PsycHacks

Exploring the challenges of academic couples in securing positions at the same university. Balancing career dedication and relationship priorities in the competitive sexual marketplace. The 'two-body problem' and the difficulties successful women face in finding suitable partners.

Women have more options in the sexual marketplace due to societal support and incentives. Men have fewer options compared to women. The implications of this gender dynamic will be explored in future episodes.

This has been my single most important realization with respect to dating and relationships, as it helped me understand much about the process that would otherwise have remained painful and incomprehensible. Women treat men the way men treat jobs. Women enter into relationships with men who they believe can offer them the best opportunity to further their goals, all other things being equal, and they will lateral to another relationship if another man can entice them with a more compelling offer. I expand on the analogy throughout the episode. #dating #relationship #attraction

The mastery of life boils down to one thing: the ability to be in the world, but not of the world. This is extremely easy to say and extraordinarily difficult to do. It means to participate fully in one's life and to cultivate the good that is possible, while remaining completely non-attached to one's life and prepared to surrender the cultivated good, as needed. This is a sign of spiritual mastery and model of being to which we can all aspire. #master #spritual #life

Masculinity and femininity are concepts that demand definition. In my personal opinion, both are attributes of the soul that are correlated to (but not coincident with) biological sex. As such, both men and women possess masculine and feminine aspects, and some folks are high (or low) in both. Like many other topics, the present one reminds us that people are complex, and that we shouldn't work too hard to restrict our thinking to "all-or-nothing," dichotomous poles. #masculinity #femininity #gender

One of the inescapable realities of human existence is that every action bears a likeness to the internal state of the actor. This means that we can't not communicate. That said, the intended state is not always accurately perceived by the observer, and the observer can occasionally perceive internal states that were not intended by the actor. To illustrate these principles, I discuss an historical example from the operation of the Allied intelligence agencies during World War II. #communication #relationship #information

In the popular imagination, every emotional wound can be healed with sufficient time and adequate treatment. However, this is not true. Not everyone can be saved, and therapy doesn't always work. What's more, when it does work, it often creates a kind of scar, which (like its physical analogue) lacks the suppleness and sensitivity of the original material. We all must grieve what doesn't return through healing. That said, there is usually enough left over for us to keep moving forward. #healing #therapy #selfhelp

Like pleasure and pain, there is a fundamental and irreducible asymmetry between creation and destruction. That which required decades of painstaking labor and inordinate talent to create can be destroyed in a matter of seconds with sufficient power and malice. A great example of this imbalance can be found in the realm of social media. I'll discuss more in this episode. #creative #destruction #socialmedia

Though extremely complex, society is fundamentally a collection of relationships between and among individuals. So what is true about relationships often holds true for society, as well. Consequently, much like individuals can find themselves in passionate romantic relationships, society can find itself in passionate ideological movements. In both cases, however, the experience is short-lived: the fire burns with such intensity that it cannot be sustained. In fact, humanity changes slowly, if at all, and, in order to sustain themselves, relationships (and ideologies) should accommodate to this reality. #change #relationship #humanity

One of the most widely-known verses of the New Testament is the one in which Jesus instructs us to "love your neighbor as yourself." This verse is usually understood to be a commandment, and it certainly can be interpreted as such. However, there is another way of looking at this instruction as a revelatory observation on reality, namely: that you love your neighbor as you love yourself. I'll discuss this interpretation further in this episode. #jesus #love #christianity