Rob Henderson
speaker
881 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 Aug
Rob Henderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And everywhere you turn, there's no shortage of advice. And it's perfectly kind of acceptable in the broader discourse to, you know, like, what are you doing? Oh, I'm watching this YouTube series on how to how to improve my career. That's fine. But if you were to say, you know, you're watching it and I'm saying, what are you watching?
You're like, oh, I'm watching this YouTube series on how to be a better romantic partner and attract someone. Somehow that is like, you know, weirdly stigmatized. We would think of someone like that is like, well, what's wrong with you that you can't just find one? We expect people to just enter the world knowing how to be an attractive partner and to find a compatible partner for yourself.
But we accept that actually it's perfectly fine to sort of seek out information and knowledge and mentors and so on to succeed in career. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is...
there could be this thing where if you are, if you require explicit advice on romance, that this in itself is an indicator of low mate value or that you're unattractive, that if you naturally know what to do and naturally know how to succeed as a person in the romantic sort of dating market, then that in itself is an indicator that you're a worthy romantic partner.
But if you need to seek out information and that suggests, oh, actually, like maybe you shouldn't even be dating in the first place. Whereas, yeah, for career less so. I mean, I still think that we if someone effortlessly succeeds like in in in their career, we do give them a bit of extra credit, but we're perfectly fine with, you know,
People who are trying to improve themselves, we are willing to confer special praise to those people too. So yeah, it's an interesting one. And I think it's more so for men specifically. I also wonder if...
because of the women are wonderful effect and the sort of accompanying effect of we tend to be a bit more suspicious of men, that if you hear that a man is learning how to improve their prospects on the dating market, our mind immediately leads to worst case scenario of, oh, you're going to learn how to manipulate women. You're going to learn how to- Harry Sisson all over again.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we don't think, oh, this is just a guy who's really falling behind and wants to learn how to have a good first date and find a girlfriend. We think, oh, he's trying to hook up with as many women as possible and dupe all of them or something.
But this piece was, you know, basically about, you know, assuming that you want to find a good partner, you know, what are you actually looking for? And earlier we talked about, we touched briefly on assortative mating, and that does seem to be the case that if you look at measures of political orientation or
religiosity, socioeconomic status, earnings, educational attainment, that we tend to pair with people who are relatively similar to ourselves. There was an interesting statistic. So this study was from 2005, which found that if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, then your likelihood of marrying someone with a college degree is 9%.
But if your highest level of education is a college degree, then your likelihood of marrying a college graduate is 65%. I'd imagine that's actually higher today. It seems like assortative mating is sort of tilting even further and further in that direction. But what's interesting there is that...
The similarity, even though that that's sort of descriptively true, that is just the case that we tend to pair with people who are similar to ourselves. When you measure level of levels of similarity within romantic partners, similarity doesn't seem to predict relationship success.
And I was reading that paper and my interpretation of this is probably that similarity is necessary, but not sufficient for a long term committed relationship.
Yeah. And there's that issue of range restriction where if you're only looking at couples, then by definition, most of them are already pretty similar. And so does that extra similarity help? Probably not. There's probably that threshold that's sort of necessary.
Yeah. Well, well, the personality thing is interesting in that, um, one thing that shocked me when I was looking at the personality research and similarities in couples is that the correlations are remarkably small. They vary around sort of 0.1, 0.2, statistically significant that if you're open, your partner that you tend to pair with will be a little bit more open than average.
Same with these other personality traits. Uh, one that's a bit higher than the others that I saw was for neuroticism, which is about 0.2, 0.22, somewhere in that, in that realm. Um,
And this is consistent with other work that people who are emotionally volatile tend to be attracted to one another or find something interesting about one another, whereas people who are more emotionally stable tend to seek out partners who are stable. There was a really interesting essay a couple of years ago from our mutual friend Scott Barry Kaufman, and he wrote about...
Yeah, which which I think like, you know, if you're if yeah, so people who are sort of relatively narcissistic find other narcissistic people interesting and attractive and those kinds of things. One thing that was interesting related to the personality point is is authenticity.
that this really interesting paper found that people who score highly on measures of authenticity within their relationship. And so these were basically the extent to which participants agreed with statements like, I'll usually tell my partner things that are on my mind, even if there's a chance he or she may not understand me.
And when people are more likely to agree with those statements, they also tend to correlate highly with levels of relationship satisfaction. And interestingly, the reverse was the case, too, that people who are low authenticity also tend to pair with people who are also more deceptive or less authentic.
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