In this episode, we delve deep into the concept of love, challenging the traditional and culturally popularized ideas surrounding romantic love. We argue that what is often labeled as 'love' is actually a bundle of separate emotions such as admiration, attachment, arousal, and fondness, and not a single profound, unique emotion. By exploring various scientific, genetic, historical, and cross-cultural perspectives, we aim to demystify and deconstruct the concept of love. We discuss the biological markers and chemical reactions associated with love, the societal constructs that influence our understanding of it, and how different cultures historically viewed relationships and love. Join us as we debunk long-held beliefs and provide a fresh, rational take on love and marriage.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, I'm excited to be here with you today. If you read this title and you're familiar with the way we do title cards, you probably think that this is some sort of bait and switch.

It is not a bait and switch.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: This is, this is with the, the, the core point I'm gonna be arguing in this episode. Is that some groups may feel love, but I suspect for the vast majority of humans at, at least given myself and with my wife, you know, I, I came to her the other day and I was like, I wasn't sure if you were gonna be mad at me.

'cause I, we always end this show. I was like, I love you and everything like that. And I was like, Simone, I'm gonna be honest. I don't feel some separate distinct emotion that I can categorize as love like, and, and I think that what's really cool is if love is a myth. Yeah. Most people don't feel that they can say that.

They can go out and say, Hey, this is a myth. Yeah. 'cause either they're not in a deep, you know, satisfying relationship. Mm-hmm. So they're in this position where people will just be like, oh, well you haven't found love yet.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Or they are in [00:01:00] a deep, satisfying relationship and people will say.

Wait, does that mean that you don't really care about your wife? Does that mean you don't, you know, it, it disconfirms being the person, the whistleblower on love to, to beat all these people. Like, Hey, I'm not sure this is a real thing and we're gonna be going through the receipts on it. Yeah. Is quite a costly thing to do unless you're in an incredibly secure position with your relationship.

And so people know us, they know that. I literally have no negative thoughts about my wife anymore. Like there are times in a relationship where like, I had like minor beast with you about this or that. I drive you a

Simone Collins: little nuts on some fronts. I don't

Malcolm Collins: even have minor beasts. The, the, the primary emotion that I feel towards you, like if I was going to categorize the primary emotions that I feel towards you is admiration.

And a sense of debt for everything that you've invested in our family and aligned future.

Simone Collins: Oh, same dude.

Malcolm Collins: And I have other feelings. I have a [00:02:00] feeling of attachment. I have a feeling of fondness. I have a feeling of sadness when you're not around or like a desire to be with you again. That's sort of like an addiction.

I have arousal from you. I think that you're a very attractive woman. But dude, I can name all of those things. Yeah. These are all separate and

Simone Collins: distinct things

Malcolm Collins: and, and, and I don't feel something other than these things that have a very commonly known name. And so I think that me coming out here and saying this is saying something that is sort of like.

And I, I will note, I do think that quote unquote love is a real thing. But what I mean by that is I think that what we are calling love is a bundle of other emotions that have easily nameable names. Yeah. It's either new relationship energy is often mistaken for love when you're starting to date.

For people who don't know, this is common in like the polyamory community. Mm-hmm. In it sets. Special feeling you get when you're dating someone you're excited about. Yeah. That [00:03:00] dies down your chest

Simone Collins: in your belly. The tingly.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, the tingly. But, but new relationship energy is obviously not love.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: People call it love early when, when somebody says like, do you love me or do you not love me? They're typically asking like, how much new relationship energy do you have for me?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The second thing that has often caused a love, and this is in relation to children, right? Is and by the way, when I say like.

This is what people are calling love, like this bundle of emotions. This is why when I tell my wife I love her at the end of every episode, I'm not lying to her. I am, I am telling her I have this emotional set that other people are calling love. But with children, I think what is often called love is a bundle of emotions, but predominantly the emotion.

The psychologists call attachment. And in psychology especially child development attachment is treated as a unique emotional state. A child does not just like their caregiver, they feel a deep existential distress when separated, insecurity when near except for our kids. And that defines attachment distress when separated.

[00:04:00] Security went near. But that's not love that nobody would say, oh, but it means our children

Simone Collins: don't love us, Malcolm, I swear to you.

Malcolm Collins: No, no. I, I mean, I don't think they do.

But I think a lot of people, they may hear this. And they'll think this is really a semantic argument, right? You're being like, well, you have these emotional states, but they're not. And I'm like, actually, not only is it not a semantic argument, it's a very big deal that this misconception has had.

And it's a very big deal because a lot of people, like if you look in at the, the sort of normal western relationship development, there is the moment when the partner says, I love you. Right? And so somebody could be like, well, you know. You're saying that, you know, loveness loving is really just , a word that means fondness and attachment and arousal maybe, right?

Mm-hmm. And it's like, well, if that is actually what everyone else means when they're saying the word love, then why do we have this ritual in relationships where people who otherwise like each other in all other formats like two [00:05:00] people will be dating for a long time, like years sometimes, and one of them won't say, I love you to the other one.

And it's supposed to be this like big step in the relationship when they say, I love you to them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And the other partner says.

Malcolm Collins: Thanks. Yeah. Or, or I love you too, or whatever, right? But, but suppose they say this and, and what love really means in our society is just fondness, arousal, and attachment.

Right. And maybe respect in, in most of the instances in which I've seen, a person doesn't say, I love you in a relationship, and it's like a big deal within our media or something like that. They have all of those emotions.

So clearly it's explicitly sort of demonstrated to people that this word means something in addition to those things. Well, and I think it causes

Simone Collins: conflict. Like I think one of the reasons why people don't immediately say I love you too, is because they think that there's some social contract that's being initiated when one partner says, I love you.

But they're really not sure what that means. Like, okay, does this mean that you expect me to propose in four months? 'cause for some people that kind of does, and I [00:06:00] remember. Also feeling this way because your family, you, you grew up using, I love you as a way to end a conversation. And I think you might've learned that from your mom.

And your mom has, like other people in her family had started to adopt it and then they would start ending calls with, I love you and I as like the daughter-in-law who wasn't. Like, I, I didn't know if I should say I love you too. So like I know that feeling. I think a lot of people can really identify with that feeling of like, oh God, like what am I into now?

Like,

Malcolm Collins: I

think so, no, but the point here being is think about the damage this could cause to a young person's relationship. Ugh. They're dating somebody. Girls,

Simone Collins: girls have brought, I mean, this sounds like the kind of thing she'd post to Reddit. You know, should I break up with my boyfriend because he refuses to say he loves me too.

Well, course's, just

Malcolm Collins: trying to be honest. Yeah. He's like, I don't feel some new emotion that is materially different from the way I felt about you up until now. Yeah, like from day

Simone Collins: one.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what, what [00:07:00] do you mean? Like, yeah. And then there's this, this, this secondary issue, which is so the person who's trying to be fastidiously honest ends up never saying it and hurting somebody else, right?

Mm-hmm.

Or. They eventually break like most people do in our society, and then just say it. And then they believe that they're lying to their partner and they're living a lie. Yeah, that's not good. I wanna start a relationship on that, right? Like, this is not a small thing. If it turns out that this is not an, an other emotion.

And it's not a particularly profound, like really, really loud emotion and I should say. We are in a uniquely good spot to talk about this. Not just 'cause we're in a solid relationship but also because we tick all of the boxes that people say break love. Like I was the first person you slept with.

You know, I was the first person you'd seriously hooked up with. I was the first person, right? Like, all of these things which are tied to like these bonding chemicals in women, like the oxytocin and everything like that. Mm-hmm. Which create attachment you have been [00:08:00] exposed to. Right. It's, it.

It's not just the quality of our relationship, it's, it's literally check every single box.

Simone Collins: It should produce the, what people say is pure love. So you're saying some people would argue that the problem many people don't experience love is that they've had too many partners or something like that, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. They'll say. And we do know this lower the amount of oxytocin, which causes the collection of emotions that people call love this sort of attachment. Which, which we have, but it's not like a super profound emotion. It's like, I miss you when we don't talk, but it's not like all of a sudden along with that, missing you.

Some other emotion that felt really awesome came up and hit me as well. There's some

Simone Collins: weird, like poetic longing. There just seems to be this poetic element to the this that I just don't.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

And note here if it is a real emotion and all I have found is just by coincidence, neither my wife or I feel it. , What this means is that there are specific individuals out there who can be perfectly happy. In fact, my marriage is better than I ever could [00:09:00] have. , A imagined, a marriage.

Being, , who can have perfectly happy and satisfying relationships without this extra emotion being a part of it, and that nothing will ever trigger this emotion in some people. If it is true that other people are having this emotion and we're just anomalies, which is another important thing to note.

Malcolm Collins: And I, I, I want to demystify this concept because what love has become was in our civilization is the, basically it just means emotions that are above reproach.

And so people will say things like, Lex Friedman will come in and be like, but what about love, Mr. All of his degrees are from Drexel. I will never stop mentioning that. My God, welcome. He, he is not an MIT professor. He taught my

Simone Collins: podcast. RIP Your chance of ever being on his podcast. Hey,

Malcolm Collins: look, he, he didn't let me online.

He didn't get back to me. This is his fault. You know, he, he also, I don't like when people like are pur purposely going out there and basically defrauding people like through the reputational fraud. You know, if you're not smart, just [00:10:00] admit you're not that bright. Okay. That's funny. Well, you can

Simone Collins: be bright and go to Drexel.

But Right. Being misleading, I mean, it, it implies a level of insecurity or just like, I don't know, whatever. But

Malcolm Collins: anyway the, the the, the people like him, sorry Simone. You can't be smart and ever respond to somebody. What about love? That's like the ultimate basic be take. Yeah. But true,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: guess.

That is, I have never heard anything more basic.

Speaker: You refer to your friends as your boys. You love bacon so much that you ruin it for everyone else.

And your preferred topic of conversation is how much you drank last night. Four beers, two shots of Jack, one Red Bull buck. This is very serious, Gerald. Very seriously basic. The good news is we caught your basicness early. If you can wean yourself off the guy's only poker nights and stop referring to your basement as your man cave. You might be able to salvage a personality.[00:11:00]

Speaker 2: Uh, actually I haven't. I haven't told you everything. I've noticed a strange feeling like this area. I think I have a crutch on Emma Watson. Oh my God. That's basic.

He is trans smart. He is someone who identifies this smart. Um, and therefore we need to affirm that identity. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: No, but I, here's the thing

Simone Collins: though, and like to, to your point about being afraid of, of being a whistleblower on the scam of love I, I think that a really big issue at play here is that. We have, there are people, and we have friends who are like this too.

Like, you know, we have our model of friendship and we believe there are only three types of friends. There are convenience friends who are like neighbors and colleagues who you're only friends with because they're literally there and convenient. There are character reinforcing friends who are literally the supporting character that you need to prove yourself, that you are the character you want to be.

And then there are utility friends who provide useful information or connections, or they have the best video game content. And, and they are useful to you and so therefore you're friends with them. [00:12:00] And we have some friends who are like, but what about the people who you just love for their own inherent value?

And who, like, we have people who say that to me, multiple different people. I think where we are with that is there's a lot of people who see themselves, like they, they. They see themselves as loving and, and that they respect humans and that they, they literally could not reconcile what you're saying about love because it would break their sense of self.

So I don't think it's necessarily a sign of stupidity. I think it could also be a flaw in their character design and that they're like, literally, they would have to admit that a huge part of their identity is just. Of sort of performative life? Fraudulent.

Malcolm Collins: Fraudulent? No, I think that people who base a lot of their character identity, and I will say that there is an emotion that is misidentified as love.

Mm-hmm. That can exist towards like the world as a whole or society as a whole. There God or any. Yes. It, it, it's [00:13:00] an emotion that is generated when you think about something that is complicated and not fully knowable. That gives you a sense of comfort. And that is, is also like not fully grable in the moment.

Mm-hmm. Like the all of reality, like when you think about the true nature of the cosmos and, and how big it is or the, the true time links of all of your ancestors and everything they went through, or God itself, right. Or himself. Sorry. I don't wanna be somebody who implies that God is a. Genderless.

You get this, this, this feeling that people call a a form of love, and I'm like, yeah, but this is clearly not what we're talking about when we're talking about like romantic love, right? Like. This is obviously some other and, and quite a trite and easy to trigger emotion. You, you can trigger it whenever you think about something that is vast and gives you a sense of security.

And, and that is complex slightly more complex in your understanding. So it's a feeling you might get when you like, contemplate the [00:14:00] nature of the Trinity. 'cause the Trinity is intrinsically not understandable. And so you'll get this feeling

mm-hmm. Or

contemplate the nature of you know, consciousness or.

Or all of humanity or the Gaia like Earth and all of the biomes that are, make it up. But this is obviously not what we mean when we're talking about love as like this magical thing that bonds you to somebody. It's, it's clearly this like easily triggerable and hackable emotional state that isn't magic or anything like that.

So what I wanna do is I wanna go through. One, the science around this, what creates love? Ooh.

Okay. I wanna

go through because some people are born with different genetics that cause them to express emotions like lust in love differently. That's interesting. Yeah. Just

Simone Collins: tell like. Some people taste the bitterness in broccoli and other people literally can't.

And you can see if you have that gene. Yeah, I don't, yeah, it would make sense. Love would be experienced differently too. Of course.

Malcolm Collins: We're gonna go through the history of this and I'm gonna show you that the concept of love as we understand it today is something different from. [00:15:00] Arousal or attachment or fondness started very specifically and easily traceable to the court culture of courtly love to the culture of chivalry.

This was a culture that was if you go to books of this time period. They were written by either horny, troubadour, or celibate monks very frequently by celibate monks. Yeah, they were, no, they were basically the Intels of the time writing stories about romancing some woman. That's great. That's great.

And, and the problem is, is that because they were godly men and stuff like that, they couldn't say. I have this hole in my life and this hole is lust and attachment and the desire to possess someone. And and so I. I'm going to define the emotion that I feel for them as above reproach, and I am going to call this, this new emotional state love.

And what we will see, because I'm gonna go through this, is that [00:16:00] actually this isn't a common concept cross-culturally and where it is seen cross-culturally, it's usually seen as a negative emotion.

Simone Collins: Ooh, okay. The

Malcolm Collins: idea that you would. Feel an attachment to somebody outside of like the best interest of both of your families is seen as a negative emotion.

And while there have been studies, and I'll go over these studies that say that like 88% of cultures have some concept of love, if you look at how they're defining love, they'll say it's like a fondness. Like I'd be sad if they died. I'd be sad if they were away from me. Bro, I feel that way for my wife.

Right. And I'm admitting that I don't have this separate other emotion. So clearly those aren't what love is. Yeah. What love is is this secondary overwhelming and clearly distinct emotion that we have made up in Western culture and, and very strangely, it's become like this weird thing in relationships.

Like they haven't said they love me yet. Like it's this weird Oh yeah. It's this weird performative

Simone Collins: thing of when do you say I love you, and do they say, I love you back right away.

Malcolm Collins: I am [00:17:00] putting this on the table, you know? Yeah. It, it, it's like this weird emotional thing. And we might get a chance, I don't know how much time we're gonna have in this to go over some other emotions that I think are mostly made up.

Ooh. Two of which I think are jealousy. I think jealousy is mostly made up.

No.

What have you ever felt, I'm not talking about like your partner sleeping with somebody else, but have you ever felt distinct? You, you may have felt like this person unjustly has a lot of stuff that I wish I had. No, no.

Simone Collins: That's you're describing envy. Jealousy is when you're trying to protect a thing that you think someone else is gonna try to take from you. Like a jealous lover. No, it's not. Yeah. Envy is when you want something. You don't have jealousy. No.

Malcolm Collins: Jealousy is when you want something that somebody else has.

Simone Collins: No, that's envy

Malcolm Collins: and and it makes you dislike them as a result of this.

That's

Simone Collins: envy.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, well I'll let you AI this while I keep going, Simone. Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm. Oh, did the AI not [00:18:00] agree with you? Oh, hold on. You go Princess. Are you trying, are you trying to get it to agree with you now because it didn't agree with you.

Simone Collins: Jealousy is wanting what someone else has envious this told you I'm wrong. Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: Told you. So, but, but no, but jealousy has a secondary implication, which is not just you want what somebody else has, but this wanting makes you like.

Dislike them or angry at them. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's just like a social construct that we that's just you

Simone Collins: choosing to be a jerk

Malcolm Collins: if you're jealous. Yeah. It's like you choosing to be petty and a jerk. And I think you could just choose to not be jealous. Yeah. Not hard to like understand. The

Simone Collins: world's not fair.

Malcolm Collins: The other one I might talk about is, is forgiveness. I don't think forgiveness is a real concept either. I'm with

Simone Collins: you on that.

Malcolm Collins: Either like, like nothing changes in the moment. I'm j I'm just like, oh, I'm choosing to not hold this against you anymore. But that's just like a choice. It's not like an emotion or a

Yeah.

But anyway, to keep going here, because I wanna go into the [00:19:00] ancient Greeks because people will be like, well, the ancient Greeks had this concept.

Okay.

Okay. The linguistic evidence is particularly compelling. Many languages don't have a single word that maps onto the English love. Which they would if this was a widespread human emotion.

Ancient Greece has multiple words, which I think is more honest about what it is. 'cause remember I said I think that this is multiple distinct emotions that have other words. Yeah. Aeros desire. Okay. Or what we would call lust.

Yeah.

Ilia. We, we would call friendship storge, what we would call familial affection.

Certainly not love. Agape which is universal compassion. This is the agape. Remember I said that this is this emotion? Oh yeah. Like, I love the world things.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That sort of baba yet too feeling. Exactly, exactly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Suggesting they saw these as fundamentally different experiences.

And note here, to me, this is pretty strong evidence that a lot of humans don't feel this emotion if the entire Greek civilization was able to get by without anyone thinking this emotion needed a name. And them being able to have debates where they [00:20:00] clearly talk about, and we'll go into these debates later, , marriage and the way I feel for my wife while describing something very different than what the modern concept of love is.

Malcolm Collins: And I'll go into Plato's Symposium because in that they, they talk about what, what is this emotion that you feel or this bundle of emotions that you feel.

You know, when you're, you're married to somebody and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Mm-hmm. And so, it basically had different speeches that gave different iterations on what this may be, and I think that they're pretty good at describing it. Posse's speech, he explicitly divides arrows into vulgar.

So this is the concept of lust, right? Okay. Into a vulgar, tied to physical arousal and body gratification, often indiscriminate. Yeah. And heavenly, a virtuous intellectual bond between partners focused on character and wisdom. Rather than just desire, affection. Oh, I

Simone Collins: guess sapiosexual.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not even sapiosexual.

I mean, I think that would describe our relationship, right? Like an intellectual bond between partners focused on character and [00:21:00] wisdom rather than desire or affection. Totally. But I don't think that that's this distinct, magical emotion. It's, it's, it's more like. Admiration is the closest word I, I have to it.

And I think that it is a form of admiration. Mm-hmm. This distinguishes between love as a moral elevated state and not merely luft or, or fondness. Heavenly love inspires self-improvement in the beloved beyond attachment, which we've always talked about in our relationship is self-improvement as a core goal.

And I would say that this, this heavenly form of the vulgar or, or of, of, of aeros is. Not even in the category that most people consider love, even though I would consider it to be the highest form of an emotional attachment. Yeah. You even

Simone Collins: had an ex-girlfriend who left you because she felt like you primarily loved her for the intellectual engagement you had.

Yes. And she wanted you to like. Vulgarly lust after her.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. She's like, you, you, you always call me beautiful and whatever. Actually, this is two different girls who had one broke up with me of [00:22:00] this. The other had issues. One just been like, you only liked me for my brain. And I was like, yeah, the nerve, the nerve I mean, you're hot, but like, I primarily like you because of your intellect.

And this other guy liked her for her body, I guess. And good for her. I, I'm sure anyone who saw what's, what's happened in my life would probably prefer to be married to me. But, i'm glad that that worked out for her. She broke up with the guy shortly after, by the way, so it didn't, didn't even, this isn't college freshman, sophomore year of college for no.

Freshman year of college. And then the next one, by the way, securing a good girlfriend freshman year of college. That's hard. 'Cause that's when you Yeah, I, I don't

Simone Collins: dunno if I'd want my kids to settle down with their freshman love.

Malcolm Collins: My brother did. That's who he married.

Simone Collins: That's true actually. Okay.

Nevermind. I stand correctly there. Solid freshman

Malcolm Collins: in college. Yeah. Yeah. Then the, the second one this was the one who was at our wedding as a, a groomsman actually. This person didn't transition or anything, it's just that she was my friend. And so we had her in a suit and everything and I consider her very [00:23:00] close friend.

But anyway, so she she one day got mad at me 'cause she goes, you always tell me hot and. What was it? No, it was beautiful. She's like, you always call me beautiful. And you never call me like hot or sexy or anything like that. And I, I, I feel like no one ever sees me that way. And like, actually, if you've seen her, you get it.

I don't know if you like, know the difference between like beautiful and hot and sexy. But she definitely is like beautiful above all else. Well, that's,

Simone Collins: so the problem is she's extremely classy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And there's, there's a level of class at which you just can't. Sexualize someone.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she's at that level of class where it's very hard to sexualize.

She was Daisy Buchanan level of class. Like Daisy Buchanan isn't sexy ever. Right? Yeah. Like, oh, I mean,

Simone Collins: and like, not to say that she isn't sexy, but like, you won't sexualize her because she, you're too busy admiring the beauty. Like yeah, there's something, there's something very, like if you're trying to like max up the sexuality, [00:24:00] dial on someone.

There is kind of this trashiness thing that you also, like, there's, you have, you have to put in trashy points. Yeah. Like, you can't be maximum sexy if you're not also a little trashy. Agree, agree. Also, you know what? I think part of it is that, and you can see this in a lot of erotic material that men watch.

A, a big part of being sexy is like really enthusiastic. Like, I need you like, I'm so excited to suck on your, you know what and a classy woman. Is a little bit too aloof for that kind of

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That

Simone Collins: element of being sexy. And so they can't be 100% sexy because that's like a good, at least 30 plus percent of what sexiness is in a woman, I think.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, to continue, aristo Fame's speech. So this is the next one. In the the Plato thing, love is mythologized as a deep existential longing for one's other half after humans were split by Zeus portraying it as a drive for wholeness. In union that causes emotional [00:25:00] turmoil, but isn't just arousal, it's not always sexual or attachment.

It's obsessive and incomplete without the partner. This frames love as a unique psychological state, a binding of partners separate from casual fondness. And I would say that again, this is an accurate thing that I feel for my wife. But I do not think that this is a love that other people are talking about.

No, this desire to be a single entity. And we often talk about this where if you look at other people where like they. See marriage as like a combining of two individuals. And we don't like, like when, I mean like two people who stay individuals. I see the primary unit of self as the family. Yeah. Secondary unit of self is me plus my wife.

Tetra unit of self is me as an individual entity for sure. But this is a recontextualization of what it means to be me. And what is the most important instance of me was in reality, I am a, a, a cell was in an organism that I exist to serve. Yeah. And the cells doesn't matter [00:26:00] exactly. But that's not love.

That's just a recontextualization of identity that's healthy to happen after marriage. And then you have later Aristotle three 50 BCE in Nyman and Essex. He differentiates Elia, a form of love akin to deep friendship, into types, utility based, practical attachment, pleasure based arousal, fondness, and virtue based, the highest mutual and reciprocal fostering.

Moral growth. Hmm. Which again, we talk about as like in a Pygmalion relationship or something like that in our, in our book, but that's not what other people are talking about when they're talking about love. They don't, in fact. Our modern culture is antithetical in its conception of love, to love applying to moral growth.

Because the most common thing that you hear within our modern culture is, I hope you love me as I am. I want somebody who loves me as I am without growth. If it implied moral growth, it wouldn't be an as I am phenomenon. Yeah. Whereas with us, actually when we got married, [00:27:00] we didn't even promise to love each other.

'cause I was like, I can't control my emotions. Not all. And we

Simone Collins: explicitly said as much in our.

Malcolm Collins: Wedding vows. Wedding vows. But I said that I will push you to improve every day, and I, I know that you care about me because you push me to improve every day. Which is, I think a very different thing from modern, if we were gonna recontextualize love as being with somebody who pushes you to morally improve every day and improve yourself every day.

I'm like, oh yeah, I can get behind. Like, like, that's a real emotion I have towards my life. 100%. Yeah. That's not what other people, that's not what Lex Friedman is talking about when he goes, what about love? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. He's talking

Malcolm Collins: about an emotion that is defined by its ir, approachability and sacredness, and the fact when people are like, God is love.

And, and,

And note for those who want to say that this argument is just semantics, and we're just using different definitions here, we are absolutely not individuals when they say something like. But what about love? They're clearly not talking about these fairly trivial emotional states. , Like attachment, like just feeling, you know, irritated when you're not around someone or something like [00:28:00] that.

They are talking about some alternate emotional state, which feels near transcendent and is irreproachable, and we are saying that emotional state does not exist, at least as an output from , relationships.

well, no, I, I almost

Simone Collins: feel like it's kind of, it's, it's downstream of this chivalric love fantasy that was created in. In, in, in Cell Monk fan fiction basically that no, it is that like never really existed and that it, it implies this like poetic performativeness of like, oh my, my darling love and I, you know, this pining and like all this weird stuff that isn't, is neither productive nor realistic.

And it was literally by people who lived. In, in single gender environments with

Malcolm Collins: no,

Simone Collins: no interaction,

Malcolm Collins: no relation. And then you've got vid. So who, who then tackles this subject? This is in, in Rome, so 48. Okay. Three B, c, e to 17 C. [00:29:00] And Roman literature, like AM Maura, R is am love is depicted as chaotic, obsessive emotion involving jealousy, pursuit, and emotional turmoil.

Often satirized as a disease or an artful game is distinct from pure lust, which he treats separately as carnal or fondness, casual liking. Mm-hmm. Emphasizing psychological manipulation and longing that binds lovers in dramatic, sometimes tragic ways. This is, I think, closest to the modern concept of love.

We've just removed any implication that it could have these negative effects. Where it's like, oh, well yes, love is this thing that causes you to act. Jealous. IE like overly protective of an individual. This is a modern concept, right? Or gives you the right to act that way, you know what I mean?

Like, again, I don't believe jealousy, the thing. I think it's a social contracts of a set of rights that you believe that you have. And no, when I say I don't believe jealousy is this thing. We'll get to this. If we get to this that this, not to say that you do not feel something when your partner sleeps with someone other than you, but this [00:30:00] is an evolved state that is not n.

What people mean when they say jealousy. It's more like a sense of disgust and anger that is like, obviously useful from like a reproductive capacity perspective. But this sort of like, I. Manipulative iteration of love is, I think, closer to what the modern person means when they say love. And most other cultures saw it as as quite negative.

I will note that before courtly love, you get some sort of like prototypical. Ideas of this modern concept of love from early Christian thinkers. So, you've got St. Paul in 50 to 60 ce in letters like Corinthia Law one Corinthians one Agape is unconditional sacrificial love, ig patient kind and not envious, modeled in Christ's self-giving.

Which I think is sort of this proto love. It's like, whatever. Whatever Christ felt towards humanity is this emotion that we're gonna define as love.

Simone Collins: But it sounds [00:31:00] more like maybe what a parent too would, would feel for their child.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. So it works well, but it's more like if, if you just look at, it's.

More just self-sacrifice. Mm-hmm. Like, I don't think that that's something different than self-sacrifice for something that you either for ideological reasons or for attachment reasons, feel attached to. Right. Then you have St. Augustine and 400 ce he emerges aeros and agape into carteris, a yearning for God.

As the ultimate good, but applies it to human bonds is a pass to eternal fulfillment. It's portrayed as restless, ascending desire. Our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Separate from capitus worldly lust for fondness or transient emphasizing a spiritual union over physical or habitual.

And note here the words that he's mo. Mixing here, or agape, which is like, that word I said is like, love for like the universe or love for like, remember I talked about like that word that you feel when you're dealing with like these complicated [00:32:00] concepts Yeah. With arrows, which means lust. So he is saying weird.

Weird.

Simone Collins: It's like, I wanna, I wanna mind.

Malcolm Collins: F God, screw you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think that

Malcolm Collins: some I'll, I'll put here the scene from South Park, which is I want to get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus.

Simone Collins: Oh gosh. Okay.

Speaker 4: I wanna get down on my knees and start please Jesus. I wanna feel his salvation all over my face. The CD is filled with instant classics. Who doesn't remember the body? Christ. Everybody up, body up I my own.

Simone Collins: Oh, there you go. Okay. Which

Malcolm Collins: is kind of, by the way, I don't know if you know this, but when Matt and Trey Parker wrote these, they had actually planned under a pseudonym before this to attempt to create a Christian rock band that became popular.

But they wanted all the songs to be of this category of song, right. It sounded like the first thing was actually like in love with God. Yeah. Or Jesus. Um mm-hmm. And, and, and they were like, we wanted [00:33:00] to see how long we could stay on recovery. Why didn't they, they decided it was too much work. And I'm like, this is so sad that that didn't happen in our timeline.

That is really sad. That's Stone and Trey Parker take over the Christian r scene with songs about Damn. Pleasing Jesus. I wanna, I wanna get done on my knees and start pleasing Jesus. I wanna feel his salvation all over my face.

Simone Collins: Oh, lost opportunity,

Malcolm Collins: lost opportunity to be in that timeline. But now here, you people will be like, well, you see it in some other places, and just courtly love, like what about Muslim writings?

And this I think is really interesting because I think he does a good job of breaking down the way people actually feel about their partners versus this magical love emotion, which is proposed. And some people probably feel pretty. Insecure about not feeling because they don't realize that everyone else is just pretending.

And we're trying to break the, this is gonna come back to haunt us. Some article's are gonna be like, they don't even love each other. And I'm gonna be like, Hey, we, whatever you guys are calling [00:34:00] love. We're just honest and secure enough in our relationship to be like, pull. Everyone else is just diluting themselves shenanigans.

This isn't real. That guy when he says, I love you, he's just waiting as long as he can to decide when he needs to say that to get to f you or whatever. Right? Yeah. Like, or to continue the length of the relationship. Yeah. To, to, to basically ef face himself by our cultural standards. But he probably doesn't feel some new emotional state towards you.

Simone Collins: No. No. And well, the funny thing though is I feel like there's this tacit understanding. That that's true. It's just people are really uncomfortable admitting that. 'cause I think people think they'll be branded as a sociopath or unfeeling or unkind if they do that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so this is written in Southern 22 ce.

The Ring of the Dove. The Arabic treaties systematically describes romantic love ishka as a psychological and emotional process with stages. And I think this is accurate as well, right? Like it's not a a, a [00:35:00] distinct emotion, it's a set of emotions that come on in stages that have other names.

Mm-hmm.

Specifically attraction, obsession, jealousy, sleeplessness, and even chased devotion or unrequited suffering. Ivan Harms drawing from personal experiences like his in situation was a maid note, by the way, here. He got this for a maid that he was infatuated with. It is not what we would call love.

Right.

Okay.

Portrays it as a noble soul binding of fiction that can be pure and elevating, not just lust, which he separates at the base and again, or fondness. Casual affection. And note here, what you often see when people have love is they have lust in new relationship energy. For an individual who they know they're not supposed to be with.

And so they then rebranded as something above the approach.

Okay.

For example, very

convenient.

He discusses love signs like gazing and secrecy, framing it as a distant [00:36:00] malady of the heart that unites lovers spiritually, even if Unconsummated. And some scholars have seen this as a progenitor to the courtly love concept.

So, European literature did create its idealized, almost spiritual concept of romantic love that was quite different from earlier views of marriage, primarily as an economic and social arrangement from an but. I will note here, this is the biggest pullback on all of this. It is actually kind of weird that evolution didn't build a love emotion that it seemed to just grab a number of other emotions and tie them together.

And so we'll, like you

Simone Collins: say in all our books, evolution's a lazy programmer. Whatcha gonna do? Oh,

Malcolm Collins: she's a lazy programmer. Just takes what's already there.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, a combination of emotion that drives the American Psychological Association defines love as a quote unquote, complex emotion involving affection, tenderness, attachment, and sometimes arousal researchers like Carol [00:37:00] Izard.

So right now, I'm just going over with the various, like scientific fields say on this. Have noted that love can be joy combined with interest in another person. Note again, this, this is what the scientists who study this say, none of these are what our pop culture would say as love. No, we define

as this other magical emotion that like you'll know it when you feel it, right?

I mean, these people are like, no, it's just joy with fondness, right? And it's like, okay, well clearly I have that for my wife. Yeah. But I don't have this other magical emotion that warrants people. Like let's Freeman saying, but what about,

Simone Collins: but again, when you, when you express any doubt around it, you are completely pill.

Like there's this famous interview between. A journalist and the newly married, or maybe engaged Prince Charles and Princess Diana where they're like, oh, are you in love? And she immediately says Yes. And he's like, whatever that means, whatever that means.

Prince Charles: And I suppose in love, of course, [00:38:00] whatever in love means too,

Simone Collins: Which is so honest. It's so true. And yet he just like, he will never live that down.

Never.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Because everyone's like, oh, this, oh, he doesn't have the, but he's, yeah. Oh, he doesn't

Simone Collins: love her very. He was the first

Malcolm Collins: whistleblower in the world of love. Yes, yes, yes. Never forget. Yes. So Helen Fisher's work frames romantic love, but not as an emotion at all, but as a motivational state overlapping with systems for lust attraction.

And attachment which again is not what other people call love. Yeah.

And

then review by Adam Bode, and, gosh, Krishna echoes this calling romantic love, a suite of adaptations, including cognitive, emotional and behavioral elements for made choice bonding rather than a singular feeling. Ru row. But let's go into the neuroscientific backing.

Okay. Brain scan, show love activating multiple systems or war dopamine [00:39:00] for a high. This is like what you get from drugs like heroin, attachment, oxytocin for bonding. This is the attachment system. And even obsession, which again addiction. So what people are describing here is a combination of an addiction system and attraction system.

Sorry, an attachment system. But not a unique love center. . , One of the most cited studies here if a 1992 paper that showed love appearing at approximately 88.5% of cultures created by the anthropologist, William Je and Edward Fisher examined theologies of these cultures.

Mm.

But what did they, what did they. Call love. Like how did they determine whether or not these cultures had love? Yeah. Well, did they have songs about passionate longing? Did they have songs about unrequited love defined as one person wanting another partner?

Mm-hmm.

Or did they have f**k folk tales of lo lovers eloping?

Again, that's not love as we mean it today, or evidence of that. No, no. Or unloving over unrequited love. Or [00:40:00] unrequited wanting somebody else? Is that a thing? Well, I mean Romeo, Julie. Yeah. It's like a thing. Oh. But yeah, this is like a this is one of these things where it's like, I can't see, like if I didn't have a bunch of kids with you and you died, even without this emotion, I would almost certainly un alive myself.

But we have a lot of kids and I have other responsibilities now. Yeah, you're super

Simone Collins: not allowed to do that, by the way. I understand,

Malcolm Collins: but I'm just saying that's very much the way I would feel about the world even without this emotion, right? Mm-hmm. Hmm. That's not evidence that a culture has this emotion.

And so when you look at these studies that find this in other cultures, what you realize is the things that they are defining as this is something that people. Normally have, if they're in a long-term relationship with someone, they have a deep admiration for even if, and have intertwined their WI lives with even if they don't have this separate quote unquote magical emotion on top of that.

Hmm.

A 2018 study on core [00:41:00] features of romantic love models found culturally universal elements like altruism and intrusive thinking about the beloved alongside variables like sexual exclusivity in est theological data from multiple regions. Yeah. But the problem is, is I have all of those things too, and I wouldn't say I have this separate love emotion.

No. Yeah. That's not evidence for it. Mm-hmm.

More recent large scale surveys such as a 2024 study against 90 countries showed people worldwide are generally unwilling to commit to a long-term partner without whatever they defined as quote unquote romantic love. What they really just meant here was liking the person and it's like.

Well, okay buddy. That's an easy thing to have, right? Like, that's not, that's not this separate emotion that you're talking about here. Or actually we can end now. There's actually a lot more to go in this episode. Oh, I'm

Simone Collins: sorry.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's okay. We're gonna go over a bunch of early cultures and see how they were generally against whatever [00:42:00] this bundle of emotions is that we call favorable. And it didn't become seen positively until it seen positively was in a few rare cultures historically, and was in this modern culture.

But that's it.

Simone Collins: I'd even argue based on the, the collective relationship advice videos that I've watched, you know, from the fifties that are in my playlist.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: That even they are like, one, just control your last, you know, get ahold of yourself. And then two, like they, they really want people to form practical adult relationships to create a household.

Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna argue, and I think that this is true, is that the emotion that we call love today, it was mostly popularized by Disney movies. Which borrowed from chivalric literature and Disney movie's Popularity. Nobody thought like this. Nobody thought that there was some separate emotion that like made it ultra clear to you that this person was your one and only.

But Disney movies needed a way to show. An attraction to a partner in a way that was above moral [00:43:00] reproach. Mm-hmm. And it

Simone Collins: also wasn't like purely wasn't sexual. Yeah. But also wasn't about housework. And I feel like the, the, you can see, even see the difference between snow white. Where first she demonstrates she's a really good housewife because she cleans for seven men.

Yes. And, and then, you know, then she gets to marry within her station. 'cause she's, you know, let's not do inner class marriage guys. Yeah. She's actually, but she, but she's really just gonna, you know, clean the castle now. It's fine Guys.

Malcolm Collins: I love your rebranding of the story, but it's so true. It's that she shows you the top tier wife by cleaning for seven men and dealing with men of all emotional ranges.

Gries. Sleepy, et cetera. Sleepy. Yes. With, with a plum. And then she marries a man of her own class.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then later it's like, it, it's only in, in, you know, the, the, the seventies, eighties, nineties, et cetera. Then that we see this valer glove where it's like. Romantic. You know, it was really, it was more just like, oh, well you need fairly modernist

Malcolm Collins: concept.

'cause it's

Simone Collins: gross if you married minors. Like, ew. [00:44:00] Yeah. Don't marry the minors. Yeah. Right. I'll stop recording then for the Wagyu. I'm, I'm assuming that I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut it into steaks for tonight and make you guys pan-seared steak. And then we, we will figure out what to do with the remaining cup.

I really

Malcolm Collins: love your pan-seared steak in olive oil.

Simone Collins: No. And butter, dude, olive oil has a really low smoke point and then it becomes carcinogenic. So we wanted always,

Malcolm Collins: no. Okay, cook it in butter and then serve it with olive oil to be on the side. 'cause I remember putting the steak after you cook it in olive oil and don't

Simone Collins: you have the herbed butter, the expensive.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, the herb butter is so good. Yeah, I do the herb butter. Okay. Okay. You know what's up? This

Simone Collins: is gifted Australian Wagyu. We are not screwing this up. This is high stakes. Oh, high stakes. You f*****g

Malcolm Collins: with that. Love you, Simone. But I hope anyone who sees this interacting, you know, when we say this, and the reason I feel comfortable saying this is because I think the way I feel about my wife is as fond of a human being as.

Any other human is [00:45:00] capable of being. And because I'm at this stage in my relationship, I'm able to finally come out and be like, guys, no matter how deep in the tunnel you go, you don't find these diamonds. They're not there. Illusion. There is no love. They made up thing. Everybody said, go to the, and everybody thinks you, they're like, well, that's just proof that you're not really working in the tunnel.

And it's like, no. Like I am at the other end of the tunnel basically. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Sweeties guys. Anyway, okay, off I go.

Malcolm Collins: Have a great day

Simone Collins: like you Wagyu and homemade sourdough. I'm so excited. I love you.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, back in, because this was a long one, so it's stretching every two days of recording. And I collected data to go into all the science behind, like what changes when you love someone and the chemicals that are released and the, these chemicals are actually released in a bunch of other instances as well.

Mm-hmm. And seem more to do with I, a lot of them are evolved in addiction. Oh, totally. And tell me why. And we knew this

Simone Collins: because the experiment that I tried. When, when we first [00:46:00] met was I, I met Malcolm as part of this campaign I had when I turned 24 that I wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken in one year because I was like, I, I genuinely even believed at that age that love was not real.

But I still, like everyone sang songs about it, wrote poetry about it. I was like, well, I'm gonna try it. And I, I might disprove it. And I made you break up with me on July 31st of that year because I wanted to see what heartbreak felt like. There's no such thing as heartbreak, but there is such a thing as drug withdrawal.

And I know exactly what that felt like. 'cause it, it kicked in a week after at the first you were

Malcolm Collins: like, I don't feel anything. Mm-hmm. Everyone else is being w wacko about this. Yeah. And then apparently what you like collapsed in the street one day or like Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then I just started crying and I couldn't stop crying.

And then, yeah, I was just super emotional and I have absolutely felt.

Malcolm Collins: But the emotion you were feeling was not, was

Simone Collins: hormonal. It was hormonal. It was about withdrawal from a hormonal cocktail. The only time I felt something similar is the postpartum experience, which is also experience [00:47:00] of an extreme, like shift in hormones.

And what had happened was, yes, I, I developed like a addiction to you based on all the stuff that had happened. As we dated and became sexually intimate. So again, you're totally right there. I just, I just wanna emphasize that point. There wasn't, yeah, because if I, if it was purely, if there was some like, thing like love, which is kind of like people being like, there's a soul.

If there was really love, I would've felt it from day one after the breakup, or as soon as I like emo like, and logically processed,

Malcolm Collins: broken up, and not just that. Throughout the entire process of our early dating, you didn't feel some other unexplained emotion that you had never felt before. Right? Sure.

mm-hmm.

You, you felt the withdraw, but you didn't feel the this extra love emotion that you could have been like one day. Oh, now I know. I'm in love with Malcolm and I wasn't in love with Malcolm yesterday. Yeah.

Simone Collins: It's not like you've discovered a new flavor like umami. It's No. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so I think that that's really important to note.

So what we are gonna jump into [00:48:00] though is what I actually think triggers the various love emotions because we wrote about this in the Pragma to guide to Sexuality which some of our fans still haven't read. So, useful thing to go into before we go into some of the other cultures that, you know, don't really elevate love or see it as a negative thing.

Perfect. So romantic love appears to be triggered by complexity. The complexity of an idea or person appears to correlate with feelings of romantic love time. The amount of time we spend thinking about something may trigger feelings of romantic love. The belief that a thing can protect and comfort us.

Feeling supported by something in a moment of personal vulnerability may trigger feelings of romantic love, prolonged eye contact, in addition to triggering feelings of romantic love. Looking at. Eyes elicits all sorts of weird, unique psychological effects. Oh yeah. For example, if you paint eyes on a collection box, people will donate more money.

And if people see fake eyes painted on something, they will act more morally. In general, there is a clearly a unique neurological pathway associated with the process with processing the concept of eyes. So it may make sense that it could be involved in [00:49:00] love. And note, there's the. Famous Kinsey study experiment where you, you know, you know, you sit across from somebody, you look in their eyes and you ask vulnerable questions.

And people from this study reported feeling love for the other priest and after this and getting married. When, when, when a couple even did. So like, clearly this is, this can be at the deepest level hacked pretty easily. Physical intimacy interaction while violating personal space. Assuming the violation of personal space doesn't put a person's guard up, may trigger feelings of romantic love.

This might be tied to the vulnerability trigger and sex. Maybe orgasms matter here, maybe they don't. But sex and arousal seem to make other loves as. Bond faster. Hmm. This trigger seems to affect women more than men and weaken with subsequent sex partners. Through understanding the above points. One can incite love in a target individual with an even higher fidelity than the message used by ar.

Arthur Aaron. And that's the guy who did the experiments for people fall into love after looking at each other in the eyes.

Yeah.

Creepy. These. The feeling, [00:50:00] specifically the feeling of love can be reliably instigated in a subject by combining regular sex with a few sessions in which you sit with the subject somewhat isolated with a view even better if there is some taboo associated with this location, which increases the feeling of vulnerability and protectedness.

Hold hands, make per own direct eye contact, discuss life philosophy. That's, that's really it. That will create, if someone forced me to do that. Oh no. In the Bay Area, this is really common because people are familiar with the research and they think that other people won't know what they're doing, but they're basically attempting to brainwash you.

I know I saw Rationalists do this all the time. It was very common at like rationalist meetings and stuff. Yeah. Actually,

Simone Collins: when we went to Vibe camp, I met someone who like talked about how they were. Deeply against that practice. And they're like, I don't make eye contact with people anymore because that's been used to manipulate me a bunch.

It's like, oh gosh, what have you been through?

Malcolm Collins: But it is, it is. It just is.

Yeah.

This technique takes about a week and a half to strongly set in and is generally effective as long as the target feels [00:51:00] comfortable enough to be vulnerable and talk about things they otherwise wouldn't feel safe Discussing an adequate level of comfort, aesthetic appeal, and hygiene is also necessary.

A target is not going to tolerate prolonged close proximity and eye contact with someone who has. Horrid breath or stinking hair, and a target will not be able to engage in deep philosophical conversations if they are tired, hungry, cold, and feeling threatened or trapped. The above technique boasts an admirable success rate on people with little sexual experience explaining the steps and the purpose of the quote unquote experiment to the target, which we would recommend in the name of good form.

Does not appear to lower the probability of this method working. So this is something I did to people and told them I would do to them and I could reliably create a very strong attachment to me. The method is not from any specific set of research finding, but rather a conglomeration of a few studies combined with personal experimentation.

It works reliably enough that we assume that there must be something behind it. And this technique revolves around three core elements. One, [00:52:00] maximizing feelings of vulnerability backed up by feelings of safety. Two physiological modifiers like eye contact and sex. And three complex cognitively engaging discussions that inspire self-reflection.

Read the GUI to life. If you don't know how to make these statistics on romantic love. In arranged marriages strongly indicate that romantic love between people forms when they spend a lot of time around each other and rely on each other or whatever we socially are calling romantic love. We developed a process outlined above merely to see a romantic love could be developed more rapidly.

Our brains appear to use complexity rather than closeness as the proxy for the closeness of a relationship. Just as one might use weight as a proxy for the volume of a thing. Or how much water is in a container, despite there being many other things that could have weight such as rocks. Our minds appear to use the apparent complexity of a person or the frequency with which we think about that person that's a proxy from our, our intimacy to them.

So basically what I'm saying here is a lot of people think what generates the feeling of love, and this is why. Things like thinking [00:53:00] about the cosmos or thinking about the trinity, or thinking about other like really deep philosophical issues or sort of unknowable issues can generate a feeling that is close to the feeling that some people call love.

Because these are very complex things. And the brain, you know, in Indiana Jones, the, the opening scene where there's the the golden statue and he, he, he switches it with a bag. Oh yeah, Sam, it's the exact same. Wait. The brain doesn't actually note. How, how much have you been thinking about someone or how do you feel about someone?

Those are too complicated of emotions for it to really wait and measure with such a simple system. All it's measuring is the complexity of your thoughts about that individual. And that can be easily hacked by thinking about the nature of the universe or reality or something like that, and create a very similar one of these emotions.

The agape emotion that I mentioned before, which is not. Traditional love. It's a, it's a sort of, all emotion, I think is a, is a closer like definition for it. But it's something that you can get from either individuals or from thinking about the [00:54:00] universe, et cetera, meditating, this is an elegant system.

Humans spend very little time thinking about our building models of people who are not romantic targets. We just don't think about other people that much unless we are trying to get said people to mate with us. If someone is successful in their romantic conquest, they will spend more and more time around their romantic target,

further increasing the complexity of their mental image of that person. So the complexity of our image of a person could prove as a valid proxy for success in romantic conquest, this could in turn increase the evolutionary advantage of falling in love with such a person. In short, since those whom we think about the most commonly are those who we romantically pursue the complexity of our mental models of others, that serves as a great proxy for our subconscious to measure when determining who slash what we love.

And by here. I, I think that this is, this, this doesn't go against my larger thing. That love doesn't really exist. I'm just saying that. The chemical state that causes the collection of emotions that we already have easy names and ways to relate to, and that clearly aren't [00:55:00] this like magical emotion that hits you all of a sudden one day when you're in a relationship.

Th the, the, these are, are not like big profound feeling things. And I think that that's the thing about love is, is it's been sold to people as something that is going to feel really profound. Mm-hmm. And that's another reason why it's important to debunk that it is not its own unique, above reproach, profound emotional state.

Because some people might not get married because they're just like, well, I haven't felt to this emotion yet. Right? Mm-hmm. In fact, I would bet a lot of people who run away from weddings. This is what, what, what causes it? Like called off weddings? Oh,

Simone Collins: some. Feeling that there's this fleeting, unrealistic, non-existent thing that they haven't yet felt.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they're like, but I just haven't felt the thing that people call love yet. Like everything else seems perfect, but I haven't felt this yet. In short, those whom, oh, sorry. Now let's go into various societies that saw love quite differently. Hmm. There's this idea that, oh no, everyone always sees loves the same. And I'm like, actually no. The anthropology that [00:56:00] did that really cheats their results, as I pointed out. So you got ancient Rome, 7 53 BCE 2 5 76 CE In Roman society, marriage was primarily an arrangement between families to enhance wealth, social class, and political standing with little emphasis on affection or romance.

Parents selected partners based on practical criteria. And laws restricted unions. IE citizens couldn't marry actors or prostitutes. Romantic love was often secondary or viewed negatively. Being overly influenced by a partner, especially a woman, was considered weakness, unfit of a true Roman man. I mean, you see this in a lot of Roman literature, in, in poetry.

Mm-hmm. And women's sexual pleasure outside of procreative purposes. In marriage was deemed evil. Ceremonies emphasize the duty and family obligations, not passion. And divorce was straightforward. If the arrangement failed to put in its practical goals then you have ancient Greece 800 BCE 2 1 46 BCE.

Greek philosophers in literature portray romantic love as [00:57:00] dangerous madness or illness that disrupted rational thought in societal order. Plato for instance, advocated for non-romantic platonic bonds as superior viewing passion with horror because it could lead to regrettable actions harmful to the community.

And then the Iliad served as warnings against love's destructive potential rather than endorsements. Marriages were typically arranged for economic or familial reasons, with love regulated to extramarital affairs, or same sex mentorships. A survival dependent on practical unions like combining resources during hardship.

Ancient Mesopotamia 3,500 BCE to 539 BCE in Mesopotamian countries. The Sumerians and Babylonians marriage was essential for societal community, family lineage, and property inheritance often arranged to ensure these goals. Romantic love was not primarily a factor. Medieval Europe, fifth through 15th century among nobility and landowners marriages and strategic alliances for power, whilst often arranged by parents and guardians with romantic love, [00:58:00] dismissed as impractical or destabilizing traditional South Asian cultures, India, Pakistan, et cetera.

Arranged marriages of the norm will actually get dup. Deeper into India because I think it's really interesting. And then traditional East Asian cultures Confucian principles emphasize familial piety and family harmony making arranged marriages standard to align with parental authority and societal roles.

And the love would conflict with the concept of duty within these relationships within Confucius philosophy, what's really interesting is, is how anti love. Indie Indians were historically speaking. Yeah. There are eight forms of marriage in Hinduism. So an ancient Hindu text Wait. Forms of are were they like, we'll get to it.

It'll make sense when I get to it. Okay. Such as a Maserati Duram Stratas outline. Eight Recognized Forms of Marriage which provide a hierarchy of acceptability. These reflect a spectrum from highly approved arranged types to condemned ones.

Ooh, interesting.

Approved type. It is called Baram. [00:59:00] Vaha. The highest and most virtuous form fully arranged by parents was a bride given a gift, often a dowry.

It emphasized duty and was ideal for preserving caste and family honor. Divya Vish Vaha vi Vaha arranged where the bride is given to a priest less preferred than Brahma, but still respectable. Arsha. Viva. Involves a token exchange eg. Cows arranged by citizen, but criticized for its transactional nature.

And then you have Illa vi. No, we haven't gotten to love marriages yet. Similar to Bahama arranged with lavish gifts focusing on mutual consent, under parental guidance. So note, that's one that required mutual consent. This is under giving your daughter to a priest under the cow transaction thing here.

Right? And this is still a partially arranged marriage, then you have. Gang Vaha. This is a love marriage form based on mutual attraction and consent without rituals or parental involvement. [01:00:00] The story of Dita and Hanta in Mahata it is acknowledged but ranked lower, criticized by mana as promiscuous or suitable only for certain lower sections of society, and seen as a holdover from less regulated times.

Okay, so what's the next one down seen as about the same as a love marriage. Okay. A, a Shara va Vaha where the bride is purchased with wealth. So basically slavery, this is seen as about the same as marrying a slave. Then the only thing worse than that is rakha Vaha, which is abduction by force.

Yeah. One of the lowest forms. And then there's Raja, which involves seduction or taking advantage while asleep. So if somebody grapes you, you have to marry them. Okay. You know, maybe not the best culture to model for everything. But I did find it to be particularly interesting to read about all of these different types of.

Marriages and to, to point out that when people are like, oh, love is universal, or seeing love is [01:01:00] a causative thing is universal. It's like, it really isn't. If you actually like do real anthropology instead of this type that's designed to confirm your preexisting beliefs generally what I find is, I'd say in about like, like historic societies.

Seems like at about 80% love marriages were condemned at least among upper classes. And love was seen as more of like a sickness. And here what I mean is love, love's involvement in choosing partners. So, so this is the, the, and, and note I'm using love here that's used colloquially. I'm talking about this collection of sort of addiction you get with a person that includes fondness, a feeling of attachment, a feeling of you know, warmth around them.

A desire to spend time with them and a respect for them. This collection of emotions was seen as a lower reason to get into a relationship than. Then the, the logical decision made soberly by a council of your elders, basically or even soberly by yourself under, not under the influence of, [01:02:00] of this particular cocktail of chemicals, which again, I note is there, it just doesn't create this feeling of profundity.

It's not particularly moral. It's not particularly important really. And it doesn't, you know, hit you particularly hard all of a sudden or anything like that. Although, no, there are differences in human biology there. There likely are some people who do feel these emotions hit so all at once due to some sort of hormonal fluctuation in dating that it may cause this.

I also note when I'm talking about like Simone is the perfect woman to have felt this, my wife. Early in our marriage especially, you were a complete Andre. Like very, very obsessed with me. And who's to say that has changed? No, you're still very obsessed with me. But we're saying as somebody like, like full on Andre mode from an anime or something and still not getting this.

Secondary emotion that people are, are hypothesizing and talking about and telling young people they need to feel to [01:03:00] be in a relationship.

Mm-hmm.

So let's talk about the biology of this, because I found this really interesting. We're gonna talk about the different alterations a person can have that causes 'em to relate to bonding differently.

Okay.

In research on love and attachment, genetic markers, like variations in the genes, A VPR one a vasso CE receptor, OXTR, oxytocin receptor, COMT you don't care what these are. And DD four are used as proxies for love susceptibility. This refers to an individual's. Predisposition to form, maintain or experience romantic bonds, attachment styles, and related behaviors like empathy, pair bonding, infidelity, or reward seeking in relationships.

These genes influence neurotransmitter systems. A VPR one A and. OXTR regulate vasopressin in oxytocin. Mm-hmm. Hormones key to social bonding and trust, while COMT and DRD four affected dopamine involved in reward, motivation, and pleasure. [01:04:00] So if we wanted to, you know, it's been leaked now that we have funded.

Research into germline gene editing. You know, in a generation or so, our family, as we become more engaged in genetic engineering and stuff, could make modifications to ourselves or to our offspring, to not even, to have even less susceptibility to this love emotion.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And this, this kind of, it reminds me of.

Or our running theory. And I think a lot of people share this with what causes obesity in modern times. It's not like it's, it's probably not mostly your difference in metabolism. 'cause as you pointed out, that's at most like how many calories day, like go to

Malcolm Collins: calories a day,

Simone Collins: which can really add up, don't get me wrong, but like, it's not gonna produce the amount of obesity that we Yeah.

Often see. We think that maybe a larger segment of people just like their response to food is so much stronger. Kind of like with love, like some people just have a different response to food than others. And you can tell this by like, how many people who have you met who are like, well, I would just [01:05:00] love to eat.

Like if I could have a pill instead of food, I would, and it's hard for me to imagine that, you know, but like, yeah. For other people, they just, it's. That response is not there. So that totally makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: So, A VPR one A the role in love and attachment, this gene codes for the receptor of vasopressin, a hormone promoting pair bonding jealousy, and long-term attachment variations affect social behaviors like commitment and marital satisfaction.

Key variants RSS three polymorphism long versus short alleles. Longer alleles are. Linked to strong care bonding, A GAT polymorphism associated with earlier sexual debut in females. So this one will cause women to have sex at an earlier age or turn down sex less, which I think is. Effects and differences.

People with longer are three alleles often report hial, partner bonding, fewer relationship problems, greater commitment, and better sexual satisfaction slash frequency. They show brain activation [01:06:00] in reward and attachment areas. EEG, ventral tein and VTA correlated with maintaining romantic love over time, suggesting higher susceptibility to stable monogamous bonds.

Those with shorter alleles or their variants, E-G-A-G-A-T long, long may, exhibit weaker bonding, higher infidelity risk and earlier riskier sexual behaviors. OXR role in love and attack in codes in receptor oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, which enhances trust, empathy, and social bonding variance influence, responsiveness to key social cues and stress in relationships.

GG carriers show a higher sociality and specific ones of these are linked to empathy, stress, reactivity, and pair bonding. Often sex specific individuals with more G alleles tend to have a higher empathy altruism toward partners or secure attachment styles. This is displayed through stronger brain responses to attachment regions when viewing their partners increasing susceptibility to romantic love and stable bonds.

Oh, I [01:07:00] should look to see where we are on this. On Nebula a. A allele carries or other, other risk variants often show lower empathy, higher attachment anxiety, greater stress reactivity and reduced emotional wellbeing. This can lead to ancient or, or, or avoidance styles. COMT. Role in love and attachment regulates dopamine breakdown in the brain, affecting reward processing and emotional regulation Variations influence how rewarding relationships feel.

One variant. If you have the val allele, higher activity, lower dopamine, or the MET allele, you'll get lower activity, higher dopamine. Met allele carers. This is the heterozygous. Ones or, or no. There is a heterozygous variant of valve slash met. So met allele characters. Higher dopamine often experience greater reward, responsiveness positive affect and obsessive thinking about partners correlating with stronger romantic infatuation and brain activity in reward areas.

Wow.

And I note here obsessive thinking about somebody is clearly it is something [01:08:00] that you feel early in relationships. But it is caused more by NRE than any relationship that I feel about my wife, for example.

Yeah.

For people who don't know, it's NRE stands for New Relationship Energy.

And it's an emotional state that typically declines with the links of a relationship and would almost be in many people's inversely correlated with the amount of love that they feel with an individual over time. And that the core thing that I think causes NRE and my experience is the.

Possibility of the partner not liking you. It's like the, the very high potential upside. Who will

Simone Collins: they or won't they? Yes.

Malcolm Collins: High potential downside of not knowing how things will develop. So I see it as actually a chemical that's likely related to chemicals that's affiliated with gambling. And, and that's why you don't see it in long-term partners because there isn't any longer.

Any like, well, how much better is this gonna get? How much worse is this gonna get? Interesting. Val. Homozygotes may seek [01:09:00] more novelty, but show less reward from stable bonds, potentially leading to lower relationship satisfaction. And, and I find this really interesting, the person's relationship satisfaction could just be downstream of their genes.

Heterozygotes, Val met frequently exhibit avoidant attachment and inhibited personality. Right.

Simone Collins: So basically you're saying it's ableist for people to be mad at their boyfriends or girlfriends for not feeling love the same way they do.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. No, I'm saying it's able to be mad at them for cheating.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: So Simone, you're just a bigot if you get mad at me because I'm going out and sleeping with a bunch of people.

Heterozygous, it's frequently exhibit avoidant attachment and inhibited personalities and exi. Then the D four, D four dopamine receptor D four role in love and attachment and codes for dopamine receptor involved in novelty seeking and reward variants affect motivation for new experiences and relationship fidelity.

And what I find so interesting about all of this, by the way as we go over this, is this means that one day we can edit this stuff. You can edit your partner to make them [01:10:00] more loving in by the, by the time our kids are older to have, to have them be less likely to commit fidelity. I mean, who wouldn't want these edits often, right?

Like, oh, I am less likely to go out and sleep with other people. That's great. I'm, yeah. And the

Simone Collins: thing is too, we can't develop this technology unless we acknowledge that there isn't some magical. Intangible property known as love,

Malcolm Collins: we, we can't develop it or,

Simone Collins: yeah. Well, if we don't, if we don't understand or, or admit that this is just a, like a highly genetic, hormonal thing.

We're not, we can't engineer better versions of it.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, we're well past arguing. Love isn't magic. I mean, that's like. Malcolm in philosophy number one point number one, love doesn't matter that much. But anyway key variants. Exon three has reduced dopamine binding. ZR four, sorry. Seven r plus carriers at least one seven [01:11:00] repeat are linked to higher promiscuity twice as likely to have one night stance.

Wow. Twice as likely, a hundred percent more likely to have one night stance. If you have the D four D in a, in a seven strand repeat. Infidelity, they're 50% more likely to have extra pair partners and novelty thinking. Like, just imagine you could test for this, right?

They show brain activation in reward areas, but lower overall romantic love scores, suggesting preference for short-term bonds and overall relationship attachment. This reduces susceptibility to monogamous love, favoring exploratory behaviors. I would bet Ala probably has this one. 'Cause some people, when we've done our like.

You know, polyamory episodes, you gotta keep in mind that some of the individuals who are polyamory might just be like, literally coded differently than you. Yeah.

And, and so, they may actually have a really hard time maintaining any sort of long-term monogamous relationship without the opportunity for this form of exploration.

And

Simone Collins: based on how they describe it, you know, they, it's described as something they just really can't help. Like, I just can't commit to one person. And I think it's really hard for [01:12:00] people to understand. They think they're just making it up or that they're just insufficiently committed to you as a partner when, yeah, no, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I think some individuals get into it when they don't have this and they really shouldn't.

Oh, that's

Simone Collins: true. No, I mean like a lot of people just try to break up. Passively

Malcolm Collins: by the article we really need to do. There was this great article in the New York Times recently about this woman complaining that nobody wants to date her. And, and, and she was in a polyamorous relationship with her husband and left her for some other guy.

And the other guy then told her even beforehand that he was not interested in her and now she's blaming it on all men. Of course.

Simone Collins: Oh well.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, that is my argument there. The other emotions that I said I didn't think was real. Another one was jealousy. Which I was actually convinced of while I was trying to look up something else related to this. And I was convinced of it by a post, by a polyamorous individual. Oh. And when I was reading it, at first I was like, come on, you're just whatever, or maybe you don't feel this.

And then [01:13:00] I thought about it and I was like, no, he's right. Like if I discount. The emotional, like disgust I would feel, and sadness. I would feel over losing a relationship with you because you slept around and that made you less attractive to me, which it would. I mean, that's a natural reaction for a lot of guys, for evolutionarily evolved reasons.

And the anger I would feel towards the individual who did that, that wouldn't be motivated by jealousy, that would be mo motivated by a very specific emotion. But then I started thinking about jealousy about other things, like somebody. Who's wealthier than me or somebody who has more figurines than me or somebody who has more followers than me.

I've never felt whatever this emotion is, I felt like a motivation to catch up to them. Like, oh my God, they were younger than me and they'd already done more. And look at how little I've accomplished in life yet so far. But then I thought, I was like, I haven't really, so I'll, I'll read this. 'cause I thought it was interesting.

And this is from a blog called Death is Bad. Very rational as you can tell. I think that's the, the real motivator here. Everyone knows the patriarchy is bad for men as well as [01:14:00] women, but they don't mention it too much because it's a lot more bad for women. Well, here's one way it's bad for men.

You have to pretend to be jealous and bluster about and say you'll attack anyone who touches your mate. Because if anyone sees someone other than yourself engage in sexual play with your mate, you're automatically less of a man. You lose status. You can't be taken seriously. You are something to be pitied F that I've powered through status seeking, shaming several times already in my life and every time I've been.

Better freer and happier for it. Now, I respect people who are in open relationships far more than those who are stuck in the social straight jacket of enforced monogamy while the limited number of years we have here sorry, with limited number of years we have here. Why would you want to do that with your life?

It's kind of sad. And once I said. I, I let that go and said, F Society, this is bs. I actually found that the opposite of jealousy happens, and this is where I disagree with him because I, and I don't [01:15:00] disagree with him. I mean, I just have a different sexual profile than him. I was happy to see my girl getting that sort of pleasure.

I would not be, by the way. Why wouldn't you want to see the person you love happy? And more than that, it's a complete turn on for him, and that's why he's okay with it. It's really effing hot. At least that's been my experience. And again, this is, there's different sexual, it just sounds like

Simone Collins: his unique form of sexual enjoyment.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And that's why when I first read it, I was like, come on, you know, you have a form of sexual enjoyment, which is really unique and not evolutionarily adaptive. It was funny in the comments. He's like, I just can't see the evolutionary reason. That people would want their partner to not sleep with other people.

We used to live in big tribes where we all shared our wives. And I was like really unusual up. But, but in addition to the anthropology not backing him up it, it, it also doesn't make sense. Even if there is partner sharing within a community, you still benefit from punishing a partner for sleeping with other people and sleeping with you more and them less.

Genetically speaking, no matter how much partner sharing there is in a community you still benefit from [01:16:00] punishing somebody who you've slept with sleeping with other people. Well, in other

Simone Collins: words, the guys who did that ended up having more offspring. You're more likely to have inherited genes that give you that tendency.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So like, no, I don't buy this. But what I do buy, when I started to think about it and he said, jealousy is a social construct. I was like, yeah, jealousy is more of. A social thing where I feel that I have a right to be upset with someone for having more than me, but I can choose not to engage with that, right?

I can just be like, but I'm not going to. Right? Like they have more than me. So what? And as soon as you choose that, you no longer feel that particular emotional output. The other one that we were talking about was the, what was the big one? It was forgiveness. I see so many things like, you know, well, I finally forgave my, my father for unli himself, and now I've begun to emotionally heal.

And it's like, well, what do you mean forgave him? Like, he's [01:17:00] dead. Like you, you, you can't, you still, you still have the, the knowledge of the choice he made. Right. You, you can change how you decide to contextualize it in your head, but that's not really an emotional state. Yeah. It's just a choice of contextualization.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, it's, it's hard for me to, I mean, I understand the definition is to, to, to let go of anger or resentment regarding a slight you've experienced and, and that sounds good, but it sounds more like, I don't know, an emotional process than anything else. And you can also choose to not feel resentful about something whenever you're ready.

Yeah. So I think that another thing I was wondering about today is loneliness. Everyone's talking about loneliness, epidemics, and people are lonely. But isn't it, is that real? I, obviously, I'm an extreme introvert, so I don't think I've ever felt lonely in

Malcolm Collins: my life. I, I've felt lonely before.

Simone Collins: You ha.

Okay. What does it feel like? Isn't it just a need for stimulation or [01:18:00] isn't it just a desire to fulfill a kind of vision of yourself?

Malcolm Collins: It's tied to your self image. And if you have a part of a self-image of somebody who has been rejected by others and who is, I mean, I think loneliness in big part is a feeling of rejection plus isolation.

Think of it like a, a claustrophobia like emotion tied to social interaction.

Simone Collins: Hmm. But that has more to do with your perception of yourself than any real feeling.

Malcolm Collins: No, it, it really feels very claustrophobic sometimes. Interesting. Like almost sort of panicky.

Simone Collins: Well, that's how I feel when I'm around people,

Malcolm Collins: but, well, other people don't know that emotion, so,

Simone Collins: huh.

Maybe, maybe, you know, we talk about sexuality being something where, with regard to arousal and disgust, there are. Typical spectrums that people have, but [01:19:00] sometimes you get a sign flip. Maybe there are things beyond sexuality where sometimes there are sign flips. Like the average, the evolutionarily average person craves the company of other people because obviously the average person who craved those things survived 'cause they didn't get rejected by the tribe.

They invested in it, you know? And, but maybe I had a sign flip. And I, I crave the rejection of the tribe.

Malcolm Collins: You crave tribal rejection, so you can be alone and not have to talk to me. Please tell

Simone Collins: me. Yes. But I mean, I, you know, it's, it's not un, it's not unheard of for people to experience flips of other forms of arousal versus a version that are not necessarily evolutionarily to their advantage.

Like men who find. A penis is really arousing and not vaginas and only wanna sleep with men, you know, like it happens. So I don't know. I don't know. [01:20:00] But that's interesting. So I don't know. What would you encourage people to take away from this? Don't, don't ask for love from people. I guess. Stop talking about love.

What are, what should people do differently after hearing this?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I mean, I think it's, it's no that, you know, you're supposed to pretend when you feel fondness and attachment to somebody and you will begin to build an addiction to interacting with your partner. That that part is real. But don't expect this transcendent emotional state to wash over you at some point in the process of dating or marriage.

And don't think that. Now, I would say really importantly, if you're wi a partner who believes in love, and don't go into them. You're just gonna

Simone Collins: have to pretend to believe in it too. Just pretend. Just say, I love you too. Just say, I love you too. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Guys. Say, I love you too. But I do think it's important for more and more people to come out and call shenanigans on this

Speaker 6: Shenanigans shenanigans.

Speaker 8: What's all this

Speaker 6: officer Paul Brady. I would like to reinstate my previous shenanigans. This whole [01:21:00] carnival is a rip up,

Speaker 8: you know? Uh, excuse me, but I agree. These rides are really stupid.

Speaker 7: Okay, let's calm down. People of South Park, do you declare shenanigans on the carnival people? Yay. Okay, carnival people. Do you accept this decree of shenanigans? What the are you talking about? This old town is screwy.

Well, that settles it. Everybody grab a broom. It's shenanigan.

Malcolm Collins: so that, you know, young people, I think this prevents them from getting into relationships or feeling really dedicated to a partner because they expect some other emotion that is just never gonna come.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That's

Simone Collins: fair. Okay. I like that. That's solid advice. Just don't, just

Malcolm Collins: chill, just, and, and I'm telling you even without this marriage is way better than I thought it could conceivably be. In terms of the way it makes me feel, totally agree, the way I feel every day, the way it feels to interact with you or have kids with you, or to interact with my kids.

I'm saying [01:22:00] I feel all of these great things. None of them include whatever this external love emotion is. And despite that they feel kind of better than the way people describe love feeling, which to me always sounds more just like a drug. And I'm just like, well, that doesn't sound like that.

Pleasant, right? Like, it doesn't come with like, genuine satisfaction or anything.

Simone Collins: When people describe love to me, I get the same reaction I felt when reading Dante's Paradiso, like the, the, the part of the divine comedy where he's exploring heaven and I'm just like this, I don't know. I don't wanna go there.

This doesn't sound very fun. Just sounds, sounds kind of brainwashed. Little, little culty kind of creepy.

Malcolm Collins: I, I think I know that so many journalists are gonna use this to attack us. They don't even love each other. They don they already do.

Simone Collins: I was, I was just listening to a YouTube video today. It was about purity culture and fundamentalist [01:23:00] marriages.

And then like 53 minutes in just randomly we get mentioned. We have nothing to do with purity culture, but it was only in the context of us not really loving our children. And, and occasionally beating them and, oh,

Malcolm Collins: now we'll have, he beats his children. He doesn't love them.

Simone Collins: Yeah, he doesn't love his wife.

We already have that reputation though. We, we already have a loveless family. No one will be surprised to discover that we have. A loveless marriage. So

Malcolm Collins: just proving the haters

Simone Collins: right here. Cat was outta the bag. We're just, we're just confirming it on the record apparently.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, obviously the alternative to all this is we come from an extremely unique cultural genotype that's just very low on one of these genetic variants.

Hmm.

And it wouldn't be surprising, like I often mention that we're of the backwoods puritan heritage, heritage groups like those two groups or the predominant ancestry groups of ours. And if any groups was going to have evolved out the love emotion, it would be those two [01:24:00] groups. So it could be that other people really feel this.

Like,

Simone Collins: but see, like to me love is living and working together and the Appalachian and before that, like, you know, Scottish clan culture is like, you saw a lot more of that. You saw a lot more family integration, everyone kind of working together, not these, this isolation that I feel separates people so much to me, love is integration.

It's also so fun to me that you, you and I have this reputation for Lovelessness when the first thing you ever made go viral. Was your marriage proposal to me? Were you commissioned one

Malcolm Collins: like top 10

Simone Collins: romantic things

Malcolm Collins: of the

Simone Collins: year, you commissioned 21 pieces of original art of you proposing to me in different styles, related to different genres that we like and we went to the front page of Reddit and that was, but God, no, we don't love each other.

Do you think,

Malcolm Collins: do you think this is gonna, should we be saving this for reporter to tell them we don't really love each other and we think this whole concept's a scam because that'll [01:25:00] go viral. Prenatal is couple doesn't love each other. They've

Simone Collins: already basically set as such in a bunch of articles.

Again, if YouTubers are like randomly, like they, they can't, even when they run out of weird fungi, couples that, you know, they need to, they need to show that couples don't love each other. They turn to us 'cause they can't find anyone else who openly,

Malcolm Collins: apparently doesn't. You're the best and the greatest Fundee couple because we are the only one bravest enough to tell the truth.

Simone Collins: Yeah, they all pretend to love each other messed up.

Malcolm Collins: But I think culturally normalizing that this isn't a thing that people feel, or at least people within our cultural group feel will make it much faster for our kids to get married and find secure partners.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. To focus on the practical aspects.

Back to arranged marriage. I love you too. Hey, tonight. Yeah. Steak tonight. Very great. Basically same thing as last night, but instead of whole wheat sourdough, I was gonna make [01:26:00] those flatbreads, but I'm going to instead toast them a lot longer. So they're Oh yeah, do that. Cook me a bit more. And this time with, with garlic.

'Cause I think it'd be fun to have sort of like garlic flatbread.

Malcolm Collins: Cook a little less of the raw steak and a little more of the cook steak because your parents didn't want the additional one. And I did.

Simone Collins: Oh, no, no, no. So I already told you I, I froze that and we're gonna use it later. In a couple weeks to do.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Love you to death. Love

Simone Collins: you too. I, I missed you on our normal morning time and then we've reported coming 'cause we haven't had our

Malcolm Collins: morning walks and now we have reporters coming. Yes, we have a dad

Simone Collins: over wanna talk with you.

Malcolm Collins: Though I learned I I miss you. I seriously, I miss you When we don't get to spend like our private time together in morning and during and so like, this is the, the only private time we're getting today or yesterday.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it just kills me when we don't get it. Indy was mad though too, that she missed her walk with you.

Malcolm Collins: She gets, you could tell

Simone Collins: she gets [01:27:00] really angry. The, yeah. She's learned the word no. So she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All morning. But I did learn a thing a new form of prepping that apparently is popular among wealthy tech elite.

Who are into prepping. Okay. That had not occurred to me, but I think it's more inspired by horror films than like an actual doomsday scenario. And it is multiple people that were interviewed by this, this guy who wrote the book the Haves and the Have yachts, which is about the super elite, wealthy people.

Billionaires. Mm-hmm. They've gotten LASIK because they're like, well. If there's some societal collapse, I won't be able to get a new glasses prescription and then I'm screwed 'cause I'll be blind. But I'm really thinking of it more from that one scene in the Mummy where the American archeologist, slash Yahoo, who's trying to find Egyptian [01:28:00] treasure, loses his glasses while attempting to run away.

Oh gosh. In the resurrected mummy and he's looking for his glasses and then the mommy just. Pulls out his eyeballs because that's what happens when you don't have lasik,

Malcolm Collins: don't have las. That'd be a great LASIK commercial. Just goes to that scene. And then's lasik. Gotta get lasik. All right. I'll get started.

Simone Collins: You know, I have to, I have to represent her since she's she's not with us in person. She's, she's with us in spirit. I went to, I, I had this like beautiful vision that after I went to get eggs from the chicken coop this morning, that I would pick some blackberries, at least for Torsten to snack on at dinner.

And if I could get more than to make jam. And I'm like, oh, it's gonna be so, you know, scenic, you got stuck

Malcolm Collins: in all the thorns. I do blackberries with the kids. I basically send them in like a little rabbit in the briar [01:29:00] pit and, and they're so good at it. They go in and they get them all really easily.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Whereas I'm covered with scratches, like, and I, I was like bleeding out there. The

Malcolm Collins: toddlers are for you send them into the Briar patch?

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that's, they're there for the mines. They're for the factories. We have giant

Malcolm Collins: Blackberry patches on our property that I didn't even plant. I just didn't weed.

And, and so whenever they start growing in any location on our property, I stop weeding in that location.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which means it's it's a little rough walking around our house. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Our house

Simone Collins: is very fortified though. I love that feeling on the, on the topic of the middle of the

Malcolm Collins: Court of Thrones,

Simone Collins: oh, court of throne thorns or whatever.

We live our life as a romance novel. But, but speaking of romance and on the topic of loveless marriages, I actually remember, from a young age, the extent to which I began romanticizing and desiring a loveless marriage. One of my, like, part of my financial package in college was that I could work for some of my [01:30:00] tuition in, in addition to getting some debt.

And I worked at my university honors office as a secretary. A receptionist. And one of my colleagues was this, this, this gay dude who would just say things that I, I loved. Like he'd crack me up. And at one point I was like, oh my God, will you marry me? And he was like, well, it would be a loveless marriage.

And I remember like, I hadn't heard that phrase before or something, and like I just, you know, I laughed at him or whatever and we got back to work. But I remember thinking after that, I was like, I love this marriage. Like that sounds. Amazing. What is this institution and how do I get involved? Like is this like where they work together or something?

I remember, oh no.

Malcolm Collins: Did I give you the loveless marriage you always desired? Well, the funny, the marriage get that all thehy stuff

Simone Collins: we have, well, no, like we, we have the sex, we have the romance. Like you, you gave me all that. But then like. We really, we lean [01:31:00] in to the loveless part and I just, I, I didn't realize until today when we were gonna do this episode that I was like, oh s**t.

Like I've. I've always wanted this. I've always wanted a loveless marriage, and thank you so much for making this girl's fantasy come to life. I, I am here for

Malcolm Collins: you. I'll get started here.

Simone Collins: Okay. Let's go.

What are you guys doing?

Are there gonna be any survivors?

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204. What If I Told You? Saint & Holy