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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey there, before we start today's episode, I wanted to share something I'm really excited about. Hidden Brain is now on YouTube. We just dropped an episode exploring a strategy that can help us to solve problems and save time, but it's a strategy almost all of us overlook. I hope you'll check it out.
You can find us at youtube.com slash at hidden brain, or just follow the link in today's show notes. Okay, here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, Portia is a beautiful, wealthy woman, and she is looking for the right man to marry. Her father has decreed that a successful suitor must pass a test.
Each of Portia's admirers is presented with three caskets made of gold, silver, and lead. Portia's portrait is inside one. Suitors have to pick the right casket. The gold casket is inscribed with the words, Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire. The Prince of Morocco selects it and discovers it's the wrong choice.
On the silver casket are the words, Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves. The Prince of Aragon opts for this casket. He too loses out. Finally, the noble Bassanio takes a turn. He picks the lead casket, which bears the sobering warning, who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath. It turns out to be the right choice. Having picked correctly, Bassanio gets to marry Portia.
In Shakespeare's time, tests like these may have seemed odd but charming. But if you set up tests of devotion like this today, it would strike your suitors as puzzling, even preposterous. But that doesn't mean many of us don't devise our own tests of love. We hold off texting someone we met, hoping they will reach out first.
We drop hints about what we want for a birthday present to see if our partner notices. We act distant in the hope it will prompt another person to come closer. Just like the tests in The Merchant of Venice, our tests of love can easily be seen as manipulation. If finding love is about connection and intimacy, tests create distance and suspicion.
What is the hunger inside us that drives us to test the devotion of others? What are we really looking for when we hope our partner selects the ideal anniversary gift? What do we really want when we dream of the perfect proposal? New psychological research suggests that many of us do not really understand our own needs. How surprising can it be that we reach for the wrong strategies?
what we truly want from our intimate relationships, and how to get it, this week on Hidden Brain. We all want to be loved.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between being loved and feeling loved?
It's one of our deepest longings, a need so fundamental that we are willing to twist ourselves in knots to satisfy it. Yet psychologists say that many of the strategies we rely on to obtain love are either ineffective or counterproductive. Instead of bringing us closer to the warmth we seek, we often end up pushing it away.
At the University of California, Riverside, psychologist Sonia Lubomirsky studies what we do to feel loved and what we ought to be doing. Sonia Lubomirsky, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Such a pleasure to be here.
Sonia, you're a fan of the TV program Couples Therapy. I haven't watched the show. Can you describe it for me and tell me about some of the patterns you've noticed?
Such a great show, right? So these are real couples in New York. They kind of forget that they're on camera and they have major problems. They're all very diverse.
And I just feel like over the years, so much resentment and so much disappointment has built up. It's very hard for me.
And what I love about the show, it actually makes me feel very smart because you hear them talking and it's like the wife is saying, oh, you never bring me to the gym. You don't do this. You don't do this. Or the husband saying, oh, you haven't done this for me. And then you see like they're fighting, fighting over here on this level.
But really underneath it, it seems so obvious that they don't feel loved, that like no matter what the guy does. she still doesn't feel loved. No matter what she does, he doesn't feel loved. But I really feel like at the heart of a lot of problems in relationships or even breakups, it's a lack of feeling loved. No matter what the other person does, you still don't feel loved by them.
I understand, Sonia, that you've recently separated and not long ago you went on a date with a man who tried to win your affections. I understand he spoke a lot about his car.
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Chapter 3: What are common tests of love we impose on others?
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's so interesting, you know, because we often don't feel loved for a variety of reasons. And sometimes the person really, really does love us. And they might even show love in different ways. But it somehow isn't registering with us for a variety of reasons. Maybe because that's not, quote, our love language. Or maybe because we don't sort of even see it.
Or we don't think of it as being very, very authentic. Or we don't think it doesn't apply to us. So it's a very interesting problem.
Whether it's our children, our friends, or our partners, what we want most from relationships is to feel cared for and appreciated, to feel loved. But achieving this is much harder than it looks. When we come back, how we go about trying to feel loved in all the wrong ways. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all want to be loved.
We want to feel cared for and appreciated by our friends and by our partners. We want our parents and our kids to tell us how much we mean to them. But many of us walk around with what you might call a love deficit. Psychologist Sonia Lubomirsky says we don't realize there's a difference between being loved and feeling loved. Sonia, let's start there.
I think most of us assume that being loved and feeling loved are the same thing. Aren't they?
I think often they are. But I think that the interesting case, you know, for me as a psychologist are the times when we are loved, but we don't feel loved. And it could be that we're not even seeing whatever the other person is doing to make us feel loved. We're not perceiving it. We're not somehow taking it in. We're not internalizing it. That love isn't being felt.
How common do you think it is, this discrepancy between being loved and feeling loved? Do you think it happens a lot?
I think it happens a lot. You know, Harry Reese, my co-author, and I did a survey where we asked people, are there relationships in your life that you sometimes don't feel as loved as you would like to be, you know, or as frequently as you'd like to be? And something I think like 70% said that, yes, there's at least one relationship in which I don't feel as loved as I want to be.
I actually think that number is an understatement. You know, I actually think it's a lot higher than that. But 70% is a lot, you know, and so maybe it's your colleague, it's your romantic partner, your mom, your child, you know, your friend. I think it's very common.
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Chapter 4: How can we create a stronger feeling of closeness in relationships?
It would be nice if you said thank you and helped me with the dishes. I'll help you do the damn dishes. Oh, come on.
You know what? No. See, that's not what I want.
You just said that you want me to help you do the dishes. I want you to want to do the dishes. Why would I want to do dishes?
Why? See, that's my whole point. Sonia, what do you hear when you listen to that exchange?
First of all, I've so been in that situation. Mostly it's Brooke, but I think I'm maybe on both sides. This is so similar to that show Couples Therapy, except it's fiction. So it's like Brooke is not feeling loved because he's not seeing her. He's not seeing how important it is for her to sort of get the dishes done. And so then they can really go about their evening.
And then to her, it just seems like this is so easy. It's just 15 minutes of your time. And so It's like she's not feeling loved by his response.
And of course, what Brooke is really asking in this case is actually not help with the dishes. She's actually asking for something else altogether.
She's asking really to be seen and heard. She needs him to kind of, yes, make her feel loved.
As she memorably says, she doesn't want him to do the dishes. She wants him to want to do the dishes.
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Chapter 5: How do negative thought spirals affect our perception of love?
I'm really bad. That vortex, as you describe it, makes a lot of sense. And I think it's something that everybody can relate to. Hmm. You talk about some of the reasons we might spiral. We heard from a listener named Lucia who writes, our 16-year-old son is in a downward spiral because of a hiccup on his schedule this year. He's a junior in high school. He's given up on school.
He thinks his life is ruined. He has a very fixed mindset and it is very difficult for him to get unstuck. We're having a hard time supporting him through this and would love some insight. We taught Greg in our previous conversation about how people often overreact to setbacks in their lives. We blow small pieces of information out of proportion.
You talked about the idea of something called a tiff bit. Can you remind us what a tiff bit is? Sure, of course. A tiff bit is a tiny fact that you have a big theory about, and then you react to it in a big way. So the teacher... maybe says something unkind and you think, she thinks I'm dumb. I'm checking out. I'm not participating in this class anymore. That would be an example of a tiff bit.
So when it comes to a young person, somebody who is in high school, I mean, it's hard to imagine the kind of setback this person could have that could justify them feeling like their life is ruined when they're a junior in high school. And yet this must happen all the time.
People in high school must constantly feel, my God, whatever happened this past week in school, it's so huge that it must mean the rest of my life has no future. Yeah, well, I think the thing to think about there is we're talking about adolescents who are in the process of developing from being children into the adults they'll be.
So suppose you're a kid, you're 15 years old, and you want to join, maybe it's the newspaper club, and maybe you get excluded from that. In your mind, you might be thinking, now I can't be the newspaper journalist that I wanted to become. You might not have that thought fully consciously, but the rejection from the club might feel like a rejection from the future self that you are aspiring to.
Lucia writes that her son has a fixed mindset. What are fixed mindsets and how do they lead to these kinds of thought spirals? Yeah, fixed mindset is the idea that you have a certain amount of intelligence. That's what you have. And you're either smart or you're not smart. And there's not much you can do to increase that.
And if you have that fixed mindset and you approach a learning situation, maybe you take a math test, if you don't do very well, that fixed mindset tells you you're not good at this. You're not a math person. You shouldn't try at this. And it leads people to become unresilient when they're faced with learning challenges.
You've done research looking at how students can avoid spirals and cultivate what's called a growth mindset. So for a parent like Lucia, who is basically dealing with the 16-year-old son who feels like his life is over, how would you recommend she deploy this idea of a growth mindset to help her son, Greg? Yeah. So I think one thing to say is that Lucia's role is one important role as a parent.
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