as mothers, we’re much more important to the survival of our offspring than fathers are. So if that is the case, and it’s really about protecting our future reproductive potential, or protecting our current young offspring, then we should see more physical aggression among women later in life. I don’t think there’s any evidence that we really ramp it up. So something else must be going on that sort of boosts men’s aggression. Mechanistically, that might even be testosterone. But we really don’t have a good handle on why women aggress the way that they aggress. I think we do now have a very good handle on the fact that women and men aggress differently.

Brett Mckay: Okay, whenever a new friend, like a new person comes into the friend group, and that other person could possibly become the new best friend of your best friend, that can cause a lot of bad feelings like, oh, my gosh, this is a threat. It can cause jealousy. There’s been a lot of research done on romantic jealousy. You’ve done some research on friendship jealousy. Tell us about that research there.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so friendships are really valuable. They do a lot of important things for us. Robin Dunbar would point out that having friends is the next best thing you could do for your health next to quitting smoking. And so we should be attuned to the concern that we’re gonna lose our friend to somebody else. Yeah, our friends only have so much time in the day. And we want them to spend that time helping us than somebody else. But it’s particularly we want that friend’s support for us over other people, their other friends, particularly for best friends. And so what we find is really simple stuff that people feel jealous when their friends might make new friendships, but not just when their friends sort of that friendship fizzles out or the friend moves away. People are more jealous when their closer friends might be usurped by other people versus their less close friends and acquaintances.

And people are really attuned to cues that their best friends are replacing them with a new friend. So for example, we ask people, how jealous would you be if your best friend started a new romantic relationship versus a new friendship? And if people are only concerned with spending time with their best friend, then they should be more concerned when they form a new romantic relationship ’cause our new romantic partners take up all of our time. But if it’s really about replacement and replacing the function that this person serves for you, and vice versa, they should be more jealous when their friends make new friends. And that’s, in fact, what we see people are more jealous when their friends form new friendships, particularly new same-sex friendships.

Brett Mckay: No, you actually, there’s a, in this study, you started off this paper with a quote from an author named Andrea Lavinthal. And she says this, most girls won’t admit this, but they’d rather you hit on their significant other than their best friend.

Jaimie Krems: Oh, yeah. So I think that’s from a New York Times article when I read that paper back in the day. And it was really hitting home the point that particularly for women, their best friendships might even be longer lasting than many of their romantic relationships, which again, it, I hate using the word problematize, but it problematizes or challenges this idea that female friendships are exclusively short-lived. There might just be a lot of them until we find the friend one. But that does seem to be the case. So when we do find sex differences, we find that females report greater jealousy at losing their best friends and close friends than men do. We also find, and this is a small effect, I don’t know if it’s real, but when men are asked to think about their friends as being on part of a team, and how they’d feel if their friend sort of left their team for another team, they tend to be more jealous there. That increases men’s jealousy, not compared to men, compared to women. Women are just more jealous at losing friends in general, not acquaintances, but friends.

You can amplify men’s jealousy by saying, hey, he’s your teammate and friend, and he’s going to the other team.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, that makes sense. So okay, the idea of men prefer large, loose kind of club networks. Another guy coming in being a friend, even a best friend, that’d be, hey, it’s great, we got another pal we can go fishing with. But if that guy, if your best friend decided, I’m gonna go, I don’t know, join the other team or something, that’s more like you’ve betrayed us. What are you doing? You betrayed the club.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, it’s exactly that way. And I should say, thinking about jealousy or friendship jealousy this way is totally different than how most people have thought about it so far in developmental psych or other more traditional areas of psychology or sociology. Some work suggests that feeling jealousy at all is a symptom of internalizing Western capitalistic ideals where you see people as things, and that’s moronic. Other work seems to suggest that, yeah, okay, young people feel jealous when their friends make new friends, but if they’re normally developing, they grow out of that because no one friend can fulfill all our needs.

So if you do feel jealousy in adulthood, when your friends make other friends, you’ve developed abnormally. And still other work seems to suggest you just don’t understand friendship, or there’s something wrong with you, personal deficits, you must have low self esteem if you’re jealous when your friends make new friends. Our functional and evolutionary look at it is just this emotion is beneficial. And on average, people that felt jealousy when their friends made new close friends, and acted accordingly in sort of positive ways to maintain their friendship, probably did better than people that didn’t feel that jealousy at all.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so if you started feeling friendship jealousy, you start doing, hey, I wanna invite you, let’s go out, let’s go do something like you try to be more proactive to nurture that friendship?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, we created a list of sort of 44 items that we call friend guarding behavior. So everything from punching the interloper to being really vigilant, maybe you sort of stalk your existing friend on social media and see if they’re hanging out with this other person.

But in between, there are these behaviors that are probably more characteristic of adults, like saying, hey, I’m really close to you, let’s make sure we spend some time together and invest in this friendship. That can be a way that people guard their friendships and their friends against affection.

Brett Mckay: But then this could go like, malad… Not maladive, like maybe antisocial, not pro social, it’s like, well, you start telling your best friend, I’ve heard this about her gossiping and starting rumors and things like that, it could go that way, too.

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, in that sense, that kind of gossip or exclusion is antisocial or aggressive toward the person that you’re negatively gossiping about or excluding. It might still be an effective form of friend guarding, though.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. Okay. And to recap, women feel more friendship jealousy than men do, on average?

Jaimie Krems: They do. The one exception, and again, this is a small effect, is that men tended to be comparatively more jealous when their acquaintances made new acquaintances.

Brett Mckay: Wait, what’s going on there?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, it could just be again, about the numbers. So men are using their networks to benefit them in ways that women aren’t necessarily. And so the loss of a network member for a man might be more costly than an acquaintance network member is to a woman.

Brett Mckay: Well, Jamie, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Jaimie Krems: So they can visit my lab website, the Social Minds Lab at UCLA. I’m Jaimie Krems on Twitter. And very soon, they will be able to hear about some of our research or maybe even see some public-facing talks at the UCLA Center for Friendship Research if they’re in the LA area.

Brett Mckay: Fantastic. Well, Jaimie Krems, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jaimie Krems: Thank you so much. This was great.

Brett Mckay: My guest today was Dr. Jaimie Krems. You can find more information about our work at our website, kremslab.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/krems, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done this already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a read on the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, I’m Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body, and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing.

Yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame.

But my guest says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network. Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people if we don’t have what he calls a “shared reality.” We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the “liking gap,” why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #803 — How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life
• AoM Article: Why Ambivalent Relationships Are Terrible for You (And How to Deal With Them)
• AoM Podcast #949: Envy — Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About

Connect With David Robson

• David’s website
• David on IG
• David on X
• David on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Hey, this is Brett. I want to let you know that we’re having an enrollment for summer cohort of The Strenuous Life starting this Tuesday, June 11th. The Strenuous Life is an online-offline program that we created, it’ll be putting into action all the things we’ve been talking about and writing about on AoM for the past 16 years. And we’ve done that in a few ways.

First, we created 50 different badges based around 50 different skills. There’s hard skills like wilderness survival, outdoorsmanship, knot-tying, building fires, but also soft skills like how to be a better host, how to improve your social skills, how to be a better husband and better father. We also provide weekly challenges that are going to push you outside of your comfort zone mentally, physically and socially. We also provide day-to-day accountability for physical activity and doing a good deed.

And every new member of The Strenuous Life goes through what we call The Strenuous Life challenge. It’s a 12-week boot camp that’s going to help you develop a bias towards action that’s going to carry over to other areas of your life, and at the end of the 12-week boot camp, if you’ve completed all the requirements, we’ll send you a challenge coin that’ll commemorate your achievement.

If you want to learn more about The Strenuous Life, head over to thestrenuouslife.co. You can also sign up if you want to sign up. Deadline to sign up is Thursday, June 13th at 9 PM Central Time. And then the challenge, the bootcamp challenge starts on Saturday, June 15th. Thestrenuouslife.co, go check it out. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.

Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing, yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame. But my guest David Robson says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network.

Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely, even when we’re surrounded by people. We don’t have what he calls a shared reality. We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the liking gap, why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more. After show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection.

Alright, David Robson, welcome back to the show.

David Robson: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So we had you on two years ago to talk about your book, The Expectation Effect, which is about the placebo effect. You got a new book out, it’s about the science of social connection. You took a deep dive into what makes us feel connected to others, and then you offer these research-backed tips on how we can improve our connection with others. You start out the book talking about the loneliness crisis that people have been talking about that’s been happening in the United States and other Western countries. You have a fresh take on the source of this loneliness crisis, and you talk about it’s the lack of shared reality. So how is a lack of shared reality behind our feeling of loneliness?

David Robson: Right, I mean, there’s a lot of talk on how modern society and then new technologies are kind of driving people apart. And I’m sure there’s certainly an element of truth in that, but the fact is, if you look at historic data from what we know, it seems that loneliness has been a problem for humans for a very long time. And even if we think about the people who surround us, celebrities, like cultural references, you can really see that people can be surrounded by a lot of friends or a lot of people, but still feel pretty lonely.

So there’s more to feeling social connection than just having face-to-face contact with a lot of people. And what I propose and what the scientific research suggests is that even when we’re kind of in conversation with someone, we can often feel a sense of existential isolation because we lack a shared reality with that person. And put simply, a shared reality is the sense that the other person is on the same wavelength as you, so you feel that their thoughts, their emotions, their reactions to events are very similar to your own. That’s really the basis of our sense of social connection, and too often we have these psychological barriers that prevent us from forming that shared reality.

To give just a few examples, when we’re in conversation, our conversations can be so shallow and superficial because we’re too scared of disclosing the things that are most important to us that we just don’t give the opportunity for shared reality to develop. So it could perfectly well be that the other person is really thinking the same stuff that you’re thinking, but you just neither of you say it, so you feel that distance, even though there’s that potential for communication and for connection.

And that’s what The Laws of Connection is all about, it’s overcoming those psychological barriers so that we don’t miss all of these opportunities. And actually, what I really discovered from all of the research that I read was that there are so many opportunities for us to feel some meaningful connection with the people around us, and with just a few changes to our mindset, to our behavior, to the content of our conversations, we can make the most of those opportunities and achieve our social potential.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love this idea because, as you said, a lot of times when people talk about how do we solve the loneliness crisis, it’s these really drastic engineering our environment, well, we need to get people more into face-to-face situation, we need to redesign our communities, or you tell people just get out there, sign up for a rec league, go to church, or something like that. And all those things are potentially good, but it might not be the solution, it’s not sufficient, ’cause you can be around people and you can still feel completely lonely, and you see this in relationships, people, they just… They’re in their family and they absolutely feel alienated from their family, and as you say, it’s because they just don’t feel like they’re on the same wavelength as their family.

David Robson: Right, exactly. And in today’s social environment, you could blame this on, say, things like political polarization, and certainly like sharing a similar world view is important for shared reality, but it can also be something very intimate, it could be that the two of you are sitting watching a film together, and one of you is laughing and finding it absolutely hilarious, and the other person is just totally turned off by that film, they just don’t get what’s funny. And that’s a very alienating experience, that creates this sense of existential isolation, because in that moment you have no shared reality. And conversely, actually, you can have a shared reality with someone who is thousands of miles away, like I have a friend who lives in DC, I’m based in England, but we grew up together and he can just send me like a gif on WhatsApp, and I know that he’s found it funny, he knows that I’ll find it funny, that creates a sense of shared reality in that moment, even though we’re not in the same room.

Brett McKay: And you highlight research when people have this shared reality, their brains actually start matching each other in different ways.

David Robson: Yeah, that’s what I love about this whole topic is that you can do these psychological questionnaires where you measure how much shared reality people experience with another person, and that can be like measured on do you have the sense that you’re kind of thinking the same thing, do you feel that you’ve got a shared stream of consciousness, do you finish each other’s sentences. And we know from those studies that the sense of shared reality really is important for our feelings of closeness, and it overrides often broader superficial similarities between people, for example, like if they both come from the same home town.

So we know that this intimate sense of sharing our inner world with someone is important, but then there’s a whole bunch of studies from neuroscience that show that there’s literal truth to the idea that we’re on the same wavelength with someone when we share a reality with them. Basically, one of my favorite studies looked at a bunch of students from this kind of graduate class at a university to watch a series of YouTube clips, so it could be a music video, a documentary, a comedy routine, and they measured their brain activity as each person watched the clips. And what they found was that the similarities in the brain activity to the same events could predict how close the friendships were between the classmates, whether they were kind of a direct connection or whether they were more of like a kind of an acquaintance who you might bump into at another friend’s party, but you’d never choose to spend time together.

This kind of interbrain synchrony is called, or interbrain coupling, and that’s really the neurological foundation of social connection.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in the course of your research, you developed 13 laws that can help you develop more shared reality with people around you. I want to talk about some of these laws today. The first one is be consistent in your treatment of others, avoid being a stressful frenemy. I want to talk about that frenemy part. What is a frenemy?

David Robson: So a frenemy is… Or the scientific term for a frenemy is an ambivalent relationship, and essentially, they’re the kind of people who blow hot and cold, they’re kind of Jekyll and Hyde figures. So you might go to them one day and they act like your best friend, like they have your best interests at heart, and then the next day, they’ll ignore you or lash out because they’re feeling jealous. They’re not reliable, they’re not consistent in their behavior.

Now, there’s been a bunch of longitudinal studies that have looked at the importance of social networks for our health, and one way of looking at this is just calculating how many connections you have, and it does seem that people with bigger social networks tend to be healthier. It can be as important the size of your social network as things like whether you smoke or drink, or whether you exercise regularly, how high your BMI is.

But then it’s not just the number, it’s the quality of the interactions with people that you have, and what was really surprising to me was that the ambivalent friendships, the frenemies who are kind of good and bad in equal measure, they’re not just worse than the people who are wholly supportive to you, they can actually be more stressful than the people who are purely aversive, those relatives, for example, or that colleague at work who’s just so consistently nasty that you just know to avoid them.

And I think the problem with the frenemies is that they have… You feel invested in the relationship and you kind of want their approval, and so when there’s this uncertainty on how they’re going to respond to you, it actually hurts a lot more. And so there are studies showing that just knowing that a frenemy, that an ambivalent relationship, is sitting in the room next to you and that you’re going to have to interact with them in a few minutes, that can make your stress levels soar, it can actually raise your blood pressure just knowing that they’re going to be there and you don’t know how they’re going to react.

Now, the conclusion of this research is obviously that we should be more mindful of the people in our social networks, so maybe keep a distance from these people who are not good for our well-being. We probably don’t want to eliminate all of them altogether, because sometimes the good outweighs the bad, but an awareness of those people and their effects on our well-being can at least help us to manage our expectations and to make sure that if they stress us out that we do something to calm ourselves afterwards and put their behavior into perspective.

But equally important, we need to avoid being frenemies ourselves, and we could be doing this without realizing, like maybe it’s just that you’re the kind of person who is always late and that leaves your friend feeling devalued, or you never respond to their messages, you forget their birthday, all of these things. We want to be consistent. If people really matter to us, we really want to show that regularly and consistently.

Brett McKay: That takes some self-reflection. You might even have to ask your friend, Hey, am I doing anything that just really bothers you, and what can I do to improve?

David Robson: Right, exactly. It’s like asking, am I the arsehole in this relationship? You might not want to hear what they have to say, but ultimately it’s going to help you to be a better person if you do.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the second law is create a mutual understanding with the people you meet. What are some tips you’ve found in your research for how to create a shared reality with someone by fostering mutual understanding?

David Robson: Just actually making the effort to verbalize your feelings to the other person is hugely important. So if they’re telling you something that really mattered to them in their life, it could be like a tragic event, it could be something that they’re super proud of, but just verbalizing how you feel for them, that is something that we sometimes forget to do. We might just assume that they can read it from our facial expression, our body language, but just saying it out loud can be really important.

And if you’re having joint activity together, just to actually say how much you’re enjoying it, so that they know that they’re not the only person who’s experiencing that kind of exhilaration, that’s one way that we can do this. Another way that was super surprising to me was that you can often achieve that neural synchronization that is kind of behind this shared reality by changing your physiological experience. So rhythmic activities, when you’re moving or singing in time with other people, so going to karaoke, dancing, these are very effective bonding activities, because they’re synchronizing your brain waves, and so fundamentally, you know that that other person is living in the kind of physical world in the present moment, experiencing exactly the same sensations that you are, that’s been proven to be really good for establishing a bond between strangers and between people who know each other.

All of these experiments showed that when people kind of dance together, they become more altruistic to one another, they feel closer, they’re more likely to share their secrets with each other. It’s very, very powerful, and it doesn’t have… If dancing’s not your thing, if singing’s not your thing, something like going to a chili eating contest together, if that’s what you and your friend enjoy, experiencing that kind of pleasurable pain together, that is also a good way of establishing this kind of momentary shared reality that can then just ease your interaction and maybe you can develop that into some more meaningful relationship, a more lasting relationship.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the sociologist Émile Durkheim called that collective effervescence, when you’ve felt you’re connected with everyone and you’re dancing. Okay, so do things together that require synchronized movement, so dance, play music together, you can even do comedy or improv with each other. And I like that other idea, it’s very simple, just validate the thoughts of other people. If they say something and you agree with it, say so, and don’t just assume that they know that you agree.

And we talked about what it feels like when you’ve created that mutual understanding. It can actually feel… It feels like you’re on the same wavelength, but then you also highlight research, and I think people might experience this as well, there’s a sense of self-expansion, like you feel like you’re getting bigger whenever you have created this shared reality with someone. Talk to us about that idea of self-expansion.

David Robson: Yeah, self-expansion is super important, so even after you’ve clicked with someone, even if you’ve spent a lot of time with them, you shared the same interests, the most successful relationships are the ones that also allow each party to grow. And you know, that’s as true with platonic relationships as it is with romantic relationships, it’s not restricted to the particular kind of connection you have with someone. We just want to surround ourselves with people who are encouraging us to kind of exit our comfort zone in some way.

Now, they could do that purely by being themselves, perhaps they’re just bringing a whole new range of knowledge and perspectives that you never had yourself, so maybe your backgrounds are just so different that actually they always help you to see the world in a slightly different way, that they always have a new insight to bring. That’s one form of self-expansion. It could be that they encourage you to do activities that you wouldn’t have tried before, maybe it’s they practice a difference sport and they help you to do the same, or they’re a real foodie and they’re kind of taking you, encouraging you to go to new restaurants, to try different gastronomic experiences. It could be that you both do star-gazing together, like there are so many ways that you can create self-expansion within a friendship or a romantic relationship, but it’s really fundamental to making sure that your shared reality doesn’t grow stale.

Brett McKay: Another law that you have, you talk about in the book, is trust that others on average will like you as much as you like them, and this law seeks to resolve a problem of socializing called the liking gap. What is the liking gap?

David Robson: So the liking gap is a very common phenomenon that I think we’ve all experienced, some of us experience it more than others, and it’s the fact that when you meet a new acquaintance for the first time, you can have a great conversation, you can really hit it off, like you’re laughing at the same stuff, you have the same interests, you really find that other person fascinating. But when you go away from that conversation, you start to experience these doubts, you start to think that maybe I said a faux pas, maybe I was a bit boring at this point of the conversation. You come away despite your good experience assuming that the other person didn’t like you as much as you liked the other person. You just underestimate how appealing you are.

The research shows that the liking gap is probably happening to both parties, so each person within that conversation is going away thinking the same thing that the other person just didn’t like them as much as they liked the other person. And you can see how this can drive people apart, because if you have that kind of anxiety, you’re less likely to capitalize on that interaction afterwards, you’re less likely to arrange to meet up a second time to go out for a drink, to get a coffee, to maybe engage in some kind of creative collaboration if it’s at work. And the sad thing about the liking gap is that it lingers for quite a while.

So one study looked at university suite mates who were living together, should have got to know each other pretty well, but they found that even after seven or eight months, these suite mates still had this liking gap, they still weren’t confident that the other person liked them as much as they liked the other person. And if we want to build better relationships more quickly, we want to overcome that liking gap after the first few meetings.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like the liking gap is maybe you established a shared reality with someone, but then after the fact you start questioning it.

David Robson: Yeah, you start… You kind of allowed that shared reality to crumble because you start to think that what you perceived was not what the other person perceived, you don’t trust that actually those feelings of closeness were real and true for each party.

Brett McKay: And this liking gap is more common for introverts than extroverts. Another thing about introverts is that they think or they predict that they will enjoy a social interaction less than they actually do.

David Robson: So I’m not doubting that there are like meaningful fundamental differences between introverts and extroverts and the kind of situations that they might find most recharging or restorative, but in general introverts tend to have more pessimistic assumptions about social events. They’re more likely than extroverts to assume that they’re just not going to enjoy an interaction with a stranger, that it’s going to be exhausting and awkward and embarrassing, and that they’ll come away feeling a lot worse than they did before the interaction. But what the research shows is that when you compare introverts and extroverts after an interaction, they both actually find these social engagements really meaningful and enjoyable, so those expectations just aren’t as well-calibrated as they are for the extroverts.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve experienced that. I’m an introvert. I write for a living, I do my podcast, my podcast, I use my closet, so I’m just at my house all the time. And so when there’s an opportunity to socialize, I always have like, Oh, I’m not… I’m going to be really exhausted, I’m not going to be very good, and then I do it and I feel great. That was awesome. Have you had that same experience as a writer?

David Robson: Yeah, all the time, but especially, I think after the covid pandemic lockdowns that we had in England. It was like I’d forgotten how to… Only temporarily, only for like the first few meetings, but I really felt like I was worried that I’d forgotten my social skills and how to interact with people. And then once I had those conversations, it was great, but it took maybe a few weeks for me to fully feel engaged again to the same degree that I had before the pandemic.

This actually comes out in the research quite nicely, that to overcome phenomena like the liking gap and those kind of official nerves about meeting strangers, anyone can do it no matter what our personality, but you do need to put in practice. So you have to make it a kind of intention every day to try to speak to someone that you don’t know, and then after just one week, you’ll find that your expectations are much better calibrated, that you feel more confident about enjoying those interactions, and more confident in your ability to conduct those interactions with fluency.

You just need the experience, but if you let it go by for a few weeks or months without pushing yourself in that way, the nerves and the fear, they’re going to kind of creep back and you’re just going to have to kind of warm up again before you feel that same confidence.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you say that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can teach us this principle of needing to take an intentional approach to developing our social skills.

David Robson: Right. There’s a great scene between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, who is kind of his love interest, even though they don’t realize it at the time, and she is basically pointing out the fact that he just doesn’t speak to people at parties, and he’s like very standoffish, and it seems to her very rude, the fact that he’ll just going to keep to his group and he just makes no effort. And he says something like, Well, I just don’t have the ability that you have to make small talk and to connect with people. And she’s playing the piano at the time, and she says, Well, I’m not a great pianist, but I don’t pretend that… That’s just like inherent within me, I’m not a great pianist because I just don’t put in as much practice as all of the other girls who can play much better than me. And maybe your social awkwardness is just part of the fact that you just have never tried to practice.

And that’s really what the science demonstrates for us, is that you put in the practice and you reap rewards in just the same way that you would with learning a musical instrument, that these skills don’t necessarily come naturally to anyone, but we’re all much better than we think if only we try hard to put ourselves in the kinds of situations where we need to use those skills.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that scene. That was a very incisive insight from Jane Austen. I really like that a lot. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So in the book, you also talk about how conversation can help us create and nurture shared realities with others. How can we better use conversations to create that shared reality?

David Robson: Right. I mean, again, there are like these psychological barriers where we might be trying our hardest to connect, and often we are successful, but we’re maybe not doing it as well as we could be. One of the problems that a lot of people have is that they just don’t ask enough of the right questions in a conversation. So I think it’s quite well known that you should ask questions to achieve a shared reality. But the problem is that when people take that advice, they can often do it quite kind of algorithmically, robotically, and they’re just kind of… It’s almost like an interview. They’ve got a list of things, like what profession you do, like where did you go to school, where do you live, what family do you have, all of these things.

But each question isn’t really building on the other ones, it’s just like a stream of new questions. Now, that’s fine. It’s certainly better than just those kind of ice breakers of like, Hey, how are you doing? And it’s better than this habit that some people have, which is like, Hey, how’s work going? Anyway, I got a great promotion and I was given this huge bonus, but you just used the question as an excuse to turn the conversation back to yourself.

So those are bad questions, but the best questions are the ones that ask the other person to open up and then build on what they’ve just said, so kind of follow-up questions that really make an effort to dig deep into this experience that they’ve shared with you.

Brett McKay: Any examples of questions that are really good for digging deep and establishing that shared reality with somebody?

David Robson: Yeah, I mean, say you are just getting to know someone, it’s reasonable to say, like, what’s your profession? What do you do with your day job? Then if they tell you they’re like a lawyer or a scientist, or whatever, just asking them like, well, why did you choose that profession, or what does it involve? Like, what’s your favorite part of that profession? What’s the worst part of it? Just showing that you have a genuine curiosity in what they’re saying is hugely flattering, and it’s just building that shared reality by constructing all these details that allow you to understand their life better. And from your reactions, you’re allowing them to understand where you’re coming from and how you feel about these different topics.

Brett McKay: You also talk about, there’s some research saying that in order to establish a shared reality with someone during a conversation, you may need to interrupt them, which goes against the advice you hear about don’t interrupt people, just listen, maybe you do some nodding and uh-huh while you’re listening, but you don’t interrupt. Tell us about this research, ’cause I thought it was really counter-intuitive.

David Robson: So the way we show attention to someone else is really important for establishing a shared reality. Now, a lot of us rely too much on what’s known as paralinguistic cues, so that’s things like murmuring assent, like mmh-hmm, uh-huh, yeah, or nodding along, that kind of body language. We think because we know that we’re listening, that the other person is going to read those cues as they were intended, but the fact is, it’s really easy to fake those cues. If you’re not concentrating, you can just like murmur assent every few minutes, and it’s really difficult to tell whether you are listening or not.

So what’s much better is to demonstrate actively that you’re engaged with what they’re saying, so it could be paraphrasing what they’ve just told you, asking one of those follow-up questions. But then the super surprising thing is that interruptions are actually a really useful way of demonstrating your interest and curiosity. If you’re finishing their sentences, or when they pause ’cause they don’t quite know what to say, and you interrupt to ask them to continue or to kind of guess what they were going to say, that shows that you’re really engaged, and that’s actually very flattering.

Now, obviously, not all interruptions are equal, so if you’re interrupting someone to completely change the topic, that’s super insulting. That’s never going to work. But yeah, if you’re interrupting because it’s a sign of your genuine curiosity and passion for what they’re saying, you know, we don’t have to listen to the etiquette guides, that is going to be a way of forging this connection.

Brett McKay: You also talk about the novelty penalty in conversation. What’s that?

David Robson: Yeah, that’s super counter-intuitive to me, and it’s the fact that when we’re listening to other people or they are listening to us, we all have a preference for hearing about something that we already know, a topic that’s already familiar. And so if you talk about something that isn’t in the other person’s life, so it’s totally novel, that’s when you have the novelty penalty, they just don’t feel the same level of connection to you through that. I think it’s very common when we’re talking about our kind of holidays, if the other person hasn’t been to the location that we’re talking about, they can feel very alienated and bored by the conversation very quickly because it’s just difficult for them to grab hold of.

Now, one of the reasons this happens is partly that our story-telling abilities just maybe aren’t as well-developed as they could be, so you’re leaving too many gaps in the conversation, in your descriptions that make it very hard for them to really get a handle on what was so exciting or fun or interesting about your experience and why it mattered to you. And so actually to overcome the novelty penalty it’s often better to embellish our stories a little bit more than we would naturally do, and I don’t mean embellish with like false details, but I just mean like fill in those gaps, be a bit more emotional in what you’re saying. Like if something like completely changed your life by having an experience, make that clear, actually explicitly say what it was that was so transformative about the experience. That just allows the other person to see inside your mind, and that’s really what is a shared reality is when people can see inside each other’s minds and really get to know what’s actually making you tick and what’s actually motivating you.

Brett McKay: And I guess if you’re listening to someone tell a story and the novelty penalty is kicking in for you, you’re just like bored. I think the solution to that would be to ask questions to flesh out those emotional details.

David Robson: Right, that’s it. I think we should be really humble about this, and rather than just assuming that the other person is really boring, not all getting irritated, we should think that maybe this is a reflection on us and that actually maybe we’re not asking the right questions or leading the conversation in the way that will allow them to tell us why that experience was so important to them and why they think it’s worth sharing with us.

Brett McKay: So oftentimes in a relationship to maintain it, we might tell white lies, we basically tell something untruthful to not hurt the other person’s feelings. So a typical one, hey, what did you think of this food I made? And you’re like, oh, it was so good. And you’re thinking, well, actually, I thought it was gross. What does the research say about how that affects relationships?

David Robson: I mean, there are very few situations where dishonesty pays off in relationships, it’s pretty much limited, actually, like a white lie can be beneficial, and it’s kind of acceptable if the other person has no opportunity to respond to that feedback constructively. So the obvious example is, if you have a bride or groom on their wedding day, and they’re just about to walk down the aisle and they look pretty awful for some reason, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they can’t manage to get a new suit, a new dress, they can’t manage to redo their hair, hearing that news is only going to make them feel a lot worse and be less confident, then it’s fine to tell a white lie, but in almost every other situation, people really respond well to the negative feedback much, much more than we would expect.

And that’s because people value honesty so much, because honesty is so essential for that shared reality. If you start to question whether the other person is really telling you the truth, all of the shared reality that you’ve constructed together starts to feel like this kind of illusion, this mirage that might disappear. So even if you have negative feedback, don’t be afraid to share it, just make sure that you are, firstly, you’re being honest, secondly, that you’re being nuanced, so don’t make sweeping statements, but try to be very specific in what you liked, what you didn’t like on their project, for example, and try to offer your own support and resources to help them to make the changes that they need.

So if you’re talking about a work project, offering to go out for coffee with the person to talk it through and to impart your expertise, that’s going to mean that the negative feedback is much better received and it’s going to help them to feel less stressed about the whole thing. But there have been studies where researchers got students to either go out into the world for a few days and to be as kind as possible to all the people that they met, kindness was their number one objective, or they asked them to be honest. So totally honest, even when it was uncomfortable, even when they might have naturally told those white lies.

And what they found was that actually both groups performed equally well, they found similar benefits to their well-being compared to a control group who just carried on as normal. And actually, those who had the honest conversations, they often reported feeling greater meaning in their interactions, even when there was the discomfort, they felt that they got to know the other person better and the other person got to know them better because they had been brave enough to tell them the truth.

Brett McKay: It reminded me of a scene. So we just got done in our family, we just got done watching Little Women. Have you seen the most recent one from 2019 with… It’s Greta Gerwig’s…

David Robson: Yeah, yeah, Greta Gerwig’s…

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, she directed it. So it’s that scene where Jo, the heroine of the story, writes this novel and she presents it to this guy, Friedrich, who she kinda likes, and he likes her. And he reads it, and he’s like, this is awful. And she’s like, what are you talking about? It’s like, no, it’s just not good. I don’t think it’s good. And then she got really defensive, like you think I’m a bad writer? He’s like, no, I don’t think you’re a bad writer, I think what you wrote was not good. And in the short term, it kinda hurt the relationship, she got all in a huff and she left, but in the end, it seemed like it was the right thing to do, ’cause they ended up creating that shared reality.

David Robson: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s it, sometimes like you might get a negative reaction initially, ’cause the other person needs to calm down and to process what you’ve said, but according to these studies, ultimately it does bring you closer together, to be honest. I don’t think this means that we… It gives us like an excuse to just be rude or tactless, I think there’s always going to be a much kinder way of telling the brutal truth, than just saying it in the kind of nastiest way possible, like there’s always a way that you can make your words… Like really emphasize how much you care about the other person and your honest intentions for doing so, the purity of your intentions to help the other person.

But yeah, mostly, like just having that bravery, it’s going to pay off for you and the other person, it’s going to help them to achieve their goals better. And it’s going to help you, as a kind of dyad, like as friends or in a relationship, it’s going to help you to grow as well.

Brett McKay: So another thing that can get in the way of relationships is the emotion of envy. I think this is a really fascinating topic. We did a podcast last year about the philosophy of envy with Sarah Protasi, and she described envy as this aversive feeling when somebody, could be even a friend, has something that you don’t have but you want and you feel bad. How do people typically manage envy in a relationship?

David Robson: So I don’t think we manage it very well. So often our fear of provoking envy in the other person just leads us to not share the things that we’re really proud of, like the stuff that’s given us joy. That’s been shown in multiple surveys that people will just keep it quiet if they’ve got promotion or if they’ve received a bonus, if they’re super proud even of like a personal best at the gym or by the number of Twitter followers that they’ve just received, it’s part of their personal reality, they want to be able to share that with the people that are closest to them, but they avoid doing it because they don’t want to seem like some kind of blow-hard, like some kind of braggart.

And those motives are so misdirected, because actually, what the research shows is that the very act of hiding your success can be incredibly insulting to the other people, because your motives seem pretty paternalistic. So when you finally found out that your best friend has got a promotion or that he’s won this amazing like prize for his novel, when you find that out and you realize that he was hiding that from you, that makes you feel like he kind of… He expects you act like this spoilt child who has to win at every competition, and that you’re going to act like this kind of brat who has a tantrum.

It kind of shows disrespect as if you’re not strong enough to deal with that good news and to actually feel joy for the other person. So there have just been so many studies showing this, so many multiple experiments showing that false modesty really doesn’t pay off, and that includes humble brags where you try to veil your boast in this kind of complaint or self-deprecating joke. All that tells the other person is that you’re trying to manipulate them, and that you’re trying to make them respect you without risking envy.

And that doesn’t go down well either, because when there’s the perception of insincerity in someone, that shakes the foundations of shared reality, so pretty much we should be more willing to celebrate our achievements, we don’t need to be ashamed of them. We just have to make sure that what we’re saying is honest and what we’re saying doesn’t involve any social comparison, so that’s really crucial. So it’s fine to talk about your promotion, talk about your prize, talk about your achievements at the gym, just don’t say something like, oh, yeah, I was running like faster than everyone I could see at the gym, or oh, yeah, like I’m now earning more money than like 90% of the people I know, because this social comparison, it triggers all of these kind of hard wire devolved responses where we’re really suspicious of people who are trying to climb the ranks of our society’s hierarchy.

We just don’t want to think of people overtly comparing themselves to others, because we might also be included in their negative judgment. That really puts people’s defenses up, but provided that you’re honest and you avoid social comparison, people respond really well to hearing about your successes, and often they experience this emotion called confelicity or mitfreude, a German word like schadenfreude, which means joying with someone, like experiencing that vicarious happiness in seeing another person’s joy and contentment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the antidote to envy is confelicity. And the way you can do that, just share the good news, don’t do the social comparison, and then when someone shares good news with you, what can we do to have better mitfreude?

David Robson: Basically like when someone shares their good news with us, like even if we are feeling a little bit of envy, we just have to let the kind of mitfreude shine. We have to try to kind of put our envy to one side. I mean, the chances are you’re… We have complex emotions, so you might feel a little bit of jealousy, but you probably are genuinely happy for the other person, and just expressing that, showing the other person how glad you are for them, that is a really good bonding experience.

Scientists called that process where you experience mitfreude with another person, they call that capitalization, because it actually ends up increasing the well-being of both parties, the person who’s had the good news and the person who is vicariously experiencing the good news.

Brett McKay: So you got a law about helping others who are going through a hard time, and it’s offer emotional support to those in need, but do not force it upon them. And I think there’s another thing that keeps people from connecting with others, when they see someone going through a hard time they don’t reach out because they don’t know what to say, right, so if they have a friend who lost a loved one to death or someone lost a job, they don’t say or reach out, ’cause they’re like, I’m going to say the wrong thing, and it’s just better that I don’t say anything. But the research actually says that that fear is unfounded. What does the research say, and then what can we do to overcome that fear of reaching out?

David Robson: Yeah, so I mean, what I found so surprising about this research was the fact that actually the nature of the relationship didn’t seem to really change how grateful someone was to receive that emotional support. So whether they were close friends or whether they were vague acquaintances, like walking up to someone and saying, I’m really sorry to hear that your dad died or that you’ve been ill, or you’re going to be kicked off your course, I’m really sorry, and I want to be here to support. No matter what the nature of that relationship, people really appreciate your effort to reach out. So we don’t need to be as scared of offering our support as we would be, because most people do assume that it’s going to be kind of awkward, that they’ll say something clumsy, that they’ll end up making the over-person feel worse rather than better. But the research suggests that those fears are unfounded, we’re actually much better at providing the support that they need than we think we are, and what we really need is just a bit more bravery to do so.

Brett McKay: When we do reach out to someone and say something, anything that the research says is or isn’t helpful?

David Robson: Yeah, definitely. So one thing is that it’s one thing to express your support to another person, but you shouldn’t be overbearing in the way that you go about that. So sometimes a few short words, a few short sentences is enough. Trying to force someone to speak about something when they’re still in the middle of a painful experience, that’s not really going to help them to feel closer to you. So just making it clear that you’re there for them whenever they want you, but you’re going to kind of be willing to step back and allow them to approach you, that can be really important.

Secondly, there’s a lot of research looking at the downsides of venting, and essentially when we have supportive conversations with people, sometimes we can just egg them on to relive the painful experience in as much detail as possible. And in some ways that can be very validating, because people want to be heard, they want their feelings to be known, you’re engaging in their shared reality by kind of telling them how painful that must have been and how much you sympathize with them, but after a certain point, it can become quite toxic, because when you’re re-living a painful event again and again and again, it’s not really helping them to move on, it’s not really helping their mental health. And so that’s why we need to combine validation with some kind of attempts at helping them to see a new perspective on the situation.

Now, we have to be sensitive and delicate in the way that we do that, so kind of blundering into the conversation and being like, oh, well, what you need to do is this, and giving really misguided advice because you don’t actually really know precisely what they’re feeling, that’s not going to help too much. But it could be you tentatively suggest another way of looking at the problem, but do it humbly, and kind of ask for their opinion, like do you think that would be helpful, that’s a sensitive way of helping them to re-appraise what they’re going through.

Sometimes it’s just kind of asking the right questions and allowing them to come to a different perspective by themselves, so just asking them, what do you think you might learn from this experience, or how do you think you might move on from this? What’s your plan now? Just making sure that that is part of the conversation, so that it’s not solely focused on the pain that they’re feeling, that has been proven to be really fundamental to not just reaffirming your relationship but actually helping that other person to recover from whatever they’re going through.

Brett McKay: A related law to that is a law on forgiving and asking for forgiveness. And you talk about the research about what happens to us when we hold on to a grudge. What does that research say?

David Robson: There’s been a lot of philosophical and religious teaching around this. I think it is probably pretty well established in so many traditions that holding a grudge is bad for us, and the scientific research just kind of proves that point. Like if you lash out and retaliate, that can help you in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to recover emotionally afterwards. In fact, when we act spitefully to someone, even if we feel that we’re justified, it causes us to lose our sense of humanity.

There’s lots of scientific questionnaires that psychologists can use to measure that aspect of how human do you feel, and what you find is that people’s answers subtly change, so that it looks like they are now considering themselves to be a bit more kind of animal-like than they would have been if they had expressed forgiveness instead. So choosing forgiveness, taking that moral high ground, that can be really beneficial to how we feel.

And then there’s a bunch of research showing that people who forgive over those who hold lasting grudges, they tend to be much healthier with their psychological well-being, but also their physical well-being. When you hold a grudge, you really feel disconnected from other people, so it kind of poisons you inside and you face the consequences of that for things like your risk of chronic pain, even your risk of things like heart disease can be liked to whether you hold grudges or not.

Brett McKay: What about asking for forgiveness? Is there research that tells that the best way to approach offering an apology and how we typically mess it up?

David Robson: Yeah. I think the biggest problem that most of us face is that we just don’t apologize even when we know that we’ve acted rudely. That’s not just stubbornness. I think there’s research showing, actually, that people often really want to express their apology, but they just assume that the other person isn’t going to forgive them, so they don’t say those words. They think, again, that they’re going to be rejected, and they might even make the situation worse by apologizing, so they almost just… They’re too fatalistic about losing the relationship rather than recognizing that they might be able to heal this rift, and that often relationships are much more robust than we expect, even when they have suffered some serious damage through some wrong behavior.

So the first thing to learn, I think, is just to, if you genuinely feel sorry, it’s to actually to say those words. When you’re apologizing, you need to tick multiple boxes, so you’ve got to accept your full responsibility for what you’ve done, you have to listen to the other person to hear about what the consequences were of what you did, and take responsibility for that too. You really should then try to show how you’re going to act differently in the future, like you have to make it clear what you’ve learned from your mistake and why you’re going to avoid hurting the other person again.

A lot of the time, we just try to rush our apologies. If we are brave enough to apologize, we might be like, oh, yeah, I’m sorry, anyway, now you have to get over it, because we need to go back to normal. That is not going to help the other person, like they need to feel that they’ve been heard and that you are going to change as a result of what’s happened.

Brett McKay: Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Robson: My website is davidrobson.me, you can find links to buy my book there. It should be available in all of the usual retailers, your local bookshops, big stores like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, obviously, wherever you get your books. You can also follow me on Twitter, that’s d_a_robson, and on Instagram where I’m just starting to kind of build a following, it’s davidarobson.

Brett McKay: Fantastic, well, David Robson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

David Robson: And a pleasure for me too. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest there was David Robson, and he’s the author of the book The Laws of Connection. It’s available on amazon.com, and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, davidrobson.me. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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What does it mean to be cool? 

Philosophers have long pondered this burning question. 

There are different types of coolness, with some related to affect, style, or talent.

But one type is connected to how we show up in relationships. It’s the type that underlies the feeling expressed when you think to tell someone (or yourself), “Just be cool, man.”

When individuals embody this way of being cool, their relationships, instead of being marked by tension and drama, are filled with a paradoxical combination of easy warmth and abundant chill.

This kind of coolness requires the development of three qualities:

1) The ability to charitably tolerate the weaknesses of others. Everybody’s got their stuff. Everybody’s trying to get their needs met. Everybody’s just trying to make it in the world. The cool individual recognizes that everyone is imperfect, just as he is imperfect. In fact, he recognizes that the flaws in another are usually just the flip sides of their strengths, and he focuses on his gratitude for those strengths, rather than their cost.

2) The ability to diplomatically communicate how others’ weaknesses affect you. Rather than believing that other people should read his mind as to what’s bothering him, the cool individual openly talks about what’s on it. The majority of relationships end because people passively stew on their resentments until they air them at explosive, point-of-no-return levels, or because they walk away having never voiced them at all.

3) The ability to readily acknowledge your own weaknesses. The cool individual is entirely self-aware of his own shortcomings, so that when someone points them out, he’s able to say, “You’re absolutely right! I do do that! I’m sincerely sorry and will keep working on it.”

Tolerance. Openness. Self-awareness. Cultivate these qualities, and you, too, can reach certified cool dude status. Sunglasses recommended, but not required. 

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Your marriage is struggling. You’ve invited your wife to do couples therapy, to go out for date nights, to spend more time together in general. But she’s refused all these invitations. 

Your daughter has the potential to be a champion swimmer. But she isn’t into the sport, and getting her to go to practice is a source of constant conflict.

A guy at church has been down on his luck, and you’ve been helping him fill out job applications. But every time he lands an interview, he fails to show up.

Your son has been addicted to drugs for a decade. You’ve paid for lawyers for related trouble he’s gotten into. You’ve paid for two expensive stints in rehab. But he’s still using. 

In these kinds of situations, when should you continue to invest time, money, and emotion in someone and in the outcome you’d like to see brought about in their life? When should you let go?

Certainly, there are no easy answers to one of the most difficult dilemmas of the human experience. 

But there is one guideline that can be helpful to adopt:

You can’t want it more than they do. 

If someone already has the will, the commitment, the desire to make something happen, then your support will be a beneficial aid to their already existent efforts. If they don’t, even the most abundant pleading, cajoling, and assistance will come to naught. 

You will never be able to pull someone in a direction they aren’t already heading themselves. 

This doesn’t mean that you stop cheering for them (from a greater distance), hoping for them (with realistic expectations), or loving them (with undiminished sincerity).

But you should only keep trying to bring someone along if, at the same time that you’re reaching out, they’re extending their hand. 

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A friend recently sent us a post from Cup of Jo, a women’s lifestyle site that was founded close to the time Art of Manliness was, and like AoM, is one of the few blogs from blogging’s heyday that’s still around and kicking. Cup of Jo is known for its engaged readership (its mantra is “come for the blog, stay for the comments”), and that dynamic was on full display in the post in question. In it, Cup of Jo’s founder, Joanna Goddard, asked readers for their “random turn-ons.” Readers responded with over 400 comments sharing the little things in men that make them swoon. 

I found reading through the comments pretty charming and interesting. I think most guys are fairly clueless about what women find attractive, so this was a fascinating inside view of things. Some of the qualities offered were expected, like kindness, a nice smile, and a pair of broad shoulders. Masculine competence and capability — as one reader put it, “Knowing a little about a lot of things (change a tire, fix a sink, how to cook, etc.)” — were highly rated. Other entries were more surprising, like how sexy women find it for men to back up the car with one arm (mentioned multiple times), and the sheer fact that the thing mentioned the most by far was . . . forearms. The ladies love forearms, guys. (Perhaps the backing-up-the-car thing makes sense, then; as one reader observed, it involves competence and forearms.)

It’s also sort of heartening that a lot of the entries are pretty attainable and don’t require hitting the genetic lottery. Highly-rated things like skills and intelligence can be readily developed, and traits some men might think are drawbacks, like salt-and-pepper hair and a big nose, plenty of women actually find very attractive.

Below you’ll find a selection of the turn-ons that were shared, along with a selection of some of the comments that accompanied them. 

1. Forearms (“forearms omg swoon!”; “every woman is a goddamn freak for forearms”; “Totally into forearms especially if they are muscled from some kind of physical activity!”)
2. Rolled-up sleeves (because forearms) 
3. Salt-and-pepper hair
4. Intelligence (“I like it when a guy rants about something he is passionate and knowledgeable about!”; “Seeing my boyfriend do math in his head”)
5. Biceps
6. Easy confidence
7. Good with kids (“a man who loves to play with kids and can get them to laugh”)
8. Cooking skills (“I love when he throws a dish towel over his shoulder and shakes around the cast-iron pan”; “love it when they have their mise en place out!”) 
9. Flannel shirts
10. Good dancer
11. Manual competence/skills (“My husband once picked a lock, and when it clicked open I spontaneously flushed with arousal!”; “building a fire in a wood burning fireplace”; “A man who can fix things and make things happen”)
12. Parallel parking (“When we were still newly dating my bf pulled off a really impressive parallel parking job – unexpected major turn on!”)
13. Backing up the car using one hand (“When a guy reverses a car and puts his hand on the passenger seat back and looks over his shoulder…why is it so hot??”; that thing when men back up the car using ONE hand on the steering wheel. It is so hot, I can barely breathe. Something about their casual confidence—’I got this’”)
14. Crinkles around the eyes when smiling
15. Natural scent (“the smell of his neck when we hug”; “There’s a scent, like a natural pheromone something, like he’s been working all day and didn’t shower and didn’t plan on seeing anyone today but here we are, and I catch it as he moves and it triggers something instinctual that catches me off guard.”)
16. Sweaters 
17. Strong hands
18. Deep voice
19. Wearing Old Spice
20. Good posture
21. Chivalry/courtesy (“hold the door for you, if it is dark/unfamiliar/possibly unsafe…make sure you see the step, walk you to your car or destination”; “I was recently on a work trip with a lot of people, but I really hit it off (in a friendly way, not a romantic way) with one of my colleagues, so we walked between meetings a lot together talking. In the third or fourth day of this trip, I realized he always walked on the outside of the sidewalk. I thought it was a coincidence but when it occurred to me that it always happened, I realized he was doing it on purpose in a chivalrous way without ever planning to mention it, and I was touched!”; “Unexpectedly jolted by an unassuming man a little my senior. I was standing back to let him ascend the narrow stairs and said ‘after you’ and the tone of his voice as he said ‘Thank you & good morning’ woke me up in a way that coffee never does.”)
22. Reads books 
23. Tailored woolen coats
24. Classy sunglasses (“especially brown ones”)
25. Ability to speak a foreign language
26. Quiet dependability
27. Dimples
28. Wearing a baseball cap backwards (“I live by this tenet — Backwards baseball hats make babies.”)
29. A neatly trimmed back of the neck
30. Skateboarding
31. Work boots
32. Defined deltoid muscles
33. White t-shirts
34. Good conversationalist (“Being able to go somewhere without knowing anyone but fit right in instantly”)
35. Chest hair
36. Chopping wood 
37. Button-down shirts with the top button undone
38. Stubble
39. Wearing a tool belt
40. Henley shirts (“and henleys WITH forearms, of course”)
41. Fitted sweatpants or joggers 
42. Sports jackets and jeans
43. Broad shoulders
44. Hoodies
45. Big nose
46. Sense of humor
47. Suits (“Wearing a well cut navy blue suit, white shirt that has been professionally laundered and still has that hot iron smell, a classic silk tie, big feet in cap toes dress shoes. Feeling that warm muscled bod when you go in for a hug putting your arms between the shirt and the jacket!”) 
48. Glasses
49. Good in a crisis
50. Uniforms (“I’m talking firefighters, military, UPS worker…If you’re in a fitted head-to-toe uniform (usually with a well-kempt haircut) sign me up.”)

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Depression is the most common mental health problem in the world. According to some surveys, about 1 in 10 American adults will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetime. Many more will experience milder forms of long-term low mood, known as dysthymia. 

Given these numbers, there’s a good chance someone you know and love will experience some form of depression. 

When you see a loved one going through depression, you want to help them out. You want your spouse, friend, or parent to be happy and flourishing, so it sucks to see them struggle with the black dog. It’s not just difficult to watch them suffer; depression can also put a strain on the connection you share. 

Today, we’ll unpack research-backed approaches for maintaining a healthy relationship with friends and family who struggle with depression. 

Strained Connections: The Impact of Depression on Relationships

One of the things that makes depression so insidious is that it can cause a depressed person to sabotage or avoid the very things that can help relieve their condition. For example, exercise is one of the best things you can do to reduce depressive symptoms, but when you’re depressed, you find it hard to get motivated to even go for a walk, let alone pump iron.

Socializing can also reduce depression, but depressed people tend to withdraw and isolate themselves, which only worsens their mood. What’s more, many depressives engage in behavior that can damage relationships. Depressed people are more likely to lash out and manifest irritable, sulking, and hyper-critical behaviors, all of which can harm a relationship.

A study on college roommates found that when someone shares a dorm with a depressed person, they experience more conflict and arguing compared to when they share a room with a non-depressed person. Studies on marriages have found that when one spouse is depressed, the marriage is nine times more likely to end in divorce.

People aren’t just tempted to turn away from depressed individuals because they can be actively prickly; people also distance themselves because the melancholy vibe of a depressed individual brings down their own mood and isn’t something they want to “catch.” Folks aren’t just being uncompassionate; research has indeed shown that when people interact with a depressed individual, they end up feeling more anxious and depressed themselves.

These factors can create a downward spiral that unravels a relationship:

The depressed person feels low, and a non-depressed loved one tries to help.

The depressed person irritably rebuffs the help; the non-depressed person feels resentful, doesn’t enjoy being around the person as much, and starts to avoid interacting with them.

The depressed person lashes out at and criticizes the non-depressed person for not being more supportive, and the non-depressed person feels even more resentful and responds with harsh words.

Now the depressed person feels even worse, and the non-depressed person is even more apt to avoid them.

And on the downward, relationship-sabotaging spiral goes. 

Writer Anne Sheffield calls the damage depression can have on a relationship “depression fallout.” In the forward to her book, How You Can Survive When They’re Depressed, journalist Mike Wallace recounts how his own severe, undiagnosed depression strained his marriage with his wife. He was constantly short-tempered and finding faults with her. It wasn’t until he started getting treatment for his depression that their relationship began to improve.

So when you have a loved one who is depressed, you not only have to worry about them, but you also have to keep an eye on the relationship you share, so that it doesn’t become irreparably damaged as the friend or family member passes through a dark season.  

Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Relationship with Someone Who’s Depressed

The following guidelines can help you maintain a healthy relationship with a loved one or friend with depression. Many are drawn from When Someone You Love Is Depressed: How to Help Your Loved One Without Losing Yourself by clinical psychologists Laura Rosen and Xavier Francisco Amador, who based their book on their clinical experience working with individual depressives and couples where one person has the disorder.

Learn All You Can About Depression

If you suspect a friend or spouse might be depressed, do some research on depression to learn as much as you can about it. Depression can manifest itself in a variety of ways; it’s not just crying and being sad all the time. Irritability, low motivation, anger, weight loss/gain, and diminished sex drive are all potential symptoms of depression. Learning about the different ways depression can manifest itself (here’s how it tends to show up in men) can put you in a better position to help your loved one.

Learning about depression can also help you take your friend or loved one’s depressive symptoms less personally (see below). If your depressed friend is more irritable, you’ll know that their depression is behind this behavior change.  

Moreover, learning what your friend or spouse is going through mentally and emotionally will help you better empathize with them. If you haven’t experienced depression, you might think it would be helpful to tell your depressed friend to look on the bright side and think about all the great things they have going for them.

But while faulty thinking is one cause of depression, changing thinking patterns isn’t easy, and there are typically other factors at play as well, like genetics, that are outside someone’s control. Understanding the intractable difficulties a depressed person is facing will help you be more patient with and sympathetic to their struggle.  

Affirm Your Support

What a depressed person needs the most is to know that you’re with them during their low times. This doesn’t mean you have to bend over backward to help them get out of their funk. Just acknowledging that they’re going through a hard time is enough. Regularly affirm the durability of your relationship and that you’re going to be there for them.

Offer Suggestions Respectfully and Judiciously

If a friend or loved one’s depression is getting so severe that it’s interfering with their life, encourage them to get help from a licensed therapist.

If someone’s depression isn’t so serious it requires therapy, or they don’t want to see a therapist, it’s okay to suggest some of the many lifestyle changes that can help alleviate depression: getting exercise, improving sleep, eating a healthy diet, meditation, etc. But follow these guidelines when you offer advice: 1) Only offer one suggestion at a time. Think about what behavior change might have the highest ROI for the person and only mention that one idea. 2) Don’t be offended if the depressed person rebuffs your suggestion. It may be an idea they need time to come around to and will decide to try on their own timetable. 3) Don’t nag them about the idea. Bring it up, and if they don’t follow through on it, wait an appropriate amount of time to resurface it. “Have you thought any more about trying X?”

Set Realistic Expectations About the Persistence of Depression

When you know someone who is depressed, you’ll naturally want to help them. You’ll want to “cure” them so that they’ll always be happy and upbeat.

But as we highlighted in our guide to managing depression, expecting to be able to “cure” depression is a recipe for frustration. There isn’t a cure for depression. Once someone’s had a major depressive episode, their chances of experiencing another one go up significantly. There’s also a chance the person has a melancholic temperament, and no amount of therapy or medication is ever going to change that. If you think depression can be permanently overcome and that once a loved one is over an episode of it, you’re forever out of the woods, you’re apt to feel disheartened and even angry when they become depressed again. Ironically, accepting that someone’s depression will likely be a lifelong struggle and that it can only be managed rather than cured, will help you be more zen about it.

Set Realistic Expectations for How Capable Someone Is of Managing Their Depression 

There are many ways to manage depression, from getting more exercise and sunlight to quitting alcohol and spending time in nature to therapy and medication.

But, as already mentioned, depression sets up a catch-22 where it saps the motivation to do the very things that would alleviate it. 

One of the most difficult questions around mental disorders is figuring out the degree to which they compromise someone’s agency. How much are they still responsible for their actions, and how much can you expect them to choose health-promoting behaviors despite the psychological constraints they’re under?

There are no easy answers, and it will vary on a case-by-case basis. 

But unless someone is suffering from a depression so severe that it’s left them essentially incapacitated, it’s reasonable to expect a loved one to make some kind of effort toward getting a handle on their depression. Often, all it takes to maintain a good relationship between a non-depressed person and a depressed person is for the former to see that the latter is trying; even if the depressed person’s attempts at managing their disorder don’t bring about big results, the effort still shows the non-depressed person that they care and are cognizant of the way their depression affects the relationship. 

At the same time, it is reasonable for your loved one to expect that you will be very patient as to the consistency and success of their depression-managing efforts, exercise a high degree of compassion in acknowledging how difficult it is for them to get going and stick with these practices, and understand that, again, even when such habits are implemented, they will not cure, but only mitigate their depression. 

Let your depressed loved one know you do expect them to make an effort, but you don’t expect their efforts to be perfect. 

Don’t Take It Personally (But Set Boundaries)

As mentioned above, depressed individuals will tend to be angrier, more critical, and more negative all around. They’ll also socially withdraw.

Once again, the tricky question of how mental disorders interact with agency arises. To what extent is the depressed person still responsible for their behavior, and to what extent is it being dictated by the disorder?

It’s possible to both give a depressed person extra lenience in the ways they might lash out or withdraw, while also not allowing them carte blanche to treat you like crap. While a person might not be to blame for having a mental illness, they are responsible for managing it so that it doesn’t harm others. Set boundaries on what isn’t acceptable behavior. You might put up with some daily irritability, but you don’t need to accept extreme anger or abusive criticism. Let your loved one know what your boundaries are and stick with them. 

Communicate Effectively

Depressives tend to filter pretty much everything in a negative light; in fact, research suggests that this negativity bias may not only be a consequence of depression but a cause of it. So communicating with a melancholy person can be tricky because something you say that seems innocuous will likely be interpreted by them in the least charitable way.

Rosen and Amador offer the following suggestions for communicating with a depressed person:

• Speak calmly, clearly, and slowly. Depressed individuals often experience slowed thoughts and difficulty comprehending information. They can feel overwhelmed and have trouble paying attention. Conversations may seem too fast and loud, making it hard for them to keep up with the flow. When speaking to someone who is depressed, it is crucial to be calm, clear, and speak slowly. Not in a patronizing way, of course, as if you think the person is dumb or disabled. Rather, your tone should simply be composed and mellow, even if expressing negative feelings, and you should avoid ambiguity; again, anything that’s not spelled out clearly is apt to be interpreted negatively.
• Don’t talk down. A depressed person is capable of having opinions and should be respected as such. Talking down to them may cause them to become angry and lose patience. Don’t assume to know what’s best for them.
• Don’t generalize. If you are upset about something, be specific about the thing you’re upset about. Don’t use words like “always” and “never,” like “You’re always a mope!” That will just make the depressive defensive and put them deeper into a funk.
• Express your needs directly. If the depressed person’s behavior is adversely affecting you, let them know. Again, indirect communication will just be interpreted in a negative light. As you express your needs, don’t blame the person! Acknowledge that the depression is a factor and that you want to figure out a way to help your loved one and also maintain the relationship. Follow the above guidelines as you express your needs.
• Listen. When your depressed friend or loved one talks to you, listen closely. Acknowledge you’re listening by repeating back what they’ve said in your own words and asking if you’ve correctly understood them. Let them know you understand that it sucks that they constantly feel hopeless and down. 

Keep in Touch

As mentioned, depressed people tend to socially withdraw and isolate. 

If your depressed friend has withdrawn from you, don’t take it personally. And don’t decide, “I guess they don’t want me to bother them,” and drop your communications. Be persistent and stay in touch. You never know when they might feel up for responding, and just knowing they have resources in their life, even if they’re not yet up for taking advantage of them, will strengthen their psyche. Send a quick text to check in. Continue to invite them to social outings. Rather than asking the person what they want to do, plan an activity they’ll enjoy and tell them you’ll swing by to pick them up; all they’ve got to do is shuffle out the door.

Take Care of Yourself

While you want to be there for and support a loved one with depression, you can’t neglect your own physical and mental needs while you do so. Having two people end up in a pit doesn’t help anyone. You need to continue to take care of yourself so that you don’t get burned out.

Keep up your own health-promoting routines. Maintain your workout habit. Carve out times of space, peace, and solitude while still being there for your loved one. Keep socializing, too. Your spouse might not want to go out, which will tempt you to stay home to support them. But Rosen and Amador recommend that you stick to your social routines as much as possible for your own sake. Let your spouse know you understand that they don’t want to go out, but that you need to for your own well-being. If you’re empathetic and direct, they’ll hopefully understand.

Depression is tough. It’s really hard for the person going through depression, and it can also be hard on relationships too. With a bit of prudence and a lot of love, you can help your family members and friends leash their black dog while not getting bit yourself. 

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We live very differently than the Puritans did 400 years ago.

The Puritans wore thick woolen clothes; people today wear light, stretchy athleisure.

The Puritans forbade work and recreation on the Sabbath; people today spend Sundays playing golf and raking leaves. 

The Puritans frowned upon dancing, swearing, and gambling; people today regularly cut a rug, place bets on everything from football games to presidential elections, and pepper their speech with profanity.

The Puritans eschewed and even banned the celebration of Christmas; people today engage in the holiday’s festivities for nearly two months of the year.

Despite how differently the citizens of modernity behave — with little to no resultant guilt — from how the Puritans did, there’s an area where they’re supposedly still pulling our strings: sex.

If the average person still desires to keep sex within the confines of commitment, still experiences unfaithfulness as the ultimate betrayal, still stubbornly feels like there’s something special about the whole thing, then, the thinking often goes, that’s just the enduring legacy of those uptight Puritans. 

For those who feel the sexual liberation movement prematurely stalled out, for those who are contemplating a decision that doesn’t feel right and are looking to quiet the conscience and push past its pangs, it’s easier to trace the source of its compunctions to a caricature of a purse-lipped, finger-pointing, buckle-shoed prude than it is to consider whether those feelings might point to some deeper reality. 

It’s easier to laugh off the natural bounds people feel around sex as the product of an archaic inheritance than it is to consider whether the import of those bounds rises higher than even that of other moral strictures — to consider whether there is, in fact, something uniquely sacred about sex that transcends time, culture, and a group of religious reformers from half a millennia back.

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Have you ever glanced across a restaurant and seen a couple sitting together in silence? They stared at each other, at their meal, or, most likely, at their phones.

This is a sad sight, for staying engaged throughout a dinner date indicates the health of a long-term relationship in two ways.

First, it shows that a couple has plenty to talk about.

In a strong relationship, the couple cultivates shared projects (beyond raising their kids). These can be more abstract aims that they’re striving side-by-side towards, like a spiritual purpose, or more concrete things, like a home remodel, a joint business, or financial, fitness, or travel goals. Happy couples love to scheme and dream together, surveying the current lay of their land and plotting a fulfilling future.

When they exhaust the topics around their common interests, the partners in a healthy relationship are able to offer news around their individual ones. For in a happy pairing, each person maintains the kind of qualities, hobbies, and friendships they had before becoming part of a dyad. Though they’re now attached, they haven’t lost the distinct identities that attracted them to each other in the first place. 

When a couple stays engaged on a dinner date, it’s also a sign that they’re still asking each other questions. Nothing stills the heart of a once-beating romance like contempt, and admiration is almost as essential an ingredient in a relationship as love. A healthy couple has maintained so much mutual respect that each person remains keen to know what the other’s been thinking about.

Of course, being able to sit comfortably in silence is the well-earned privilege of intimacy. But comfortableness isn’t the highest standard of lasting love. You can know you’re in a thriving relationship when you’re able to sit in silence, but rarely want to.

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What does it mean to act in a moral way?

One of the answers the philosopher Immanuel Kant formulated to this question can be paraphrased this way:

“Never treat people merely as a means to an end, but always as an end in and of themselves, too.”

We all treat people as means sometimes, and that’s okay. But others don’t exist solely to meet our needs. Each individual possesses their own rationality, agency, and dignity. Each has their own purpose, destiny, telos — their own ultimate end. 

If someone makes you think they really care about you when they were just looking for sex or invites you to what seems like a social lunch but turns out to be a business pitch, you’re apt to feel used — that you were treated as an object, an instrument, instead of a human being.

Most of us avoid acting like a tool by outright treating others as such. But we can all, especially in close relationships, lose sight of the fact that others have their own ends, apart from what we want from them.

You want your kid to take over the family business. But is that what’s right for him? 

You want your girlfriend to move across the country for you. But is that what’s best for her?

You want your spouse to change some trait, but what if it’s part of what makes them, them and helps carry them towards their life’s purpose?

Of course, in relationships, people have a common end, and each person makes compromises so that they can reach that place together.

But even as you journey towards this shared destination, you should never approach someone solely through the lens of “What can you do for me?” but also ask, “How can I help you become who you’re supposed to be?”

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If you want insight on how to make love last, you might ask friends, family, a therapist, or a pastor for advice. You probably wouldn’t think to turn to a divorce lawyer. But my guest, James Sexton, who does that very job in New York City, says there may be few people who have a better perspective on how to hold a marriage together, than the guy who’s got a front row seat to how they fall apart.

James is the author of If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together, and today on the show he shares what he’s learned from overseeing over a thousand divorces that you can use to reverse engineer a relationship that lasts. We discuss the five types of infidelity James sees in his practice and the approach to marriage that will prevent affairs. We then get into common sources of conflict in a marriage, including sex, finances, and kids, and how to address these issues so you never end up in James’, or any other divorce lawyer’s, office.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #550: How to Strengthen Your Marriage Against Divorce
• AoM Article: Why the Secret of a Happy, Successful Marriage Is Treating It Like a Bank Account
• AoM Podcast #850: The Infidelity Formula
• AoM Article: A Resolution for Romance — The 52 Love Notes Challenge
• AoM Article: How and Why to Hold a Weekly Marriage Meeting
• C.S. Lewis quote on the “dance” in relationships from That Hideous Strength

Connect With James Sexton

• James on IG
• James’ firm

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. If you want insight on how to make love last, you might ask friends, family, a therapist or a pastor for advice. You probably wouldn’t think to turn to a divorce lawyer. But my guest James Sexton, who does that very job in New York City, says there may be few people who have a better perspective on how to hold a marriage together than the guy who’s got a front-row seat to how they fall apart. James is the author of, If You’re in My Office it’s Already Too Late, A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together. And today on the show, he shares what he’s learned from overseeing over a thousand divorces that you can use to reverse engineer a relationship that lasts. We discussed the five types of infidelity James sees in his practice, and the approach to marriage that will prevent affairs. We then get into common sources of conflict in the marriage, including sex, finances, and kids and how to address these issues. You never end up in James’ or any other divorce lawyer’s office. After the show’s over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/staytogether.

All right James Sexton, welcome to the show.

James Sexton: Thanks, Brett. It’s great to be here. I appreciate you having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a divorce attorney and you have overseen over 1000 divorces in your career. That’s a lot. And I thought it was interesting in your book you talked about how you wanted to be a divorce attorney even when you’re in law school. You talk about like, yeah most people, I went to law school, and most people don’t go to law school wanting to be family law or divorce attorneys. Something you just kind of end up doing because something else didn’t shake out. Why did you wanna be a divorce attorney?

James Sexton: Yeah. It’s funny. When I went to college I wanted to be a therapist. I was very interested in being a therapist and I thought that would be my calling. I wanted to help people. I wanted to… I was very interested. I was a psychology major and undergraduate a minor of substance abuse counseling and East Asian Studies is what it was called at the time. But I was focusing on Buddhism and Japan and I was always very interested in that from my background in the martial arts. So I really had no aspiration becoming a lawyer. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a lawyer. I remember I watched LA Law, it was one of the few adult shows my parents would let me watch. And I really wanted to be Victor Fuentes. That was Jimmy Smith’s character ’cause he was like the cool lawyer [0:02:27.0] ____ an earring and a ponytail. Which is kind of funny ’cause I ended up more like Arne Becker, who was kind of the heel and the divorce lawyer. But when I was a little kid being a lawyer sounded exciting to me. Then I wanted to be a therapist. And then when I got through undergraduate and went to graduate school I studied sociology, communication and persuasion specifically. And as I was doing my doctoral work, when I’d finished my master’s working my PhD, I decided to take the LSAT. It was largely because I was teaching test prep for a company and I was teaching SAT test prep and I could make more money if I was teaching Law School Admission Test, LSAT prep.

And so I ended up taking the LSAT so I could get a high enough score to be able to teach test prep for the LSAT. And I did so well that I ended up getting offered scholarships to law school and then I ended up going to Fordham Law School. And yeah, the only law that interested me really was divorce law, because it was the only one that really felt like it was as human as I wanted my career path to be. And there was something that to me felt like it was the skills of persuasion and all of the things that I liked about the idea of being a therapist. But at a time in someone’s life where they’re just incredibly open to change, because either they are creating change by deciding to get divorced or they’re having change thrust upon them by their spouse saying, “Okay our marriage is ending.” But it’s a time of just massive change and reorganization of a person’s life.

And that struck me as a really, really amazing opportunity to be part of people’s reimagining of themselves. So it hit all the boxes that I liked about being a therapist but with the ability to use my powers of persuasion and speech and my sort of chess player mentality and bring that to the benefit of my clients. So yeah, it’s very rare in law school, I was the only person I met in law school who wanted to be a divorce lawyer. And I say in my book as you note that, “People tend to when you talk to divorce lawyers they say well, I ended up in divorce law because of this or I ended up doing… ” And end up is the term you use all the time. And I think that’s very funny because you very rarely use that term for something you meant to do. Like you don’t say well I ended up in Milwaukee, it’s like, Oh, yeah. I was trying to get to this place and I ended up there. It’s always that you landed someplace you didn’t mean to be. And I was very deliberately a matrimonial lawyer.

Brett McKay: So what’s the state of divorce in America today? Like what’s the divorce rate?

James Sexton: Divorce rate changes every year but the latest statistics put it somewhere in the area of 56%. That’s up a little bit from the year prior. But the question of course is, what was the impact of COVID and the slowdown and shutdown of the court system in varying degrees across the United States? The statistics for first marriages is what we’re really interested in, because second marriages have a higher divorce rate than first marriages, but third marriages and beyond have abysmally high divorce rates. Like you’re in the 76% when you get to like a third marriage. But yeah, I mean the state of divorce is that it continues to be above 50%. It is still more likely than not that you will get divorced when you get married, which arguably if we’re using legal standards and I know you have legal education so you understand the concept of negligence or recklessness, one could pretty saliently argue that getting married is a reckless activity or at a minimum a negligent activity, because the probability of harm is quite high. If you get married, the likelihood of harm is quite high and the severity of the harm is quite high. So what we use call the BPL analysis the, what is negligence per se. Theoretically, marriage is still an inherently negligent activity, similar to owning a lion as a pet or having a trampoline next to a radioactive waste pile.

Brett McKay: So yeah, that divorce rate it’s, you gotta break it down since you mentioned if you’re on your second or third marriage the rate goes up. What’s the rate look like for first-time marriages?

James Sexton: First marriages is somewhere over 46% as of 2022. That’s the 2022 statistics. And yeah so it’s still quite high. The reason why, when you say it’s 56% is the divorce rate, you’re talking about everything.

Brett McKay: Everybody right.

James Sexton: So they’re all in. But basically, the stats which are pretty publicly available. I know Forbes puts them out every year but they’re always compiled by the Bureau of Vital Statistics. What’s interesting to me about that is those are the people that file for and ultimately receive a judgment of divorce. But that does not include people who are unhappily married. Who stay married but aren’t enjoying the marriage. They stay together for the kids or for religious reasons or because they don’t wanna deal with the financial repercussions of divorce. It also doesn’t calculate in people who just, are not together anymore but don’t file for divorce. I mean we used to call that jokingly the Irish divorce. You go out for milk and never come back. But that percentage that already quite high percentage, doesn’t include people who just physically separated from each other and act as if they were divorced even though they didn’t legally divorce. Those are just people who legally went through the paperwork of getting divorced.

Brett McKay: Are there any demos of people more likely to divorce?

James Sexton: Yeah, I mean there’s a huge amount of statistics out there about what leads to it. And again I mean I’m not a huge fan of statistics because I think that correlation and causation sometimes get mixed up. But yeah, I mean the couples who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce. So they have a higher divorce rate if they live together. Having friends who are divorced increases your risk of divorce. 60% of divorce couples cite infidelity is the reason for their divorce. 58% of couples report that arguing was present, 45% indicate they married too young. 38% say that financial problems were a root cause.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another statistics I’ve seen if you’re not college educated more likely to divorce that’s another one I’ve seen.

James Sexton: Yeah. And then the outcomes also which is people who are divorced die more prematurely than people who are married.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s bad for men. Men really get in a funk when they get divorced. Yeah.

James Sexton: Yeah. And I think that’s an interesting misconception that like men fare better after a divorce because of the old sense that, men age like wine and women age like avocados. This idea that a man who divorces in his 40s in his 50s that he still has the ability to have 20 and 30-year-old romantic partners. But the statistics really actually bear out that men fare a lot worse after a divorce in terms of their emotional outcomes. When a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail. And I think there is a lot of misandry out there now and there’s obviously a lot of people that are looking to, they’ve decided that men have it better and then they wanna find statistics to back that up. But I don’t find that to be the case in my own professional practice of representing men and women.

I think that men do have a very hard time with divorce. And again some of that may be a function of men having less of an emotional vocabulary or being encouraged to have less of a more emotional vocabulary from a younger age. I think divorce is, by all accounts a failure. I don’t think anybody ever means to get divorced or when they get married they certainly didn’t mean to get divorced. So men don’t generally as a… At the risk of oversimplification, I mean we have challenges with failure. It’s hard to admit that you failed. It’s hard to lose. And divorce is a loss, even if you “win” in the divorce. If you have a better outcome financially or you do well in terms of the obligations you have or the amount of time you get spend with your children, it’s still a loss. It’s still a tremendous loss. You can have the friendliest divorce in the world and you’re still losing effectively half the time you’ve had with your children. So that’s a big hit for people.

Brett McKay: Who’s more likely to initiate divorce in your experience? Men or women? Or is it about the same?

James Sexton: Statistically, women are more likely to initiate divorce than men, but in my experience, it’s roughly the same. It’s also a question of who initiates the divorce. Meaning who files a divorce action? That’s not usually the person necessarily. It doesn’t automatically mean that’s the person who took the steps to say, “Okay, this is over.” Divorce is really the process of burying what’s dead, but who killed it? And who’s the first person to acknowledge that it’s dead? That’s a very individual thing and I don’t really think there’s a clear gender line on that, but filing-wise more women are likely to file for divorce than men. But it begs the question, is that because women have come to the conclusion the marriage is over before men did or is it that women are more inclined to want to protect their rights or understand their obligations when they’re in a situation where their marriage is ending?

Brett McKay: Yeah, this is completely anecdotal but like my social circle of couples I know that got in divorce, I would say like half of them the man initiated the divorce but it was because he found out that his wife was cheating. Which is interesting because, we’ll talk about this later on but what causes divorce? Because we typically think of the philandering husband as the stereotype but.

James Sexton: Well, ’cause that’s a really popular stereotype. I mean it makes for great stories. I think that sort of the zeitgeist is masculinity and misandry and all of that is really, if a man cheat he’s a scumbag, he’s a scumbag, he’s a bad guy, he’s a philander, he’s low morals. He doesn’t care about his family, doesn’t care about his wife. If a man cheats, he is the bad guy. If his wife cheats he is still the bad guy. He wasn’t taking care of her. He was neglecting her needs. She was driven into the arms of another person. It really is a situation where if a woman is cheated on, she’s the victim, this poor woman here she is and her husband’s running around on her and if a woman cheats it’s like, Oh, my gosh. You poor thing. How could you have been forced into that situation? Your needs weren’t being met. It’s a voyage of self-discovery. Or you needed to explore who you really are and your husband wasn’t meeting your needs.

So I do think culturally and right now, we’ve created an environment where yeah, the men are generally easier to paint as the villains. I kind of wish life was that simple. It’s like Solnit said, “I wish there were just good and bad people and they were just running around doing bad things or good things.” But the truth is the line of good and evil runs through the human heart. I’ve had female clients that just pursued relationships ’cause they felt like it. And I’ve had people whose needs were being terribly not met and they moved on and found someone else that reminded them of the fact that they could feel love and romance and excitement. And that was the thing that pushed them over the precipice.

I’ve had men who had that exact same experience. I talk a lot about infidelity in my book, because there’s just a tremendous amount of infidelity in divorce work. You talk to the cheater, you talk to the cheated on, and you start to figure out that it’s just not as simple as people would love it to be, where it’s one good guy or good girl and one bad guy or one bad girl. And it’s just, or a femme fatal who sweeps the other person away. It’s just that’s such an oversimplification, makes for great movies but it’s just not… It’s not real.

Brett McKay: Men and women, they can both be awful, ’cause we’re both human beings.

James Sexton: Well, they can both be vulnerable. They both are susceptible to the same temptation as anything. I mean we all are susceptible to temptation. I’m not a religious person but I tend to think it’s humorous that if you believe in any of the Abrahamic religions and you believe that God gave us 10 rules, whether he spoke to Moses through a burning bush or on a mountain, but I think we’d all agree that the 10 commandments themselves have some validity. Whether they were divinely inspired or whether they’re just an invention of the authors, I don’t know. But they’re 10 rules that have been handed down 1000s of years ago, and “Don’t have sex with someone who you’re not married to.” is 2/10. It’s the only one that gets repeated.

Like “Thou shalt not kill” is one time. “Thou shalt not kill”, “Thou shalt not steal.” That’s one time. But “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Those are two commandments. You only get to make 10 rules and two of them, God theoretically as the author is saying, “Hey seriously, like don’t sleep with people other than your spouse. No no, but like for real don’t sleep with people other than your spouse.” If that doesn’t give you some indication. This problem has been around for a while, and has been something humans are dealing with for a real long time. I don’t think there’s a better example or proof of that, than the fact that 2/10 commandments are addressing this specific issue.

Brett McKay: Okay. So despite the fact that you’re a divorce attorney, that’s how you make your living, helping people in their marriages. And despite the fact that you said that, “If you look at the statistics, marriage looks like a big giant risk. It’d be negligent to get married.” You’re a romantic and you actually you’ve written a book, it’s a marriage advice book. And you talk about how what people can do to strengthen their marriage and hopefully create a marriage where they don’t have to end up seeing you. I’m curious what insights does a divorce attorney have about creating a marriage that lasts that, why would you think you need to write a marriage advice book?

James Sexton: Yeah. Well first of all, I do think I am a romantic at heart, in terms of my temperament but I also see the value in marriage. I mean, look we talked about the statistics of divorce and how frequent it is but here’s the statistic that a lot of people don’t talk about. 86% of people who get divorced are remarried within five years of their divorce. Now what does that tell you? That tells you that there is some need for this particular form of pair bonding. That there is something here that even when it’s failed, even when you’ve been through the trauma and difficulty of a divorce 86% of people go at it again. They go let’s try it. Why? If it didn’t have value to us, I don’t believe I can learn everything about myself from myself.

I think I need other people to help me find my blind spots and intimacy. If you look up the word intimacy, it doesn’t have anything to do with sex. Intimacy is the ability to be completely yourself with another person. And in its best form that’s what marriage is, it’s the ability to be yourself with another person who loves you, who’s cheering for you, who sees your blind spots that you can’t see, and you see theirs and you love them anyway. And try to help them grow and develop into the fullness of who they are. And look to me just because something is unlikely to be successful doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. I tell people jokingly that marriage is like the lottery. You are probably not going to win, but if you win what you win is so good and so valuable that I think it’s worth it to buy a ticket.

I think it’s worth it to try to be married. And so the second question you asked which is, what is a divorced divorce lawyer of all people, going to be able to tell you about how to keep your marriage strong and vibrant? And I actually think I have a very unique perspective, not only lived experience but that could be very uniquely mine and therefore not applicable to many people. But as a divorce lawyer, I have had a ringside seat to men, women, every permutation older, younger, different religions, lived together, didn’t live together. Long-term marriages, short-term marriages, marriages with kids, without, high net worth, lower net worth. I’ve seen every permutation of how love falls apart. Well, who’s gonna tell you how to keep your car together better than a mechanic, who all they do is watch how cars break down and watch what parts of the car are the first to break down and look at, hey, if you’d come in…

My sister, for example, my sister’s a dentist and she often will say to me that if you have a toothache it’s too late. There’s a very limited set of things she can do for you if you have a tooth ache, by the time your tooth hurts, there’s too much going on now to fix it, but if you’d seen her before, you had a toothache, there’s a whole bunch of things she could do to prevent you from ever having a toothache, and to prevent you from ever being in that situation. So I really looked at it as my job puts me in this very unique role where people are very candidly with attorney-client privilege, telling me the honest truth about their marriage, their finances, their parenting, their relationship with their spouse, and they have no reason to lie to me because they’re protected by attorney-client privilege, and your doctor and your lawyer, are the only two people you should never lie to because our only job is to protect you.

And I get to watch how all these couples fall apart, and I started to see patterns of how people got into my office, and that’s how the title of the book, If You’re In My Office, It’s Already Too Late, that it really was about… What got these people here?

Because I genuinely believe Tom Wolfe on in The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the characters is talking about his financial woes, and the character says to him, how did you go bankrupt? And he says, the same way, everybody does very slowly and then all at once, and I think that’s what happens with marriages is they fall apart very slowly and then all at once, and so I wanted to write a book about what is the very slowly.

What we fall in love super fast. We just feel this spark, this connection, this passion, but we fall out of love more slowly, and I wanted to think about and talk about how could we keep those little connections so we never have those big marriage killers, like infidelity or other major things come into play.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about what causes divorce, and I think the big one we’ve been talking about is infidelity. And you talk about there are five types of infidelity that you’ve seen, what are those five types of infidelity?

James Sexton: I think we all like to think of our lives are so unique, but having now, I’m the guy who has to read the text messages between the mistress and the guy, or the paramour and the woman, and so I got a real ringside seat, and again, I represent the cheater and the cheated on so I don’t have a dog in the fight. But yeah, I think I try to break it down into five types and they’re very general, of course, but the first one is what I call the freshly discovered soulmate, which is where you just decide, I’ve met this person and they are my soulmate. You’re raptured by this person, and I think we’re particularly susceptible to this right now because the concept of a soulmate has just been jammed down our throats culturally, even though I think it’s a terribly toxic way, ’cause really, what does it mean like your soulmate is your perfect friend, perfect romantic partner. Perfect sexual partner. Perfect roommate, Perfect co-parent, perfect travel companion. What are the odds of one person being all of those things, that’s crazy, that’s just a ridiculous list of demands for a person.

And the truth is, you don’t need to have all of those with your spouse, you and your spouse don’t have to like exactly the same music, exactly the same food. There are certain things you want, like if you’re a slob and your spouse is a neat freak, that’s an incompatibility. But you don’t have to be perfect. Like perfect is the enemy of good. Perfect is the enemy of… And comparison is the thief of joy. But we live in a society now where we’re looking at this curated greatest hits from everyone on social media while we’re living our gag reel, and we’re looking at our marriage and comparing it to the performative status of people’s marriages who by the way, are doing #besthusbandever #blessed while they were just in my office doing a consult, so they’re not being honest.

I crack up when I look at the social media of people who I represent, because a month before they came in and filed for a divorce, they’re posting about how wonderful their life is and all their pictures of how great everything is and in their vacation and how wonderful it is. And they’re full of it but People are comparing themselves, so it’s just like face filters, you’re comparing yourself to something that’s not real, so soulmates, the discovered soulmate is what I call the first type of infidelity, which is you find someone who you’ve decided, This is my person, I made a horrible mistake being with this other person, and by the way, it rarely plays out that way. There’s a joke in my line of work that a man who leaves his wife for his mistress just creates a job opening. And I think there are statistics to some degree to bear that out.

The second type of infidelity, I call it the wake-up call, and the wake-up call for many people, I think is, it’s really like the nail in the coffin they’ve been unhappy, they didn’t realize how unhappy they were, and when they meet this new person or they reconnect with a person who they used to be with and they feel that spark of connection and passion, it shows them how far they are from their spouse, and this happens a lot with women. I find a lot of women who’ve engaged in infidelity, it’s sort of the soft place to land, it’s the thing that made them go, Yeah, I didn’t realize how bad it was. And I think this is something we can all relate to in the sense that until you get over being sick, you don’t realize how sick you were. You go like, Oh man, I was really sick.

If you’re tired and cranky. And then you go to sleep when you wake up from that nap, you go like, Oh my god, I was so tired. I didn’t realize how tired I was. And So I think it’s a matter of sometimes people don’t see… And so I call it the wake-up call.

The third kind is to me very tragic, and that is what I call the big mistake, which is I do think sometimes people just… People are just stupid, they just have an impulse control issue and they’re drunk, or they have an opportunity, and they give in to an impulse, to a sexual impulse, and they make a mistake. And look, I’m not suggesting an, Oops, you just made a mistake, no big deal. I understand it’s a big deal, but look, we all do things that we know are bad for us, that weren’t a good thing for us, that don’t align with our morals or our goals, discipline is… Jocko Willink, he says is trading what you want… Now, for what you want most. And I think the reality is, is we all know, Hey, I’m trying to honor my diet and my body and be really healthy, but then someone walks by with cupcakes and you’re like, Oh, come on. I’m just gonna have one, and then you have one, and now you’re like, Oh, I just blew the diet, I can’t believe it.

Look, I think that people make mistakes sometimes, and I’ve had people who come in and they go, Look, I don’t… I love my spouse. I screwed up. I love my spouse. And thankfully, a lot of those people work through the infidelity. They work through that situation, it’s very, very sad when someone as a result of just a mistake, a poor impulse control, an urge that they follow through on that they shouldn’t have and they know they shouldn’t have and they regret terribly when that leads to a divorce, that’s a very tragic thing. It’s the least often that I see in my office, usually people come in with the their freshly discovered soulmate, and they come in and say, Oh, I’ve met someone and I love them. And this is the person for me.

The fourth kind I call the push out of the closet, and that’s a unique set of circumstances, but I’m seeing it less often these days, thankfully. Early in my career, in the last 10, 20 years, there’ve been major strides in LGBTQ+ legal rights and obligations when it comes to marriage, and so there was certainly a time where I think the level of homophobia and heteronormativity in our culture was such that there were a lot of closeted gay men, closeted lesbian women who were kind of living double lives and then they would have same sex affairs, and if they get caught, that’s sort of the push out of the closet. And I had in my career, a number of people who just got caught with a same-sex partner, they had been living their lives purportedly as heterosexuals, while they were secretly having either same-sex attraction or they were in fact having same-sex relationships, so that’s a very common form of infidelity, that’s the fourth kind.

And the last kind is what I call the revenge, which is simple to understand, which is your partner cheated, so now you’re gonna cheat, you’re gonna teach them, you’re gonna teach them a lesson. Oh yeah, it’s okay for you to sleep with your secretary well I’m gonna go sleep with my personal trainer. And that’s an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. I don’t think anybody feels any better at the conclusion of that, but it’s a real real common thing to do.

Brett McKay: So you said the most common one is the the soulmate thing?

James Sexton: The most common one that ends up in my office. Again, I have a unique perspective, I’m a divorce lawyer so I’m sure if you asked Esther Perel who I’ve been on some panels with and who works with couples who are navigating their way through infidelity and trying to stay married, she would probably have a different experience of it than me.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about that wake-up call one, because that seems like something you can… There’s things you can do in your marriage to prevent that from happening, right?

James Sexton: 100%.

Brett McKay: And it’s typically not a big thing that happens that causes you to go oh this relationship is over, and I might as well go find someone else, what are the little things that lead up to someone, man or woman, cheating on their spouse because they found that the relationship they have right now isn’t meeting some need?

James Sexton: Yeah, I think the unfortunate answer is it’s a lot of very small things, and anyone who’s married knows this, like if you’re sitting around having breakfast with your spouse and you’re having a discussion about the best way to cook bacon and 10 minutes later it’s like, you know, I never liked your mother. And it’s like, wait How did we get here? What happened, this was a discussion about the best route to take to get to the mall on whether the freeway or the back roads, and suddenly it’s the you never listen to me and you don’t care about my opinion and you never liked my sister. Like, what is this stuff you’re carrying around. So I generally think that disconnection is the answer that that’s what happens, people slowly disconnect in these little tiny ways, so what I encourage people to do is to just vigilantly maintain connection. We should always be working on our marriage… We should always be trying to look at it with new eyes. We should always be… As Jimmy Iovine said, he was one of the most successful marriages in Hollywood and in the recording industry is, he said, I’m always trying to close my wife, he said, I’m always trying to act like I’m trying to impress her and woo her.

And what’s amazing in my experience as a heterosexual man is how unbelievably easy that can be, if you make a concerted effort at it, the test I tell to most of my male friends is leave a note, I just… I cannot emphasize this enough, if you don’t believe me, if you don’t believe in anything that I say, that’s okay, people are entitled to their opinions, and my beliefs don’t require that you believe them, but if you wanna try something, just leave your wife a note every morning for a couple of weeks, just leave her a note, just a little, Hey, Babe, just thanks for last night on the couch watching TV. It was so nice, like the smell of you, is just it just makes me so happy I fell asleep with it on me or you looked so pretty when I woke up this morning and I’m so glad to have such a wonderful woman in my life, I love you, and that takes you 30 seconds, and I’m telling you that little tiny investment of time and effort will pay dividends like you wouldn’t believe, there are these small things, and when you get to have the view that I have where people are talking to me about these painful ends to their relationship.

I talk about in the book, one of the chapters, I talk about a young woman, I was divorcing who had two children, and we’ve been a lot of miles, and I said to her, was there a moment where you knew that your marriage was over, and she told me well… It was very heartfelt to me and very powerful to me. Which is she said that there was a granola that she liked to eat that she used to put in her yogurt and her husband used to always notice when she was running low on it, and he would always get a new bag of it for her. I guess it was only sold at a particular health food store or something, and she’s like, I never told him that that meant so much to me, but it was just such a sweet thing that he would just notice that I was running out of my granola, he didn’t need it, but it was like he would notice I was running out of my granola, and there’d just be this new bag and he didn’t come to me and say like, Oh look, I got you a granola for you. He didn’t want credit for it, it’s just something he did. It was this small gesture that I’m paying attention, that I see this detail and that I love you, and I want to just extend this kindness, this courtesy to you.

And she said that one day, she ran out of granola and she thought, Oh well, maybe he’s busy and he didn’t notice or whatever, so she left the empty bag in there, and after a week or two, he still hadn’t replaced it, and she thought, Okay, this is over. And she said it became apparent in the weeks that followed that this distance was coming between the two of them, and I thought to myself, what if that is it. If it’s just granola, it’s just these little tiny gestures of, Oh, they use this milk, so let me put it on the table, or Oh, they don’t like the sound of the garbage disposal, it jars them when it’s loud, so I go, Hey, babe I’m gonna turn on the garbage disposal, real quick. Don’t be afraid when I turn it on. Like the small considerations. You know them about your wife, I don’t. Your wife knows them about you, I don’t. And those, to me, those intimacies, those little things, the things you love, the things you’re afraid of, the things that get on your nerves, your partner theoretically has the ringside seat to those, and they can leverage them in the most beautiful ways.

I see it when they weaponize them, so by the time you get to my office, you go, Okay, I’m angry at this person, and here’s where their soft spots are. So here’s what we can stab them. But I really think that if you can identify those things while you’re happily married, you can use them without a massive amount of effort, just small little efforts to just build this abundance of happiness and good will between the two of you and maintain it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Okay, so maintain connection. And I think it’s about continuing to do the kind of little niceties, the polite stuff, the sharing of gratitude, the affectionate stuff that you did when you were first together and not letting that stuff drop off. And you also talk about how important open communication is in keeping the connection.

James Sexton: I have a chapter called Hit Send Now, where I talk about just regularly checking in with your partner, I suggest it be done by email, because there’s something about writing that I think helps you organize your thoughts and also it’s non-confrontational, like if you try to talk to someone verbally. You’re sort of saying, Okay, we’re gonna talk about this right now. Here we go, and then it brings out something defensive in people, whereas when you read something, you sometimes have time to reflect on it and think about it before you formulate your response, but I’ve had couples who have contacted me after they read the book and said, Yeah, we do a walk and talk now once a week, and we just walk around, we just talk about what did you do well this week in the marriage and what could we work on, and just maintaining that level of vigilance, I’m sure if you thought about your marriage and yourself as a husband, you could tell me something you did this week that you’re proud of for your wife or in your relation to your wife, and you can probably find something that you’re not proud of that you could have done better.

And by the way, as painful and hard as it is to do. I bet you could point out something your wife did for you this week that made you feel loved by or close to her, and maybe something that she said or did that made you feel less loved and less close to her, or an opportunity that she missed that she could have done. And why not say it? Like why not say it? Wouldn’t she want to hear that? Wouldn’t your wife want to hear like, Man, when you said that last night. That was so nice. It just made me feel so loved when you said that or when I told you about what happened at work and you said, Oh, I disagree with this or that, Man, I just felt so kinda criticized and I felt like you kinda didn’t meet me where I needed you. And again not saying it from a place of so you suck and I’m leaving, you’re saying it from a place of, I know you have such power over me, you have such an ability to make me happy, we’ve got a culture that just encourages us to just criticize our spouse, and at best it’s constructive criticism, but constructive criticism, is still criticism, and no one likes to be constructively criticized either.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to steer your partner into directions that will make them happy and you happy, but doing it in a way that makes them feel loved, supported. One of the things we love about our partners is that they’re cheering for us, there’s 7.3 billion people in the world, and you picked your wife. Like 7.3 billion people, and you said you’re the one. You’re the one I wanna take this ride with, I wanna have kids with, I wanna solve problems with. I wanna get old with you’re the person. That’s huge, it’s a huge, huge task that you’ve given that person and why wouldn’t you communicate really actively. People are always asking me what is the thing that we can do to stay together, and it’s kind of like saying to me like, What is intelligence? I don’t know what intelligence is, but I can spot stupid a mile away, so I don’t know what makes marriages work, but I think what makes marriages work is just doing the opposite of the thing that makes them fall apart. So what makes them fall apart is when you stop caring about what’s going on in your spouse’s mind and in their heart, when you stop trying to let them know how much you love them, when you stop feeling loved by them and seen by them and appreciated and valued by them, so anything we can do to lean into that that’s valuable as far as I’m concerned.

Brett McKay: Alright So that can prevent the wake-up infidelity, because if you’re paying attention to the small things, someone’s not gonna go to someone else to get those things. Yeah, ’cause I think a lot of times… We’re gonna talk about this, but I think sometimes a lot of people tend to think that infidelity is about sex, and it can be for some people, that could be a thing, but oftentimes it’s just about my wife my husband, they just stopped caring about me, and I found someone who gave me that attention that I had when I was first dating my wife or my husband.

James Sexton: Of course and by the way, sex isn’t just about sex. Sex isn’t just about sex. Sex is friction. Sure. Sex is a biological act. Sex is a drive and an impulse. But sex is also about feeling handsome or beautiful, feeling desirable and desired, feeling physically capable. And I mean, sex is loaded with all kinds of things.

Brett McKay: So, pay attention to the small things to maintain that connection.

James Sexton: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Well, but let’s just talk about sex. Sex is one of the reasons that people get married. And…

James Sexton: I’d like to think it’s one of the only reasons people get married. I mean, otherwise it’s a roommate. Because I have to tell you, if sex is no longer part of your marriage, I’m not quite sure why you’re married. I mean, look, if both of you were just, okay, yeah, cool, sex isn’t part of it anymore, but then you’re just roommates, or you’re two people running a daycare facility together. Sex is the thing that makes you a couple. It’s the thing that makes you a romantic coupling, is that sexual connection. So, why would you wanna give that up if you don’t have to? Why would you wanna compromise on that if you don’t have to? Especially if you knew that it ultimately became something that was a huge marriage killer when people’s needs were not being met. When you talk to someone whose needs are being met in their relationship, particularly their sexual needs, if they’re being very well met, that person is usually gonna have a very high level of satisfaction.

Brett McKay: But it can be a source of marital conflict. What are…

James Sexton: Tremendous.

Brett McKay: What are the biggest issues you’ve seen in couples that are divorcing when it comes to sex?

James Sexton: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s different for men and women. I know it’s not popular to gender things, but I feel that one of the things I like about your podcast is, I can speak in the terms of the masculine and the feminine. And I appreciate that. I really do believe, and of course, nothing’s true for everyone, but I genuinely believe that a lot of men complain about the frequency of sex, that they’re not having as much sex as they’d like. And a lot of women complain about the lack of love and intimacy and connection that leaves them feeling less interested in having a desirable sexual connection to their partner.

Brett McKay: So what do you do if there is a mismatch in your sexual relationship? Like maybe it’s over the frequency of sex, but it could be over something like, the husband likes one thing, or wants to experiment with something but the wife doesn’t, or vice versa. And maybe you try to have a conversation about it, but there’s still a mismatch. Is it just a matter of figuring out a compromise?

James Sexton: Yeah. I mean, there’s a chapter in my book called Go Without or Go Elsewhere. And I think you have to decide for yourself which of those two you’re gonna do. I think if you’ve communicated your need to your partner and it’s an important thing to you, then you either are gonna have to go without or go elsewhere. And the question you have to ask that only you can answer is, which of those two are you comfortable with? I mean, look, the example I give in the book is feet. I’m not into feet. I don’t understand the sexual appeal of feet, but there’s a lot of people into feet, and it’s like a thing. And I’ve done a lot of divorces where I’ve had to read people’s emails about feet with the people they were cheating with. It’s like a whole vocabulary for it.

If you ever go down that rabbit hole online, it’s really quite a lot. And I’m not kinkshaming anybody. Listen, there’s so many varieties of the human sexual experience, God bless, consenting adults have a good time. But the truth is, if my partner was super into feet and said to me, Listen, this is such an important piece to me. Okay, well, my partner now has a choice. ‘Cause I’m not in into feet. They either gotta go without or they’re gonna go someplace else to get that need met. Now, I don’t want them to go to somebody else to get that need met. Okay? So listen, can I fake it? Can I say, all right, listen, I’m not super into that, but if it’s something that is gonna scratch your reach, like I can pretend I’m into it. I mean, listen, how many people don’t like some member of their spouse’s family, but they act like they like them when they have to go to a barbecue with them?

And do you go, oh, that’s so dishonest. I can’t believe you acted like you like Cousin Greg when you don’t. Oh, no, you’re being a considerate partner. And maybe you get in the car and you say to your spouse, like, oh, I can’t stand him. But I think I did a good job of seeing them. Like, oh yeah, yeah, no, and I appreciate it. You keep things calm in the family. Yeah, no, no, it’s cool. We make compromises all the time. Listen, if you’re, maybe you don’t love every single thing that they love, but you sit through it or you go, Okay, I’m gonna throw this into the repertoire so they don’t have to go elsewhere or even have any temptation to go elsewhere if it’s something important to them. Or it might just be something passing and small to you where you think you’d like this thing.

I mean, how many things sexually? Ask yourself the question. Honestly, if you’ve had a good sexual relationship with a partner where you’ve been able to experiment, and if you’re a man like I am who was raised on pornography and has seen all kinds of things, and you go, Oh, boy. That would be fun to do. And you got a partner who goes, all right, yeah, let’s do it sometime. And then you do it and you go, that was like weird. I don’t know, it looked really good. Shower, best example, ever shower sex. Shower sex looks awesome. You watch any movie, people have sex in the shower. It looks so passionate. Anyone who’s ever had sex in the shower is gonna say it’s the worst possible place to have sex. You’re washed off every natural lubrication either person has, it’s the worst.

You’re slipping or you can’t get traction. But it looks nice. Now, again, are there people who probably enjoy it? Good. God bless. But the truth is, is what you think it’s gonna be for you and what it is. But the only way you’re gonna figure that out is to do it. And then you go, oh yeah, that wasn’t as amazing as I thought it was. And it saves you the trouble of saying, you know what? What if? What if the grass on the other side of the sexual fence was greener? It’s not. It’s just more grass. It’s just a different grass. And so help your partner and help yourself identify what really is compelling and what’s really meaningful.

Brett McKay: This reminds me, CS Lewis in a book he wrote, I forgot which one it was, but he has this idea, he talks about submission in a marriage and he says it’s actually a mutual submission. It’s like a dance. The husband and wife had to take turns submitting to each other. And this is not just about sex, it’s other things too, but it’s the same sort of idea. You have to look at your spouse and say like, what do they want? What do they need? And how can I give them that? And then in a, hopefully in a healthy relationship, a healthy marriage, your spouse is doing the same thing. What do they want? How can I give them that thing that they need or want? And you take turns doing that.

James Sexton: Yeah, I think sometimes you gotta be Beyonce and sometimes you get to be Destiny’s Child. Sometimes you get to be the Commodore, sometimes you get to be Lionel Richie. And in the right dance of a marriage, you’re following and leading in different ways. You have different… And again, that’s a dynamic that two people should not be afraid to work on together, honestly. I think we’re creating a culture where men are ashamed to admit that they like to be dominant and they’re ashamed to admit that they like to sometimes be submissive in things. And when I say submissive, I mean that they like to defer decision making. Like there are aspects of my life. I am submissive and I’m a very dominant person, but I don’t care what couch we have. I’ve had the same couch probably for 10 years.

If you asked me what color it is, I couldn’t possibly tell you. My partner picked it out. I didn’t pick it out. I have no idea. I don’t pay attention to those things. So if you say to me, if you’re my partner and you say to me, Hey, what do you think of this couch? I’m humoring you when I go, I don’t know. What do you think of it? Well, I really like it. Yeah, no, I like it too. I’m being submissive in that aspect of our relationship ’cause I just don’t care. But there are other aspects where I’m very much a very take charge, very dominant type of a person. And so I think we should all be able to do that dance together. What is that about? Submission is about trust.

I mean, we have all this talk about alpha males and Chads and all this stuff that’s sort of in the manosphere. And what’s humorous to me about it is a lot of it’s about trust. And trust is about being worthy of trust. Being the kind of man who a woman can lean into and submit to. How do you expect a woman to feel comfortable deferring to your view on something or trusting your judgment if, if you, that’s not worthy. I have always found as a man that I like to pick the restaurant, but I like to pick the restaurant that she’s gonna wanna go to. And actually, my favorite thing is to pick the restaurant that she’s gonna wanna go to that she doesn’t know she’s gonna wanna go to. That she doesn’t know how much she’s gonna love it until we get there. ‘Cause I know her so well that I know that she just went, oh yeah, no, I don’t think I’ll like that. But I secretly, I know she’s gonna like it. She just needs that little push. And what is that? That’s being trustworthy, that’s having this person’s best interests in mind. And I want a partner who has that view of me, and I wanna have that view of my partner always.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we’ve talked about sex. Let’s talk about another source of marital conflict. And that’s money. How have you seen money cause marital conflict in your work?

James Sexton: Yeah, money again is about trust and about communication. I think it’s like infidelity in the sense that it’s about trusting someone and then being betrayed in that trust. But again, it’s not a simple good guys and bad guys situation because very often people will say, well, he was lying about the finances and he should have just told me the truth. And he say, really? Would you have been receptive to that? Like if he’d said, Hey, look, you’re spending more than I can make, or I’m chewing my best to make as much as I can, but my business has changed. Would you have met that with a like, oh, of course babe. And I’m still gonna be as excited and happy in our marriage as I was before. So I think it’s the same kind of thing. It’s very easy after someone has been caught cheating, saying, well, if you just told me that you wanted different things in our sexual relationship, I would’ve been there for you.

Oh sure. You would’ve been. No, you wouldn’t. If you would’ve judged me, you would’ve denied me of it. You wouldn’t have done that. You’re only saying that now ’cause it’s easy to say it in retrospect. Same thing with finances. Finances very hard to be honest about finances, about the workload, about who manages the finances and the trust that comes with that. If you share a household and you share finances, that’s a tremendous intimacy. It’s a tremendous loss of privacy in terms of, if you have purely joint finances, I actually encourage people, in my book, there’s a chapter called The You The Me and The We, where I encourage people to maintain separate accounts as well as joint accounts. Because I think it’s important to have a certain amount of autonomy in a relationship where if I buy you a birthday present, you don’t get to see how much I spent on your birthday present necessarily, or exactly where I bought it, if we’re using the same credit card.

So I think there is some value to having some privacy, even when you’re in a marriage and agreeing that, look, here’s what the money that’s coming in, here’s how much stays in my account. Here’s how much goes in your account, and here’s how much goes into our joint account, and here are the bills we pay out of the joint account and here’s the money that we spend at our individual accounts. And you can use that for manicures, you can use that for spa days. You can use that for classes that you wanna take. And I’m gonna use this for my golf, or I’m gonna use it to sports gamble, or I’m gonna use it for gaming or whatever it is that I might want. And that way everybody has a certain level of autonomy. So I think finances, it’s one of those things that we don’t have a lot of formal education in it.

There’s a lot of deception. There’s a performative society where everybody’s, on the Instagram page with their luxury cars flying private, and meanwhile that’s not real. It’s false a lot of the time. Or it’s based on a debt structure that you’re never gonna see until it’s too late and they’re already bankrupt, or it’s based on a Ponzi scheme. So I think it’s the same kind of thing, it’s the same as sex. It’s something we don’t like to talk about. It’s uncomfortable to talk about, which is why we should talk about it more.

Brett McKay: So, my wife and I, we have joint accounts and we haven’t explicitly put like a money limit, but for the most part, both my wife and I have just autonomy on buying stuff from the joint account.

James Sexton: Sure.

Brett McKay: But there’s like a thing that’s like expensive or like, oh boy, this is gonna be a big thing. Then we have the conversations like, well, I’d like to buy this thing, but here’s the price tag. We do it. And that…

James Sexton: I mean, you run it like a business. Which is if you’ve got an expense account, at your business, or you got a company card and you’re charging Dunkin’ donuts to bring to a client’s, okay, well then you don’t have to… But if I’m buying a $500 bottle of wine for a client, I need prior authorization from the office. And I think that’s pretty reasonable is to say, Hey, what’s the limit? And by the way, you can increase that limit as your income goes up. There’s a time early on where it’s like, Hey, 50 bucks, if it’s more than that, we gotta talk about it. And maybe you get to a place where you go, yeah, if it’s more than 10,000, we should have a conversation. But if it’s less than that, don’t worry about it. And I think that that’s important. It’s all about communication.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So keep an open communication. And then also one thing that happens in marriages is you get comfortable with roles, right? So…

James Sexton: Sure.

Brett McKay: Typically, often what I’ve seen a lot of marriages be like, well, the husband doesn’t wanna think about the finances. I’ll just put the paycheck in the thing and the wife just worries about things. Or it’s like the husband takes care of all the investments and the wife’s like, I don’t like to do that stuff. And that can cause problems because you don’t have eyes on each other.

James Sexton: Sure.

Brett McKay: And then when you finally discover, oh my gosh, you’ve been investing in this crazy Ponzi scheme and I haven’t known about it, then that’s when the it blows up. So you point out an important thing to do, if you do set up roles where one person’s taking care of finances and the other person’s not worrying about it, still make time where you get together regularly and say, Hey, here’s what’s going on with the investment portfolio or retirement accounts, or here’s what’s going on with the daily expenses for the kids. Just so you know, and that’s important to do.

James Sexton: 100%. I mean, I think anything other than that’s irresponsible. A simpler and less threatening analogy is if you’re married to someone and they love to cook and they just enjoy it. They learn to cook from their family, they enjoy cooking, they find it satisfying, they love to watch you eat the food that they cooked. That’s amazing. What a gift. Wonderful thing to be married to someone who’s a good cook. But you still gotta know how to cook for yourself. There’s gonna be times where your partner’s not there and able to cook for you. They’re gonna be away, they’re gonna be doing something else. You need to know how to cook. And maybe you don’t need to know how to be a gourmet cook, but you at least know, how do I scramble an egg? How do I make some spaghetti?

You gotta know enough. So yeah, maybe they don’t know how you have your investments hedged and what index funds you’re in versus what bond portfolio you have laddered. But they certainly need to go, okay, here’s where our accounts are and here’s roughly how much is in them. Here’s what debts we have. If nothing else, you know, God forbid something happens to you, they need to have access to that information, that basic information, because they’re on that boat with you. They’re invested in this with you. So it’s up to them to know it as well too. I am shocked at how many people come into my office and they go, yeah, my partner handed handled all the expenses. I don’t know anything. I don’t know where our money is. I don’t know what we spend on what I don’t know. And sometimes I have to tell them that, yeah, you look rich and you’re poor.

You got white teeth and rotting gums. You, yeah, you got a beautiful car that is owned by a leasing company and you’ve got a great house that the bank, it’s 90% of it is leveraged debt to equity. Like this is the reality of your finances. It is very dangerous to just hand everything over to another person. I understand, again, the temptation to do it, but long term, don’t you wanna have some sense of what’s going on with your partner and their stresses as well? Don’t you wanna understand? Because I do think sometimes the stress that we carry about finances, it can translate to other disconnections within a marriage. It can translate to other problems. So it’s important to stay connected on all spheres of your partner, their health, their economic health, their sexual health, where they’re at, because you’re with them on this thing.

Brett McKay: Any other sources of marital conflict you’ve seen? I think one you mentioned is in-laws can be a source or even friends.

James Sexton: Yeah. I don’t think you’re ever married to one person. I think you marry a family, you marry… Even if the family’s not around, you’re marrying a family history. You’re marrying the conflict resolution techniques that they watched their parents do successfully or unsuccessfully. The holiday traditions that they did. The baggage or the trauma. If you’re married to an adult child of an alcoholic, you’re marrying the control issues, you’re marrying all those other things. I mean, the history of addiction that a family might have and that then might be carried through with the people that are there, the role modeling they’ve seen of how couples should relate to each other, how people should argue and fight. So I think it’s very important to remember that you’re marrying a person who is part of a tapestry. And it’s important to sort of know what that tapestry is and understand the dynamics of it.

And of course, if family members and friend systems are still part of this person’s life, you’re gonna have to deal with those people. You’re gonna have to deal with exes. People who marry someone who’s divorced and has children, they have a co-parent you’re gonna have to deal with. People do not… Are not an island. You’re marrying into a system and having honest conversations about the challenges and opportunities created by that, is a good thing. Listen, it’s not all burden having a mother-in-law. A mother-in-law can provide free babysitting. A mother-in-law can be a tremendous ally in your relationship if you have a good relationship with her. But it can also be a tremendous hindrance. It could be someone who always takes your spouse’s side or who’s very critical of you or who you find it difficult get along with. None of these things are in and of themselves, good or bad, but they’re factors. And I think just looking honestly at those factors, rather than just focusing on what cake we’re gonna have for the wedding, is what’s important. And I think we should be mindful in our marriage, in our selection of a marriage partner and in maintaining the health of our marriage.

Brett McKay: And this is where that [0:55:29.9] ____ mentality can come in handy. So let’s say you’re newly married and then you notice your mother-in-law, she’s kind of a busy body and she wants to inject herself into your marriage instead of not saying anything and being resentful about it. Like, tell your wife like, you know what, your mom’s great. I love how she does this and does this. But when she injects herself all the time into decisions we’re making about like what house we should buy, I’m not comfortable. That makes me feel upset. You have to get it out there in the open.

James Sexton: A 100%. And I think that… But doing it in a way that doesn’t put your partner on the defensive or that they’ve done something wrong, I think is important. Because again, constructive criticism is still criticism. I think you, as a happily married man, you showed a good little technique there, which is, You started by saying, Listen, I love your mom. So you started with that. I love your mom, not saying, I don’t love your mom, no one’s perfect, I’m not perfect, she’s not perfect, but… And then you use a lot of I statements. I felt very put off when she was saying A, B and C, So you’re not saying, you know she sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong. What you’re saying is, Listen, I felt this way, because who’s gonna argue with your feelings. Like you feel the way you feel, you can apologize for feeling the way you feel, but you feel the way you feel. And maybe your a partner will say to you, No, no, you shouldn’t feel that way, because this is how she relates to everyone, or Here’s some examples of, you know she loves my dad, but here’s how she talked to him about the house, or this is just a house thing.

Oh, this comes from the fact that my dad never let her pick the house, so now she’s kinda working that out with us in our house, and sometimes understanding the context, when it’s explained to me that my family member went through The Depression, and that’s why this person keeps the tin foil, I was like, Alright, I’m not gonna make fun of that anymore because I understand the context of it, or oh yeah, this person, their father died at the kitchen table when they were seven years old of a massive heart attack, so that’s why they’re very sensitive to loud noises. Okay, man, I know that context now, I’m gonna interpret that very differently, I’m not gonna look at it like, Oh, your mom thinks I’m an idiot, I can’t pick a house. No, my mom is working her stuff out and the stuff in her marriage to my dad, and then you kinda look at that with compassion and with empathy and with love, and that might help you navigate it, but you gotta give your partner the opportunity to explain it to you, rather than what do most people do.

Brett McKay: They don’t talk about it. Yeah, right.

James Sexton: Just suck it up. Hold it in, get pissed, and when six months later, you get an argument about the best way to get to the mall from your house, it turns into, You and your mother, you sound just like her, and you just know everything, just like your mom does when it comes to houses and you’re like, Whoa, how long you been carrying that around? Why didn’t we talk about it when it happened? And why didn’t we talk about it in a way that wasn’t this fight, this attack on each other. Why didn’t we talk about it in a way where we’re supporting each other and saying like, Hey, look, man, that hurt. That hurt when your mom said that, or Man, it hurt when you take your mom’s side on that, I feel like I expect you to take my side and maybe that’s wrong of me, but man, it hurt. I wanna know, I wanna know if I hurt my partner. I know I didn’t mean to. I know I didn’t mean to. I know that that’s not my goal. I know that the people I love, I know I love them, and I know I don’t want to hurt them.

I’m sure I do hurt them from time to time, but I’m really grateful when they have the courage to tell me that I hurt them because I know I didn’t mean to, and I know I wouldn’t wanna do it again and again and again. So I’m really grateful when they tell me how I might have missed the target.

Brett McKay: So people often get married to raise a family, have kids, but kids can change your marriage, and instead of thinking of your spouse just as a sexual partner, a person who is there to help you be the best you can be, right? You see them as, Okay. They’re a mother as well. And that changes the dynamic. How have you seen kids unintentionally harm a marriage and what can you do to avoid that?

James Sexton: Yeah, that’s a great question. Kids are, I think, antagonistic to a marriage in many ways. I mean of course, there’s certain aspects of being a parent that I think very much can deepen a relationship and a bond and a love between people. So I’m certainly not saying don’t have children, but I do think that look, people, A, are sleep-deprived when they first have children, their bodies, particular woman her body changes tremendously and feels out of control in many ways after she’s had a baby, it changes people’s sexual habits, I mean it’s all kinds of things that come from that. But also, I just think it’s easy to become two people running a day care facility together just focused on the kids needs above anything else forgetting that sexual chemistry and romantic connection between the two of you is the thing that created this child’s existence. It was born of your romantic and sexual connection. I mean children are born of a sexual romantic connection, and so I think it’s important not to lose that. I think people who are divorced in a friendly fashion are on to something that I don’t think you have to get divorced to enjoy.

And that is, and I say this as a man who my kids were five and seven when I got divorced, and it was a friendly divorce, I lived down the street from my ex-wife, and we had a very friendly relationship and the kids were able to go back and forth very comfortably. And I had time where I had my kids and I gave them my full focus, and then I had time where I did not have to think about my kids, they were with the other person who loves them as much as I do, and I could really just focus on career or life or other relationships, and that was a phenomenal, phenomenal thing. And I don’t think you have to be divorced to do that. I think that you and your spouse, it’s really important when you have kids, to say, there’s time as a family and there’s time as individuals, and I want you to have some time where I’m gonna mind these kids and you go be you, whether it’s go to Starbucks and read a magazine or go to a yoga class, or go to the gym, or just go enjoy yourself, go out with your friends, like remember the you you were when I fell in love with you, that then led to these kids being born. And I think that’s a really important thing.

Brett McKay: I like that. So you stay married, but you’re gonna do a split custody.

James Sexton: Exactly, right. Do joint custody and really lean into that and get a sense of what it’s like to be in the fullness of yourself, and also give your kids a taste of what it’s like to have you alone, one parent alone. Anybody who has more than one child will tell you when you go out with one child as opposed to both or multiple children, you get a different kid, ’cause a different side of them comes out, they’re not competing for each other’s attention.

Brett McKay: Something my wife and I do, we do a weekly marriage meeting, and we’ve written up article about this and we’ve done a podcast about it, we’ll put a link to in the show notes, but the weekly marriage meetings on Sunday, it takes about 15 minutes, it’s not very long. It starts off with appreciation, so we just tell each other like, Hey, this is what I appreciated this week that you did. Thank you for doing this. I love that. And then we talk about to-dos which is basically household stuff, this is like the business part of the marriage. Things that need to get done around the house, bills that need to be paid, stuff that needs be half with the kids, but then we do this plan for good times and it’s plan for good times as a family, but then also plan for good times as an individual.

James Sexton: I love that.

Brett McKay: So it’s like, Hey, it’s a chance to be like, hey, I wanna do this thing with my friends, or I wanna go to this event by myself or whatever. Can we make that happen this week or in the next couple of weeks.

James Sexton: I love that.

Brett McKay: You do the same thing for your spouse, like give them a chance. What do you wanna do this week on your own?

James Sexton: But what you’re doing there, Brett, you’re really doing the you, the me, and the we. You’re saying, What do you need to be the fullness of you and what can I do to support that? What do I need to be the fullness of me and what can you do to support that? And then what can we do together? And we’re making time to identify what we’re doing right and what we could do better, and giving each other that kind of fearless communication, that kind of sort of, that commitment to us as individuals and us as a unit is really, I think the key, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that will keep you out of my office, which is great.

Brett McKay: So another reason that can cause marital conflict or can lead people to your office is they just kind of become indifferent. It’s really sad. They just become indifferent to the marriage and indifferent to their spouse. But I think we’ve kind of been talking about, it’s little things that lead to that indifference. It’s just not paying attention, and here a lot of people talk about marriage, it’s like, man, marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s really, really hard, man. And you argue that marriage is actually pretty dang easy ’cause it just comes down to you just gotta care. You just gotta pay attention. That’s it.

James Sexton: Yeah. Yeah. I just think that if you’re finding marriage very, very difficult, I don’t think you’re doing it right, I really just don’t think you’re doing it right, because the people that I know that have very satisfying, happy marriages, yes, they work at it. I work at my job, but I love my job, I enjoy my work, I find it overall very satisfying. Yeah, there’s effort involved, it’s challenging at times, but it’s not drudgery. And I think if your marriage is drudgery, if your marriage is more often than not, an unpleasant thing you have to attend to rather than something that’s adding value to your life, I think you have to ask some hard questions at that point ’cause you’re either doing it wrong or you’re married to the wrong person.

Brett McKay: So, yeah. Do the note thing.

James Sexton: Yeah, note thing is a good call. And those kinds of check-in meetings, I think that you’re on to something with that. And it’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about in the book when I talk about Hitting Send Now, or having walk and talks.

Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

James Sexton: Yeah, the books available everywhere books are available. If you wanna listen to me talk for eight and a half hours, you can go to Audible and download it, the audio book sells really well, I don’t know if that… I don’t think it has anything to do with my voice, I think it just has to do with the way people consume media. You can find a little bit about me on Instagram, which is NYCDivorceLawyer. I don’t post there often, I avoid social media like the plague to some degree, but certainly there’s information about my firm and my work, and when I do media appearances, television and things like that, we post it on the firm’s website, which is NYC, like New York City NYC Divorces, plural divorces.com, so nycdivorces.com, or jjsesq.com. That’s James Joseph Sexton, jjsesq.com. But any of those place is a good place to find out what I’m up to.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, James Sexton, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure.

James Sexton: Thanks for having me, Brett. Appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guess here is James Sexton, he’s the author of the book, If You’re In My Office, It’s Already Too Late. A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide To Staying Together. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, nycdivorces.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/staytogether where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to leave us a review in Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps that a lot. And you’ve done that already. Thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think would get something out of it. As always thank you for the continued support. Until next time it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.

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