Speaker 1: I'm Jessa, and this is deeply human why we do
Speaker 1: the things we do, and we are gathered here today
Speaker 1: to talk about love. We spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: trying to find it, but we might be better off
Speaker 1: trying to build it, less wiping and more second dates.
Speaker 1: Can you hear me very well? Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 1: ask some questions about dating. If you could think of
Speaker 1: a character in a movie that would serve as a
Speaker 1: rough model for a good match for me, who would
Speaker 1: it be? Oh, my goodness, the first thing that comes
Speaker 1: to mind is Indiana Jones because of the adventurousness. I
Speaker 1: would totally date Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. Of course
Speaker 1: you would. And he's got the physical thing. He's not
Speaker 1: afraid of getting dirty. He's swashbuckling. That's my mom, Sylvia.
Speaker 1: She's very a professional in public and kind of goofy
Speaker 1: when it's just us. We talked on the phone most weeks,
Speaker 1: sharing little updates about our lives, comparing notes on the
Speaker 1: world around us. I happened to be on the dating
Speaker 1: market at the moment, and I've been thinking a lot
Speaker 1: lately about romantic matching. What it is that attracts people
Speaker 1: to one another? And fixes them together. I still remember
Speaker 1: when my mom was dating after my parents divorced. She
Speaker 1: met her new husband through a personal ad that was
Speaker 1: online dating, when the Internet was still made out of
Speaker 1: paper in a previous era of American history, my mom
Speaker 1: might have been the person to set me up with
Speaker 1: a guy. But times have changed. Now we're dating online,
Speaker 1: which is seriously expanded the dating pool, and we're marrying later,
Speaker 1: which means we're treading water longer. The contemporary dat sifts
Speaker 1: through way more candidates to find her special somebody, and
Speaker 1: as we'll learn, the numbers matter more than you might think.
Speaker 1: When you looked at me little, did you have any
Speaker 1: idea of the sort of partner that I'd end up with? Like?
Speaker 1: Did you think about that about me dating? When when
Speaker 1: I was like, I think a parent always thinks that way,
Speaker 1: Even when I took a look at the four year old,
Speaker 1: this was a curious mind. And I think when I
Speaker 1: think about your dating, I can only imagine that it
Speaker 1: would be someone who would be equally curious. I think
Speaker 1: that being a physical person, the physical strength of the
Speaker 1: person you're with actually matters. What do you mean, like
Speaker 1: like someone I can't win in an arm wrestling match. Yes,
Speaker 1: someone who could pick you up and twirl you around. Okay,
Speaker 1: just for the record, I'm like a hundred and forty
Speaker 1: five pounds and five tents. That narrows it down. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of guys out there like that, though.
Speaker 1: Do you know what Tinder is? Do you know what
Speaker 1: the app tender? Next time we have lunch, do you
Speaker 1: want to like drive my Tinder app and you can
Speaker 1: swipe left or right and you can tell me, Oh, sure,
Speaker 1: that would be kind of fun. We're looking for a
Speaker 1: companion for chemistry, a partner for good times and for bad,
Speaker 1: for Netflix and for chilling, someone with whom were really compatible.
Speaker 1: But what exactly is compatibility and how much of it
Speaker 1: can we expect to find in a partner. Years ago,
Speaker 1: I was talking with my best friend Jacqueline about this stuff,
Speaker 1: and our exchange has haunted me ever since. She told
Speaker 1: me someone we both know was going through this big breakup,
Speaker 1: and Jacqueline asked him what happened, and he told her
Speaker 1: he and his girl had really tried to make it work.
Speaker 1: He said, man, we were so close to being a fit.
Speaker 1: We were, but we just couldn't do him. Not long afterwards,
Speaker 1: another friend of ours announced that he'd asked his girlfriend
Speaker 1: the big question, the one posed on bended knee. When
Speaker 1: Jacqueline asked him, ah, so how do you know she
Speaker 1: was the one? He responded, We just fit. We match
Speaker 1: like on everything. Two couples, both feeling well matched and
Speaker 1: the exact same grade, flunked one guy out of dating
Speaker 1: and landed the other in a second ring suburb with
Speaker 1: two kids and a joint checking account. So how good
Speaker 1: is good enough? How much can we ask for? What
Speaker 1: should we settle for? I spoke to someone who studies
Speaker 1: choice and decision making to figure out exactly how people
Speaker 1: set their standards. Barry, Yeah, do you mind if I
Speaker 1: call you Berry? Not at all. The expert with whom
Speaker 1: we are now on a first name basis is Barry Schwartz,
Speaker 1: a professor of psychology at the Business School at the
Speaker 1: University of California, Berkeley. He's particularly interested in how you
Speaker 1: behave when you're in environments where you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of options, like the serial aisle and the supermarkets, say
Speaker 1: or you know, tender. Intuitively, most of us are likely
Speaker 1: to think, Hey, more options to choose from means I'll
Speaker 1: be more likely to get just what I'm looking for.
Speaker 1: But as Barry explains in his book The Paradox of Choice,
Speaker 1: that's not always the case. Most Western industrial societies believe
Speaker 1: that since freedom is good and choice is essential to freedom,
Speaker 1: that choice is good, and that the more choice people have,
Speaker 1: the more freedom they have and the better off they are.
Speaker 1: Choice is good. But there can be too much of
Speaker 1: a good thing. And when you give people too much
Speaker 1: of a good thing, instead of being liberated by it,
Speaker 1: they get paralyzed. They can't pull the trigger. Think of
Speaker 1: your local grocery store with dozens and dozens of serials
Speaker 1: on offer. Barry says that the process of sifting through
Speaker 1: so many options can actually make us less satisfied with
Speaker 1: whatever we've put in our cards. His thinking goes likeness.
Speaker 1: While we're comparing all the potential choices, we're making note
Speaker 1: of the best features of every option. Oh hey, this
Speaker 1: box of frosted puff whatever is is on sale. Oh
Speaker 1: but this one is organic. Ah, but this one has
Speaker 1: so much niacin. I love nias. At the end of
Speaker 1: the process, nothing can compare to the super breakfast you've
Speaker 1: collaged in your imagination by combining the best bits of
Speaker 1: each box. So even if you do end up making
Speaker 1: a pretty good selection, you just don't feel that good.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just about cereal. This applies to big
Speaker 1: life choices too. One of the things we have to
Speaker 1: fight against is adaptation. Barry has been studying this stuff
Speaker 1: for forty five years. You have good experiences and they're wonderful,
Speaker 1: they're spectacular for a while, and then they just become
Speaker 1: your life. And as normal keeps going up, experiences that
Speaker 1: are really going to knock your socks off have to
Speaker 1: keep going up to the socks stay on, And I
Speaker 1: don't know what you can do to get somebody's socks off.
Speaker 1: So maybe the problem is that I've dated too many
Speaker 1: great guys. It's weird to say it, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that's a ridiculous idea. I've been lucky enough to
Speaker 1: know and love some awesome dudes, and I've sometimes wondered
Speaker 1: if I had been forced to marry one of them,
Speaker 1: could we have made a go of it. I bet
Speaker 1: we could have pulled off a workable partnership. But of course,
Speaker 1: workable isn't really the standard we're going for these days,
Speaker 1: is it. We want to lose our socks, We want socklessness.
Speaker 1: Barry is quick to point out there's very little empirical
Speaker 1: evidence on this, but still I can't, for the life
Speaker 1: of me, see why having two cereals to choose from
Speaker 1: and the grocery is any different from having two hundred
Speaker 1: romantic partners to choose from on a dating site. It
Speaker 1: seems to me that all the problems that having all
Speaker 1: these options present in the retail domain, they present, perhaps
Speaker 1: even to a greater degree, in the romantic domain, because
Speaker 1: the stakes are so much higher. Barry told me about
Speaker 1: a pretty interesting study on dating choice as it played
Speaker 1: out in the world of speed dating. If you're unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: speed dating started in the late nineties, and it goes
Speaker 1: like this. An organizer gather there's a bunch of people
Speaker 1: in a room to set them up on tiny dates
Speaker 1: only a few minutes long. A bell rings to indicate
Speaker 1: when you're supposed to move on to your next day,
Speaker 1: to the next, and at the end of the night,
Speaker 1: you submit a little sheet of paper to the organizers
Speaker 1: to indicate who you'd like to see again. If they
Speaker 1: also pick you, then you're set up for a real
Speaker 1: date at normal speed. What's interesting is how the number
Speaker 1: and range of potential daters in the room can affect
Speaker 1: the number of matches. A two thousand eleven article and
Speaker 1: a publication called Biology letter Is reported findings from a
Speaker 1: study of eighty four speed dating groups. Researchers discovered that
Speaker 1: the daters who had a wider variety of people to
Speaker 1: choose from picked fewer people than want to see again,
Speaker 1: and when they had a lot of really varied choices,
Speaker 1: they were more likely to pick no one at all.
Speaker 1: And arguably this is because with everybody you see, you know,
Speaker 1: the scarce person is pretty nice, but that other person
Speaker 1: was funnier, and that other person was a little bit
Speaker 1: better looking, and that other person seemed to be a
Speaker 1: better listener, and so every attractive feature of everybody reduces
Speaker 1: the attractiveness of everybody else. Confession time I tried speed dating.
Speaker 1: Once I liked a guy with a pink dress shirt
Speaker 1: who did not indicate liking me back. If you're listening now,
Speaker 1: pink shirt guy, this is the glamorous podcasting life you
Speaker 1: could have been a part of. One of the most
Speaker 1: fascinating recent revelations about love and dating comes from the
Speaker 1: work of Dr Helen Fisher, a researcher, a tier and
Speaker 1: a public figure who spent much of her career studying
Speaker 1: how we make romantic choices. Here's the study I read
Speaker 1: that blew my mind. Dr Fisher recruited a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who were passionately in love and put each of
Speaker 1: them into an fMRI machine. While inside, each participant was
Speaker 1: shown a picture of the person I loved and pictures
Speaker 1: of somebody else as a control image. The machine tracked
Speaker 1: brain activity throughout the session, and at the end of
Speaker 1: her research, Helen was confident that she'd identified exactly which
Speaker 1: parts of the human brain are involved in romantic love.
Speaker 1: I've actually seen these regions modeled in three D, even
Speaker 1: hopped in an fMRI machine myself to have my own
Speaker 1: brain scanned. And let me tell you, love is not pretty.
Speaker 1: It's a curving set of nabby, mangled, sort of claw
Speaker 1: like things clenched deep inside the darkness of our skulls.
Speaker 1: Nobody gets out of love alive. I mean, we're trying
Speaker 1: to win life's greatest prize, which is a mating partner.
Speaker 1: Helen talks with her hands. She is inexhaustibly excited about
Speaker 1: what she does. I had thought that the hardest thing
Speaker 1: I would do with my career would be to figure
Speaker 1: out the brain circuitry of romantic love and attachment. But
Speaker 1: as it turns out, it's actually not. The question was
Speaker 1: why do you fall for him or her? Why are
Speaker 1: you drawn to a particular person? And there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of cultural reasons. I mean, we tend to fall in
Speaker 1: love with somebody from the same socio economic background, same
Speaker 1: general level of intelligence, same general level of good look,
Speaker 1: same religious and social values, same reproductive goals, same economic goals,
Speaker 1: your child. It certainly plays a role. Timing is important,
Speaker 1: Proximity is important, and I would say at my age,
Speaker 1: lighting can help you, know. So I began to think
Speaker 1: to myself, well, maybe basic biology can pull you naturally
Speaker 1: towards one person rather than another. There's four basic brain
Speaker 1: systems that each one of them is linked with a
Speaker 1: constellation of personality race, the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen system.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna slow a role here because this part is important.
Speaker 1: Those four substances Helen mentioned dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen,
Speaker 1: They're in all of our bodies and they act on
Speaker 1: systems in our brain, affecting the way we feel, learn, think,
Speaker 1: and act. Helen started studying the available research about how
Speaker 1: a person's temperament is to some extent shaped by these
Speaker 1: four brain systems. People who are testosterone dominant, for example,
Speaker 1: may be more prone to skepticism, People who are serotonin
Speaker 1: dominant tend to be more religious, estrogen people may be
Speaker 1: more verbal, and dopamine dominant people are more novelty seeking.
Speaker 1: Helen wanted to know are there dating patterns that emerge
Speaker 1: between these four types? How are they attracted to one another? First,
Speaker 1: she said about designing questionnaire that could allow her to
Speaker 1: categorize daters into their biological types. I collected all the
Speaker 1: data from hormone studies and neurotransmitter studies and medical and
Speaker 1: biological studies to make the questionnaire, and then I went
Speaker 1: on to do two brain scanning studies to prove that
Speaker 1: this questionnaire actually measures what it does. She also linked
Speaker 1: up with match dot com and chemistry dot com, big
Speaker 1: online dating sites, which gave her access to a huge
Speaker 1: number of active daters. The users agreed to take her
Speaker 1: temperament questionnaire, and then they set about matching and dating
Speaker 1: each other, and she took note of who linked up
Speaker 1: with whom. More than fourteen million people in forty countries
Speaker 1: have taken Helen's questionnaire, I recently joined their ranks, answering
Speaker 1: her fifty six questions. On one of those agreed disagree skills,
Speaker 1: I find unpredictable situations accelerating. Yes, taking care of my
Speaker 1: possessions is a high priority for me. I dropped my
Speaker 1: phone every time I stand up. That's a strong disagree.
Speaker 1: I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing. No,
Speaker 1: not so much. My answers classify me as driven by
Speaker 1: the estrogen system. According to Helen, people like me verbal social,
Speaker 1: inclined towards monogamy, conflict diverse, like to date test uster
Speaker 1: our own people, logical, confident skeptics. Oh come on, really,
Speaker 1: that's just oh hell, that is totally true. However, the
Speaker 1: seratonin camp planners who value tradition prefer to date within
Speaker 1: their own ranks, as do the novelty and adventure seeking
Speaker 1: dopamine folks, who presumably take their candle at dinners on
Speaker 1: the wing of a plane toasting Chardonnay cup with red bull. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1: Going back to Barry Schwartz, our choice expert, he says
Speaker 1: there are two distinct approaches that people might use to
Speaker 1: guide their choosing. There are some people who, whenever they
Speaker 1: have a choice to make, they want the best. We
Speaker 1: call people like this maximizers. There are other people who
Speaker 1: are not so concerned about the best. We call these
Speaker 1: people satisficers, and it's a term that was coined by
Speaker 1: a psychologist named Herb Simon half a century ago. The
Speaker 1: thing about being a satisfy sir is you don't have
Speaker 1: to examine every option. You examine options until you find
Speaker 1: one that meets your standards. Then you stop looking and
Speaker 1: you are satisfied with what you've gotten. Maximizers want to
Speaker 1: make sure to score the best possible option. This is
Speaker 1: a friend who will tour a thousand apartments before signing
Speaker 1: a lease. Satisficers, meanwhile, have a specific standard in mind.
Speaker 1: They wanted two bedroom and the hardward floor is a
Speaker 1: closet big enough to record a podcast in, and as
Speaker 1: soon as she finds a place that meets those requirements,
Speaker 1: she's ready to move in. Satisficers aren't necessarily less choosy.
Speaker 1: They might have a lot of boxes to check, but
Speaker 1: generally it's the maximizers who find themselves spending a lot
Speaker 1: of time and energy on their deliberations. Intuitively. Most people
Speaker 1: think you should make the little decisions as a satisficer, like, hey,
Speaker 1: this works, I'll take it, and the big decisions as
Speaker 1: a maximizer. I'm going to spend the time and energy
Speaker 1: on this to find the very best. But Barry says
Speaker 1: they're wrong. You know, by the time you find your
Speaker 1: romantic partner, you'll be in your mid fifties, and uh,
Speaker 1: that's not the right way to go through life. In
Speaker 1: addition to which, since we're talking about Roman Tick relationships,
Speaker 1: there's a huge mistake I think that people make, which
Speaker 1: is that the challenge when you're seeking a romantic partner
Speaker 1: is one of discovery find the right person. And I
Speaker 1: don't think it's really about discovery. I think it's about creation.
Speaker 1: You find a compatible person and then you build a
Speaker 1: great relationship. It's worth noting here, and Barry agrees that
Speaker 1: we don't have to partner at all. Life has some
Speaker 1: other pretty great prizes. But Barry has a point. If
Speaker 1: we do want to find a companion, it'd be nice
Speaker 1: to find that person while we've got a lot of
Speaker 1: time left to pack around together. I know that you're
Speaker 1: married for fifty two years as of three days ago. Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm late with the happy anniversary. So how did Barry
Speaker 1: meet his wife? mRNA? There's some hyper rational decision matrix. Well,
Speaker 1: so she's probably going to be mad at me for
Speaker 1: revealing all this stuff. But we became best friends in
Speaker 1: eighth grade and I was romantically interested in her from
Speaker 1: the get go, and she was not romantically interested in me,
Speaker 1: and it took a lot of persistence on my part
Speaker 1: to get her to change her mind. When you were
Speaker 1: doing that, are you using methods of satisficers or maximizers?
Speaker 1: I watched fifteen years old. Give me a break. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the hell I was doing as to
Speaker 1: where I ought to be looking for my partner. Barry
Speaker 1: is not impressed by the app I happen to be using.
Speaker 1: You are way way too good to be needing to
Speaker 1: use Tinder. Let me say, I'll take it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: put that you don't have to do if it's cool
Speaker 1: with you want my endorsements, Barry? Can I put that
Speaker 1: on my Tinder account? I'm doing it for all if
Speaker 1: you think it will help. I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: it's funny, I asked Talent Fisher, our expert on love
Speaker 1: and brain systems, who we should point out still does
Speaker 1: work for match dot com. If there are any best
Speaker 1: practices for online dating. The brain is not well built
Speaker 1: to go through a hundred different choices. There's a sweet
Speaker 1: spot in the brain between five and nine, and after
Speaker 1: that you just end up choosing nobody. So if you're
Speaker 1: on a dating site after you've met nine people, stop
Speaker 1: and get to know at least one person. Better think
Speaker 1: of reasons to say yes, no, no, okay, all knows?
Speaker 1: So far, so far we've had one yes and like
Speaker 1: six or seven knows. Remember how at the beginning I
Speaker 1: asked my mom if she wanted to drive my tender account. Well,
Speaker 1: here she is behind the wheel. Ah, he doesn't look
Speaker 1: adventurous enough. And can you tell that from his expression
Speaker 1: or from what he's wearing or what he's in an office?
Speaker 1: We're in an office, I know, but I know we're adventurous.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. This is not a guy who I would
Speaker 1: have paused on. But I think you should sit right because, okay,
Speaker 1: it's a match. Do you know what that means? Mom?
Speaker 1: That his dad is swiping from his tender accounted? He
Speaker 1: he's sliped right on me too. I admit that watching
Speaker 1: my parents divorce has probably made me a little gun shy.
Speaker 1: They're both kind, sensitive people, and it hurt to see
Speaker 1: them so damn sad, which made it seem all the
Speaker 1: more important to choose my own match carefully. But I
Speaker 1: don't want to set a standard for compatibility so high
Speaker 1: that it's impossible to meet, or worse, makes me an
Speaker 1: ungenerous partner always disappointed with her guy. So Barry's idea
Speaker 1: that compatibility isn't only something you find, it's something you
Speaker 1: create is compelling. How good is good enough? Isn't a
Speaker 1: question to retire after you swipe right, or even after
Speaker 1: you like it and put a ring on it. How
Speaker 1: good can this get? Can be asked every day when
Speaker 1: deciding who makes the pre dawn pot of coffee, how
Speaker 1: the bills are paid, how the compliments are paid, when
Speaker 1: to relent, when to insist on a difficult conversation instead
Speaker 1: of turning off the light to fall asleep alone in
Speaker 1: the same bed. I bet there are many potential relationships
Speaker 1: that any two people could build together. Their decisions in
Speaker 1: the first morning they spend together reverberate through the afternoon.
Speaker 1: The decisions of their youth shape the partnership of later years.
Speaker 1: Choice is not a lever we pull once, It's a
Speaker 1: wheel that's always turning. Okay, here is my revised tender profile.
Speaker 1: Tessa thirty nine design features five ten musician and writer
Speaker 1: half Puerto Rican Water. I like science and milk, chocolate
Speaker 1: and kindness, and I'm looking for a charismatic, smart, trustworthy
Speaker 1: dude who's mostly but not completely grown up. I am
Speaker 1: officially endorsed by Dr Barry Schwartz. Okay, so Deeply Human
Speaker 1: kicks off of the bang big ideas about love. It's
Speaker 1: not just who you pick but what you make together.
Speaker 1: So if you're expecting to fall hard for someone, you
Speaker 1: might have to help dig the hole. So happy shoveling.
Speaker 1: In our next episode, the topic on deck is pain.
Speaker 1: We'll be delving into why we hurt, why some of
Speaker 1: us can't stop, and how pain might shape some of
Speaker 1: the most important parts of our lives. Deeply Human is
Speaker 1: a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production
Speaker 1: with iHeartMedia. Until next time, Curiously, Yours, Dessa,