Ty Tashiro is a psychologist, author, and relationship expert. Searching for love can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to find the right person. So what traits should we actually seek out, or avoid, and how can we give ourselves the best chance of finding our person? Expect to learn why happily ever after is so hard to find, why people have difficulty envisioning their romantic future, why we only get 3 wishes for our partner, the biggest mistakes people make when choosing a long-term partner, why some people are drawn to relationships that are really tough, if it is possible to optimise your chance of finding the right partner by increasing your odds of timing and randomness and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is 'Happily Ever After' so hard to find in modern relationships?
Awesome. Okay. Happily Ever After. How come it's so hard to find?
Oh, this is a long story. It gets a little depressing. I promise people I'll... have a better story as we go along here. But, you know, the two things people really want when they sit down and think about it is they want a relationship that's happy. I think that's the more obvious thing. But they can forget that, hey, we also want something that's going to be stable and last.
You don't want to have something that flames out after two or three years. And so happily ever after actually is a phrase that captures that well. And if you look at the data on that, happily ever after is really elusive for modern love. So I think a lot of people are familiar with the divorce statistics, but let me break that down with a little bit more detail.
So the divorce rate for first marriages is somewhere between 41 and 43 percent. So it's obviously pretty high. You would think maybe in a second marriage, your divorce risk goes down because you learned a couple of things. Actually, not the case. It goes up 10% for second marriages. It goes up 15% for third marriages.
So if you kind of average all these numbers together, the divorce risk is about 50%. Now, Also part of that is the happy part. So some couples stay together, but they're really unhappy, chronically unhappy. And if you use the most modest estimate possible... You know, that's going to be about 8% of 8 to 10% of couples. So now we're up to 63%. So, you know, or 60%, I'm sorry.
So happily ever after, yes, is really hard to find. And I think it's harder than ever in the modern dating environment that we have.
Okay, that's a very depressing way to begin a conversation about love. Look, it seems to me that I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this too. As fun as reading Sex at Dawn was, I don't think it's accurate. It seems to me that humans are sort of
serially monogamous or monogamish something like that working on between two to seven ten year cycles with partners getting infants to the stage where they're able to remotely fend for themselves what's your perspective sort of uh anthropologically here
Yeah, I think that's about right. It gets confusing with some of this evolutionary psychology theory because it could be true, for example, right? Let's say that we're not designed to be as monogamous as we are in modern society, but we have all these social constraints. We have financial commitments attached to marriage. We have kids attached to it.
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Chapter 3: How do our desires and biological impulses affect long-term relationship stability?
Do you reckon that's the same for sociosexuality? If you were the girl that was sleeping around a load in high school, you're still the girl that's sleeping around a load in the retirement home?
Well, you know, that is a concern, actually, with older adults right now. So there's this... STD concerns, one of the places it's most acute in public health is among... older adults.
Phenomenal.
Yeah.
Phenomenal.
Which is amazing. So yeah, people don't change because traits are, you know, traits are stable and folks might see these articles every now and then that, that you can change your personality. And that is true to an extent, but the number of people who will change their personality is,
Like, the rough way to put that is about 20% to 25% of people, like, for example, who are neurotic will turn themselves into not neurotic people anymore. The remaining 75% to 80% will show stability over time. And the reason I like to put things that way is if you're in a position of choosing a partner, you know, this is a bet, really, right?
And you're saying, okay, so I have this person who's high in neuroticism. Hmm. Do I think that's going to change? 75% chance, yeah. It's going to be exactly the same way for the rest of my life. 25% chance they change. That's not a bet I would probably want to make.
It's interesting when you think about what people are doing when they first find a partner. They're kind of
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