558 - This Is Your Brain on (Jealousy) Drugs

A throwback to jealousy

Today we're bringing back a remastered episode from way back in the day. We're going to be revisiting our first episode about jealousy, diving into the science behind it, why we feel it in certain situations, what's happening inside our bodies, and some tips on how to manage struggling with jealousy. This episode originally aired in 2019 when we were still offering bonus episodes to Patreon supporters, so we have included the content from that bonus episode in today’s remastered version.

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Emily: Hello, everyone. It is Emily coming at you from the other side of the world in Hong Kong. And today I am bringing you a remastered version of episode 215, which was the Science of Jealousy. This episode came out in April of 2019, so pre-pandemic. It's always really fun and often a little terrifying to go back to these episodes and listen to them, especially when they happened five years ago now. It's really interesting to see who we were then and try to look at how some of our viewpoints have changed and what things we are still aligned with today. I really wanted to give everyone the opportunity to listen to this episode again, because it's on something that's pretty synonymous with non-monogamy discourse, and that, of course, is jealousy. The episode really gets into the nitty gritty of a lot of the research and studies that have been done on jealousy. And we discuss some really interesting hypothetical questions that some of the studies posed to their respondents. I actually had a fantastic conversation with my partner on some of these hypothetical questions. And so for you all out there, after you listen to the episode, maybe find someone to discuss some of them with. And you never know, the answers might surprise you. The answers that my partner gave me definitely surprised me. And it was just a really fun conversation to have with them after re-listening to this episode. So we hope you enjoy.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about the science of jealousy. Jealousy comes up in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of relationships, but in this episode, we're actually going to be looking at some research out there and kind of what's actually going on under the hood of your human vehicle.

Dedeker: Emotional car.

Jase: Yes.

Emily: Your emotional car.

Dedeker: If you had an emotional car, what would it be?

Jase: Like a DeLorean or something.

Dedeker: Really? Wow.

Jase: Looks really cool, but just breaks down all the time.

Emily: Come on. You are such a cancer.

Dedeker: Oh my goodness. Okay, I'm sold so quickly.

Emily: Such a cancer. Wow. You really are a cancer. What would mine be? I always want to say a Ferrari, but that's some bullshit. So I don't know, like a Mini Cooper or a Beetle.

Dedeker: Yeah, I was going to say you definitely could see you as a Beetle.

Emily: I mean, I've had two in my life, so that makes sense. I do love that car.

Dedeker: What would I be?

Emily: I feel like something really hippie, like maybe, I don't know, maybe the classiest Subaru around.

Dedeker: Okay, I could see a Subaru.

Jase: Okay.

Dedeker: I feel like I'm not quite Jeep. I'm not quite full-on rugged open-air Jeep, but I do feel like my emotions could be like a, I don't know, was it a Forerunner or a Jeep?

Emily: Toyota. Toyota.

Dedeker: Why do you know that?

Emily: I'm very, I know quite a lot of car things. I like cars.

Dedeker: With my emotions, if there's problems, I just keep on truckin' until the car suddenly breaks down, but it's not going to give you any kind of indication. It's real tough.

Emily: It could be like a Grand Cherokee. Jeep Grand Cherokee, yeah.

Dedeker: Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jase: Now I'm just thinking about different metaphors for different cars. If your emotional car is a BMW, where it runs really great, works great, but when it breaks down, it's very expensive to fix, because you need very specialized parts for it.

Emily: Yeah. There you go.

Jase: Or if your emotional car is a Honda Accord, it runs great, it's really cheap to maintain, but it's also very popular to steal, because parts are so sellable.

Emily: But what is that like?

Dedeker: Is that like people, like, really easy for people to manipulate you emotionally?

Jase: Maybe, yeah. Because your emotions are so predictable. And the parts that make them up are so widespread people can more easily manipulate. I don't know. I'm just trying to come up with car metaphors.

Emily: Please, out there, you all let us know what your emotional car is. I'm really interested to hear your discussion.

Dedeker: We'd love to know that. To bring us back to the episode, jealousy. It's been a minute since we've actually directly addressed a full episode about jealousy. Personally, I don't know what the two of you think about this, but I feel like we've avoided specifically talking about jealousy for a while now because for me, it's always the low hanging fruit of anyone who identifies as non-monogamous. That's always the question. What do you do if you get jealous? What if you get jealous? How do you avoid jealousy? And it's very important questions, very important conversations to have. But in my personal life, I'm just sick of talking about this. So what I tend to try to bring to the show is let's talk about anything but this topic specifically.

Emily: I mean, our Deconstructing Jealousy episode was after we did that talk at Berkeley. It was basically centered around what we talked about there. And I think a lot of people really liked it and said that it was a great episode for them. So, I guess we kind of were like, well, we're not gonna do anything else about it then for a while.

Dedeker: We're gonna quit while we're ahead.

Emily: Yeah, exactly. And like 100 episodes later, here we are again. It's pretty amazing. I feel like part of it, too.

Jase: Might be that it's not something that comes up for us very often, going, oh yeah, we haven't talked about that in a while because of how often it does come up.

Emily: That's true.

Jase: In conversations, like when

Emily: you're talking about- and in episodes.

Dedeker: Yeah, so that's true.

Emily: We talk about it a bit.

Jase: Yeah, that's true too. But I just mean anytime I'm interviewed somewhere to, oh, we're writing a thing about non-monogamy and we want to learn more about it. Those are always the questions. And so I guess it's never like, man, that's something I haven't talked about in a while. It's always kind of there, you know?

Emily: Yeah.

Dedeker: So when I initially set out to research this episode, I wanted it to be about the history of jealousy. The same way that we've examined or read books about or seen blog posts about the history of romantic love, for instance, or the history of the concept of soul mates. I really wanted to know the history of just culturally in literature, in movies, what is our collective cultural story around jealousy? And I really wanted to dive into that. But I ended up chasing this other rabbit of science. The rabbit of science. So that's where I ended up going. I do still want to do that deep dive. And definitely, if anyone has any resources out there, anything interesting they've come across specifically about the history of jealousy as a concept, I would definitely love to read it. So send it my way. But we're going to talk about science because at Multiamory, we love science. We do love science.

Emily: First we're going to talk about what goes on in your body when you feel jealous. This is something I really remember feeling when you and I started our polyamorous journey together. And I felt a really intense, jealous, anger feeling in my hands, which makes no sense at all.

Dedeker: Like you wanted to punch something?

Emily: No, it was like a tingling sensation all through my fingertips, too. And I used to feel a lot of emotions in my hands. Again, no idea why. I could also feel intense love in my hands and intense anger or various things. So your emotional car is hands, actually. There you go. Although I will say that's not something that I can point to anymore. I haven't recalled feeling that in quite some time.

Jase: Any kind of emotion in your hands?

Emily: Yeah, not the same kind of thing. I'll have to think about that.

Dedeker: But way back in the day, it was like jealousy lived in your hands, at least in that particular moment that you're recalling.

Emily: Correct.

Dedeker: Interesting. I think for me, when jealousy has struck me the most intense, it tends to be more stomach-based. It feels like my stomach's kind of dropped out and I definitely lose any appetite whatsoever. It is. It's a mix between feeling like I'm really nauseated or feeling like I just have no stomach. I think that's the thing that gets me.

Emily: You lack my stomach.

Dedeker: Yeah, when I think about times I've been really, really struck with jealousy.

Emily: Interesting.

Jase: Geez. For me, it's in my chest. For me, it's like there's a weight, like I can't take deep enough breaths. Or there's sort of a tightness there. And I think for me, that's also where stress will show up for me, is kind of in my breathing or in my chest. Yeah, that makes sense. Like as if there's a weight there or there's something just kind of constricting that part of my body so it can't move as well. So it is really interesting that we all feel it in different parts of our bodies, and I'm sure other people feel it in other ways as well. I get the stomach thing sometimes too. It's definitely all related, but I think the main one for me is the chest. So, essentially what's going on here is this is something that's known as the acute stress response. Also probably better known as fight or flight, or sometimes fight, flight, or freeze, since that is another option if you've ever seen a deer in headlights. Literally, that's the freeze version of the fight, flight, or freeze. So this is something that happens basically when we're presented with a threat, like a predator, or a car coming at us, or if we're agitated or were angry or were scared. And those feelings are very much related to jealousy, right? If you think about jealousy in terms of the fear of losing something or feeling like it's unfair that someone has something that you don't, in either case there's elements of being agitated or being angry or being scared or feeling threatened. And so it's bringing up those same responses physically.

Emily: Yeah, and other physical symptoms, the ones that we talked about obviously, but then in addition, things like your heart beating faster, maybe sweating, breath rate increases. You might get muscle tension, you might get sleepy in some cases, or shaky in other cases. You might have things like butterflies in your stomach or a sinking feeling in your stomach, and that can happen because blood and oxygen are being redirected. Which is really interesting. Also, the other really awful one is that sometimes your sphincter muscles loosen.

Dedeker: So the idea is that if your body is preparing to protect you from a threat, it's redirecting all of its resources to the things that it thinks that you're going to need, like your muscles so that you can be ready to run or increasing your rate that you're breathing or your heartbeat so that you can pump your blood better and you can get oxygenated faster. But that means it's shutting down other parts of your body that are non-essential.

Emily: Like your peripheral vision, for example.

Dedeker: Like your peripheral vision, like your stomach, your digestion shuts down. One that I've read about is the part of your brain that's responsible for converting your thoughts into speech, into words, essentially. That shuts down. And that's why a lot of people experience the sense of like not even being, that's like the scared speechless thing. It doesn't even have to be extreme fear, but it's the idea of just being totally paralyzed when it comes to trying to describe what's going on.

Emily: to trying to describe what's going on.

Dedeker: Or trying to put it into words. Interesting. Wow. And yes, part of that is the sphincter too, apparently. I think that also comes from, in a lot of animals, that when they're scared that they'll suddenly poop or pee, and that's also kind of like getting rid of extra weight, essentially, in some species, so that you can run away faster. And that still sticks around with us too. So, for some people, when they get the fight or flight response, they suddenly need to go to the bathroom. I think that's pretty common. And it's not just the physical symptoms, but of course, in your brain as well. So like I mentioned, where that section of your brain that's responsible for converting your thoughts into words, shuts down. Your mind is also going to be reverting into what I refer to as the radar system, not our radar system.

Dedeker: I gotta call it something else.

Dedeker: The traditional, the Doppler, some kind of-- yeah. Some kind of ultrasonic, subsonic, some kind of sonic.

Emily: Supersonic woman out of you.

Dedeker: Yes, a supersonic woman in your brain who's sweeping and just trying to keep track of what are the things

Emily: that are going to hurt me? And so you're more likely when you're

Dedeker: in this state, your brain is going to be more likely to be thinking about all the terrible possible ways that this could go, like all of the really negative future outcomes. And it's also bringing up memories of stuff that happened in the past that resembled this situation. This is something that's referred to as state-dependent memory. So as in when you're back in a similar emotional state, it becomes a lot easier to remember other times in the past when you were in that emotional state, versus if you're feeling great, it's a little bit harder for your brain to actually call up memories of a time that that you were feeling crappy or feeling depressed or feeling jealous, for instance. And the brain does this because, again, it's trying to protect you. It's trying to make it a problem solving situation where it's like you go through the Rolo decks of, Ooh, was there something similar that happened in the past that was similar to this? Could that solution that worked then could it possibly work now? You know, things like that.

Emily: Yeah. And speaking of brain functions, often it can be hard to just snap out of the state because your frontal lobes are not engaged in this process. So we talked about this a little bit in the Wired for Love episode, which was 177. But the idea of the primitives and the ambassadors. So the ambassadors are the things that are able to reason with yourself and to say like, okay, wait a minute, is this response that I'm having really justified? Is it something that I need to be doing? Do I need to be getting as angry in this moment or whatever in this moment as I am? Whereas your primitives just have that initial automatic response and they're the ones that are not in your frontal lobes and are making that kind of fight, flight, or freeze. That's very difficult to say. Yes, but they're making that response as opposed to your ambassadors.

Jase: Yeah. And then kind of last thing we wanted to say about this for now, we're hopefully going to talk about this a little bit more at the end of the episode with some kind of takeaways. And that's just to keep in mind that all of this came from a place of trying to protect you.

Emily: Of your brain and your body trying

Jase: to protect you from real life threats, like actual predators or saber-toothed tigers. Right, saber-toothed tigers or other people trying to kill you or whatever it is, like an actual real life or death kind of threat. And the problem comes about that because humans have this ability to think about things in the abstract and to who actually call up certain memories or imagine things, that this fight or flight part of our brain doesn't always know how to tell the difference between what's a real threat and what's an imagined threat. This is why, say you go and you watch a scary movie, that you'll feel those physical symptoms of stress, right? Maybe your palms will get sweaty, or maybe your mouth will get dry, or maybe your breathing will get shallow, or

Dedeker: your heart will race.

Jase: I know for me, playing certain video games, I'll look at my Fitbit and I'm like, Whoo boy, that pulse is up.

Emily: Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Jase: Because your body, that part of your brain that's controlling your body doesn't know the difference between the fact that this is just sort of a mental exercise in potentially stressful situations versus actually being in those situations.

Dedeker: Yeah, the way that my therapist described it to me is that it's like your brain, and especially your frontal lobes, your higher brain, is using language, essentially it's like texting. It's trying to text your lower brain. It'd be like, Hey, this is what's going on. And this person said this to me, but then this person went on this date. And then I was like, I don't know how I was feeling. And your lower brain is like, I only understand binary. I only understand ones and zeros. Is it scary? Is it not? And if it's not scary, cool. And if it is scary, then I'm going to do what I do as a lower brain. The lower brain doesn't have a sense of nuance in situations, really. And that's why even in situations where it's like, well, clearly my partner going on a date and me feeling threatened doesn't threaten my life, but my body's still going to react as though it does.

Emily: It is.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: All right, so that's what's happening in your body. But I really wanted to dive a little bit deeper into what's going on in the brain and why is this happening in the brain? And I went really far down the rabbit hole of jealousy research and I really quickly found out there's a lot of jealousy research, but there's a lot of problems with jealousy research. And I really, I had to spend a lot of time researching to kind of find the stuff that was actually answering the questions that I wanted. And so I'm just going to break down a couple of the recurring things that comes up in a lot of jealousy research that is maybe a little bit difficult. It was definitely difficult for me. And the first one is what's known as the JSIM or the JSIM model.

Jase: Not to be confused with JSUN.

Dedeker: No, not JSUN.

Emily: The JSIM model.

Dedeker: I didn't know it was called this, but it's basically the hypothesis is, and this was, there was a study that came out in 1992 that basically said, oh, we found that women are more upset by emotional infidelity and men are more upset by sexual infidelity. And so then we can sprinkle in some evolutionary psychology and infer that, oh, well, that must be because women are more upset by the idea of someone taking their provider away and men are more upset by someone taking their sexual object away. And everyone I've even heard that and we're like, Makes sense. Love it.

Emily: Obviously.

Dedeker: Obviously. And I first even heard that hypothesis from a friend of mine. It wasn't even in a scientific general, it was just a friend of mine being like, this is a thing, you know, this is a fact. And they're like, oh.

Jase: I learned about it in Psych class in college.

Dedeker: Really?

Jase: Yeah. No, like that's just as if that's how it goes.

Emily: Yeah.

Dedeker: Well, and so the thing is, so this was first published in 1992 and it has been controversial since then. I realized in researching this that in the academic and scientific communities, it wasn't like people were like, okay, great, that's a fact now. It was controversial because since 1992, there have been countless studies showing that there actually isn't much of a gender difference in the experience of jealousy.

Emily: Since '92, and yet, Dr. Drew, I swear, recently on a podcast that I listened to that had him on it, said essentially the same thing. Yeah. It was like, women have a harder time with emotional infidelity. They're more interested in emotions and men.

Dedeker: are more interested in sex.

Emily: Well, yes, it just goes perfectly.

Dedeker: It fits into our already established cultural stories about men and women of, oh yeah, those emotional ladies and those horn dog dudes.

Emily: Exactly.

Dedeker: You know, they're like, so it totally makes sense.

Jase: So why would we question this? Yeah.

Dedeker: And it's like even in the academic research, even researchers are still trying to puzzle over why did this one study produce that result?

Emily: Was it just one? It was just one and then everybody jumped on that bandwagon.

Dedeker: Yeah. And then why have there been so many more studies that have disproven that? And why did they get that result? Some people have theorized that, oh, maybe it has to do with intensity of emotion in general, that that's the difference between the genders that they surveyed? I don't know.

Jase: I remember I also heard a hypothesis that it had to do with men or women being conditioned to be better at imagining certain situations.

Dedeker: I remember that too.

Jase: So there's lots of different explanations for it, but the point is that it's been shown to not actually be true, that that's not necessarily true.

Dedeker: There's been a lot of, there's been some studies that have found that, no, actually both men and women are just

Jase: generally more upset by emotional infidelity than

Dedeker: sexual, and so it's actually they're similar in that way. Other studies have shown not, it's just infidelity in general is upsetting to people across the board. And of course there's variations in how upset people get, but it's not really split among gender lines necessarily is what they found.

Emily: And does this next quote come from the exact same study?

Dedeker: No, so the quote that's here comes from this book on jealousy that was published on 2010 by Dr. Christine Harris who is specifically like an emotion researcher. And she published a book specifically about jealousy and jealousy research, and how evolutionary psychology theories play into that. Yeah.

Emily: And she said that ancient humans might not have been as nuclear family-esque as people often assume. I mean, which makes sense, like they were tribal cultures.

Jase: Right.

Emily: Way different than what we currently have.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Emily: So the ancestral past may have been significantly different than the one envisioned in the JSIM hypothesis. In fact, very little is known for certain regarding the socio-cultural environment in which humans evolved. One possibility is that infidelity may not have occurred at high enough rates to require the evolution of specific jealousy mechanisms. A very different hypothesis is that the ancestral past of humans may have been like many hunter-gatherer societies of the present, where sharing and cooperation are emphasized. Thus, individual males may not have been responsible for providing resources to their own offspring since the group shared food resources, white and Mullen 1989. Therefore, a man's inclusive fitness would not be as disastrously affected by cuckoldry as suggested in the JSIM theory.

Jase: Right. So in other words, to cram that all down into a simple concept is that if we're all sharing all of our food and we're all sharing in the raising of our children, both of those theories go out the window. That men had to evolve this thing to make them jealous of sexual infidelity so that they were sure they were only providing for their own children. And on the flip side of that, that women didn't have to evolve some mechanism for being extra jealous of emotional infidelity, because they were all being provided for by the entire tribe, not just by this one guy because he thought the kids were his.

Dedeker: I don't remember who made this observation, and I forget where I read this, but someone commented, it's so interesting that this is based on this story of a woman who has a baby, and then she has to carry that baby, she can't go and get food for herself, so she's dependent on her male partner to go get her food and provide for her. But then someone commented, even if you believe that, for some reason, this is very dire, couple-y.

Emily: You can't do anything except for sit there and carry the kid.

Dedeker: Even if you believe that, that whole problem is solved as soon as you invent the baby sling. That as soon as you're like, oh, I'm gonna take a piece of fabric and strap this baby to me so that my hands are free. Yeah. That then it's like, okay, well, now I can provide food for myself.

Emily: And then it all starts to fall.

Dedeker: apart of this kind of narrative of even ancient human women being so 100% dependent on a singular man instead of- I don't need a no man. Well, it's not even that, instead of just being co-dependent on a tribe of people or multiple people around them.

Emily: Fascinating.

Jase: Yeah. So another one is that basically in the research, stuff has been shown that basically things have shown that jealousy responses can be linked to relationships lasting longer. They did these studies measuring people's relative amounts of jealousy, and they found that people who were more prone to experiencing jealousy were more likely to be in that same relationship after 10 years, or I forget exactly how long it was in this study. But what the study didn't ask was, it didn't try to take any measures of whether that was a good relationship, whether those people were happy, or if being more jealous just made you more likely to hang onto and stay in an unhealthy and unhappy relationship. So that I thought was kind of interesting, and that a lot of the studies are kind of based around this idea of trying to make the argument that jealousy is something that we've evolved, and that it's somehow we've evolved it because we need it, whereas there are other people saying, well, actually, maybe it's more of just kind of a side effect of other things and other ways about the ways that we work. Kind of like dreams, you know, where we don't really know what those are all about, why we have those. Like hopes and dreams, like why would we?

Dedeker: I'm like, literally, no, I know. I'm riffing.

Jase: You're such a joker.

Emily: Such a joker.

Jase: Yeah. What was it? From 1978 to 1985.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: So what's that? Like seven years that people who were.

Emily: Yeah, more likely.

Jase: Yeah, were more jealous. Were more likely to still be with that person after those seven years.

Emily: Really interesting.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah. And then those who were lower on the jealousy scale were less likely to be involved with that person.

Jase: I mean, yeah, just that those two correlate.

Emily: Yeah. That is fascinating. It's like, why though? And well, yeah, I mean, to me, the only thing that that potentially suggests is that someone's like, well, I need to hold on to this relationship or this person because, again, I don't want someone else to get it, which is not necessarily the case, but because they didn't ask what the relationship satisfaction of those people were. Yeah, that's one could assess that, yeah.

Dedeker: That's been the thing in a lot of this research is that there's a lot of research that's like, oh, jealousy is useful or even positive in the sense that it produces these relationship-preserving behaviors.

Emily: But that's maybe kind of shitty, too.

Dedeker: But then they don't also ask the follow-up question of how does your partner feel about your relationship-preserving behavior?

Emily: What exactly does that mean? What would be an example of a relationship-preserving behavior?

Dedeker: Well, okay. The standard story is the very basic story is like, oh, you see your partner flirting with someone else, so your relationship-preserving behavior is you go over and cockblock them in some way, I guess. Yeah.

Jase: Or like... Yeah, I think the example Dedeker gave is the one that's given kind of in support of that, right? It's like you feel this jealousy, and so you're gonna do something to stop that from happening. Either go and join that conversation and kind of assert your place, you know, like scare the other person off essentially, which, I guess scientists could view that as like, oh, that's a positive thing. It alerts you to keep an eye on your partner. It's very problematic. Yeah, but on the very negative side of it is that extreme jealousy leads to things like keeping your partner isolated from their friends and from other family plans, essentially leading to abuse.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: That both of those are mechanisms that you could say, they do serve a purpose of preserving the length of that relationship, but at what cost in either situation is very different from the other.

Dedeker: Definitely.

Emily: So you were talking about attachment theory when we were discussing this episode. And how do you think that this all correlates to attachment theory? Because we've spoken about that at length, and I think we could even do even more episodes about it, but we have talked about it in various episodes.

Jase: Yeah, I just wanted to bring it up because in another one of these papers that we read, this one was by Christine R. Harris and Ryan S. Darby, that they sort of did this long kind of review of all of the research that's out there about jealousy in 2010 when they wrote this, I believe. You know, kind of trying to put that together and kind of reconcile some of the different findings that different studies have found. And when it came to attachment theory, that's often brought up in relation to jealousy. You know, go listen to our episodes.

Dedeker: where we've talked about attachment theory.

Jase: Attachment Theory for more about that. But what I thought was interesting was specifically looking at people who are securely attached. Those people tend to have a fairly good opinion of themselves and also a fairly good opinion of other people. They're more likely to be trusting, less likely to constantly be worrying about the state of their relationships. And so some studies have hypothesized and then gone to show that securely attached people are less likely to feel jealous. Like when imagining certain situations, they'll report lower levels of imagined jealousy about that situation. But then in other studies, they had shown that securely attached people were more likely to react angrily, like to react with jealous anger.

Emily: That's really interesting.

Jase: Yeah. And I guess they were trying to make the case that somehow these securely attached people people are just more likely to have a good, strongly evolved relationship-preserving mechanism or something. That's really interesting. The hypothesis for why is weird and a little icky.

Emily: Yeah. Because when I think of a securely attached person, I do not think of a jealous person.

Jase: And I don't think of an angry person either.

Emily: No, totally. Yeah, I think of someone who has a good handle on those emotions.

Dedeker: Well, I think that the recurring theme here is that I feel like culturally and socially, we're always writing this line between, Do we think jealousy is a healthy thing that comes up in relationships and is an admirable thing versus do we think it's not so much of an admirable thing? And I feel like even anecdotally, just talking to people on the street, I feel like it goes both ways. There are some people who are like, Seriously, if my partner's jealous, that's a huge turn off. I'm really not into it. And then I also feel like I talk to the equal amount of people who are like, if my partner doesn't act jealous, then I'd be worried. Or kind of equating jealousy with love or attachment to a certain extent. And so I do feel like the fact that we're seeing this in the wide array of studies and surveys, I think that does reflect in the general population as well.

Jase: Yeah. Can I read these two quotes that were at the top of this thing that Harris and Darby put together?

Emily: Harris and Darby.

Jase: They put these two quotes at the top, which I thought was great. One quote goes, if you have not experienced jealousy, you have not loved. And the second one is Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.

Dedeker: Oh, it's kind of like two sides of the same coin.

Jase: Exactly, that they started this whole thing showing how, and these are, you know, St. Augustine and Havelock Ellis, both well-known philosophers or whatever you would call them, that come down on very different sides of this. So, yeah, I love that they showed that right at the start of this article.

Emily: Well, and I suppose that usually if you are in a relationship, at some point, you will feel jealousy. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to at least be aware of and be aware of how it can potentially make your relationship not good. And to think about that.

Jase: Yeah. Before we go on to the next section, we want to let everyone know that we have an amazing community of subscribers who get access to ad-free early releases of episodes, monthly video processing groups, as well as exclusive locked subscriber-only channels in our Discord server, where there's amazing discussion and support going on. If you'd like to be part of that and join for a sliding scale, go to multiamory.com/join. In the meantime, take a moment to listen to our sponsors for this episode. They directly support our show, and if you find them interesting, use our promo codes or the links in our episode description. That directly helps support our show.

Dedeker: Okay, so now we're going to get into what I personally think is the really interesting stuff. As I pored through all these studies and all these different opinions and all these different surveys and papers and journal articles, I found this one survey, the results of which were published in 2017 in the Frontiers of Psychology Journal. And the title of the article is pretty on the nose. It's the Evolutionary Psychology of Envy and Jealousy. And now even though the phrase evolutionary psychology is in the title, the article itself is actually quite critical of evolutionary psychology itself, which I think is what what got me to actually keep reading because I've also become quite critical of evolutionary psychology in recent years. Yeah, we're going to talk more about that in the bonus content. But anyway, they specifically, they were trying to figure out how does our jealousy and envy responses, how do they tick, how do they work? What motivates them essentially? Because the standard explanation for why this kind of nuanced emotion would have evolved is it's like, well, someone has something that you want, so you need to go and take it. It motivates you to go and take it or to get it for yourself or something like that. It's motivating you to preserve the relationship in some way. But the findings that they found from this survey were actually really, really fascinating.

Emily: Yeah, so one of those findings is that we tend to be more envious or jealous of someone who's similar to us but doing a little bit better, rather than someone who's doing way, way better than us. So our sense of envy and jealousy correlates to how relatable or attainable we feel that the other person's situation is. For instance, if we have a neighbor or a friend who's doing slightly better than we are at their job, making a little bit more money, then we tend to be more jealous of them than we would be of someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

Jase: Yeah, it's so interesting, because if you try to make that argument of like, oh, it's just about because we want the thing someone else has, then you'd think you would be more jealous... Of.

Emily: Something like larger... Of the Bill Gateses.

Jase: Or the Oprahs of the world.

Emily: Well, maybe they're jealous of each other, because they have similar types of notoriety, I guess.

Dedeker: And I think it's not to say that you're not at all jealous, or it's impossible to be jealous of someone like Bill Gates or Oprah or whoever, but they just found that people are just much more likely to feel jealousy when it is like someone similar to to me is making a little bit more money versus someone who's mega rich.

Emily: Yeah, I'm jealous of podcasts, people who make their entire living off of that.

Dedeker: Yeah, Jason and I had a conversation about that the other night when we were looking through all this stuff.

Emily: Yeah, gosh.

Jase: Yeah, so what's interesting is something similar to that is that we'll be more jealous of someone, say like a coworker at work who you feel like works just about as hard as you is pretty much a peer to you, and they get a promotion. You're probably gonna be much more jealous of that than someone who's just better than you, right? Maybe they work way harder than you and they get the promotion, or they're way more skilled or something. When they get that promotion, it's more likely to move into admiration.

Emily: Yeah, that's true.

Jase: And like, wow, that person's great. They really deserved that. Maybe, I wish I was more like them, but it's not kind of that same, like, what the, just life is so unfair. Like, why did they get that thing and I didn't?

Emily: Yeah. That's like a different quality to it.

Jase: Did they get that thing and I didn't?

Emily: Right.

Jase: There's like, a different quality to it and something that didn't get discussed in this, I just wanted to point out is I feel like this is kind of true on the other side, too. If you see someone who you perceive to be doing much worse than you, that you're also less likely to be jealous of them too. Right?

Dedeker: As in. Wait. As in someone.

Emily: Why would you be jealous of them?

Dedeker: Wait, someone who's doing much worse than you. Getting rewarded.

Jase: Yeah, getting something good. You have a friend, say you date a lot, but lately you've been having some trouble finding dates. And you have a friend who, and they find a date, you're probably gonna be more happy for them, because you kinda perceive them to struggle with this more than you.

Emily: Interesting.

Jase: And so it's like, oh, good for you. Like, I'm glad you're coming up.

Emily: You're coming up, you can get there.

Jase: Even if, or like with a job, you have someone, you know, who makes a lot less than you, and you've also been gunning for a promotion at your job, and you're frustrated you're not getting it, but then this person who makes less than you gets a promotion, you're still more likely to feel positive about like, oh, that's great.

Dedeker: I'm glad that's working for you. I hope it will for me too. Yeah.

Jase: As opposed to someone similar to you, you are just slightly above you being like, oh, why couldn't that be me?

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: But I think it's kind of interesting on both sides.

Emily: Yeah, that's true.

Jase: Once you move out of your immediate peer group, that's where it becomes an issue.

Emily: Right.

Dedeker: Now I'm going to throw one more log on the fire here.

Emily: You and your metamore metaphors.

Dedeker: Okay, this is just a little bit mind blowing to me, yet it makes perfect sense. So they found that we're more likely to feel envy or jealousy of someone who has what we want, regardless of whether they are happy or not. Now, the question they used in the survey, it's a little bit troublesome. I'll just warn you about that. But this is the question that they asked was, let's say that I can prove reliably either by brain scans or something, I can prove that A, the Dalai Lama is way happier on an abstract but a very real scale. The Dalai Lama is for sure the happiest person on the planet. This is a hypothetical. Yeah. Let's say I could prove that the Dalai Lama is extremely happy.

Emily: Okay.

Dedeker: Do you feel more jealous of him or do you feel more jealous of someone like, say, Hugh Hefner, who has just like a ton of money, really nice house, limitless access to attractive women, but we can't tell whether he's happy or not.

Emily: Well, he's no longer with us.

Dedeker: Well, Emily, you got to come along with us.

Jase: This is the example they used.

Dedeker: This is the example they used. It's called a hypothetical. Anyway, they found that people were just way more jealous of Hugh Hefner than

Jase: they were of the Dalai Lama, even

Dedeker: when there's a concrete way of proving like, yeah, this person's much happier. And I think it makes perfect sense because we look at so many people who are rich, who are attractive, who are well off, who have everything they need, but are absolutely miserable. And yet we still envy their lives anyway. We've seen time and time and time again that the traditional hallmarks of success do not necessarily equal life satisfaction or contentment. I mean, look at how many celebrities and how many people who are well off who kill themselves or who struggle from depression, it's so clear, and yet we still are more likely to feel envious of them anyway. More than we would if someone who maybe is very poor or not very well off, but who was for sure happy.

Jase: Yeah, and that's really interesting.

Emily: Money doesn't buy happiness.

Dedeker: Yes, but we don't actually believe that in our emotional car.

Jase: I know.

Emily: Our emotional car doesn't believe that.

Dedeker: Our emotional car isn't hearing it.

Emily: That's what the name of this episode is, the emotional car. People will be like, what?

Dedeker: You know, we're not, so it's like there's some part of it that says not actually pursuing happiness or peace or satisfaction, you know? And that's what I think is really interesting.

Emily: Yeah. This next one, I had a little bit of a hard time wrapping my brain around, but I understand what you're saying here, Dedeker. That if there were repeated examples of being jealous, not of the final level of intense pleasure or happiness, but of someone having access to and only slightly enjoying something for which you have a modest desire for and will only modestly enjoy, but you don't have access to. Does that make sense? So, somebody has access to something that you kind of sort of want and you don't, and they get it and you don't even know if they really care about it or want it or not. You will still be jealous of that.

Jase: Right. That you're more likely to be jealous of those things than it's kind of similar.

Emily: To, the entry. It's like if somebody out there has access to a Ferrari or a Tesla. I have a friend who has a Tesla 3, and I'm like, ah. I don't know if I would actually be much happier having a Tesla 3 than my Fiat, but I want it. I definitely want it, and I am jealous of it. So even though I don't know if she's happy or having it either, right?

Jase: It's kind of similar to the last one. Yeah. That it's really not so much about the happiness that they get from it or the happiness you would get from it, but just the fact that they have a thing that you can't.

Emily: Yeah, we all want things that, like the grass is always greener.

Dedeker: Exactly, exactly.

Jase: Yeah. Another one is that we've kind of talked about this on the show in the past when we've talked about jealousy, but the researchers in this, they theorize that envy and jealousy may have evolved to motivate us to also go out and get these things that other people have done. And I suppose you could see in that way that that makes sense. That if jealousy, if the purpose of jealousy was to help you be motivated to go get things that you didn't have, to work harder for those things or to achieve them, then it makes sense that you would feel that more strongly for things that seem more attainable. People who are a little more similar to you, have similar resources to you, or are a little closer to you, you go, Ah, I'm going to get this extra motivation to go out and get that that thing, that that makes sense as opposed to someone who's just so far out of your reach that it's like, well, what's the evolutionary point of being really motivated to go after this thing that seems so far off in the future?

Dedeker: Right. This is an interesting thing that they covered in this survey. And okay, bear in mind, this was not a survey that was about infidelity or non-monogamy, but this question came up and they specifically asked the men who are participating in the survey, if your female partner had sex with someone who was not you, and that person was a man, or that person was a woman, which one do you feel more jealousy about? And it was like 96% of the respondents, yes, thought that their female partner having sex with a man made them feel more jealous. Which, if it doesn't sound familiar, it should, because...

Emily: It's like a one penis policy?

Dedeker: Yeah, well that's usually what motivates one penis policies, I feel.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This can kind of be like an explanation for people out there who want to do one penis, but I don't think it's a good justification for it. But yeah, that idea, I mean, absolutely, this has happened in relationships that I've had. Oh wait, yes?

Dedeker: I'm so sorry to interrupt again, because there was a second part to that question that I forgot. So they did ask the one question of like, just basic man or woman, which one makes you feel more jealous?

Emily: Sure.

Dedeker: They also asked a question of like, if your female partner had sex with a woman and had a really incredible, amazing, pleasurable experience, versus if she had sex with a man and had an okay experience, they still found her having sex with a man was much more jealousy producing than her having this much better sexual experience with a woman. And which, of course, we could go into a whole thing about how we feel about girls having sex with each other and whether or not female-female relationships are valid or not in society's eyes. We could go into that whole thing. But it's kind of like outside of that, it really supports what we were saying earlier, where they find it's not about about what the actual end result is. It's like you're not jealous of her experience of her sex being great. Like you're jealous of how the penis-- the penis, yes.

Emily: I think that that has come up in a lot of conversations that I've had with people over the years about, you know, dating men or women or people just being like, yeah, I'm fine with my female partner having sex with other people who identify as women, but not men. No, that I wouldn't be okay with. Well, okay, but often it isn't even that expansive.

Dedeker: of I'm comfortable with my female partner dating other people who identify as women. Often it's much more specific. I'm only okay if this other person has a vagina. I'm not okay if this person has a penis. I don't care where their gender identity is.

Emily: Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Jase: If I can kind of loop this back and relate it to the first sets of studies that we were talking about. So this one here is talking about jealousy and envy, and it's kind of asking questions, trying to tease out like what is it really about when we say we want what other people have or we want the happiness that other people have and kind of showing here them being more similar to us makes it more threatening that their happiness really has nothing to do with it. It's just them having access to something that we don't. But if we look at the other studies about jealousy, which focus more on the type of jealousy that's like fear of losing a relationship, like we talked about with what would be an example, like, you know, like with your caregiver giving attention to someone else, like that kind of jealousy, or a romantic partner being interested in someone else and showing that jealousy helped make these relationships last longer by, like, reacting to those threats or, like, driving you to react to those threats. I think that. That people would make the argument, oh, well, that's what's happening here. It's not about whether she's having a good time with this other man or this other woman, or that she's having a much better time with this woman than with a man. But it really comes down to this idea that I perceive the threat of this other man as a more real threat to losing my relationship. In this case, I think it's not so much about gaining, but it's still problematic in a similar way of saying, well, why is it that you are evaluating this person as a real threat, whereas you're evaluating this woman is not a real threat. And that does go back kind of in the same way to a lot of this very ingrained, very unexamined sexism that we have in our society that we're taught.

Emily: There's a lot of that.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: Just all over the place.

Dedeker: Just all over. It's like roadkill.

Emily: Yeah.

Dedeker: Really. Gotta dodge it with your emotional car. Yeah.

Jase: Well, I see we're bringing back the car.

Emily: Metaphor. Yeah.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Emily: So with all of this, what are some takeaways? What can we gain and put in our emotional car so that our emotional car is the savviest, awesomest, fastest?

Jase: Right. Better shocks. Make sure we clean out our cylinders. Change your alternators. I've had some of those go out on me.

Emily: There you go. It's always impressive to me that you knew how to change your own oil.

Jase: Yeah, you know. You changed

Emily: my oil a couple times, which was hugely impressive.

Dedeker: Good God.

Jase: Yeah, it's important to change the oil on your emotional car.

Emily: Yeah.

Jase: I had a friend in college who, our parents gave her a car to drive out to college, and at no point in her life had they ever taught her how to take care of a car or the maintenance that needed to go into a car. She didn't know you had to get your oil changed because no one had taught her that. Oh, my God.

Dedeker: And after, like, a year, her car.

Jase: just was completely locked up and was totaled because she'd never put oil in it and never gotten it changed. But you gotta learn to take

Emily: care of your car. I need to get my oil changed.

Dedeker: Yeah, I wanna double up now.

Emily: No, but yikes.

Jase: So it's important to understand at least a little bit about how your emotional car works so you can do some of this maintenance.

Emily: So you don't lock up and are totaled.

Jase: Right, right. So something that can actually be very helpful about these studies is just realizing that these things are happening inside of us and that we do have these tendencies. Like with a lot of psychological studies and things like that, people can get very discouraged by them because they'll learn about something like cognitive dissonance or about these studies about jealousy and just go, well, fuck, I'm damned to just do these terrible things and always have these assumptions. Oh. And, right, rather than looking at this and going, okay, if I understand that I do probably naturally have a tendency to react in these certain ways and that it's probably coming from these certain things, that actually empowers you to be able to do stuff to change that through changing your thinking or through just kind of remembering that or becoming aware of it. Yeah, the whole knowledge is power, the more you know. So I think one thing that is really helpful is to remind yourself, and I found this to be helpful for me, is to really remind yourself and check in of like, what is it that I actually want? What is it that does actually make me happy? Because maybe I'm experiencing jealousy right right now over something that I definitely don't want it enough to put in the effort to get it like someone else has. And for me at least, a lot of the time, just having that realization really helps take the edge off. Like for example, if I have a partner who's going on a lot of first dates and I could feel jealous of that, when I think about it, I'm like, you know what? I really don't want to take time for that right now. That's not really what I'm looking for right now. Or maybe my partner's having a lot more of a certain type of sex.

Emily: with other people than I'm having.

Jase: And it's like, well, Maybe that's actually not a kind of sex or I'm not really feeling like I'm lacking sex in my life, but it's like I'm just feeling jealous because someone can get something that I don't think I can. And just having that realization is so helpful.

Dedeker: Yeah. I think learning about all this and reading about all this is just so fascinating. And I think the main takeaway for me and that I would want to impart to other people is that it's not wrong, first of all, it's not wrong to feel jealousy. It's not wrong to feel these things. It's a thing, you know? It's there for a reason. It's part of our nervous system. Again, it's part of this whole complicated system that is protecting us. And it's okay that you feel something and your feelings are not necessarily facts. Like in Jase's situation where it's like maybe you feel jealous that your partner is going on a bunch of first dates with a bunch of different people, that you don't have to jump straight to, oh, that must mean that's what I want, so I have to pursue that too. Maybe after you examine it, you do realize, Hey, actually it would be kind of fun to go on a first date. So maybe I do feel motivated to put in the effort for that. But maybe upon examination, you realize actually no, actually I'm kind of glad.

Jase: I don't like that at all.

Dedeker: Yeah, being able to have my time. And so it's okay, just put a critical eye on your own feelings and on your own thoughts, and that'll serve you.

Emily: And when you're going through these emotions, understand that they're biological responses to a degree. So you can thank your brain and your body and your nervous system for doing things that they were meant to do. Because again, your body is just trying to make sure that you're safe. And even if it's not putting a lot of thought into why or if that's a valid concern at that present moment, it still is doing the thing that it's meant to do. And so it's okay from time to time, instead of getting angry at yourself, like, oh, why am I so pissed off right now? Or, oh, why am I so sad right now? Or why do I feel jealousy or whatever it is, to be like, I'm having a biological response. It's gonna be okay. Thank you, body, for doing that. I'm good, really. But you can calm down, but thank Thank you for taking the time to do what it's meant to do.

Jase: Yeah, I love that. Just that it's not because you're broken. It's just something to learn over.

Emily: the years, for sure, I think from all of us.

Jase: Your body's just trying to take care of you. It's just doing its best. Your brain is trying to take care of you. It doesn't always do the best job of it, but it's trying real hard. I think just accepting that can be so good. And then another one that this came up in one of the other studies here is that there have been studies showing that our perceptions and our reactions to jealousy situations does really change depending on the status and the relationships between all the people involved. And so in these studies, they've shown that, you know, children as young as, like, six months old will Express jealousy, essentially, of their caregiver giving attention to someone else over them. And so that's part of that argument of like, well, jealousy is this, you know, it's this evolved thing that helps us to get the care and the connections that we need. But what's interesting about it is they found that as early as four years old, we start changing our understanding of these threats. And so in the example here, which is from a '93 study by Monks and Kineapple, I just took a stab at those two there, that in this study they found that as early as four years old that children will be less jealous of their caregiver giving attention to an infant than they are to someone else who's more of a peer. The idea being that by four years old, they have enough understanding to see that infants need more care than toddlers do, like they are, right? They understand they need that, and so attention being given to them isn't going to be perceived with the same level of threat. And I think that if we take this knowledge to just go like, look, see, jealousy isn't something that's just fixed forever, but as we learn more about other people in the world and other people in that situation and we kind of broaden our understanding like that infant has by the time they're four years old and then continuing on as they get older, that can actually change our experience of that jealousy. And I know that I can say for personal experience that has been the case for me in my relationships with my partner's other partners, or them going on dates or having sex with people, that at first those things, even if I was intellectually okay with them, evoked a little bit more of an emotional, physical jealousy response or a fear response or a competitive response, something like that. But as I've gotten to know non-monogamy better and I've gotten to know some of my partners better and also just kind of had I had more experience and kind of learned through experience and seeing like... I think I learned better. Yeah, knowing myself better and kind of seeing what things aren't actually the threats that I may have thought they were, that that has changed how I actually feel about that jealousy. It doesn't mean I never feel it, but it's like the volume on that in certain situations is turned way down. And like that, just because I have this different perspective. And I think that that, for me reading this thing about the four-year-olds, I was like, oh my gosh, Yeah, we're all like those four-year-olds who are just having to learn like what things aren't threats. Like it's not about learning what things are threats, but like learning what things aren't threats. I think that's a very powerful thing that we can take with us into our adult lives.

Dedeker: I like it. A four-year-old can do it. We can all do it.

Emily: Yeah, come on, everyone.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: Alright, it's me, Emily, again. Back when this episode first aired, we made a bonus episode for it as well for our Patreon members. It was a patron only exclusive, but today through the help of our sponsor, Uber Lube, we wanted to bring you that content remastered and re-edited so that everyone could get a chance to hear our conversation. Of course, Uber Lube is our favorite lube brand of all time, and we really appreciate their sponsorship that has allowed everyone the opportunity to listen to this extra content today. So we hope you enjoy our discussion on evolutionary psychology.

Dedeker: Hello, patrons. Thank you for joining us for another week of bonus content. I wanted to talk about evolutionary psychology. Are you with me? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Evolutionary psychology in a nutshell is basically just the idea of kind of looking back through our anthropological record, looking at the ways that different societies have behaved over the course of many centuries and millennia and kind of trying to find an evolutionary basis for why we act the way we act and why we are the way that we are. I think that evolutionary psychology is a really fascinating field of study. I'm always really, really interested to read about it. However, I have seen it used as kind of like a cudgel, I would say.

Emily: A what?

Dedeker: A cudgel.

Jase: Cudgel.

Dedeker: A beating stick. I've seen evolutionary psychology be used basically as an excuse to be an ass, to be like, well, we evolved that. Yeah, exactly. Men are just attracted to women who are young and who have big tits. And so that's why it's okay for men to only be attracted to that, because that's just evolution, baby. That's why I'm not going to date someone who doesn't have the perfect body, because it's just evolution, baby. So it's that kind of something we addressed earlier in the episode of this idea of, well, women are the emotional ones, and it makes sense because they're used to dudes being the providers, and men are just the horn dog, horn dog, so you know, horn dogs, the horn dog, horn dogs. So that's, I think that's why, when I started seeing that is when I started getting kind of, a little skeptical of evolutionary psychology, honestly. And that's hard because a lot of people who are in the non monogamy community and polyamorous communities, they reference sex at dawn as being really life changing. And it was, it was life changing when I read it. I know for you too, Jase, Yeah, definitely. Like, it's definitely a really interesting book because its basis basically is that it's using evolutionary psychology to make the argument that humans are not naturally monogamous, which very conveniently supports people who want to not be monogamous. However, well, before I go on, I wanted to ask the two of you, any other evolutionary psychology stuff that you can think of that gets tossed around on a daily basis?

Jase: What I wanted to say first is just that part of the issue with evolutionary psychology is that it's basing a lot of things off of assumptions all stacking on each other. And a lot of those, I think it's a field where we're particularly prone to our biases showing up, for the biases of the researchers themselves showing up, because you do have to fill in a lot of the gaps. And this is true of any field of science where sometimes the way you go about trying to test a hypothesis can cause really not helpful results because you've kind of gone in with too many other assumptions. You're not questioning the right things essentially.

Emily: I do think it's interesting that based on these assumptions of old men having to be the providers and women having to be the emotional support to children and to their partners, that it's like a way in which people still say, well, I feel like I need to make a ton of money and provide for children or something. That's what I feel like my purpose in life is. And it seems like sometimes they still want a partner that gives that emotional support unconditionally. I've felt that and heard that in some of the men that I've talked to over the years, and just that that's the kind of thing that they're looking for. It still is on this really old idea of what gender roles are, and that evolutionary psychology backed that up somehow, which I don't actually know if it really has.

Jase: Yeah, I think something, gosh, like the sex at dawn thing, I think is really interesting, because some people will try to use it in the same way that the majority of evolutionary psychologists will use it to really reinforce gender norm roles and these things that you were just talking about, Emily.

Jase: And that a book like Sex at Dawn looks at a lot of the studies that already existed and says, actually, wait, some assumptions were made here and researchers read some things in, and if we look at the exact same data that they got and we interpret it a little bit differently by getting rid of certain assumptions, we can come to the opposite conclusion from it in terms of monogamy and non-monogamy. And that some people will try to use that as like, look, this shows that this is natural.

Dedeker: It's like, but we can still use it as the cudgel, even if it's for a different conclusion. It's still cuddling.

Jase: Right. But I think what was and still is so important about that book is more the fact that it points out what we're talking about here, that there's problems with coming in with too many assumptions and that there's problems with these things. And it's not, in my opinion, not something to be used to say, well, look, we proved that we're right and you're wrong, actually. It's like, no, the point is that all of this needs to be questioned, that someone can't tell you... I guess that the research isn't quite as monolithic as we thought it was, because it was mostly created by a pretty monolithic belief system of the European cultures that did these studies.

Emily: Yeah.

Dedeker: Well, okay. So here's the thing is I found an article that I think laid down some pretty interesting points to consider that I think are really helpful. Just anytime you read any kind of

Emily: article where anyone's or any kind of

Dedeker: study where someone's trying to claim well, ancient humans did this, therefore we're meant to do X, Y, and Z. Or we evolved to be acting this way, therefore that's the way we should be acting. Any time that comes up, it doesn't mean that you need to automatically think it's bullshit or automatically think it must be true, but just I would invite critique. Yeah. Because the thing is that we can't actually make the assumption that every single emotion or mood or behavior directly correlates to some kind of survival response. You know, there are some things that make more sense, like the flight or fight response. It's like, well, totally makes sense. You got to get away from the Sabertooth tiger or something, you know, or you got to fight your way out of this person trying to murder you. Like, yeah, sure, totally makes sense. But not every single thing is necessarily that cut and dry. And this article that I was reading, they actually highlighted, like, the dangers of kind of relying too much on evolutionary psychology to use as explanations for human human behavior. The first one being that, again, not everything is an adaptation. Not everything is something that was directly correlated to us needing to survive some kind of situation. The next one being that a lot of behaviors that we consider to be universal are learned behaviors. And that's where things get really fuzzy when it starts getting down to kind of the nature nurture thing of like, is this inherently in our biology or is this the product of the culture that we are raised in? A common example that's brought up is cooking, for instance. Cooking is universal. Every single culture around the globe cooks in some way. Different ingredients, different techniques, but they all cook. But we can't look at cooking as like, oh, well, there's this special cooking section of the brain that evolved in order for us to be able to do that. That was a learned behavior that's been carried throughout the generations, throughout the centuries, and passed down. But it wasn't something that was just evolved in our brains all of a sudden one day. And then the last one being that with a lot of evolutionary psychology theories, the problem is that they're very difficult and sometimes straight up impossible to test, to confirm, deny, or refute, essentially. It's all speculation. So that's why I really appreciate a book like Sex at Dawn. It really opened my eyes to the possibility, like, oh, things could be different. But even that, you can't confirm any of it. It's still speculation what they're putting out there. And it's impossible to be able to confirm or deny it. Either way.

Jase: Yeah, and something that came up when I was actually discussing Sex at Dawn with my dad after I first read it, and my dad is a biology professor, and so he's kind of, you.

Emily: Know... And he specializes on the brain, right?

Jase: No, actually he specializes in the neuromuscular junction.

Emily: Oh, okay.

Dedeker: Well, sorry.

Emily: Wow, the neuro...

Jase: I know the neuro is in it, but it's in the neuromuscular junction, more the nervous system than the brain.

Dedeker: Okay, okay, so your dad...

Emily: But he does teach classes on the.

Dedeker: Brain and all these things. Yeah, my dad knows some things.

Jase: There's some brain stuff involved. He knows some things.

Dedeker: He's a brain dad.

Jase: Talking with him about that book was interesting because he was already familiar with most of the studies, or at least quite a few of the studies they were talking about. And so it was kind of funny where I would, you know, I was talking about it and would make some sort of point. And he'd be like, huh, well, I seem to remember there was some other study that said this different thing. And then he borrowed my copy of the book. And when we talked about it, like, the next day at brunch or something, something, he was like, oh, actually, that study I mentioned, the book actually did go over that study. And that was one of the ones that they talked about, kind of the way that it was interpreted or the way it was put together. So that was kind of cool. Anyway, the point though that he made that's really stuck with me is that sometimes we can get a little bit confused or a little bit off course when we try to focus too much on what's natural and kind of making this argument that if something's natural, it's therefore good. And the example that I like to use for this is if we look at, say, like our primate cousins, right? That we can see violence is natural, like having a certain amount of violence of like asserting yourself over other people, things like that. Like so you can make the argument that that's natural. But we as humans who live in society together have agreed, actually we think violence is not a good thing. And so we're going to say, even though that may be natural, we're going to agree not to do that to each other, except I guess in certain situations. Except when you're an MMA fighter or you're at war, or you know, we kind of structure it, but it's not that normal lashing out, right? There have also been studies showing if you're angry, your blood pressure is going to go up. But if you hit somebody, your blood pressure will will go down unless you think you're going to get repercussions for doing that, and then your blood pressure stays elevated. But it's like you could make the argument of like, oh, we should just be able to hit people when we're mad at them. But it's like, okay, just because that might be natural, or maybe at some point that was useful in our evolution, that doesn't mean that it's good. It doesn't mean that it's right. And I think that that's also something we need to keep in mind when it comes to non-monogamy or jealousy or these other things. It's like, yeah, it's interesting to look at what's natural and use that knowledge to help us be the kinds of people we want to be, but it's not about determining like, this is what we have to be because this is what's natural.

Emily: Yeah, and I don't know if this has much to do with evolutionary psychology, but I've definitely heard people say like, well, you know, the vast majority of people in my situation, X, Y, and Z, like, would have the same reaction as I have. And so therefore, It's okay.

Dedeker: It's logical fallacy, though.

Emily: Exactly. It's such a logical fallacy, and I'm like, no. It's like, you know, I have a problem with the one penis fallacy thing. Like, well, you know, the vast majority of men in my situation would have a problem with my partner having sex with another man, and therefore, you know, I'm justified in my actions or my ideas because of that. Or it's okay, or it's good, or it's right, or whatever. And it's like, no.

Dedeker: Okay, well, I'm going to pull a Phoenix Wright and I say, Objection.

Emily: Oh, my goodness.

Dedeker: First of all, if you're going to cite that, give me numbers.

Jase: Well, he has the numbers of the 97% or whatever you just talked about. There you go.

Dedeker: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Okay, fine. Well, then fine. Secondary objection is logical fallacy. Anyway, I think that where this really drives, I mean, comes close to home is I feel like a lot of people, especially when they're new to non-monogamy and polyamory, and they're kind of in that phase of really having to defend and justify it to a lot of people. And I did this. A lot of people go for the evolutionary psychology thing of like, well, I read Sex at Dawn. And did you know, actually, humans aren't naturally monogamous. And so this is actually maybe a more natural way of being. And society has kind of put these restrictions on us, and we really need to connect to our roots. And I just, I just wish people would stop that.

Jase: Stop trying to fight fire with fire in a way.

Dedeker: Yeah, it's not, there's just many better arguments to be made. Like, for instance, this makes me happy. Fuck off, which is kind of my new favorite argument these days. Right.

Emily: You don't get to tell me anything, bye!

Dedeker: Yeah. Yeah, that it's like you don't have to pull something that's already kind of shaky and difficult. That isn't actually strong. It's very compelling and interesting, but it's not actually a strong argument, I feel, for anything, honestly.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: All right.

Dedeker: Wow. I love this. I want to talk about science and evolutionary psychology and not evolutionary psychology for hours.

Jase: Yeah, it's easy to get caught up in all this.

Dedeker: It's so much fun.

Jase: Anyway, would definitely love to hear your opinion.

Dedeker: In the Facebook group, let us know what you think. Let us know. I mean, oh my goodness, I read this article was talking about this particular evolutionary psychology claim, and that was initially a parody is the thing, and then people took it seriously. And there was some researcher who put out this parody study saying that, oh, there's an evolutionary basis in why gentlemen prefer blondes. And it's because blonde women, you know, you're more likely to be able to see signs of aging or signs of disease. And so...

Emily: Wait, in blondes or in brunettes?

Dedeker: Blondes. So they put out this like, oh, because you could, you know, on the scale, like if someone has really pale skin, you're more likely to be able to see if they have some kind of disease or some kind of skin condition which would affect fertility. The idea that it's like in a blonde, it's easier for you to see them blush. And so that helps to indicate either sexual arousal or attraction or something like that. They put this out as a parody and people took it seriously. People were like, oh, okay. Makes total sense. Makes total sense. Why I'm gonna prize a blonde more so than someone with any other kind of complexion.

Emily: Wow.

Dedeker: So that's how easy these things can get out of hand. Anyway, I brought that up because I would really love to hear from our patrons. If you've heard any other kind of ridiculous evolutionary psychology stuff that's floated around, or if you found stuff that's really interesting and resonating and compelling to you, definitely love to to hear that too. So we will see you around the patron group.

Emily: And the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @multiamorypodcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Jase Lindgren, Dedeker Winston, and me, Emily Matlack. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Jase Lindgren from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.