I've been with my boyfriend for four years. I thought I was super happy, but I recently got a crush on a co-worker. Now I'm worried that maybe I'm not totally satisfied in my relationship. If I were truly in love with my boyfriend, why would I be crushing on somebody else? Does this make me more vulnerable to cheating? Should we go into therapy?
--So Confused
You're in a relationship, not a coma.
That said, your worries are understandable. There's been a belief, even amongst some researchers, that crushing (on somebody other than one's partner) is the gateway to cheating -- as well as lower commitment and lower relationship satisfaction. Obviously, crushy thoughts about, say, a co-worker can lead to a hookup (or more) in a way that matter-of-fact thoughts -- "Why does he have four chargers?" -- do not.
However, it turns out that researchers failed to make a distinction -- between having a crush (an attraction to a person other than one's partner) and having a high degree of what's called "attention to alternatives" (basically, eyeballs ever on the prowl for "attractive alternatives" to one's current partner).
In research by doctoral student Charlene F. Belu and psychologist Lucia F. O'Sullivan, 80 percent of the participants reported having a crush on somebody other than their partner while in a committed relationship. Only a small subset (17 percent) of those participants "reported they would leave their romantic partners for their crush if the opportunity arose," suggesting that for many, their crushes "are not considered true viable alternative partners."
The researchers found people's crushes to be "of relatively long duration, although not as long as the length of" a person's "current romantic relationship." This "duration ... suggests that one's crush endures in parallel to one's primary relationship." They even speculate that having a crush may even help sustain a relationship, by (mentally) "providing some variety to help cope with monotony" that's a natural part of long-term relationships but "without the risks inherent to infidelity."
So, getting back to you, as long as your relationship's satisfying and the only sex vacations you take with your crush are in your mind, you're probably okay. In short, "I only have eyes for you" sounds lovely but is probably only realistic if you wear special headgear whenever you leave the house -- such as one of those stylish black bags favored by kidnappers and executioners.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
Out of nowhere, a male friend started criticizing me, telling me that I need to change careers to make more money. He does have a successful business (started with seed money from his extremely wealthy family). But I didn't ask for his advice, and besides, I love my job, and I'm working on what I need to do to move forward. So I ended up snapping at him. He got mad and insisted that he just wants the best for me.
--Steamed
Criticizing someone does not make them want to change; it makes them want to google for listicles like "10 Foolproof Tricks For Getting Away with Murder."
To understand your friend's spontaneous outburst of unsolicited advice, consider that human communication is strategic -- just like that of our earth-dwelling colleagues, from apes to insects. Honeybees, for example, do a little dance to tell their fellow bees where the nectar is; they don't just go all twerky for no reason.
Back here in Humanland, evolutionary scientists Vladas Griskevicius and Douglas Kenrick find that seven "deep-seated evolutionary motives" -- emerging from survival and mating challenges our ancestors faced -- "continue to influence much modern behavior." These evolved motivations still driving us today are 1) evading physical harm, 2) avoiding disease, 3) making friends, 4) acquiring a mate, 5) keeping that mate, 6) caring for family, and -- ding-ding-ding! -- 7) attaining status.
Yes, status. There's a good chance that a dispenser of unsolicited advice has the best of intentions -- like "I just want to help you...uh...help you (and others who hear about my help) think more highly of me!" (He then becomes the expert, the career seer, the swami of success.) But whatever this guy's motive, you have no obligation to donate your attention to his cause.
The best time to set boundaries is before they're needed. Or needed again. Gently inform your friend that you truly appreciate his desire to help but the only advice that works for you is the solicited kind. Should he wish to, uh, solicit your solicitation, he can ask: "Would you be open to hearing...?" If you accept, it might help you keep an open mind if you focus on what you two have in common -- for example, a relative who proclaimed, "When I die, all of this will be yours!" Unfortunately, your grandma was making a sweeping gesture toward her salt and pepper shaker collection.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I'm a 32-year-old gay man, and my boyfriend of three years sometimes vents to his friends about our relationship. I feel a little betrayed by this -- like my privacy's being violated. Why can't he figure things out on his own -- without bringing in a jury?
--Disturbed
A few years back, a woman with a grudge against my assistant called me to try to get me to fire her: "She talks trash about you!" Me: "Everybody talks trash about their boss!"
The truth is, we all do a lot of grousing to others about people in our lives -- our romantic partner, our business partner, our criminal conspirator. That's actually a healthy thing, though it runs contrary to what emotion researcher Bernard Rime calls the "Lone Ranger individualist perspective of adult emotional regulation." This, Rime explains, is the mythic view (held even by many psychologists) that healthy adult processing of emotions involves a sort of "rugged individualism" -- meaning being "self-contained, independent, and self-reliant."
In fact, Rime notes, emotion seems to have evolved to be not just an internal, solo process but a "fundamentally interdependent process." Research by the late social psychologist Stanley Schachter, Rime, and others suggests that experiences that give rise to emotion in us motivate us to seek out others -- to share the experiences and our feelings.
Rime explains that our emotions -- especially painful ones -- can be overwhelming to us. Experiencing emotion "is a dense and diffuse experience in need of cognitive articulation"; that is, it needs to be hashed out and understood. "By using language and by addressing others, individuals 'unfold' the emotional material" so they can understand and manage it and maybe gain objectivity and insight.
Understanding how driven we are to share our experiences might help you stop feeling like your boyfriend's betraying secrets and instead see it as his seeking a sounding board. There's a good chance that this serves to improve your relationship -- sometimes by confirming that he has a legit issue to discuss with you and try to resolve.
Of course, we're all prone to latch on to crazy and ride it like a pony. We need someone to talk sense into us -- like to convince us that the jail time isn't worth it, despite our partner's disgusting, depraved indifference to all that's good and right. Yes, I'm talking about atrocities like opening food packages from the middle ("Hello...are you a rodent?!"), vacuuming in weird, random lines (like a serial killer!), and setting the alarm an hour early and then hitting snooze five times (surely an underappreciated cause of homicide).
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I'm a 66-year-old man. I got married in my mid-20s. I was totally faithful, but my wife left me after 10 years (I think for another woman). I was with the next woman for 20 years. Again, I was faithful, but she left me, too. Is being faithful overrated? I thought it was the way to secure a relationship.
--Failed Relationships
Keeping a marriage together by being faithful is important -- but it's also a step above keeping a marriage together by not being dead. (Note that the marriage ceremony has a little more text to it than "Keep it in your pants, mkay?")
Still, it isn't a surprise that you'd go, "Wait...faithful to the first one, faithful to the next one; must've been why these relationships tanked!" This leap you're making probably comes out of how uncomfortable our minds are with uncertainty (stemming from ambiguous situations, unanswered questions, and other mental untidiness). According to research by cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, a mechanism in our brain's left hemisphere that he calls "the interpreter" steps in to fill in the blanks, to save us from the cognitive chaos by coming up with an explanation. Unfortunately, it's like the world's sloppiest detective. It quickly scans for any patterns or vaguely plausible meanings and then just goes with them -- creating a narrative that seems to make sense of our experience (and never mind the tedious snore of weighing whether it actually does).
Accordingly, though it's easier on the ego to see your being faithful as some sort of common denominator, a more productive take would be accepting that relationships end and considering whether there's anything you might have done better, both in picking partners and in being one.
You might also reconsider the notion that you had "failed relationships." The reality is, partners change and grow apart. They come to want conflicting things (like a wife perhaps wanting a wife of her own). Or they just get bored with each other. As I see it, a 10- or 20-year relationship is a feat to celebrate -- not only making a relationship work for a whole lot of years but refraining from bludgeoning your mate for the horrible, psyche-scraping sounds they make when they chew.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I'm a 34-year-old struggling comic. My girlfriend is a 29-year-old children's therapist. We've been together for a year. She wants to move in with me, wants me to meet her parents -- adult relationship stuff that I don't feel ready for now. I love her, but I live in a studio without a kitchen. I don't even have a car. As a man, I want to be a "provider" for the woman in my life. She doesn't want to wait.
--Don't Wanna Lose Her
On the upside, you aren't without savings. There's that jar with all the change that you take to the Coinstar twice a year.
Your reluctance to be all "let's move in together and start a life over my hot plate" probably comes out of how (according to cross-cultural research by David Buss and other evolutionary psychologists) women seem to have evolved to seek men with the ability to acquire resources -- that is, to "provide."
Men coevolved to expect this -- and feel they need to rise to the occasion in order to get (and retain) the ladies. In other words, you, as a man, are psychologically driven to feel unsettled when, in terms of sheer earning power, you're just this side of living in your car.
This might lead you to wonder why, if you're so wigged out about being broke, your girlfriend's evolved psychology seems to be all "yeah, whatever." Well, there was no such thing as "wealth" in ancestral times, so cues to the ability to acquire resources seem to point to mate quality. As I've written before, a woman's seeing ambition, entrepreneurial thinking, and high intelligence in a guy who isn't exactly raking in the bucks with a crop harvester may ring enough of her psychological bells to make him a choice.
A woman who isn't yet in "let's make babies!" mode might also be more open-minded than realistic. Think about the life you want, and ask your girlfriend to think about the future she wants, and then put your wants together (along with the timetable for each) and see how well they fit. Sure, comedy is a career that can eventually pay off Seinfeldanormously, but for many, it never goes beyond driving around to do $50 sets in suburban Yuk-Yuk Huts.
If it's "babies or bust!" for her, consider how willing you'd be to trade your comedy dream for a dad job -- the boringly stable kind with a reasonable weekly paycheck. Unfortunately, actual money tends to go over better at the kids' dentist than a pair of free tickets to The Chuckle Castle plus a garbage bag of recyclables and a pledge to come back with more every day until mid-2024.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
My guy friend said my problem with men is that I keep forgetting who I am. According to him, I'm smart, beautiful, accomplished, funny, and super-cool but the moment I like a guy, I act weirdly needy and turn guys off. How do I change this?
--Clingy
In presenting yourself to others, you're like the world's worst used-car salesman: "Fantastic deathtrap for the price! Just the thing to strand you on a desert highway and leave you crawling on your hands and knees over rocky, snake-infested terrain!"
Unfortunately, self-loathing is only stylish for about 20 minutes -- and only if you are a newly-Goth 13-year-old. Also unfortunate is a big long-standing error in psychology, overvaluing talking and undervaluing action as the way to change our default behavior -- meaning the way we typically (and pretty much automatically) react. Granted, recognizing where you're going wrong and how you could behave less counterproductively isn't unimportant or useless. But research by clinical psychologist Stefan G. Hofmann and his colleagues suggests that taking action alone -- without talk therapy -- leads to dramatic shifts in thinking, including significantly diminishing "negative self-perception" and other counterproductive beliefs.
As for your tendency to go all needypants around a guy you like, ask yourself why you do this. Not the underlying reason but why you let your emotions drive your behavior. People don't think to ask themselves that, but as I write in "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence" -- my science-based book on how action is the key to emotional and behavioral transformation -- "your feelings are not the boss of you." In short, it isn't how you feel that matters; it's what you do.
When you're around a guy you like, act in a way that serves your interests -- like a person with self-respect, which is to say, one who has no problem walking away. (Be whiny to your friends, if necessary.) After all, deep down, you know you could get a man to stay with you forever -- that's what basement wall chains and bucket toilets are for.
I'm a 35-year-old woman who's been married for a year to a 70-year-old man. My husband's closest female friend is also one of his exes. He's known her for 40 years. She's a real sore point for me. She stayed at our apartment while we were away. She wouldn't reply to any of my emails but constantly emailed my husband. Recently, I saw a text my husband sent telling her to just email him at work because I have access to his phone. (That's how I discovered that she was dissuading him from fixing things with me when we were fighting.) I feel that a husband shouldn't have marriage-undermining friendships. I want him to stop talking with her. Am I wrong here?
--Angry
Take a counterintuitive approach and put yourself in this woman's shoes: Where's she supposed to shop for men...the cemetery?
Older women get seriously annoyed at how men their age -- typically the wealthiest and most eligible -- dip down through the decades for partners. On dating sites, even a 98-year-old man in an iron lung will set his age preference at 18-30, just in case some woman is "open-minded" (uh, about dating a man who has socks far older than she is).
Another thing to consider: In a relationship, it's common to ask for and expect sexual fidelity. But how much social fidelity is it reasonable to expect? The notion that a relationship involves becoming somebody's "one and only" socially, too, sounds romantic but is actually in sharp conflict with the complexity of many people's lives. Your husband, for example, has had a friendship with this woman for 40 years -- five years longer than you've even been on the planet. His cutting her out of his life would mean cutting out somebody who understands who he is and where he's been in a way few people probably do.
That said, it's natural that you'd wish he'd give this woman the heave-ho. The jealousy that gives rise to feelings like this is wrongly maligned as a "bad" emotion. However, like all emotions, it's actually "adaptive" -- which is to say functional. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss explains that jealousy seems to have evolved to protect us against threats to our relationship -- alerting us to possibilities that our partner will cheat on us or leave us for another. But jealousy can also be toxic to a relationship and damaging to the mate value of the partner who expresses it. (Nothing like endlessly fretting to your mate that he could trade up to suggest that he should.)
Additionally, consider how counterproductive it often is to tell somebody what to do. The late social psychologist Jack Brehm came up with the term "psychological reactance" to describe a motivational state that automatically rises up in us when we feel our freedom to do as we choose is threatened. Basically, the more somebody tries to control our behavior the more we want to resist, rebel -- do whatever they've been trying to stop us from doing. (In short, nothing like being shown that there are straps to put someone in a mind to gnaw through them.)
This isn't to say you're necessarily off base about this woman. Chances are, she resents you and is trying to chip away at your bond with your husband. Rotten. However, as for how successful she could be, do you think your husband married you by accident? Like maybe you just happened to be in the passenger seat when he pulled into a drive-thru chapel: "Oops. Thought this was a car wash."
As annoying as it must be to have this woman lurking around the borders of your marriage, consider the thinking from psychologist Erich Fromm that love is not just a feeling but something you do -- sometimes by being a little more generous than you'd really like to be. This isn't to say you have to shut up entirely about this woman. You can be honest with your husband that you find her undermining.
Ironically, the best way to control your romantic partner is not by trying to control them but by being so loving, supportive, kind, and fun that it would be idiotic for them to leave you. Also, let's quash any fear you might have that this woman could steal your husband. There's little novelty (and thus little excitement) in getting together with somebody one's known and been in touch with for 40 years. Also, recall how men, throughout their life span, tend to be most attracted to the younger ladies. Chances are, if he were to suddenly develop a thing for anything "midcentury," it would be something like Eames chairs -- not a woman who's aged out of every dating program on TV, unless, of course, you count "Antiques Roadshow."
I'm a female comic, so being smart and funny and having a strong personality is basically my job, as well as who I am. A friend had me stop by his business meeting at a cafe so he could introduce me to his client he was hoping to set me up with. I tend to show off when I'm nervous (going big, loud, and funny), and I apparently terrified the guy. My friend scolded me, telling me it's a turnoff for men to have to compete with a woman. Come on! I'd be thrilled to have a partner who is smarter and funnier. Shouldn't men be like that, too?
--Bummed
As a powerful, confident woman, you can make a man feel like a real animal: a Chihuahua in a bee suit nervously peeking out of a little old lady's purse.
Social science research finds that there's a bit of a chasm between what men think they want in a female partner and what they actually end up being comfortable with. For example, when social psychologist Lora E. Park surveyed male research participants, 86 percent said they'd feel comfortable dating female partners smarter than they are. They likewise said they'd go for a (hypothetical) woman who beat their scores in every category on an exam. However, when they were in a room with a woman who supposedly did, the men not only expressed less interest in her but moved their chairs away from her (as if they might catch something from her if they sat too close!).
This seems pretty silly, until you look at some sex differences in the importance of social status. Sure, it's better for a woman to be the head cheerleader (as that plays out in junior high and beyond), but a woman isn't less of a woman if she isn't the alpha pompom-ette. Manhood, on the other hand, is "precarious," explain psychologists Jennifer Bosson and Joseph Vandello. It's achieved through men's actions but easily lost or yanked away -- like by being shown up publicly by a chick.
The answer isn't to be someone else on a date (somebody dumber, with less personality). But maybe, seeing as some of the big-personality stuff comes out of fear, you could try something: Challenge yourself to be vulnerable. To listen. To connect with people instead of impress them. You should also seek out men who are big enough to not feel small around you -- men who are accomplished, as well as psychologically accomplished. These are men who've fixed whatever was broken in them or was just less than ideal. When a guy says "She took my breath away!" it should be a good thing, not a complaint about how he was nearly asphyxiated by your personality.
I'm friends with this guy. Only friends, and he knows it. But lately, we'll be on the phone, talking about our businesses, and he'll suddenly start talking dirty (saying sex things he wants to do with me). I just make a joke and get off the phone, but then he'll do it again the next time. How do I get him to stop?
--Uncomfortable
You get a lot out of your friendship -- but last you checked your Venmo, not $2.99 a minute.
There you are, talking about your plans for the third quarter, and there are the guy's sex thoughts -- kind of like a goat ambling into your living room. As annoying as this must be, his being motivated to do it isn't inexplicable. In surveying the scientific literature on sexual desire, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues find evidence for what many of us probably suspect or believe: Men, in general, have a far stronger sex drive than women.
This is reflected in how, among other things, men "experience more frequent sexual arousal, have more frequent and varied fantasies, desire sex more often, desire more partners, masturbate more, want sex sooner, are less able or willing to live without sexual gratification," and are often interested in freakier stuff. (It isn't women who show up at the emergency room all "TOTAL MYSTERY TO ME, DUDE!" about how that reading lamp or Butterscotch the hamster got up there.)
You can most likely get him to stop -- but not through hinting or hanging up when the conversation goes "what I'd like to do to you with my tongue"-ward. Tell him straight out: "Hey, from now on, we need to keep the raunchy talk out of our phone conversations. Makes me seriously uncomfortable." There's a time and place for everything, and sex talk suddenly flying into your casual conversations is like placing your order at a drive-thru speaker -- "Hi...I'd like the cheeseburger with fries" -- and hearing heavy breathing and then a low male voice: "That'll be $8.97...and a picture of your feet."
