E109: The Emotional Domain of Risks

Katie: So welcome back to our 7 Domains of Risk. In the physical domain of risk, we talked about how pregnancy might be the riskiest thing that women do physically, emotionally, financially, really in every domain. It's been that way throughout history and remains so today.

But in this episode, in the emotional domain of risk, we're going to talk about the thing that's kind of upstream of getting pregnant, which is getting into a relationship in the first place.

Here's where I want to start, because it turns out right now, more and more people are not getting into relationships, or at least not in the traditional sense. Right now, 30% of American households are just one-person households, and that is a record high and a real demographic shift. It's really the first time in recorded history that large numbers of people worldwide are living alone.

In 1940, solitaries, that's the actual sociological term, made up 8% of households. So it's a big jump and something that's worth kind of paying attention to.

And that's happening at the same time that the U.S. Surgeon General has declared a loneliness epidemic. In 2023, about a third of American adults reported feeling lonely at least once a week. And the health stakes for being lonely are not trivial. Chronic social isolation carries mortality risks that researchers are comparing to smoking half a pack a day.

This is also important, that living alone and feeling lonely are not necessarily the same thing. Plenty of people live alone quite happily. I'm one of them. And plenty of people who feel desperately lonely are in relationships, and I've been there too.

So the question is, if we have evolved as a species to need intimate connection, that that's what keeps us healthy, why are so many of us opting out or struggling to get in? I think part of the answer is that getting into a relationship is genuinely emotionally risky. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about why.

I'm Katie Ward. I'm a professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Utah. I'm a practicing women's health nurse practitioner, and I just finished a PhD in biological anthropology, which is in part thanks to the two people I get to talk to today. One is our guest, Lisa Diamond, and the other is my co-host, Dr. Kirtly Jones from obstetrics and gynecology. Hi, Kirtly.

Kirtly: Hi. Well, I'm just recently a solitary. Being alone for the first time in my adult life feels simple. I can't say I'm lonely, but it just feels simple, and maybe that's kind of good. But I have friends and family who've been solitary for years, and they have close physical ties, not just electronic ones, with friends that make their life look full, at least from the outside.

I think with changes that come with living into your last third of life, you build a new tapestry, medieval tapestries filled with people close and people far and musical instruments and books and a dog or two and a deer out there in the trees. How do you add people to your tapestry as you get old? I mean, not just older, but get old. And what are the risks of adding someone close? And how do you reweave a tapestry to remove someone who was close who's gone? Or maybe you don't. They're just there still. Anyway, it's complicated.

Katie: Yeah, it sure is. I want to tell you guys about a book I just read that just came out, and I know you probably haven't read it, so this is not going to be a book group, but it was a fascinating read called "The Intimate Animal." It's by Justin Garcia, who's the director of The Kinsey Institute, and he's also the scientific advisor to Match, the dating company. So he has some insight into how people behave when they're looking for relationships.

And a lot of these dating companies now are actually . . . their platforms are for finding friends too, not just somebody to get in a romance with. So if this sparks any interest, I'd recommend the book.

But he's an evolutionary biologist, which is kind of what I call myself also, because he talks about this in terms of courtship and mating and pair bonding, which connects with how I think about relationships as a scientist, which is kind of not romantic at all, I guess.

But one of the things that he brought up that I thought was super interesting, and it was a framework I hadn't thought of, was that there were these two big shifts in how we form relationships.

The first one was 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution, and we started living in bigger groups at that time and kind of trading. The marital relationship was a bit more about a property trade or building a coalition between families.

And now the digital revolution, which is where we live alone but communicate with potentially the entire world via computer, but we still have this Paleolithic brain, which was wired for what he calls social intimacy.

He kind of put this idea forward that I thought was really interesting, which was that we have an imperative for social monogamy that is as fundamental as food or shelter.

And social monogamy usually involves the person we're sexually involved with. But in terms of our sexual behavior, there's a pull towards novelty, which isn't necessarily in sync with our intimate needs.

Now, he's not advocating affairs, but just sort of explaining why we have this kind of complicated relationship with a need for one person that's our other person. At the same time, we have a need for some novelty out there.

Esther Perel, who's another person I admire, kind of talks about this, that we currently want one person to provide what a whole village used to.

So those are some of the threads I was kind of thinking about today as we were preparing for this episode.

But in order to get that intimacy, the love, and even the sex that matters to you, you've got to meet somebody. And that is the thing that feels hard today. I'm certainly feeling it. And I think, Kirtly, you were kind of alluding to that. How do you build those new relationships? Potentially, I have the entire world at my fingertips through my computer. But in spite of that, it feels harder and harder to connect.

Our brains evolved to fall in love with someone we knew, probably somebody we grew up with, maybe somebody our parents or kin picked for us. And so in this world where there are all these profiles to choose from, but we don't have the chemical signals of, "Do I like how this person smells or how their body moves in the world?" or, "Can I hear their laugh?" we can't tap into those things that might have connected us before.

The challenge we face is the idea that there's just something slightly better if we keep swiping. I find the work of looking to be just almost too hard and unrewarding, and I've kind of given up on the whole idea.

Kirtly: Oh, no. Well, gosh, Katie, that sounds so discouraging, but swiping is just . . . First of all, they want you to keep swiping. So I don't think they really want you to bond. They want you to keep swiping.

And this business about seeing someone across a crowded room, that one person you just catch their gaze, I don't think swiping is equivalent to catching someone's gaze.

I think pair bonding later in life for women is just as complicated as in younger years, but in a different way. There's less of the physical drive to bond that's part of adolescence, a drive for sex, although it's still there, and the emotional roller coaster of bonding that happens in adolescence.

I know that it still happens in movies and books. Did you see "Book Club"? These older women, all in their 60s and 70s?

Katie: Diane Keaton.

Kirtly: Yeah. They're all getting on it again after not having used any of their body parts for a while. There's a lot of discussion in that movie, and we will . . .

Katie: Go back to the menopause conversation.

Kirtly: Yeah, right. So I've seen women who are divorced and widowed in midlife after a life married to a man and raising children who pair up with other women as their choice. So pairing up again in midlife has the emotional and social risks, like, "What will the kids think? And what will my friends think?" But sometimes making the move from solitary to paired may have significant financial gains for seniors as housing and food and transportation is shared. So the emotional mathematics of risk are different in the pair bonding issues for folks who do this later in life, I think.

Katie: All right. Well, I want to bring in our guest now. Lisa Diamond is a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, and she is one of the world's foremost researchers on sexual fluidity, which is what you were just bringing up, Kirtly, and sexual orientation and the development of intimate bonds.

Her book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire," changed how researchers and clinicians think about sexual orientation. It challenges assumptions that sexuality is fixed, binary, and primarily about who you're attracted to sexually. And it showed that for many women, especially, love and desire are far more contextual, relational, and changeable over a lifetime than we've ever acknowledged.

Lisa, you taught a class that my daughter took 10 years ago, and she actually still talks about things that she learned in that class you taught about love. So all the way around, I thought you were the person to talk to today about this. So welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Lisa: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

Kirtly: Well, Lisa, I think young people that I talk to, and I'm talking about 20- to 30-year-olds, I'm impressed at how comfortable they are, maybe thanks to your work, with sexual fluidity. People in my generation thought that you might never even think about having a sexual relationship with a person of the same gender. You would never talk about it. You were uncomfortable about it, even though it certainly happened. And now young people are very easy with this.

Of course, what they call polyamory, we used to just call sleeping around. And so in our days, sleeping around meant all kinds of bad things. Now, polyamory is almost cool. So thanks for the work you've done to shine a light on what we've always been doing, but now kids are good to talk about it.

Lisa: Yeah, it really is interesting. Sometimes I'll talk to students, and they seem amazed that this was ever controversial. Sexuality is fluid. And I'll say, "No, you don't understand. People didn't believe me."

And so I think a part of the shift has been that, again, the internet and social media and all these digital things have made it easier for people to hear one another's stories and to hear stories that are different from the very rigid essentialist stories of sexual orientation that certainly predominated when I was in graduate school.

Some of the women that I interviewed for my book back in the mid-'90s, when they would describe their own sort of fluid experiences of desire, they would say, "I think I'm not a very good example of a lesbian, so it's okay if you want to take me out of your study. I don't want to mess it up."

And the only reason they thought they were atypical was because there was no easy access to a diversity of stories of sexual life course changes. If you wanted to learn about queer people or people having the same gender attractions, you had to go to a library. You had to wait for an article to be published in a magazine. Remember magazines?

Kirtly: Oh, and wrap it in brown paper so nobody would know that you were taking that book out.

Lisa: Exactly. And so there was a lot of gatekeeping of just the diversity of human experience. And the doors have been blown off. One of the things that smartphones and social media . . . and I think they're also terrible in a lot of ways, but what they have made it possible for individuals to do is to hear just how many different life paths, sexual and relational life paths, are out there because people are just talking about them. And it normalizes a lot of the variability that back in the '90s people thought was strange.

The only reason they thought it was strange was because there were so many steps that interceded between someone's lived experience and that getting out into the media or in a book or a magazine or something where someone else could read it and say, "Oh, I didn't know that that was a way you could be."

Now it's all out there, and so I think that's partly why the youngest generation says, "Well, of course things are complicated. I see that all the time on my feed."

One of the real benefits of smartphones and online everything is that it's made it so much easier for individuals to hear the diversity of experiences that actually exist in the world. 

Katie: But in spite of that, that maybe we have more knowledge that we're normal or that there are others like us, the risk that you take of moving from the safety of your phone to taking that out in person still, and I hear this a lot, feels very vulnerable.

Do you have any ideas for how we tap back into that evolutionary instinct that we have to find connection?

Lisa: I totally sympathize. I think it's a great question, and I honestly do not know. We are creating new problems for ourselves. The online dating apps make it possible for you to be sexually and romantically rejected not just by one person in a given day, but hundreds of people a day.

Kirtly: Oh my goodness.

Lisa: And so the experience of rejection when you are on one of those apps and trying to find someone and knowing that you are just being swiped over and passed over by hundreds and hundreds of individuals, that is an experience that is evolutionarily novel. It was impossible to experience that in the past.

The other thing about our wiring is that, because we are a social species and because we were never able to live alone, our sensitivity to social rejection is exquisite. It is intense. 

There's a reason it feels like death to be shamed or rejected, because in the ancestral period, it was. There was nothing worse than to be pushed out of the group. We've still got that.

And so we have these exquisitely rejection-sensitive brains. And then you have this technology that allows us to experience that pain of rejection at a rate and speed that is historically unprecedented and that our brains were never designed for. No wonder people go a little bit crazy.

Kirtly: This is making me sad and scared just listening to it. I mean, having never done this, it's like, "Oh, god."

Katie: When I said it's too much, it's that exactly. I do not need to get online and feel that bad about myself.

Lisa: These apps, they're making money off of you being on them. And they are exploiting some peculiarities of the evolved human social architecture, some of which is the preference for novelty. Every swipe is a little dopamine hit. Maybe the next one, maybe the next one, maybe the next one.

And again, in the analog world that we evolved in, you didn't have that many people to choose from. You were limited to the people in your group. You couldn't get a dopamine hit through novelty seeking. That was limited. It was just limited.

Our brains evolved to do different things, and we kind of smushed them all together. We have our very rejection-sensitive brains, which now have the opportunity to get more rejection than we've ever had ever. We are really responsive to cues of reciprocal liking. Cindy Hazan has done some of this work. There's nothing that humans like more than someone who appears to like us.

Kirtly: Well, I get "Harvard Magazine" just because my husband was a Harvard graduate. And at the end, there's the personals. These are always geared for alumni that are probably somewhere between 50 and 90. And so they're older folks, but it's, "Thin, beautiful, white, highly educated, slender blonde woman looking for," what they're looking for. And the men are often looking for someone who's younger. The women are looking for adventures. "I like piña coladas and walks on the beach," all that kind of stuff. And people are putting it out there. At least in the magazine that comes, it's in written form.

But it's so threatening because the people are presenting themselves to be gorgeous and thin and fit and strong and wealthy and travel the world and looking for someone to share this with them.

And so it's not just young people who are looking. And the consequences for women particularly, they feel like men who might be their own age, 60 or 70, are looking for somebody who's . . .

Lisa: They're not interested in women our age.

Kirtly: No, I'm afraid not.

Lisa: Every woman my age who's in the heterosexual market . . . Other women don't do this to women. If you look at queer women looking for women, they tend to look for people of a broad age range. They're not averse to people their own age or older. Let's be clear who is at fault. It's men, and not just het men. Gay men also prefer younger men. So this drive for youth and beauty is still a male phenomenon.

The data that now some of these . . . and I show some of this data in my class. The degree to which men, even in their 60s and 70s, who do they prefer? Who do they click on and swipe on and message? Women as young as 20, regardless of how old they are.

Katie: I heard it was half your age plus seven.

Kirtly: Yeah. So having said all that, all that gloom and doom stuff, Lisa, it feels awfully risky . . . I mean, I'm not interested in this process at this point, but it feels awfully risky. But understanding the risk, where are these currently socially available mediums where people can actually make those first steps without risk?

I would say the classroom, when people used to hang out in the classroom or hang out in the library, or maybe in a church, or . . . Where are the opportunities now?

Lisa: I have kind of utterly changed my perspective on a lot of these things. And it is partly due to the fact that I am recently divorced. I got divorced a little over a year ago.

Kirtly: So all three of us are solitaries.

Katie: We are.

Kirtly: We're all solitaries over different times for different reasons.

Lisa: And I was partnered for 30 years. I spent all of my adulthood partnered. And my ex-wife and I, when we had friends that were unpartnered, we would always be like, "Oh, you need to find someone."

What I am very aware of now is that these old systems of attachment and bonding . . . Remember, they did not evolve for romantic attachment. They evolved for infant-caregiver attachment. Adult romantic attachment is just an exaptation of the infant-caregiver attachment system. It's exactly the same wiring. It's exactly the same processes.

Kirtly: Neurohormones are the same too. Oxytocin, dopamine.

Lisa: All that stuff. Proximity seeking, safe havens, secure base, separation distress. Sexual orientation does not orient romantic love. We can bond with anyone. Our bonding architecture is not gendered. It couldn't be. I mean, infants don't prefer same gender or other gender . . .

Katie: Caregivers.

Lisa: And if you look at the way we evolved with alloparenting, we have always had the capacity for multiple attachments. We tend to be monotropic, we tend to prefer one above the others, but we have always . . . Part of our architecture is to be able to bond with more than one, to be able to attach strongly to more than one caregiver. That is true for romantic attachment as well.

And here's the other thing. We attach to friends. We attach platonically, and those platonic attachments can be incredibly strong and intense. And if you look at the historical and anthropological literature, in cultures around the globe and throughout history, different cultures have acknowledged and honored non-sexual bonds, lifelong friends.

If you talk to some men who served in the military, they will say that some of those bonds are stronger than their marital ties. You think about who you trust. Who would you call first when something major happens? So we have always had the capacity to get our attachment needs met by more than one person and by a person that you're not sexually involved with.

And if you look again at the way marriage has changed over the centuries, many cultures did not consider the marital bond to be an emotionally gratifying bond. It was practical. It was reproductive. Sex outside that bond was so normative that at least in the colonial period, it was really common for people to write the infidelity partners into the will.

And so it is only relatively recently in the course of human history that we decided that the person that you're having sex with and making children with should be your primary emotional attachment, your only emotional attachment, and that it should last until you die. None of that is consistent with our evolved architecture.

I have just personally realized since my divorce that I have these incredibly fantastic attachments to my closest circle of friends, and they're not even all friends with each other. I have attachments that serve different attachment needs, and they are actually healthier than putting all your eggs in one basket.

Humans bond. That's what we do. And your bonds with friends in many ways are the most trustworthy bonds you will ever have. And yet we have a culture that puts friendship down. We say, "Just friends." Just think about what is communicated by that. "We're just friends." Well, my "just friends" literally are the reason that I'm okay. I think without that, I don't know how I would've gotten through such a huge rupture in my life.

Don't focus on finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a partner. Focus on building a diverse and interesting and nurturing friendship network. And if you do a good job doing that, then what will happen will be you'll probably meet someone through your friends. It might be one of them. It might be a friend of a friend. But if you put your energy into friendship, and if you do that long enough, that's going to be a better way to meet someone that you might want to have more with. So don't look for a partner, look for friends.

Kirtly: Lisa, I think that's brilliant. That's exactly right. With many people now working from home, that ability to make eye contact with someone and become a friend with someone, it's work that you have to do.

Lisa: And we're in a friendship recession. There's a lot of data showing that we have fewer friends. We spend less time with them. I think some of that started during the pandemic because I think the pandemic encouraged a lot of folks to cocoon with their intimates.

So they had lots of time with their closest partners, and what we lost was sort of that middle ring. Not your closest intimates, but that kind of circle that's one step removed. I think we treated those relationships as expendable and ancillary. They are none of that. They are essential.

It does take work to maintain an in-person relationship, and we've all gotten a little bit out of the habit. We're so used to the convenience of online meetings and online connections, but there is something different about in-person ties.

We're going to have to get used to the fact that inconvenience is okay. People want to avoid it. They want to avoid putting themselves out. "Oh, I don't want to have to go to this event. I don't want to go to this thing." And I feel that way too, but now I actively push against that tendency to retreat because it is important. It's part of our humanness to bump up against people other than the people that we're living with and the people who are closest to us. 

Katie: Yeah. That has been one of my mantras for a while now, is to say yes. When somebody invites me to do something, I say yes. And it's a little bit of friction because in my head, it's easy to say, "I really just want to watch TV. I don't want to do my hair and put on my . . ." But I have just had to say, "This is my mantra. I'm going to take that risk. I'm going to go out and I'm going to say yes."

Kirtly: But again, Lisa, when you mentioned that people like to be liked, there's something precious when someone reaches out to you and says, "I'm looking forward to meeting you or seeing you again. Can we go for coffee?"

I realized that when I do that for someone, they know that they're special to me, and for that little bit . . . Hopefully, they'll meet with me for coffee or for lunch or for a walk, but I want to reach out and make my friends feel like they're loved. And I'm not as good at that as I should be.

Lisa: Periodically in the evenings, I'll just scroll through my texts, because if I just scroll through, it's the people I generally know, people who text me, who don't just email me. And that gives me a chance to sort of say, "Oh my gosh, I haven't checked in on that person in a while." And so I make it a part of my routine to remind myself, "Who are the people in that middle circle? I want them to know that I'm still here."

I really do think it makes a difference for all of us to feel that we're not moving through the world unseen, that the people that we are connected to are aware of us, that they're holding us in the back of their mind.

And I think that is part of our evolved architecture as well. Because of humans' vulnerability and because we attach so strongly, we want to feel a sort of circle of connection and care around us, that there are people other than the ones we're living with or married to in our family who are extending to us that sense of connection and care. That is a part of our evolved legacy as well. It's the lack of that that often makes people feel lonely.

You can live alone. There are nights that I'm all alone in my new apartment, but I'm having multiple kind of text chains with some of the people I know. I don't feel lonely at all because I feel that living, breathing connectedness. I feel the threads of connection between me and the people that I know and care about and work with.

If you want to feel that, you have to invest in it and decide, "I'm going to take the initiative. I'm going to build a relationship with that person." All it takes is spending more time with them. Your social brain will do the rest.

Katie: I am going to throw out the 7 Domains of Risk challenge to everybody that's listening and say call up an old friend, someone that you think might not remember you. Call them up and say, "Hey, do you remember me? I was just thinking about you. Tell me what you're doing."

Kirtly: And it's much less risky than hunting for an intimate partner. Going back to reconnect is not a big risk, and it has huge benefits. As you've just said, Dr. Diamond, make your social network bigger, and then all kinds of things can come.

Katie: Lisa, thank you so much for sharing your work and your time and your expertise with us. It's really fun to get to chat with you.

Lisa: Oh, you too, always.

Katie: So you can find the "7 Domains of Women's Health" wherever you get your podcasts, or at womens7.com. And if you're listening to this and this sparked an idea, reach out to a friend. Take a risk. You'll be better for it.