How to Build a Happy Life Podcast: Can Technology Really Help You Find Love?

Arthur the real reason I don't use dating apps is because I don't want to go about my love life in the same way I do playing Wordle or some game on my phone it's just it's weird to me you don't want to use the same technology that you would for goofing around while waiting for the bus that you do to find your actual life partner because it seems so incredibly important to you why would you reduce the selection of or at least the initial selection of somebody who might turn into your life partner to the same technology that comes when you're just Doom scrolling through Instagram is that what you're saying it's just it just seems too trivial I almost feel like I'm cheating to get to a human being someone who I know is gonna inevitably be far more complicated and emotional and the act of finding the person seems so diametrically opposed to what the experience of being with that person would actually be like and I think that's that's my reasoning and I know that's not everyone's and I can't speak for everyone under the age of 30 who maybe shares some degree of that sentiment but that's that's how it is for me this is how to build a happy life I'm Arthur Brooks Harvard professor and contributing writer at the Atlantic I'm Rebecca Rasheed a producer at the Atlantic [Music] many of my students have told me that there's kind of an irony about dating these days they can get anything they want as consumers at the drop of a hat look you want a hippopotamus delivered to your house you can practically get it from Amazon Prime but a lot of the same people who are amazed at that will confess that their dating lives are pretty dry they'll often say they don't know how to date in the right way that where it can be actually successful they don't know what the right procedure actually is or or they're afraid of what will happen if they put their heart on the line what explains this incredible irony where there's easier access to people all over the world but at the same time people are either less prepared or more afraid to engage in love behaviors [Music] today we want to explore whether romance facilitated by technology has delivered on its promises now what it means to actually put the work into love I'll be straightforward about my perspective here and hear me out I believe a lot of emotional dissatisfaction in modern dating can be explained by research there's data showing technology media relationships fall secondary to in-person interaction other research suggests that romantic love can blossom when people explore their differences something I fear dating apps often discourage it concerns me that many of these apps favor selecting romantic Partners based on similar traits rather than complementary traits now look I recognize that technology can create opportunities to connect and that there is research showing the success of online connections after they jump off the screen but I also want to examine the potential hazards of a limitless nature of tech reducing human beings to options and perhaps even encouraging a certain degree of socially sanctioned game playing I know when when if you talk about it with your students when I talk about it with my undergrads right so I teach classes about human sexuality and about intimate relationships and stuff and I ask them you know do they use Tinder and some of them do and they ask you know what to use them for and people are using Tinder to find love not to find hookups which is interesting to me right my name is I'm a professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas I sat down with Omri galat to identify the satisfaction gap between what tech promises and what it often delivers the fact that it's easy and accessible doesn't mean that it's what people need so they're going to be a gap between what the industry and the technology is going to provide us and what we actually need and between you know people are doing for money and what people are doing for you know the greater good the trend the social cultural Trends are out there showing that you know less people are getting married less if you're having kids less people are having sex which is you know kind of weird because you have this author of options right you can go on Tinder and just swipe and get your next you know hookup but this final that less and less people are finding themselves in in a relationship and one thing that I've actually seen Dave that I've looked up says that people are less likely to get married but they're also less likely to cohabitate and as you suggested less likely to have intimate physical relationships we're not substituting one kind of relationship for another we're substituting no relationship for relationship and that's what we really need to dig into right right and and you you you might say you know what well maybe people find their you know a relationship somewhere else you know the world is like a small village now you can you can have people friends all over the world so this is not what we're seeing there's so many people now that are lonely that are looking for love can't find it when they find it they can't stick with it and it's definitely something that we're trying to understand and figure out the underlying mechanism of that and kind of trying to figure out what happened now let's talk a little bit about some of the big differences to make this Vivid for our listeners and your work you talk about how when you discuss your feelings with somebody in person versus when you discuss your feelings with somebody on on social media and it has opposite effects on the establishment of relationship talk to me about that yeah so what we find this is work that I did was a former grad student um Juan Lee when you're when you're self-disclosing and you talk about your fears your dreams your fantasies your secrets all of these things to people face to face right in person it usually increases intimacy increases satisfaction help you build the relationship people are actually over time getting closer however if you do the same thing online right on things like you know Facebook Twitter Snapchat what have you it has the opposite effect right and basically you know people and by people you're talking about you as a person and your partner having lower level of intimacy lower level of satisfaction you kind of feel like you're left out right we can sit together in the same room and you can tell me something or you can email them to me and the effect is going to be very very different right now you remember in that famous famous paper by Arthur Aaron where he was actually trying to induce feelings of romantic love between strangers and he would bring it he brought the experiments a wonderful experiment he brought strangers into the room they sit across the table from each other they start by answering 36 questions that are escalating in intimacy so the first one is something stupid like you know if you could have dinner with anybody you want who would it be and this is an icebreaker but by you know question 30 is when was the last time you cried which is the classic kind of question of self-disclosure that you're talking about yeah I think again technology can be very helpful can help you with for example filter right up to the first date but after the first date It's gotta be in person it's Gotta Be face to face you got to be able to smell the other person see their you know body language you know we have for example research on flirting it's so much easier to do flaring face to face and do it via the computer and I think that we're happy to rely on technology we're happy to even use this replacement so you know one of the things that we see in our studies is that people are now using chatbots as replacements for friends and relationships have you ever heard about replica no what's that that's a chat bot that was built by a group of programmers their friend was killed in a car accident and they wanted to replace him so they took all of his you know social media information and created a chat bot and kind of kept on talking with their friend via the bot and now they give it to anyone anyone can use it and build their own replacement for a friend a dead friend or an ex-lover or what have you and you know one of the things that you got to wonder is is it really helpful is it really something that a you can trust B you can benefit from and see what happens to your information who gets all of your secrets that you were so heavily sharing with this app right and again from our research when you are dropping these things on a on a boat or when you're communicating you know like that online you're not enjoying the same benefits that we see face to face with a real person Armory it sounds awful I mean we've all experienced deaths in our families and you know the loss of people and people have broken our hearts and it seems like it would compound the pain have a fake version of the person there's a reason that people don't want that right there is this human element it's like the essence of life is love it's what it means to be alive and that's what we've I feel like we're losing especially when we're we're trying to match ourselves up to other people in in actual love relationships using these anti-human means so yes so think about the movie hair right where Scarlett Johansson is is kind of like you know this amazing version of Alexa and the guy is falling in love with her and Julie finds out that she's actually having relationships with all these other guys at the same time you know we're in my research now we're doing some research on AI and trying to understand these jet boats and understand what happens when for example they would do the art Aaron study and go through 36 questions with an AI rather than the person what would happen then we're kind of wondering is that gonna increase intimacy or is that going to make you like look creepy and people would not want to engage in so yeah it creeps me out just to talk about it you know particularly when AI starts to pass the Turing test and you can fall in love with it technically I mean is Tech gonna kill Love dead maybe it already did but uh you know it's so I mean to take a horrible kind of like example right think about the atom bomb they can be very good uses to it right we can create a lot of energy clean energy and on all that but it can also obviously create the bombs and this is why the reason why I talk about the atom but you can talk about AI because that's another example that people are scared about and kind of like oh my God the robot's going to kill us and I think you know technology on its own is not better good I think technology can be amazing if you're for example highly anxious or if you're suffer from social anxiety and stuff like that so they're good size race for sure it's great right we can talk you know there are thousands of miles between us we can still talk and have this interview because of Technology but at the same time if all of your relationships are online and all your relationships are mediated via computers then you're missing on a big part of what it means to be human and human content look when when you and I were in our 20s and what do we want we wanted love and you would see somebody who you found really attractive and you'd go talk to that person you know a lot of my students will say if you do that in a restaurant or a bar they're going to think you're some sort of a weirdo tell me what I can tell my kids and students that that they can do so that they can meet somebody in person what's the solution do you give up social media yeah that's one step I mean there's so much research about the damage that social media can do to you so in one of the studies that we did we asked people to look at pictures of potential mates and they either looked at 10 pictures or 100 pictures with a text underneath or without it and you know the the more tinder-like environment where they had 100 pictures and without text cause them to look more in a kind of one-dimensional objectifying mode so you're losing a lot you know opportunities to meet someone else who is amazing just because you using this technology so some of our other studies are about doing these novel activities you know together right so you know like skydiving or you know I just recently started doing some Triathlon so I get to meet a bunch of amazing people yeah and do you think that we all love to do and this is what I tell my my kids to do right it's you know just try to to kind of go back to basic be out there in the real world enjoy the sunshine do activities with friends you know find groups of people that you enjoy you know do some sports you know together so this is really interesting so the admonishment that we should get off social media young people should get out social media is different than how to meet people the key thing I think that you're telling us now is that go do a thing that somebody else is doing and in doing that third thing together that's a very Aristotelian piece of advice isn't it I mean he talked about perfect friendships come from a a love of a useless third thing you know I'll talk to young people who are traditionally religious for example and I'll say were you trying to meet somebody like I'm line and say well how about church how about your synagogue how about looking for a young person who actually shares that thing which is not useless by the way but which is a third love a third Aristotelian love so if that's what you're talking about get out there do more stuff find other people who have the same kind of interests as you and that's a lot less threatening than walking up to somebody in a bar at one o'clock in the morning going hey you want to have coffee which you know kind of creeps me out too [Music] okay back to Omri galat in a second but first a quick timeout I want to offer up a sort of a new framework to think about tech and dating apps and their role in facilitating romantic connections It's oddly a sort of business school approach to problem solving but hear me out there are two kinds of problems in life complicated problems and complex problems they sound like the same thing they aren't complicated problems in life are problems that are hard to solve but once you solve them you can replicate the solution over and over like making a toaster you can get one at Walmart for 20 bucks and it will be your toaster for the next 20 years it's unbelievable it's human genius that's a complicated problem well all the really interesting problems in life all the things we really care about are not about good toast they're about human love these are what we call complex problems a complex problem is like your relationship with your cat your cat is complex it wants kibble and a scratch and warmth and to go out from time to time but you never know what it's going to do and that's because you can't really simulate the cat so relationships fall into this category the category of complex problems and that's why relationships are so hard to figure out and that's why they're so interesting to us here's the problem with tech in a nutshell in my opinion we want cats but technology just gives us toasters again and again and again Tech tends to take complex problems like human love and treat it as if it were a complicated problem of trying to solve a bunch of math and it just doesn't work that way okay so let's say now that that somebody's had some success and is actually dating somebody fantastic right what's the goal in the first few years one of the things that I have found is a lot of people think you know they've seen a lot of Disney movies and they have sort of Destiny beliefs and and they believe in soul mates so what they want is the passion from the very beginning to continue till the very end and what actually the data say is that you should be pursuing companionate love over passionate love in other words best friends that's the goal as opposed to just the passion the white hot passion at the very beginning because the neurochemical Cascade of falling in love cannot be maintained you'd go insane and this gets us to really a huge area where you've been the major contributor in social psychology which is attachment Styles so tell me what's the goal when somebody is now paired up what kind of attachment should be the ambition that gives the greatest likelihood of a successful happy and enduring relationship right so you know often the beginning is around passion often people are very attracted to someone else right they don't look at you and say oh you have an amazing attachment cell I definitely want to use the father of my kids or something they see someone and they find him attractive or attractive and they want to hook up and they want to have sex and as you said these are the honeymoon kind of phase of the relationship but after that it's more about finding someone who can understand you who can support you I would say even if you drop the Romantic Club the goal is to feel secure it goes to feel loved and appreciated and and you know to know that you have someone in your corner that would be there no matter what there are some couples who staying very highly passionately in love you know madly in love forever right it can happen but for most of us passion and sex would go down and attachment and caregiving would go up this is what we've seen in many of the studies and that's kind of like just the normative way of relationships to evolve how however you know again with insecure people everything is a bit more difficult there are three Styles right there is secure style which the majority of people are then there are people who are avoidant who don't want to be committed don't want to be you know worried about other people depending on them getting too close and stuff like that and then there are anxious people these are people that are all the time worried about preoccupied about being rejected and Abandoned and people never love them as much as they love the you know the other people and so on so you know when you're insecure either avoiding or anxious everything is harder The best scenario that can happen is that you find someone who is secure is providing security and can help you shift over the lifespan to becoming more secure than you were at the beginning you make it sound simple but of course it isn't and I think one of the key points that you're making along the way here is that you got to do the work I mean you actually have to take the risk and do the work the idea of simplifying procedures on the basis of apps and tech make it easier than it actually really is and that's probably in and of itself doing a disservice because it says that finding the most important thing in your life is as simple as wiping right and it isn't like that at all and that actually isn't even helpful for the beginning relationship right right in relationships you know it involved always involved work and and you know people have this very strong sense of fomo right there is always something else that we might be fitting out maybe a better partner a more you know attractive partner or richer partner or a more sexy partner what have you right if you live your life with that sense you you always gonna chase the next big thing instead of being happy with what you have and actually enjoying it so this is tough advice that you're a tough prescription that you're giving young people today which is honesty vulnerability and authenticity I mean and so basically if you're in love with somebody you should say I'm in love with you if an earth which is authentic which is super vulnerable if you're love say your love and and take a risk be an entrepreneur in in your in the startup of your own love life is that what you're saying what what he said yes absolutely it I everything that you said is perfect in a way from the moment that we are born right if you think about it from a touching perspective and we have this unconditional love from a mother nothing is better than that we need that we need someone and often this someone is our romantic partner I used to have a English teacher back in high school who said you know it's better to fall in love and fail than to never fall in love and and I totally agree with it I think that you know you got to put yourself out there again and again and and the worst thing that people can do is hide behind again all these screens and then they find out that you know having this one dimensional uni-dimensional life is not fulfilling and is depressing and it's something that you gotta you gotta be aware of it's you got to be prepared to deal with the consequences make yourself vulnerable put yourself out there you know experience the real world firsthand and be be ready to put real work into it I get it I mean you don't like the selection of a life partner to be reduced to more or less the same technology as video gaming or shopping for socks on Amazon right like get it I get it and and you want to start off in a more profound way now of course I'd like to speak for everybody but I would suspect that most people would say no I don't I don't want to reduce you know love to shopping either but I got to meet somebody someplace and hope that it turns into love so do you I don't know the shopping analogy resonates because it dating apps really feel to me the same way when you go into the grocery store and you have one item you need to get like peanut butter and you're like okay I just gotta get in and get out that's what I want that's it's very clear to me that's the thing I need but as I'm shopping I get more and more distracted by all the options and I I come out of the store with everything else but the peanut butter yeah I mean the research is pretty clear that dating apps they do induce the Paradox of choice which means that you're you're very likely to imagine a future where you're regretful of a choice that you made so you keep shopping in the current moment and therefore never really landing on somebody and ruling out a lot of choices that might be really really good right on the other hand you wouldn't say the only way I'm going to get peanut butter is I'm going to spontaneously stumble across it and it's going to be the love of my life I mean right you got to find some way to get the peanut butter too [Music] thank you to our how-to listeners who make this show what it is we asked when was the last time you confessed romantic feelings for someone and here's what you said my husband of many years passed away unexpectedly almost four years ago now so I have found myself in the dating pool after about 20 years of being out of it in that time I have confessed my romantic feelings several times um actually just last week I had reconnected with somebody I dated shortly after my husband died and it wasn't a fit timing wise and then we reconnected again a couple months ago and so about a week and a half ago we had a conversation in which we said oh well maybe maybe things are getting a little too serious are we able to do the things we need to do after we agreed that it would be good for us to each take some space I felt so sad [Music] and as I investigated my sadness I realized that I had fallen in love with him and that I needed to tell him this and so I did I told him and he felt felt feels the same way my name is Sean and I live in British Columbia Canada what a wonderful example of how humans are different than machines I mean it takes risk it takes actual human interaction which is what Sean is talking about she had to interrogate her feelings about why she felt so sad there's no algorithm that's going to tell her that she had to muster up the courage to go tell the man that she's falling in love with him that's uniquely weirdly human we're cats not toasters Sean makes that point one last note I hope Sean and that man get together because Happiness Is Love [Music] that's all for this week's episode of how to build a happy life this episode was produced by me Rebecca Rasheed and hosted by Arthur Brooks editing by AC Valdez and claudina babe fact check by Anna Alvarado our engineer is Matthew Simonson

2022-10-23 21:26

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