How to Stop Dating the Wrong Person

Introduction

0:00This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach, built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights, and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google account, Google Health app, internet, and Google Health premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy.

Romantic Comedies

0:30Every romantic comedy ever made, practically, has the same premise. There's these two people who really like each other, but they're terrible for each other. They're not suitable for each other, but through a series of errors and misunderstandings, et cetera, et cetera, they suffer a lot, but then make it work, and they live happily ever after. I mean, that's kind of the whole premise. But that's actually a pretty dumb premise. Maybe you have found that you don't date the right person, that you date the wrong person, maybe over and over and over again. How come? What's going on? I'm all about complimentary.

1:01I love puzzle pieces that fit together in relationships. What I don't like are the ones where people are actually terrible for each other and trying to make something work that actually shouldn't work. What is today's episode?

Episode Topic

1:12The three reasons you might be dating the wrong person over and over again, and the seven ways to stop doing that. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, and I'm going to talk especially today about love, romantic love, and the problems in it. Now, this is a show that we run every single week about some of the biggest questions that people have ever asked me and how behavioral science and even some neuroscience

1:44can illuminate the answers to these questions. I hope you're finding it interesting and useful. For those of you who've been watching this show from the very beginning, thank you for staying with it. Thank you for sharing with other people. The whole idea is to lift other people up. I want to help equip you to become happiness professors, just like me, in your own way, in your own life, and sharing this show with other people is a good way to do that. So I appreciate that an awful lot. If you like the show, please do let us know what it is that you like, or if it's something you don't like, let us know that as well. We really like the feedback.

2:15It's really important to us. So do write in at officehours at arthurbrooks.com. That's the email for the show itself. And if you want more content like this, you can get it by subscribing to my newsletter. That's at my website, arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And if you actually want to go a little bit deeper, we're actually running a series of retreats, and you can find out about in-person events where you can be talking about these things with other people and indeed with me. So go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. As always, please like and subscribe

2:47and leave any comments that you've got any place that you're watching or listening to this show.

Meaning Problem

2:53You're not broken. You're meaning starved. I talk to people all the time who are by any external measure successful. They built careers. They have families. They've checked the boxes. And yet, something feels off. Life feels thin. Like you're going through the motions. Like you're watching yourself from the outside. And here's what I want you to know. That feeling is not a personal failing. It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you. It's a meaning problem.

3:25And it's an epidemic. The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning. And no amount of success will fix that. I've seen it in my research, and I've seen it in my own life. That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life. It's not a lecture. It's not a quick fix. It's several days of real work in a small group

3:55on the questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look. As I mentioned at the outset,

Falling in Love

4:07today's episode is about falling in love and staying in love. That is the number one topic when I teach my class. To my graduate students at the Harvard Business School, I have a unit, a module in the class called Falling in Love and Staying in Love. And quite frankly, they would keep me on that topic the whole semester. It's utterly baffling. It's very mysterious. Such a complex thing. Seems so hard and yet so unbelievably important for most people so they can live a happy life. And it seems like it's getting harder in modern life, which indeed it is. And I've talked about that in all the episodes that I did

4:38about the meaning of life and the overuse of technology. I talked about how it's just, it's a difficult thing. I'm not going to complain about technology today, about how the way that we disintermediate our relationships technologically, how bad that is for actually falling in love or making friends or anything. I've done that ad nauseum. I will do that in the future. Today, I want to talk about more eternal problems that people have. Some of the chronic issues that people have in finding the right person. Maybe you have found that you don't date the right person,

5:08that you date the wrong person. Maybe over and over and over again. How come? What's going on? Well, I'm going to give you some information that you can actually use. If I do my job, you're going to see yourself. You're going to be able to break out of patterns because I'm also going to give you a whole bunch of solutions.

Three Reasons

5:23What is today's episode? The three reasons you might be dating the wrong person over and over again and the seven ways to stop doing that. It's a very practical episode. So do feedback. Let me know how you think about this topic. And do you want me to talk about this more on the show? I really find this interesting. And part of the reason is because I want you to find love if you haven't found it yet so that you can live a happier life. I'm a big fan of relationships that really work. Now, let's begin with a little bit of data.

5:54According to the Pew Research Center, I quote their data all the time. This is really one of the very finest survey research sources that we have. When people are asked whether dating is hard, whether finding the right person is hard, people who are actively dating, 75% say, yeah, it's hard. 75% of people who are dating saying, this feels really hard. And most people say that dating is getting harder. Now, a lot of that is what I've talked about in the past, about the way that we misuse technology, how the complicated algorithms are not a substitute

6:26for the complex in-person relationships. One of the reasons that I'm working with some app makers to get people out on dates faster and staying less time in the apps themselves because you need the complex information, not just some sort of algorithm telling you who your perfect date actually is. That just doesn't work. But if you're the kind of person who finds that you haven't just dated the wrong person, but that you're dating the wrong person over and over again, this is really an episode for you. Now, what does it mean for dating to be difficult?

7:00One problem that people often talk about is that they go on a lot of dates, but there's not very much attraction. That's kind of level one trouble. Higher than that is that they are attracted, but they're attracted to the wrong person and it leads to a lot of heartache. At the highest level is they're attracted to the wrong person and they can't get off that track. It's kind of like that movie Groundhog Day where they keep going back and keep going back to somebody with the same kind of sets of traits and they're in one ruined relationship after another.

7:31Now, our culture doesn't help here. I mean, every romantic comedy ever made practically has the same premise. There's these two people who really like each other, but they're terrible for each other. They're not suitable for each other, but through a series of errors and misunderstandings, et cetera, et cetera, they suffer a lot, but then make it work and they live happily ever after. I mean, that's kind of the whole premise, but that's actually a pretty dumb premise. You know, the truth of the matter is that doesn't even have anything to do with real life. I've seen this over and over again.

8:01I've seen this because I've been in education for such a long time with young adults who want this. The truth is that, you know, you shouldn't look at movies and say, oh, that's so romantic. The people who are truly terrible for each other and somehow make it work, that that's just such a beautiful story. Why can't I do that? That's the wrong way to live your life because that's completely at variance with the way that things actually go. Attraction to the wrong kind of person, generally speaking, leads to sadness and frustration. Now, what am I not saying? I'm not talking about people who are attracted to each other, who are very different from each other.

8:33That's a different thing entirely. I mean, I, you know, when I was 24 years old, I met a girl who was a year older than me who had never been to the United States, didn't speak a single word of English. I didn't speak a single word of her language. And that was a lot of difference there. We now have four grandchildren and we made it work. But that wasn't because we were bad for each other. It just meant that we were really different from each other and had to figure out how we were really good for each other despite the differences. And the truth is, we were really good for each other. We were both single. There was no,

9:04there was nobody was being unfaithful to another partner there, which is a horrible way to start a relationship. Generally speaking, we had the same values. We wanted the same long-term things. We wanted to be in a permanent relationship and love. We both at some point thought we wanted to get married. I knew that better than she did. I mean, she's from Barcelona and they're very modern people. That's actually took a little bit of convincing on my part. We were ready for a long-term relationship, you know, so we were compatible in all sorts of ways. We were just really different. So I'm not talking about difference.

9:36And if you follow my work, you know that I'm all about complementarity. I love puzzle pieces that fit together in relationships because that kind of complementarity is the essence of what good relationships are. What I don't like are the ones where people are actually terrible for each other and trying to make something work that actually shouldn't work. Now, to be sure, if you date at all, you're going to make a mistake. I mean, not everybody, but almost everybody does make mistakes. And that's important because that's how you learn and grow. It's the same advice I give to people

10:06who are trying to start businesses. Look, it's not always going to work. On average, an entrepreneur has 3.8 failures before her or his first success. You learn and grow, actually, from your mistakes, to be sure. The problem with entrepreneurship is when somebody keeps making the same stupid errors over and over and over and over again. You've got to break them out of that cycle. And it's the same thing with the entrepreneurship of romantic relationships. That's the ultimate startup is how it works. And so you've got to make sure that you're actually learning and growing and not making the same mistake over and over again. Hence, the topic of today's conversation.

10:39Many, many people tell me that they feel like they're just attracted to the wrong type of person. And it turns out they probably are. There's a bunch of social science on this. And this is not an exhaustive list, but I'm going to give you the three big ways that people tend to be attracted to the wrong kind of person, which becomes a pathology, actually. And then I'm going to give you the seven ways to break out of that. So the seven ways are good even if you don't fall into one of these categories because there's going to be seven good pieces of advice for finding your soulmate.

11:10But these big three, you might really see yourself or some variant along these lines. And this is a ton of research behind it. As usual, I'm going to drop a lot of academic papers into the notes, which you can look at or not. Okay. Number one, the first big problem that people have is that they find themselves attracted over and over again to people who are already restricted. Now, what do I mean by restricted? That's just social science talk for they're already in a relationship. Some people find that they're most attracted to people who are already

11:40mated, not necessarily married, but dating somebody else. That is a phenomenon that social scientists call mate choice copying. See, we can take all the life out of everything, can't we? Mate choice copying means that you find somebody who's already in a relationship inexplicably more attractive to somebody who's not in a relationship. There's a ton of really interesting experiments that actually look at this. There's one 2009 study. This is from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which is a great journal.

12:11The title is The Ability to Judge the Romantic Interest of Others. Good place to start. In that 2009 study, there was a group of single heterosexual undergraduate women and they were shown a picture and a description of a young man, a moderately attractive young man. They were told different stories about him. And so they gave his background and his interests, et cetera, et cetera. Those were all the same for everybody. But for half, they told the woman that he was already in a relationship. He was mated.

12:42And the other one, they told him he was single. Well, it turns out that the women found the ones who were already in a relationship, same guy, same picture, same life background, four times as attractive. So these undergraduate women said, oh, he's already in a relationship? Interesting. Now, you might say to yourself, why would these women, and by the way, it works the same way with men, why do they find people already in relationships so much more naturally attractive, all else held equal, which is what these experiments do? There's three basic reasons why people do this mate choice copying.

13:14Number one is just laziness. You know, somebody else is doing the work for you to make sure that that person is domesticable, that person is capable of carrying on a relationship. They're giving you the data that they're capable of doing so. And, you know, I mean, look, there's a lot of people out there, and most people watching me here have had experiences where somebody looks good and they're not because they're just not good to be around. Well, if somebody else says they are, maybe you should take that seriously. But that's laziness, isn't it? The second is envy.

13:45So, mate choice copying is kind of an envious thing. That person has a relationship. I want that relationship. I'm going to see, I mean, I would certainly like to swipe that person's mate. And envy is super common. I mean, we're evolved to envy each other because we're a hierarchical species. We know who's on top and who's below. And if somebody has got a relationship and we don't, that's something that we want. And so that envy leads us to want a little bit of a mate swiping, I guess you'd call it.

14:16And last but not least, it's just basic social comparison. I want something that other people have because that's related to the envy part, I suppose. That's a mark of status that somebody likes me. And so this is one of the reasons that, or these are reasons why we would engage in mate choice copying. Now, to begin with, that's a disaster because it usually ends poorly. And interestingly, even when it's successful, it'll end poorly down the line. Why? Because your relationship

14:46will generally end like it started if it was built on taking somebody else's mate. People who are unfaithful to somebody else will generally speaking be unfaithful to you is how that works. So infidelity is super high in relationships that started with infidelity. This is one of the reasons that mate choice copying is such a bad strategy for finding mates and you have to deal with this interest that you have in people who are already mated. You might say that's karma if you believe in karma. You know, you did that thing and that thing happens to you to be sure.

15:19But it's also just whether you believe in karma or not, unbelievably unethical. You know, trying to go after somebody who's already mated, that's double crossing somebody whether you know them or not. So it's a bad strategy from an ethical point of view it's also a bad strategy from just an odds perspective of success. And that's one of the reasons that people will often say the big problem that I have is I only like men or I only like women who are already in relationships and it always winds up becoming a disaster. That's why.

15:49So that's the first big pattern that we see. Are you a mate choice copier? Hold that thought. The second big pattern that we typically see in the data that comes up again and again and again in the psychology literature is people who are weirdly attracted to the people who are addicted or who abuse substances or have addictive behaviors. And a lot of that according to most of the people who do work in this, most of the social psychologists who do work in this is it has very much to do with somebody's childhood. That's the whole idea. Sort of the model

16:19of what it means to be an adult. There's one 2009 study for the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. This is a quote. I'll just give you this quote. And the reason I'm going to read this to you is because this is the most academic sentence I've ever read. This is the problem with academic writing. Non-alcoholic daughters of alcoholics were more than twice as likely to marry an alcoholic as non-alcoholic daughters of non-alcoholics.

16:46That's what it's like to read the academic literature. But you get the point among women in this study. If your father was an alcoholic, you're more than twice as likely to be attracted to alcoholics when it comes to parapod mating. What is a man, in your view? It's dad. What did dad do? He drank too much. That's the whole sort of psychology that's actually behind that. But of course, that's horrible. I mean, a lot of people think that they can solve their partner's addictive behavior. Most people, that's an exercise in futility to a very large extent.

17:17It's a bad idea to get into a relationship with somebody who's compulsively using, craving, hiding, escalating, experiencing withdrawal. And here's a reason for that. I've done a lot of work in this area. An addiction is a relationship. And I got news for you. It's the most important relationship to an addict. If you have somebody who drinks alcoholically, the booze is number one. You're not number one. And trust me, you're going to figure that out real fast because you'll be betrayed for the alcohol, the drugs, the gambling,

17:48whatever it happens to be. It's like a love relationship. There's a very famous book by a writer named Carolyn Knapp, K-N-A-P-P, called Drinking, A Love Story. It's a great book. It's a memoir of her struggles with alcohol where it really felt like a love relationship because that's how addiction actually feels. The result of it is that if you're attracted to an addictive person, you're basically make-choice copying, but just with substances. That's a big problem. That's something you actually have to fix.

18:18Now, not just because it's usually a doomed relationship, but because a partner's uncontrolled abuse of substances, that leads almost inevitably to psychological, physical, and social trauma. And the rate of divorce is way, way, way higher. Now, interestingly, I've seen data that show that men are more likely to divorce alcoholic wives as opposed to wives divorcing alcoholic husbands. Women tend to hang around it a lot longer, and they sustain a lot more psychological trauma

18:48as a result of it. Men are women. You're not going to like it. If you're attracted to somebody who's an addict, again and again and again and again, you need to fix that. So stay tuned. Okay, number three. The third big pattern that shows up in the literature is that you're attracted to somebody with a dangerous personality, with an antisocial personality. And you think to yourself, well, that's not possible. Why would I be attracted to bad people? Because people are attracted to bad people, and I'm going to explain

19:19exactly why. Now, if you've been following this show, you know where I'm going with this. I'm going toward the dark triad right now. I'm going to explain that here in a second. This is your first episode that you're watching. I'm going to explain what a dark triad is. But suffice it to say that long-term watchers of this show know that I talk an awful lot about people who have personality characteristics that are highly antisocial. Being attracted to somebody who's really quirky can be fine, can be okay, right? But the more neurotic somebody actually is, the more likely it is that the relationship is going to end in tears. And the more that the person

19:49that you're attracted to actually has an antisocial personality, the more dangerous it actually gets. If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element. LMNT. Probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work.

20:19Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed. It's made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats. So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at Drink Element. That's drink, just like it sounds, LMNT.com slash Arthur.

20:52Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. Okay, now, I'm going to put a link right here to my episode on dark triads. When you're done with this one, go watch that one if you're interested in this topic. A dark triad is a personality constellation that's present in 7% of the population according to Scott Barry Kaufman, the Columbia psychologist who does the best work on this subject. They're above average, the population average, in three different personality characteristics. Narcissism, it's all about me.

21:23Machiavellian, I'm willing to hurt you to get what I want. And psychopathy, psychopathic traits, which is to say, I will hurt you and not feel any remorse or any empathy or very little of that. Okay, so just to be above average on those three traits puts you in 7% of the population and this is really bad for relationships when you're with one of these people. By the way, these make horrible friends because they tend to betray you. These make horrible colleagues. They take credit for your work. They make the worst bosses because they'll just mistreat you.

21:55But above anything else is how terrible it is to be in a romantic relationship with dark triads. They cheat. They steal. They'll empty your bank account. They'll break your heart. They're overwhelmingly disloyal to you. They will betray you. They will cheat on you. That's what dark triads do. And yet, some people find that they're irresistibly attractive. Now, I know some of you are watching this going, wow, well, that's me. I keep getting attracted to jerks. Maybe it's not just a jerk.

22:27Maybe it's something beyond that. Let me explain why some people would find romantically irresistible somebody with these personality pathologies. And if you don't have this, good for you. Maybe you're shaking your head going, how is it possible? Boy, is it ever possible because we see it again and again and again. Dark triads in dating markets are very good at getting you to fall in love even though they're not falling in love. So, you've seen my work on this perhaps, but there's a neurochemical cascade that happens in your brain

22:57when you're falling in love. You're going through a series of changes neurochemically that's bonding you to the other person. Dark triads are very good at looking like they're going through this cascade while you're really going through this cascade. Their whole objective, a dark triad, narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic, it's all about me, I get what I want. They want to use you. They're not interested in learning more about you to see if they're falling in love. That's the normal thing to do for healthy people. They just want you to fall in love so they can get what they want,

23:28which is maybe getting you into bed, getting into your bank account. It's something that they actually want from you, which is not a lifelong relationship. Here's where it gets really toxic and here's where we actually see this happen again and again and again. Dark triads in the dating market are often matched up again and again with people, especially women, because this is where most of the research has been done. We don't know as much about this among men. Women who have a syndrome that's often referred to as hemophilia. That's E-M-O-P-H-I-L-I-A.

24:01So not hemophilia. It's not a blood disorder. It's hemophilia, which is the tendency to fall in love very quickly, sort of pathologically quickly. Now, is that you? There are lots of people watching me right now. It's like, yeah, I fall in love really fast. Sometimes I feel like I fall in love after an hour or after two dates. You see this a lot. There is this. And again, it's not your fault. I mean, this is just something that some part of the population tends to do. Almost certainly, that means they go through this neurochemical cascade of falling in love extremely quickly.

24:32They scream through the process. That's much faster than ordinary people. And it can be hard on you if that's you under the best of circumstances. Here's the problem. You will be attracted to and you will attract dark triads if you're hemophilic. Why? Because they can spot you a mile away. They're very good at spotting people who fall in love really, really quickly. And then these are the ones who will glom on to you and say, oh, it's like you'll confess, I feel like I'm falling in love after one date.

25:02And they'll say, me too. Because you're bait. It's irresistible because you're the kind of person that can take the greatest advantage of. There's a lot on this. I'm going to throw a few articles into the notes about this combination, both dark triads and the dating market, but the combination with dark triads and hemophilics where the dark triad is going after short-term mating and the hemophilic actually wants a long-term relationship, et cetera, et cetera. But suffice it to say that it's a complete disaster because it almost never works. The hemophilia is,

25:32which sounds really romantic, it's not good. Under the best of circumstances, it generally speaking means that people will jump into relationships. These are Vegas weddings, right? And it leads to very indiscriminate romantic bonds that look like true love at the very beginning and turns out that are not. Multiple engagements, lots and lots of marriages. And when they involve the dark triad coming on the scene, which hemophilics, once again, find irresistible. Why? Because they can make themselves out to look like fellow hemophilics.

26:02Like, oh, I found my soulmate. We both fell in love in two hours. No, you just, you just attracted the associate to death. And so, a lot of people who date the, you know, antisocial personalities again and again