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 so there really is that sort of assortative mating there going on, too, which I guess like one potential inference here is that if you want an authentic partner, if you want someone who tells you the truth, you have to be a bit transparent. You have to be open yourself in order to establish that trust.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, the best, you know, that's why we call them honest signals, right? Is that, you know, only someone who's truly authentic and truly whatever that, you know, you're going to be the most likely to attract a partner with those kinds of traits as well.
as opposed to uh keeping some stuff just for your journal and the therapist room interesting yeah i i think generally well it depends on what what the um the conversation is about um you know if you have your sort of most wild extreme thoughts like i don't know maybe those don't always have to be aired well like i'm gonna punch a baby and put it into the road or yeah yeah yeah
Yeah, well, but but I think like when it comes to issues around the relationship itself, that maybe there's a way I think like it's better to generally over communicate rather than to let things slide and let resentments build up.
And then it potentially explodes later into a serious argument that I mean, there's a way I think to over communicate and a kind of diplomatic, respectful way of just like, why do you do that? That upsets me. Stop doing that. You know, that's probably not the best way to go about it. But if you see something and you point it out in a gentle way.
And I think that is probably a better approach than just letting it all build up over time.
Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah, our mutual friend David Buss on this one was a fascinating paper here about how, you know, there's this idea, you know, basically, what are people looking for in a partner? Is it someone who just meets their relationship needs, you know, oh, like, here are my 10 list of demands for my partner. Oh, you meet nine out of the 10.
And this person meets 10 out of the 10. And so I'm going to go with a 10 out of 10, that kind of thing. you know, as if we're grading on some objective rubric. But that paper suggested that actually we more so grade potential partners on a curve where we are kind of putting together multiple things in our environment.
First, you know, the person that you're with, how do they stack up compared to partners that you could reasonably attract in your social environment? And what they found is that if you're
partner is basically you know better quality than the alternatives realistic alternatives around you then people tend to be happy if the person is kind of less attractive than a potential realistic alternatives around you people tend to be less satisfied and that was especially true for people who evaluated themselves as being more attractive than their own partner and so i think that's that that may be the most sort of dangerous situation here is if um
you know, if you're with someone who views themselves as much more attractive than you, and also thinks, Oh, well, I could also do better. And I see all these other people around you, that this could could lead to a potential unstable relationship dynamic.
And so for a lot of guys, I think what they do ask them what they want, especially young guys, like under 25, they just, you know, I want the hottest possible girl, you know, physically perfect 10 out of 10, I want a dime. But then, you know, if you point out to them, well, you know, if you're
pretty average guy, and you do happen to land a date with some supermodel who, you know, maybe in another, you know, some other day of the week is going out with Leonardo DiCaprio on his yacht, that, you know, that's probably not going to work out for you.
And that may be another reason why we tend to mate assortatively is gradually over time, people kind of figure out where their level is and find someone who's roughly the same level of attractiveness as themselves. But yeah, there is that point there that, you know, what predicts relationship dissolution?
And it does seem to be, you know, people thinking to themselves, well, you know, is this really the best I could do? And this, I think, also has something to do with what we're seeing with the dating apps. Although I think this is sort of tapering off, but for the last...
basically since 2012 with the rise of Tinder, I think that probably contributed to kind of relationship instability is more and more people thinking that they could do better because of the apps. And then a lot of people realizing, actually, that's not the case.
less uh insecurity less mate guarding needed less jealousy less all of that stuff uh so yeah that's the that's a good way to go about it yeah yeah yeah i think that's yeah you can kind of like money ball your way into a relationship by going for people who are attractive maybe uniquely to you but that maybe others are overlooking in some way like that is yeah that's interesting i mean on the personality point i mean it is the case that
Similarity and personality is relatively low. I mean, statistically significant, but small correlations. But then what does seem to predict satisfaction is regardless of your own level of, say, conscientiousness, your partner's level of conscientiousness does seem to predict longer relationship duration. Interestingly, it also tends to predict your own level of career success.
So you and many of your listeners are familiar with the fact that, you know, obviously intelligence IQ that predicts career success, but then also conscientiousness of the big five personality traits. Conscientiousness has the strongest predictive power for how successful someone's going to be in their career.
But what was interesting is in one paper found that even when you control for the participants own level of conscientiousness, Their romantic partner's conscientiousness predicts their own career success, which suggests that if you have a partner who's hardworking, diligent, focused, and so on, that that also somehow benefits you in your own life.
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