The Science and History of 'Love at First Sight'

The video explores whether 'love at first sight' truly exists, examining historical references and scientific studies. It touches on selective memory bias, medieval concepts of love, and modern research on oxytocin and dopamine. The hosts also discuss how physical attraction plays a vital role in these instant romantic connections, the role of cultural attractors, and how AI could predict romantic compatibility. The conversation digs into the biochemical pathways involved in love and lust, historical perspectives, and culminates with reflections on genetic predispositions and societal norms regarding relationships.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I've got a question for you. Do you believe in love at first sight?

Simone Collins: I believe in lust at first sight.

Malcolm Collins: Well, around 52 to 66 percent of people in the U. S. claim to have experienced love at first sight. However, this belief may be bolstered by a selective memory bias where individuals romanticize their initial encounters over time.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: However, what I would say is we have actually seen the concept of love at first sight discussed All the way back in history. We see it in Greek stories. Oh, so you see it in like Ovid metamorphosis, the story of Pygmalion depicts a sculptor falling in love with a statue he created at first light.

Site or the greek myth of narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection Also embodies a form of instant love And they even had a mechanism of action for it in the medieval period where The eyes of the lady [00:01:00] when encountered by those of her future lover thus generated And conveyed , a bright light from her eyes to his

Simone Collins: laser.

Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, no, they thought that, like, love was something that, like, woman generated inside of them and then, like, shot at men with their eyes. This is terrifying. This is just Captured his heart. But they might've been right about that. We'll get into in a little bit, but I want to hear, well, your lust at first sight comment is really astute when they look at the data.

And we'll get into this in a second, but what they found is yes. It appears that there does. appear to be this emotional thing that people call love at first sight. But it only occurs to people you find physically attractive. People aren't falling in love at first sight with their chubby whatever husband, they are falling in love at first sight with people who are generically [00:02:00] attractive.

And when people say they love someone at first sight who is not well, arousing to them or more generically attractive. They're typically lying in a supposed fact saying Or they were

Simone Collins: looking at their Bugatti instead. They just happened to be inside it.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. One of my favorite is that medieval texts also would, would compare the gaze of a beautiful woman to the sight of a basilisk.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You've got Medusa as well that turned men to stone with her beautiful gaze. Oh, they made

Simone Collins: them rock hard. Yes. This is what

Malcolm Collins: happens. Made them rock hard, right? Yeah. This is what

Simone Collins: really, there was just something was lost in translation and we thought, Oh, you mean they, they turned into a stone.

They're like, nah, kind of. So one thing I will say that I think is interesting is that even now When I have our podcast on or something and I, I freeze it and. [00:03:00] I walk by our computer screen and I see your figure, but I don't realize it's our podcast. It's on the screen. I'm like, Oh, who's that? And then also when we're in airports and you and I are separate or you're out walking by yourself and I'm just gazing across a crowd.

And I see you and I don't know it's you. I'm all like, who's this? Who's this? And I think that that's what people are describing as love at first sight is that you're just so much my type that even when I don't realize it's you, my body is just like, Yeah, we

Malcolm Collins: definitely had that reaction when we first met where you're like, and I still

Simone Collins: have it.

I still have it when I don't realize it to you. I have a different reaction when I know it's you because it's more like my person. But when I don't know, it's you. I definitely feel this like. Spark and I can totally understand what [00:04:00] these whatever medieval writers were talking about in terms of this, like, like lasers.

So, but again, I, I, I think that's entirely physical lust. And not well, and I mean, it would

Malcolm Collins: logically have to be so I'd also like to walk back here where people act like the concept of love at first sight is a romantic concept when really I see it as an anti romantic concept. Oh, yeah, because you don't know anything about the person yet.

You don't know anything about them.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You would have to believe that In magic or the soul and that love is somehow capturing these systems Except we we understand love very well at like a psychological level. And it is not magic. It is not fairy dust uh Well, i'll read a quote here anthropologist Helen fisher who studied the brain activity of people madly in love with each other through mri scans says that romantic It says here through MRI scans, but it's wrong.[00:05:00]

It must have been through fMRI scans. But anyway says that romantic love takes a very quote unquote primitive pathway through the brain. The good feelings we experience when falling in love is driven by dopamine, the brain chemical behind our motivation to find food, water, and everything else we need for survival, and also some oxytocin, which we'll get into in a second.

It's just like the other survival mechanisms, like fear, for example, it can be triggered instantly. So, what we mean is, because we understand what love is, fundamentally, in the brain then the concept of, can it be triggered instantly, is just a concept of, Are some humans born abnormal? And yeah, of course, you know, even, even though we might be coded for like men to find women attractive and women to find men attractive, you're going to get some percentage of the population where that's not the case.

It's the same with a system like love. It was coded to only form after long periods of time. time it's going to accidentally fire sometimes when like the lust system is supposed to be firing or something like that. Well, and

Simone Collins: I think it's you're wrong to [00:06:00] use the word love when you say that yes, love at first sight exists because there are very different things that are happening hormonally between lust and love.

And also Let's say you see someone and you feel that spark and you're very attracted to them, but then you discover that they were war criminal and they have a habit of torturing people and you know that you're probably not going to love them. You know that they may be hot, but they're really bad. I disagree.

Do you know how many? Sorry, I should have. Okay. Okay. I need to use a better example for you. It turns out they're French. Okay. And then you're just like, Oh my God. Yeah. So nevermind. I'm just saying, The loving a person is very different. It involves knowing who they are, how they think. Although I will, I guess you have to add, there's this additional complication in Alexander cruel.

I think I sent you a link to this on what's up today. And we should probably include it in the description has 1 page. He put together of just all of the studies that show what AI and [00:07:00] or researchers. Can infer from just an image of someone's face so you can infer anything from mental health problems to various genetic conditions to whether they are liberal or conservative to are they happy or depressed?

And I guess against my own argument and judgment, I could argue that based on just someone's appearance alone. You could make a lot of inferences about them and perhaps know them better than the average person would like to suggest. Yeah, that might be a

Malcolm Collins: big part of this, actually. And this is something, you know, obviously the progressives don't want to talk about, or the urban monoculture people don't want to talk about, because it's like, Oh, if you can tell something by somebody's face, what you're really looking at is genetic correlates there.

And we build enough patterns to recognize, like, you can judge with a really high probability whether someone's conservative or progressive.

Simone Collins: Even criminals look different. Like even on average, people who commit crimes, they're, they're, they're amalgamated faces look [00:08:00] quite different. AI

Malcolm Collins: is going to get really good at making these sorts of judgments, which I I'm very interested to see if we can work this into the criminal system or hiring systems and stuff like that.

Cause I imagine that facial judgments made by AIs are probably going to be more accurate to personality than these big, long, like, Surveys that people fill out for like, if

Simone Collins: already AI is 60 to 70 percent accurate and judging things ranging from mental health conditions to political affiliation, it's going to only get worse.

And you're right, but I think most people, when they discover this are not going to say, oh, how great that is. They're going to say, oh, my gosh, this is, this is minority report. We're going to be arrested just because our face implies that we're going to become an ax murderer. That's not well,

Malcolm Collins: we can do a little minority report, but you know, actually, I was

Simone Collins: just looking at another study actually that was looking at sex crimes and it found that there was a really high genetic correlate.

In other words, if if your brother commits a [00:09:00] sex crime. You are much more likely like your odds of also committing one of those crimes is as much higher. And the researchers who looked into this were arguing that, you know, this is a strong basis for perhaps engaging in preventative interventions related to siblings of people who are convicted of these crimes.

Because if you do that preemptively, You could probably keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind. I mean, for the blank Slater's who are like, Oh, keep the baby when you're great. I'm not in favor of that.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: I think not abortion in the attachment to the kid because they raised the kid, but I'm just saying, like, there are.

Externalities involved here for other people that you might not be thinking about because you're

Simone Collins: choosing to also pass on the behavioral traits of a criminal who committed who committed a crime creating that human who is innocent and guilty. I mean complicated.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I will [00:10:00] also say here before we go further into the science to go over our theory of love, which we talked about in either the pragmatist guided relationships or the pragmatist guided sexuality which would actually preclude love at first sight.

So when I was looking at the concept of love, my general assumption is that love probably first evolved in mammals. And in the book, we go over a lot of evidence for this to keep us from competing, whiz, killing, eating our offspring. It was something that we needed to be able to develop so that we, you know, when we looked at an offspring where we're like, Oh yes, bonded with this.

I am going to I love this thing. Yeah. And we always say evolution is a cheap programmer. So evolution will pick up an emotional state that was created within one scenario to use in a different scenario, but it becomes highly useful. Love is very different from lust. Yeah. In that it is longer term, it leads to caring for the thing, not just wanting to pay more attention to it, and it [00:11:00] leads to admiration and veneration for the thing.

And all of these are very useful in the way you treat a spouse if we were beginning to develop as a monogamous species. As such, the love system needed to learn to trigger for spouses. Here's the problem. We don't have anything that is unique to a spouse. In terms of our daily interactions. Like, is it the person you interact with the most?

Is it the person you admire the most? Is it the person you, you know, there's just not a really, so, okay. What collection of things did it begin to collect as this is a spouse? So I will generate love emotions for them. And. It's a bit like if I'm going to word it this way, the way we can determine what the love system is measuring is by looking at when the love system breaks.

So when do we experience love when we shouldn't be experiencing [00:12:00] love? And it's a bit like was Indiana Jones. It's like, okay, this. Stone is triggered by weight, so yes, it could be triggered by a golden idol, a spouse, but it could also be, you know, triggered by a bag of sand.

Simone Collins: And if you get it

Malcolm Collins: wrong, you know, then the ball starts rolling, right?

You know, so you gotta say, okay. What is, what is the actual mechanism of action here? And when I look at when I've experienced love, other than interacting with a partner or child, it is when thinking about or meditating on really big, expansive concepts examples here would be. The vastness of the universe and how small I am in relation to it.

Or the ways that various like really complicated sciences interact with each other, like the vastness of how like neurons actually work and the brain actually works and everything like that, or. When I think about my relation to [00:13:00] something like a deity that does a very good job of that, but specifically when I am thinking about incomprehensible aspects of the deity from my own perspective, it could be things that are designed to be incomprehensible, like the trinity or a cone by the way, a cone is one of those things in Buddhist philosophy where they're like a tree fell in the woods, but then when they're, P O A N.

Simone Collins: Right? Not. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you're like, well, I mean, it created a reverberation, whether anyone picked that up with their auditory, they slapped you. They're like, that's not what it means. And it's like, well, I mean, then you're just like gaslighting me. Like you're trying to show me that you are, are, are superior to me.

When really you asked a fairly simple question. Do you mean, did it create a vibration or was there anyone there to hear the vibration? That we interpret as sound. And because you are from a simple backwards culture, you don't think of it that way. You think of it as, as some intractable question, which maintains this hierarchy.

I am not a fan of cones. I think that they are a form of [00:14:00] abuse and within any other world, we would call them gaslighting. But anyway I'm sorry, it's just a horror meant to systemically disempower people from asking questions or trusting their own judgment. But let's not get into that. They do, they do create this love emotion.

And so when I look at that, I'm like, okay, so then what's really creating the love emotion? I think it is

anything that you think about frequently. So it's not looking at how often you interact with a person. It seems to be measuring how much you are thinking about a person or a concept. The second thing is, The vastness of that concept, like how deep is your thought about this concept, right? And this can be triggered with something that is arbitrarily incomprehensible to a human mind, like the Trinity or it can be something that is genuinely complex and deep, like the vastness of reality.

And then it looks at, do you find this thing to be comforting and safe? And if you hit all of those things, you're going to experience this love output. And I [00:15:00] think that these things aren't experienced in this love at first sight, which is really, I think, a lust output for most people, except people was like, really like broken systems.

But let's go into the research on this so we can see what's actually here. But do you have any thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: You had said to me just the other day that you weren't sure if you ever really felt the feeling of love or that you, you said that you don't really know what love feels like.

And I kind of agree with you on that. So that's where I, I can generate

Malcolm Collins: a feeling that appears to be the feeling that other people are calling love by meditating on complex topics. And

Simone Collins: like that doesn't resonate for, I mean, but also I don't know if this is an autistic thing. Like maybe I can't figure it out.

Remember

Malcolm Collins: my mom said that autistic people can't love. Yeah, there's like a wife who truly loves you because she's autistic.

Simone Collins: Yeah, she's so great. I love her so much. I miss her. I,

Malcolm Collins: I honestly, I prefer a wife who is infatuated with me than one who loves [00:16:00] me. That is, that is.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, so there's this, I hope you can find this clip.

There's this famous clip with. I've told you about it when Prince Charles and Princess Diana were engaged and a journalist asks Diana and Charles, are you in love? And Diana says something like, yes. And he's like, whatever that means, obviously the worst thing to ever say. And that has come back to bite him a billion times, but I don't disagree, right?

Like what even is love?

Speaker: I suppose in love. Of course. Whatever in love means.

Simone Collins: Like, what are you asking me? What is this? And. It's such a kludgy thing. And another point that we make in the pragmatist guide to relationships is that Love is not useful to anyone. Abusive people love their partners. That doesn't help them. You know, creeps stalkers, murderers often love [00:17:00] their victims a lot.

So much that they just want to eat their faces, you know. Just like, love is not useful to the recipient. And there is a correlation to your point about evolution being a cheap programmer and perhaps it hijacking the love of a parent that's very, you know, hormonal for, you know, the love of a child.

And there are many correlates that are also then, I think, highly associated with last year, there's oxytocin and there's dopamine and there's serotonin, you know, all these things kind of factor in. And there, so there's like the hormonal elements of love and lust, which are all kind of. You know, they're, they're correlated, but they're not directly together.

And then there's these more complex concepts that you describe, like when you're thinking about the complexity of the universe or God or cones, and then there's this whole, like, you know, your mind gets just kind of fuzzed up and you're like, I don't know, love. So,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I suspect that that love is like, if we're describing it in like a neurochemical sense, yes.

A combination of dopamine [00:18:00] and oxytocin release that forces a bond with another individual. And I say this because we know, remember I said, I think that it originally evolved for our children, post childbirth women, for example, are flooded with oxytocin, huge

Simone Collins: surge. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But you also experience it.

Women get a higher dose of oxytocin if they haven't slept with as many men and they sleep with a man, which causes a bonding.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Where we talk about and the studies on this have all been like scraped from the internet. It's really weird because it used to be, I could find it. And like I went back and tried to Google it and I couldn't find it.

But women who have had sex with lots of partners reduce, release less oxytocin every time they have sex. I'm like, that makes perfect sense because that would mean in an ancestral sense, they were probably a. slave, basically. And that, that if you were in a monogamous situation, ancestrally, yeah, it would make sense to fall in love with the first person you're having sex with.

So, you know, of course the systems would function this way. But I, you know, we see a lot of, okay, you're getting this oxytocin release. It causes you to bond to a person. Here's my question for you. You're like, I don't know if I've ever experienced love. [00:19:00] Well, what's the emotion that bonds you to the kids?

Like they haven't like, okay, little, Indie there, right? She hasn't said anything, done anything, and yet you feel a fondness for her that is undeniable. I mean, I watch the way you set her on the table when you're working and everything like that and get so excited when she's being cute. What is that emotion that you're feeling?

That is the love emotion.

Simone Collins: I mean, I, I, I feel that feeling when I look at Rain on glass, you know, when it, when it hits a window, I feel that feeling when I see autumn leaves shimmering in the sun, like, is that, that, that it's, it's not, I don't think calling that love is, is accurate,

Malcolm Collins: right? No. Okay. What you are describing here is, and I think that this is a component of love is you were describing a set of environmental stimuli that Correlates

Simone Collins: with the feeling of bliss and contentment.

Malcolm Collins: That correlate with the feeling of bliss and [00:20:00] contentment, which you feel when looking at infants that are yours. So then my question to you is, do you ever feel that feeling of bliss and contentment when looking at, say, me? Yeah, so that's especially

Simone Collins: when you oh my god when you eat and I hear the sound of like you chewing or something.

I just like

Malcolm Collins: Other women are so like

my husband likes Maxine's food. You're like, I love listening to him munch Yes, makes me so happy. Oh god.

Simone Collins: Okay for you Yeah, I I don't know. So then is is love Oh, this person or thing correlates with a feeling of contentment and bliss for me. Like that also just seems so shallow.

Malcolm Collins: And because most humans do not correlate with that for you. You don't look at most human bodies and get a feeling of blissfulness and content. You wouldn't feel that way. If a stranger at a restaurant was eating and you overheard them, you'd [00:21:00] probably be like, ew, gross.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but if, if that, if that. If other things like rain on, on glass or the pitter patter of rain on a roof, you know, can, can trigger that.

Like how does love for a human, how would love for a human be special? You know,

Malcolm Collins: what do you, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, there are other things,

Simone Collins: there are other elements in life that are non organic that can also trigger in a human. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So what you're saying is it activates the bliss and content system and not the lust system.

It's a completely different category of, of thing that is

Simone Collins: elevating

Malcolm Collins: and that's actually interesting that you are looking at an attractive man and instead of feeling a lust, you are feeling blissful contentment which is clear that you were meant to feel for children.

Simone Collins: No, that's, yeah. So that's true because we were talking about that going, when I see you in an airport, I don't realize it's you.

And then there's the separate like, [00:22:00] but I feel when I. Are you eating

Malcolm Collins: food? So I love the description of it going.

Yeah. So that's the difference here.

Simone Collins: Lust versus love. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But, but let's go further. You know, in the first few months of a relationship, your serotonin level dropped, causing cortisol, the stress hormone, to flood your body. This is why your heart beats faster and your pupils dilate, and maybe you start feeling quote unquote butterflies in your stomach.

Lower serotonin levels might also be why you are suddenly obsessed over the new person, unable to think about anything other than them. So it is a rise in cortisol and a drop in serotonin. Your body odor may play a role. part in how attractive you are to someone. Some studies have shown that during ovulation phase of the cycle, women may be more attracted to musk like pheromones that men excrete.

By the way, I don't know if you've seen this study, but there was a study where people like wore dirty t shirts and then put them in a pile and men could pick out the shirts of women who are ovulating and women could pick out the shirts of attractive men. I [00:23:00] haven't gotten a 1995 sweaty t shirt study.

Where it, it showed that women sniff t shirts that had been worn by men. No cologne, no deodorant, all natural. Results showed that they preferred the odor of men with major histone compatibility complex MHC genes that were different from their own. This would produce offspring with a stronger immune system.

Oh yeah. Okay. I've heard of this. The general like fitness and stuff. Another interesting thing is a 2019 study found that when women were in love with someone, their immune system was bolstered. Now this is the study I found most interesting.

One study found that 60 people who had never met before and found that prolonged eye contact between two people increased the romantic attraction they felt for each other. Blood pressure skyrocketed and the participants wanted to be paired with the same people again in the future. They wanted to know more about the other person.

These effects were even stronger when people allowed quote unquote mutual touch despite the fancy wording that meant holding hands. And we know that holding hands causes oxytocin [00:24:00] release. We know that long eye contact causes oxytocin release. I think that yeah, that's, that's what we're seeing here.

That's really interesting to me

One of my favorite studies on this was done by Arthur something or another and it showed that you could basically force people to fall in love. We had this idea of I like sit two people down and they look into each other's eyes and they ask a series of questions of each other that they'll fall in love and people who were in the study as random participants even ended up getting married.

That is how good it did at creating this emotion, which is to say that love systems can be hacked. And this is one of the things that really scared me away from like the early effective altruism community and early singularity community is they would do a lot of these sorts of events where you'd like sit down and stare someone in the eyes.

And I'm like, this is what cults do to brainwash people. It's also what touchy feely did at Stanford, which is a hijacks the love system.

Here's the final bit here that I found really interesting. First and foremost, they found that love at first sight didn't exist without a strong physical attraction.

Looks did matter. Also probably [00:25:00] unsurprisingly, people in long term relationships scored higher on quote unquote love tests than people who had met for the first time, but reported love at first sight. So. Yeah, it doesn't appear that's that easy to accidentally motivate the love system, but what are your thoughts and think about them and I'm gonna get a

Don't think about them too much. You are a woman. I'm gonna have to put the women

Speaker: An ordinary dinner party, the sort of occasion we all enjoy. The men are exchanging witty stories, and look at the women, aren't they pretty? But now the conversation turns to more serious matters.

Speaker 2: I wonder if the government should return to the gold standard. I think it should. Good, then we're all

Speaker: agreed. But oh dear, what's this? One of the women is about to embarrass us all.

Speaker 3: I think the government should stay off the gold standard so that the pound can reach a level that will keep our exports competitive.

Speaker: The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own. What [00:26:00] heartbreak drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt.

Women, know your limits.

Malcolm Collins: The important

Simone Collins: thing is To I think understand the underpinnings and mechanics of love as well as one possibly can. Same goes for sex so that you don't pedestalize it to your detriment and trying to find a well matched partner.

Speaker: Look at the effect of education on a man and a woman's mind. Education passes into the mind of a man. See how the information is evenly and tidily stored. Now see the same thing on a woman. At first we see a similar result. But now look. Still at a reasonably low level of education, her brain suddenly overloads.

She cannot take in complicated information.

Simone Collins: And that's, I think one of the bigger problems. This is certainly not the heart of problems for forming relationships these days. There are so many other big factors that are a like the fact that [00:27:00] women want higher status men than them. But most middle class women are going to struggle to find men who can thrive more in a middle class, like bureaucratic job system than they do.

So they can't find partners and people are all waiting to have to get married until after they're completely set up with their lives. Whereas they really should be getting married as they begin building their lives. So they're obviously bigger fish to fry in the relationship world. It is nevertheless, a big problem that we still see.

And even people who understand that they need to get married early, and even people who understand all of the weird asymmetries that need to be in place to make a relationship work, they still pedestalize love and sex in a way that is incredibly stupid. And they're like, well, I have to feel this spark and I have to feel this.

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: absolutely. And, and, you know, you see this with arranged marriages, right? I'm like people like, well, shouldn't I have like the chemistry as a person? Like, no, it doesn't really matter. And, and arranged marriages after 10 years of marriage, people have the same love [00:28:00] rates. As people in, with chosen partners, but here's the thing that's not accounted for.

Arranged marriages have a dramatically lower divorce rate than non arranged marriages. So it means when you account for survivorship bias, you are actually more likely to be in love with someone in 10 years if they are chosen by people who know you well without you having much input. Then you are, if you choose someone who you already love in the moment, which just shows what a bad compass love is.

And I think we see this in the history of love. Remember all those early stories of love? Love was always seen negatively. Especially love at first sight was seen negatively in a historic context. This was understood to be a negative thing, a form of madness, depending on what culture you're looking at.

Simone Collins: Like,

Malcolm Collins: In, in, in some cultures it was just seen as like an intrinsically immoral thing, no different from lust. And I think that that's really the healthiest way to look at it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and, or it was, it was supposed to be something that was uncoupled from your marriage. So if [00:29:00] you, if you wanted to pursue love, it would be in the form of a dalliance or it would be in the form of a mistress.

It wouldn't be in the form of Marrying someone, it can even be some kind of platonic like Dante and Beatrix. Sorry, not Beatrix, Beatrice like Dante and Beatrice in the divine comedy. So there were all sorts of forms of love that were very passionate, but when they worked out, they weren't done within the capacity of.

Attempting to marry and trying to make that work was deadly like in Romeo and Juliet. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're killing your kids by not arranged marriage by letting them just marry whoever they want like like like animals like What is this you you that's that's not the way this works No, I I really appreciate what you're saying there and I think it's a very important concept to elevate and I think that Really the only culture that [00:30:00] I'm aware of in a historical context that elevated the idea that you should marry the people you love.

This comes down to Western culture but it's not a historic component of Western culture. It certainly wasn't around in the Roman Empire. It was something that came downstream of and for people who are wondering how things worked in Rome, you had strict monogamy in Rome, i. e. you only had one real wife, but you would hook up with other people, right?

You know, and here I could, I can put the clip of Octavian reprimanding Marcus. , for sleeping with people who weren't, weren't his wife.

Speaker 9: Remember, colleague, you are talking to my wife. Your wife in name only. Still mother that performs the wifely function, is it not? Well, Octavia does the same for my good friend Agrippa. That's very convenient for all involved. DO

Speaker 10: you deny it? So What? What if it is true, eh? What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 9: I shall have this sad story told in the forum. I will have it posted in every city in [00:31:00] Italy. And you know the people are not so liberal with their wives as you are.

They will say you wear cuckold's horns. They will say your wife betrayed you with a low born pleb on my staff. You will be a figure of fun. The proles will laugh at you in the street. Your soldiers will mock you behind your back.

Malcolm Collins: But it, it, it came through the courtly love culture that was largely created by people who don't know, like they hear courtly love and they think courtesans were writing these books.

Courtesans were not writing the book. You're

Simone Collins: using the wrong word. Courtiers? Maybe you're Courtiers,

Malcolm Collins: whatever. Not, yeah, sorry. Courtiers. Court People in the royal court. It wasn't written by people in the royal court. They were predominantly written by monks. Or as we might call them today, nerdy incels.

They were writing their version of sexual fantasy comic books. There begin to become a, a, a culture of this. And this [00:32:00] is, this is what was being made fun of in stuff like Don Quixote, right? They were like, these, these, these people are ridiculous idiots. Like, this isn't the way any of this would ever actually play out.

You know, they're living these fantasy lives in order to, well, fulfill their own fantasies. You know, that's, that's the way this stuff works. And as a result of that It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Still these incel monks are writing this, but they end up creating some genuinely amazing literature eventually.

Think of it a bit like fanfiction communities. Yeah, I mean, fanfiction is like raunchy and smutty, but eventually some of it's really good. There, there's some good fanfiction out there that I think is better than some of the best books I've read.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And as a result, when people were creating the early literary canon in the West, they relied on the tropes from these, well, basically infel comic books.

And that had the problem of creating early [00:33:00] Disney. I think is where a lot of this entered

Simone Collins: the mainstream.

Malcolm Collins: Is the idea of love at first sight and needing to love someone to marry them. I think was largely disseminated in modern Western culture into the mainstream by Disney and normalized by Disney.

And I think that that is where the rock comes from. So it's interesting that Disney rotting our culture isn't a new thing. It's, it's, it's, it's been happening since its inception in its borrowing themes from the quarterly love culture. That weren't necessarily common in American culture before this.

Simone Collins: This isn't to say that I don't think you should be. well matched with your partner. I think that what you saw, for example, in Puritan and even Quaker early colonial communities, where there were times when youth could get to know each other and, you know, they would choose to marry and they could choose to not marry.

And they, I love

Malcolm Collins: the Puritan thing of like being in [00:34:00] the bed was the person and they would tie you up in a sack.

Simone Collins: Yeah, or there was, you could be in the company of a bunch of chaperones, essentially, but they would give you a tube or a hollowed out log to talk between so you could talk privately. We should, we should,

Malcolm Collins: They actually have a scene where that's done in the Patriots. They

Simone Collins: do, and they joke about how they would. I

Malcolm Collins: hope you tie the knots better than my father did or something like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

But I, so yeah, I think you should be really stoked to marry whoever it is that you marry, but you should be looking at it as a lifelong business partner and not.

A lifelong yeah, like a lifelong entertainer, a lifelong professional friend or entourage member, or quite honestly, mother or a father. That's

Malcolm Collins: actually such a good point. And, and, and a watcher of the podcast once asked me they were thinking about bringing an additional person into their relationship and they were like, okay, you know, this is somebody who I find attractive.

My partner finds [00:35:00] attractive. Should we bring them into the relationship? And I was like, well, I mean, the first thing you want to ask is how efficient are they, how much how good are they at work? And I think that this is the thing they were thinking. Like, I like being around this person because I like having sex with them.

I like spending time with them. And what they weren't thinking was is this somebody I would want to start a business with? And that should be the first thing that you think and vet when you're choosing someone to marry or spend your life with or have kids with.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and there's this whole trope on social media of what do they call them?

Like single, single married women who just feel like their entire lives. Is taking care of their husbands. They're just doing their laundry. Like that, just their husbands kind of just married someone that they expected to do the same thing that a mother would do for a child. And that's lame. And then there's all these women who just want sugar daddies.

Like they just want a new daddy. Who's going to spoil them and pay for everything and buy them things and send them on vacations. And they just sit around and do nothing and [00:36:00] expect to be pampered. And that's equally toxic. Perhaps even a little more disgusting because I don't know. I just really hate that.

I find it gross. So. You know, both of those are really bad. So yeah, but what you're looking for again is a business partner and anything else should be seen as purely recreational on your own time with your discretionary income and nothing else,

Malcolm Collins: Your discretionary income. I don't know. I think you know, Like if I was, was, was going to hook up with someone other than you and I use my discretionary income on that, that would be quite a violation of our marriage.

Simone Collins: No, it wouldn't. Our discretionary income. That's, that's your money that you get to spend on whatever you want.

Malcolm Collins: Well, let's thank God. Neither of us have any particular makes it, it makes it very easy. That was the, the, the unfortunate thing on the, are we monogamous episode that we did ages ago where like, the core thing is like.

You have rules against sleeping with other people. I don't. I just don't see a reason to like, it's so much effort. It's so much effort. This, [00:37:00] this fantasy of, Oh, I'm going to sleep with all of these people. It's like, yeah, but what you're not thinking about is the work and the risk and the grossness and the, like, why would you?

It's so much effort and ickiness and it just makes life harder. Like I don't, I get the desire, but like, if it slows down the speed at which you actually marry someone and start having kids, like what's the point of all that, right? Like,

Simone Collins: or if it puts an existing marriage at risk, which is, I'm even in poly relationships, there's just always this very real risk that.

Yes, it goes fine until it doesn't. It goes fine until something falls apart and that that's difficult. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, no, I hear that. And well, and this is because systems that may have been designed for a monogamous relationship end up firing in the wrong way, you know, they're like, Oh, [00:38:00] now, now this person is attached.

And keep in mind, even historically, when you had a societies that practice a polygyny where they had multiple wives. There was genetic competition between the wives. I mean, the wives not only wanted to have the maximum number of kids of the wives in, in a marriage but they wanted the kids to get more resources than the other wives, kids like that was the goal from a genetic standpoint here, I'm, I'm saying and that this was ever harmonious, I think is a, a fantasy.

There's just a strong incentive where actually women within cultures that are intergenerationally polygynous, i. e. having multiple wives, would likely be, I'd say, more spiteful and cunning towards other women than women in cultures that aren't polygynous. Because they would have been genetically rewarded for that intergenerationally speaking,

Simone Collins: Much

Malcolm Collins: more than women in cultures who aren't polygynous, like monogamous cultures, where women generally get, get [00:39:00] genetically rewarded for cooperating.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: An interesting point I hadn't considered before. I'd love to look at the data on that to see if there's data supporting that hypothesis.

Simone Collins: Yeah. The

Malcolm Collins: women from societies like in Muslim societies are women more backstabby than in two other women. I mean, than in you know, like Christian societies, like, is that a thing?

I don't know.

Simone Collins: The research I've seen of women being backstabby are in Western societies and there's no positive backstabbing. What I

Malcolm Collins: say is women are backstabby in Western societies. Yes. Like very well studied. Two other women, I mean, like women are very intersexually competitive in a way that men are not.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the famous research that found that. If, if a woman was more attractive than her hairstylist, the hairstyle was more likely to, for example, cut her hair a little shorter than she asked.

Malcolm Collins: I like the study that was looking at bosses and like almost no woman in the study preferred a female [00:40:00] boss to a male boss.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like this idea that like women are better off cause we're promoting where women is not true. Women are much worse off for it

Simone Collins: on

Malcolm Collins: the whole.

Simone Collins: Unfortunate.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is unfortunate. It would be great if we could genetically modify this trait out of women, which maybe we'll be able to do soon.

It's called

Simone Collins: autism, Malcolm. That's why.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's called autism. Just give all of my female

Simone Collins: friends are a little more, a little more autistic than your average there. That's

Malcolm Collins: true though. You have so many autistic female friends

Simone Collins: and you think the increase in mental health diagnosis is a bad thing.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm.

Simone Collins: I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway I love you to death Simone, you're quite a special woman and I'm really, really lucky to be married to you. And I actually wonder because you said you'd never found anyone attractive before me. What was the like emotion you felt when you first saw me? Is it not something you had felt before?

Was it something you had felt at different

Simone Collins: levels? No, I mean, I, I found people attractive before. [00:41:00] I just. Like, there was never this, this combination of like being attracted to someone and then also finding them like to be such as a person, an attractive person as well, like both physically and everything else attractive.

But no, I mean, I certainly found other people attractive before. Okay. You just happened to be very

Malcolm Collins: much my type. So it was the first time that you had both found somebody attractive and really like jived with them at like, I guess a cultural level. And then again, culturally we're very similar. People often joke that we're twins.

Apparently we're called the Cromwell twins and in fundie circles, which I'm okay with.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Oh, am I not making you dinner tonight?

Malcolm Collins: No, I didn't end up going out. I didn't have time. I had too much to do. What would you like? Grilled cheese with tomato soup. Would you like? Oh my God. Yes. Yes. Okay. Do we have any

meat left by

the way, song, [00:42:00] or

Simone Collins: I can take more out.

Do you want something with me? No, I can do more of the slow cooker

Malcolm Collins: cheese and tomato soup.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So that's okay.

Malcolm Collins: You don't want to have a, yeah, no, two girls. She has those

Simone Collins: kebabs. I can make you an addition to the girl cheese. You're going to two kebabs, like from trader one kebab, one kebab, a bowl of grilled, sorry, a bowl of tomato soup and a girl cheese sandwich.

Two girl cheeses, two girl cheeses. Consider it done, sir.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, my beautiful, beautiful wife. I love too. You are so Cutty, kitty, kitty, kitty, and I'm just so lucky to be married to you. . What?

Simone Collins: We're intolerable. I, I hate people who are in love, you know, they're, they're gross. And I, I feel bad inflicting ourselves upon other people.

Yeah, I do. I hate

Malcolm Collins: people who are in love too, and I'm, yeah. One of the interesting things about love is a desire to signal it publicly and loudly, which of course makes it, but no one wants to

Simone Collins: see it. No one wants to see that. It's like.

Malcolm Collins: Well, right, [00:43:00] because I'm basically saying, okay, this mate is mine, just so everyone knows, like, competition will ensue if you try to compete.

I think

Simone Collins: it's more like screaming. You know, when you scream, it doesn't hurt, but when someone else screams, it hurts.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is people will say in, in like high school, in my high school, I mean, maybe people have matured out of this because they've gotten better at like how bad this looks, but early on when they'd be dating, Oh, I love X person.

I love X person. We're so in love, love, love. Why are you so perfect? They just needed to shout it to the stars. And I think like shouting it from the roof, which is a sentiment you hear historically is one of the biological reactions to the love emotion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I do think it's interesting that this whole and then they, they got, they married and they lived happily ever after.

And there just aren't really, you don't see a whole lot of media in which people really love each other. And if you do, it's that they love each other, but for some reason they're kept apart because I think there's something about people who love each other and are successfully just in love and not having [00:44:00] problems.

People just hate it. It's just intolerable, like nails on a chalkboard. I don't want to watch it. No

Malcolm Collins: famous influencers who like actually care about each other and love each other.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah. Where they have to like make up drama or something. Yeah. Maybe because people just don't want to see it. It's gross.

It's terrible. And so they have to make something either. They have to make up something wrong about them. And make up separate drama about how they're evil and not really what they say they are. Well, you're the puppet

Malcolm Collins: master. That's what I've heard. Yeah. You control me. I've seen other people comment on us and they say that I am this dull, witless puppet of a man who's being controlled by the cruel puppet master Simone, who seduced someone out of her league is what they said.

You, you saw this video.

Simone Collins: Well, you are out of my league. I, and I guess technically I seduced you through my work ethic. And you discovered that you couldn't do better than me in terms of. You know, sheer, I, I, I basically left you with no choice. Yeah. This was not something where you really [00:45:00] had a lot of choice in the matter because I, well, how did I not have choice in the matter?

Yeah. I

Malcolm Collins: mean, yeah, I guess I didn't have choice because Yeah, you didn't have a choice. Nobody seduce you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I, I, so I did seduce you, but with work ethic. 'cause I'm obviously way below your league. So from a, an aesthetic perspective, just fortunately. You are not as sensitive to aesthetics as other men are.

You're like Mormon polygamist men, you know. I don't think that's true. Well,

Malcolm Collins: okay, so you got to do the Mormon polygamist quote here. Can you pull it up?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Mark Twain. Went when he was young to Salt Lake City at the time. I think when Brigham Young was still alive. He was vehemently against this concept of polygamy and he had a change of heart.

And here's what he wrote up after his experience in Salt Lake City. He writes, quote, I had the will to do it. With the gushing self sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve great reform here. Until I saw the Mormon woman, then I was [00:46:00] touched. My heart was wiser than my head.

It warms toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically homely creatures. And as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, No, the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity, which entitles To the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure.

And the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open handed generosity. So sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

Malcolm Collins: I love this. So this is so, but I did notice something because you were actually talking about this where I was talking to one of our Mormon fans and we were going over pictures because, you know, we were trying to identify traits, you know, that are common in the people who are having kids who aren't having kids, etc.

And at one point it was like, oh, you know, the hot one. Right. And I realized that his [00:47:00] perception of which of the hot one I go, Oh, you mean this one? And he goes, no, the hot one is this one. And I realized that, and I think you actually see this like genetically was in subpopulations. What? Is considered attractive can be radically different than what another group considers attractive.

And this is why people often naturally end up going for their own cultural group. So for like somebody like Simone and I, people are like, you guys look like twins or siblings or something like that. It's like, yeah, she's part of my esoteric cultural group. Like of course I would have found her more attractive than competing people, especially at the arbitrage level.

I either degree to which I value her type of attraction. is much higher than, for example, a random Mormon man would have valued her iteration of attractiveness. And the degree to which I would value, you know, the average Mormon woman would be much lower than the degree to which a Mormon man would value a Mormon woman.

And I think between cultures, sometimes it's differentiates a bit more. [00:48:00] Like I, I, I notice that I think what I find attractive overlaps with. Maybe surprisingly to the audience what Catholics find attractive. Like, I find often whatever the Irish are selecting foreign girls very attractive.

When I was younger, I, I loved Irish girls. So maybe, or yeah, this is another thing where I noticed where different communities have different things that they find attractive. And I don't know if I can like build a whole video on this, but it's something I mentioned in an episode that hasn't gone live yet.

So for example, with me, the women who I pursued in disproportionately had relationships with when contrasted with their percent of the population, heavily Jewish, first of all, I'd say a good 40 percent of the women I've ever dated have been Jewish. In, in ancestry, at least Irish. I found Irish women disproportionately attractive.

Outside of that, like freckles and stuff like that, like that's my thing. But again, our kids, we've [00:49:00] got like redhead and freckles. So clearly, like we're still in this tradition. So my ancestors must have felt that way too. And your ancestors must have felt that way too. The one category that I've always found surprising is the group that disproportionately pursued me the most.

Was Romani women or gypsy women like really people of that descent group up here to find whatever I'm bringing to the table like disproportionately attractive. And I remember Simone was like, well, there's almost none of them. And I'm like, and that's why it's weird that I have hooked up with so many of them.

I don't know what it is. It might be a cultural thing or it could be a genetic thing. I really don't know within these different groups that leads to these cultural pairings. Any thoughts.

Simone Collins: No, no. I mean, I just think they're, they're probably more likely to be broadly. You know, genetically close ish to you. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of travelers in the UK, tons and tons, and you were super UK, so I don't know. Yeah, but I don't find

Malcolm Collins: Scottish women attractive.

Simone Collins: In modern

Malcolm Collins: Scottish women, [00:50:00] but yeah.

Modern Scottish women look like dysgenic selection. When, but keep

Simone Collins: in mind, like a lot of the most you could argue like bit adventurous entrepreneurial, you know, capable of getting out of really dire situations. Ancestors moved to, you know, it's hate. So they're here. You wouldn't necessarily realize

Malcolm Collins: that's also true.

So you, you, you are partially Scottish descent as well. So yeah, I guess I do like Scottish women, just the ones who immigrated. It's the same with Irish women. I like the ones who, who, emigrated, e emigrated, i. e. left I don't know, I don't remember walking around Ireland and thinking people were uniquely attractive.

It was more I lived for a long time in Massachusetts and the, maybe that disproportionately colored how many Irish girls I was encountering. For people who don't know, that's for the large Irish population settled.

Simone Collins: Well, I've got to go make dinner because I've got that campaign tonight and I want to make dinner and shower the kids.

So you have it fairly easy tonight after I leave. So [00:51:00] let's get her done. I love you too. And I'll start your sandwiches, your Sammies. Love you, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: She makes the best grilled cheeses.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): To anyone who's like Malcolm, your voice has been shot in terms of recent episodes, you are feeling horribly sick or something. No. , this past week Simone and I were on vacation. So everything you thought this past week was like really prerecorded. And I was just adding those bits and final editing. , because we were at Heredic on, , where we were giving a speech. , which is such a cool experience, but every night there, they would have these parties up until like two or 3:00 AM. And, you know, Two things about me.

One, I am not the type of person who knows how to party or go to parties or nightclubs or whatever, but I'm also not the type of person who would ever turn down an opportunity to network. If it could be used to help the larger cause that we're working on. And the people at these events are so high value.

I couldn't turn it down. So I just had to stay up like yelling, to talk to people at nightclubs at like one or 2:00 AM. And I do not know how the rest of the world handles this. [00:52:00] But fortunately, we were able to make it back in time to take our kids out trick or treating and hear the video of my. You know, very obviously. What's the appropriate word here.

Neurally diverse children. , sorting their trick or treat candy. I love these kids so much with one of them. , wanting to watch us eat his candy or tried parts of it, but him not wanting to eat it himself. It is so sweet.

Speaker 14: Do

Speaker 15: you want to try it? Here, do you want me to open it for you?

Try it.

Speaker 14: Okay,

Speaker 15: well I'll see if I can find it. I think I know where that

Speaker 14: is.

Speaker 15: Here, do you want to eat it? It's very yummy.

Speaker 14: Hm. What? I follow you. Try it.

Speaker 15: I'll try it, babe. I try it. You have to promise to eat the rest, okay? Mm. I can. Here. I don't wanna, this whole thing is been here. Daddy, try it. I tried to buy it and now he won't eat it.

And then [00:53:00] I tried this. And now he won't eat it.

Speaker 16: Toasty, eat your candy! No!

Speaker 14: Eat

Speaker 16: your candy!

Speaker 14: I can't!

Speaker 16: Eat your candy! I don't want to! But it's candy, Toasty! But

Speaker 14: I want to eat food!

Speaker 16: Candy's a type of food. Try a bite.

Speaker 14: Um, hey!

Speaker 17: Toasty, what do you want to eat? I've

Speaker 14: been, I've been,

Speaker 17: I've been stopping to

Speaker 14: eat this, and this one.

Yeah, but

Speaker 17: are you going to eat it?

Speaker 14: No.

Speaker 17: You wanted a flat chocolate, Octavian, you

Speaker 14: said? Uh. Can

Speaker 17: you help me open

Speaker 14: this? Help me open

Speaker 17: this. But Toasty, you don't even want to eat it.

Speaker 15: I think you'll like this, Octavian.

Speaker 17: Why do you want to open it if you don't want to eat it?

Speaker 14: It's got a chocolate bar so you can't. Do you see it?

Let me open this by myself. Let

Speaker 15: me see, what is it? Do you know what that is? That's gum.

Speaker 14: Gum? Do you want to

Speaker 15: eat

Speaker 14: it? Um, no thanks. I want to eat gum! [00:54:00] You want to eat gum! I can't! I want gum! I want gum! Where's the

Speaker 15: gum? This is the strangest Halloween I've ever seen. This is his first year doing a real Halloween.

Speaker 14: I can't! I want gum! See, I like them

Speaker 17: on the top.

Speaker 14: I like stuff

Speaker 15: in there. Let me

Speaker 14: open it.

Speaker 15: Okay, here, do you want me

Speaker 14: to open it for you? Yes, please. I got this for you. It must be

Speaker 15: stuff. It must be stuff. Okay, let's put this in. Here, I'm going to open this for you. Oh, look, here it is. It's food. It's food? Yeah, it's food.

Let me,

Speaker 17: let me. Are you going to eat that food? What?

Speaker 15: What? Here, Torsten, look, it's food. Do you want to eat it?

Speaker 17: We're not [00:55:00] going to have you open this. It's just

Speaker 14: solid.

Speaker 17: Toasty! You better eat your Halloween candy. You better eat it until

Speaker 15: you're sick. Torsten, Daddy will take a bite to test it to make sure it's safe. I want to eat

Speaker 14: it!

Speaker 15: Do you want me to test it? You

Speaker 14: can't eat it! Well,

Speaker 17: gum is for chewing. It's such yummy food!

Speaker 14: No! Uh, you better put that back.

Simone Collins: Yes. You have to look visible and beautiful. You need it for reasons.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know why I married you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you do though. Yeah. Yeah. It worked out well. It worked out well. I had to fight for it, but man, I got what I came for and then some. Did you

Malcolm Collins: want marriage when you first found me?

Simone Collins: No. No. You, you know what I wanted.

Malcolm Collins: When you just wanted sex you were like

Simone Collins: I didn't know I didn't want [00:56:00] I wanted to fall in love and have my heart broken and live alone forever. You know exactly what I wanted. I was so clear about it. And sex was a part of that. Sex was a part of it. Yes. Yes, and yes, you are very much my type. So,

Malcolm Collins: you were Which is actually something I want to get into in this episode.

So, I'll get started with that.

Simone Collins: Dive in.

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