How to Find Love in 2026

Today I'm going to talk to you about one of my very favorite topics, which is romantic love. I'm going to make the case that romantic love is one of the best ways that human beings find the meaning of their life. Romantic love has been something that's been a major feature of my own life. You know, I try to eat my own cooking when it comes to true love and happiness, and in this regard, it's really gone well for me. I feel very fortunate. We've just celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary. We have three adult kids, we have four grandsons, and our communication has marginally improved over those intervening decades. Now why do I tell you all this? It's not because that's so extraordinary, not from people my age. They all have a weird story like that. But here's the thing, it turns out that that kind of story is less and less normal today. We're finding that there are fewer of these tales of sort of entrepreneurial romantic derring-do. And what's up with that? Well, that's what I want to talk about. Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love, meaning, and happiness. How you can find more of it using the big ideas in science, and how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together using science and ideas. And I want you to have those ideas as well, because I'm not just a happiness teacher. I'm trying to be the leader of a movement of happiness teachers. And I need you in the movement with me. That's how we make a better world. Today, I'm going to talk to you about one of my very favorite topics, which is romantic love. I'm going to give a deep dive into the science of romantic love and how it's very, very important for finding the meaning of your life. Now, as always, if you have criticisms or ideas or questions for me, please do feedback. The email address is officehours.arthurbrooks.com or put it in the comment section wherever you're viewing or listening to this podcast. As always, please like, subscribe, leave a review, and do stay in touch with all of us because that's what we really care about is once again building this community. And that requires hearing from you. Well, back to the main topic today, which is love, specifically romantic love. I'm going to make the case that romantic love is one of the best ways that human beings find the meaning of their life. It's not the only way. And in different episodes, I'll talk about other ways to find the meaning of your life. But as always, what I'm talking about here is a piece of this new book that I have on March 31st, 2026, called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Specifically, I'm going to be talking about a whole section of this book on romantic love and how this is the entry point. This is the first rung in the ladder toward finding the meaning of life. But of course, it's a hard one for a lot of people because romantic love is so mysterious. It seems so impossible to solve. Well, and put in fact, it is a problem that's impossible to solve. It's one that you only have to live with, that you have to understand quite intuitively. And I'm going to talk to you about exactly how to do that. I'm going to use science and ideas to talk to you about something that goes beyond science and ideas. That's the bottom line. And when you actually live in this particular way, including in the unpleasant parts of it, the breakups, the heartbreaks, the grief, you will find more meaning in your life. That's my promise to you today. Romantic love, that's our topic. Now, romantic love has been something that's been a major feature of my own life. You know, I try to eat my own cooking when it comes to love and happiness. And in this regard, it's really gone well for me. I feel very fortunate. When I was 24 years old, well, as those of you who know a little bit about my backstory, I was a professional classical musician in those days, all the way through my 20s. It was my gap decade, you might say. And I was playing on the road at one point in the summer of 1988. I was doing a concert tour, a chamber music concert tour with my quintet in the Burgundy region of France, playing classical music, chamber music concerts, different wineries and, you know, at different schools and things. Just a chamber music tour. And after one of the concerts that I was playing, I met a girl. I was 24. She was 25. I went up to her to talk to her because she smiled at me during a concert while I was playing. And that didn't happen all that often. And so I made a beeline for her to introduce myself. It turns out she didn't speak a single word of English, which is problematic because I didn't speak anything else except English. She spoke French and Spanish and Italian and Catalan, among other things. And I learned through an interpreter, through a friend who was bilingual, that she actually wasn't French. She was studying in France as a music student herself, and she was from Barcelona, Spain. And so I did the only obvious thing, which you might think, be to say, well, too bad. You know, maybe in another life I'll actually be able to talk to you. I did what I should have done, which was I asked her out to dinner through an interpreter, and we went out to dinner and had a couple of dates. And then I went home from my tour, but I couldn't get her out of my head. So I called my dad, and I said, Dad, you know, I think I met the girl. I'm going to marry. And he said, great, great. Can I meet her? And I said, well, it's a little complicated. She doesn't speak a word of English. She doesn't live in the United States and she has no idea that I feel this way, which actually put some barriers in the way. But there are no barriers to a red-blooded American 24-year-old. So I stayed in touch as best I could and set a plan to get to know her a little bit better. I didn't just set a plan. I set a strategy. I actually quit my job. I moved to Spain. There's a little bit between here and there. There was a year that went by during that. And she had actually come over to visit me in New York and she had started studying English. So she took some initiative as well. But by the next summer, I had actually quit my job and taken a job in the Barcelona City Orchestra to try to, well, close that deal if it were possible. You know, learned how to communicate with each other a little bit. It took me about two years to close that deal, but indeed, we got married, just as I had hoped. And you might be wondering how the story turns out, because that's kind of a quixotic tale, sort of like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The music career wasn't long for the world. I moved on at age 31 to other things, but the marriage was a big success. We've just celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary. We have three adult kids, we have four grandsons, and our communication has marginally improved over those intervening decades. Now, why do I tell you all of this? It's not because that's so extraordinary, not from people my age. You talk to people in their 60s today, 50s, whatever, late boomers or Gen Xers, and they all have a weird story like that. But here's the thing. It turns out that that kind of story is less and less normal today. We're finding that there are fewer of these tales of sort of entrepreneurial, romantic daring do. And what's up with that? Well, that's what I want to talk about. And I want to talk about how you can be more of an entrepreneur in your love life, even if you're 24 today, like I was back then, how you can think about your life as an enterprise. And the currency of that enterprise is love and happiness. Romantic love being the highest octane, kind of that fuel for your entrepreneurial journey and how you can design your life by taking strategic risk in a way that perhaps the world has told you not to do, how the technology has discouraged you, but in point of fact, how you can get your life back, starting with the romance that you very likely want. So where do we start the story? We start the story with, well, how about a little bit of data? And I just made the assertion that that was more frequently the case that we would have stories like this for people my age when they were in their 20s compared to people who are in their 20s today. And that's not just an assertion. And that's not just an old guy saying, kids these days, you know, shaking my fist at the clouds or something. No, that's actually in the data. It's pretty clear. For example, and let's go back before my time in about 1950, 1949 to be exact, 79% of households in America contained a married couple. Today, that's 47%. 79% to 47%. Something big has happened. You find that there's been not in a complete implosion, but a significant diminishment of the rate of people actually getting married. So you might think to yourself, well, yeah, well, sure. Thank you, professor. But people are living together without getting married. That's true, but it's not also true. You find that even cohabitation has fallen, especially over the last couple of decades. So since 1990, which is around the time that I met Mrs. B, specifically, I met her in 1988. I got married in 1991. One, that the percentage of people unpartnered completely has risen among men by a third and among women by a quarter. Here's basically the way to think about it. Marriage is going down. Cohabitation is going down. People are even having less sex. Not even hookups is what we're talking about here. In 1988, people in the 20s, about 50% at any given time had a sexual partner that was more or less regular. Today, it's about 33%. So even that is falling. Okay, so I'm giving you all these data. Who cares? Well, I do, because I think about love and happiness. Happiness, yeah, for sure. All this, less marriage, less being together, less romantic life, less romantic love is horrible for happiness. And it's a big part of, it's a symptom of, and it reinforces what we call in this show, the psychogenic epidemic of unhappiness. Now, a psychogenic epidemic is an epidemic, meaning it's highly contagious. It's creating a lot of misery, but it doesn't have biological origin necessarily. Now, everything has some biological origin because, as you all know, psychology is biology. But be that as it may, this is something that's really weird. It's not as if a virus or a bacteria has entered the population. has made people not fall in love, not be attracted to each other, not go out with each other. It's something psychogenic that's going on in our happiness that's related to the unwillingness or inability for people to actually find romantic love that so many people will confess that they want, but that just isn't there as much. Now, if in your own particular life, you do have a romantic love relationship, that's fantastic. I'm super happy for you. but you probably know somebody who doesn't. And if you don't, you probably, or you might, want one. And so let's demystify it a little bit. Let's talk a little bit more about the psychogenic epidemic because as we always do, let's use the science to understand our problem and then let's actually get to some solutions. What I want to do today is to give you a protocol for actually understanding the experience of having real romantic love in your life. How do you get it? How do you keep it? You fall in love. How do you stay in love? Let's start off a little bit with a description of what happens to you when you are falling in love. And then that will give us an opportunity to talk about why it doesn't work right sometimes, why it might not have worked right in your life, why you've actually had the experience where you were falling in love and the other person wasn't or vice versa. This is a good way to understand, to demystify a lot of what seems like the most mysterious experience that we'll ever face. And in point of fact, it sort of is. When we fall in love, there's kind of a four-step process that's happening in the human brain. The first step in the process is just basic attraction. And attraction is largely understood in the context of sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen. By the way, both men and women have testosterone. Both men and women have estrogen. You probably already know that. It's just that men have more testosterone than women and women have more estrogen than men. And there's a surge in the sex hormones when there's a basic attraction. That's not weird. That's not toxic. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the most normal thing ever. This is how we were evolved. This is a biological process. This is how homosapiens actually identify each other as potential mates. That happens at the very beginning. That can happen as quickly as seeing somebody from across the room, as a matter fact. But of course, it's much more intense when we're having a conversation with somebody who's attractive, which is why people want to go out on a date. They want to get to know each other. They want to see whether the attraction is real, which is to say they want to see whether or not there's an experience that they're having neurochemically, largely with the sex hormones, testosterone, and estrogen. Now, this is very quickly followed by a second neurochemical step, which involves neurotransmitters, which get involved specifically norepinephrine and dopamine. Now, you all know about dopamine. I've talked about it ad nauseum in the show about addiction and craving and desire and learning and wanting and escalation of particular behaviors and all that. But dopamine is just involved in so many types of behaviors. And indeed, it has a very big involvement in the process of falling in love, as does norepinephrine, which is a stress hormone produced in the adrenal glands sitting right above the kidneys. You say, wow, a stress hormone. Yeah. Well, if you've been in love before, you know it's unbelievably stressful, but it's unbelievably blissful as well. What is this actually doing to us? It's giving us a sense of anticipation and a sense of euphoria. So, for example, you're falling in love with somebody or you just went on a really, really successful date or two with somebody. And you're saying, I wonder if that person is going to text me. Well, you know, the anticipation of the text is delicious and terrible at the same time. That's dopamine. That's dopamine that's actually in your brain saying anticipation and reward. It's going to be great. If it happens, sure hope it happens. And then ding. And it's actually the person. And that's that little splash of euphoria as you actually hear from that person. That's norepinephrine. Now, all the things that I'm talking about here, this neurochemical cascade of falling in love, by the way, all of this, like almost everything in neuroscience, is not settled science. So it's not as if everything has been seen in the lab and there's no neuroscientist who disagrees with us. On the contrary, if you're a neuroscientist and you think this is too glib or something, let me know because I want to learn and we're all learning. We're actually getting better at this. But this is as close as I can get actually based on the refereed academic literature on this to try to turn it into language that ordinary people can understand with respect to the experience that they actually have. So that step two norepinephrine and dopamine that gives you anticipation of reward and a sense of euphoria That happens relatively quickly like within days of actually meeting somebody sometimes even more quickly than that And that what makes you feel kind of addicted to the other person. And in point of fact, neuroscientists studying the brains of people in love versus those addicted to drugs find similar activity in the pleasure and pain regions of the brain. If you've been following the work all along, you know that I'm talking about the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, et cetera, et cetera, all those parts of the brain that are involved in pleasure and pain, which you get when you're actually addicted to drugs or gambling or you get that when you're in love too. I mean, look at the activity of somebody falling in love. You'll be like, oh my goodness, this is a methamphetamine addict. Oh no, it's okay. It's just somebody who's in love. And that's the reason that you feel addicted to the other person when you're in the early stages to falling in love. Okay, that's step two. Step three is where it gets kind of gnarly here, I have to tell you, because that's where we get a big drop in serotonin. Now, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that's implicated in the process of people experiencing clinical depression. Major depressive disorders, generally speaking, involves a big, big deficit in the synapse of serotonin. That's the reason that people who seek relief from their depression symptoms will take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so-called SSRIs. Prozac, for example, is the most famous variant of a whole family of these drugs to keep more serotonin in the synapse, which is associated with lower symptoms of depression. Well, guess what happens when you're falling in love in this third stage? Your serotonin tanks. Now, here's the interesting thing about this. And once again, all this stuff is contested, but this is really, I think this is unbelievably useful way to understand what's going on here. You ruminate in sadness when you're depressed. You ruminate on another person when you're falling in love. Well, rumination is rumination. Rumination comes from ruminare, which is Latin for chewing the cud. That's what rumination is all about. So you can't get, you know, sadness and regret out of your brain if you're clinically depressed, feeling so crummy about yourself. You can't get that other person out of your brain. You're thinking and thinking and thinking about every little thing. And did I say the right thing? Was that a stupid thing that I said? And that little gesture that she did, does that mean that she doesn't like me? Does it mean she does like me? What does that mean? Well, it's the same kind of activity because your brain is working the same way. What's happening with rumination? You're imprinting something. When you're really depressed about something, your brain is literally trying to learn a lesson so that you won't make a mistake a second time. It can be really out of proportion. It can be really exaggerated, which is the reason that relief is so important. And drugs for some people can provide some relief. But when you're falling in love, you want that other person to imprint on you because you're in the process of becoming pair bond made it with that person. I mean, you're potentially, this is it for life, man. So you better imprint in the right way. But at least all this kind of weird, kind of ruminative, obsessive activity. Like, why did I just leave 10 voicemails in the last hour? Maybe I'm dating myself. You know, who leaves 10 voicemails now? Why did I send 100 text messages in the last hour? I'm so stupid, stupid, stupid. That's classic. That's classic for ruminating low serotonin. So really, I mean, technically, you should be able to look at somebody's brain and say, wow, really low serotonin activity. Either they're clinically depressed or they're in the third stage of falling in love. That's one of the reasons that falling in love is a thrill and wonderful, but at the same time, really terrible. And you wouldn't want to stay in that stage for the rest of your life. People would say, I just wish I could be in love like the early days with my spouse for the rest of my life. Are you kidding me? You'd need to be medicated if that were the case so you could function at all, most likely, especially because of this third step. And last but not least, this is where we're trying to get in the weeks and months after falling in love. This last step involves oxytocin and, to a lesser extent, vasopressin. These are neuropeptides in the brain that function as hormones in the brain that bond us together. Now, women have about three times as much oxytocin as men. And part of the reason for that is that women bear children and they need to bond to a brand new baby who doesn't have the slightest idea who even they are to the baby. And men also bond to the baby, too, especially with eye contact and touch, which is why when your newborn baby is born, of the guys, if you're going to be a dad, and the doctor says, you want to cut the cord? Say yes. And if they hand you a kind of a messy baby, say yes, because you want to bond to the baby. That's really, really important. And it's a very beautiful thing. By the way, people when they have a newborn baby, it's like the 4th of July inside their head and they don't know what's going on. It's an unbelievable explosion of oxytocin. You also get a lot of oxytocin when you're in the process of falling in love with somebody, especially in the stage where you're bonding to the person. You're making somebody who you're not related to your kin. You know, I've talked in the past about the four pillars of happiness, the four habits of happiness that people engage in, faith, family, friendship, and work. Well, friendship and family, there's only one thing that falls into both categories, and that's your spouse. That's your lifelong romantic partner. That person becomes another you in a very real way, but not related to you, not supposed to be related to you. It's a taboo if they're related to you, but they become related to you in the way that really, really matters, which is that you're neurochemically linked in a pair bond that's supposed to last for life. Of course, it doesn't always last for life, but at least at the early stages, nobody's like, yeah, man, oh man, oh man, I want this to last for life, but I probably won't. That's not what people say, right? And the reason they don't say that is because they got the oxytocin pump on. vasopressin, which is more prominent in males, by the way, that's less of the love link. And it's more about loyalty and defense. So that's the reason that males have that a little bit more than females, as you'd imagine from the evolutionary biology. But the bottom line is men and women, they both get both and they're both really, really important such that the person that you're with is your mate forever. Human beings as a general rule, there's a lot of debate about this? Are we naturally monogamous? Are we serially monogamous? Are we non-monogamous? And there's no consensus on this, except that if there is, it's that ideally almost everybody wants to be single, unilaterally pair-bond-mated. That's what people want. That's the ideal that people want. And so some would say that that's sort of the natural habitat for us. It doesn't always work out that way, of course, but that's the case. And that's certainly how you feel when you're falling in love. This is it, man. This is going to be it for life, or at least I sure hope it's going to be it for life. Now, the goal at this point is not the passionate love of steps one, two, and three. The goal is to get there together at the same time to the oxytocin level, to the vasopressin level, for deep connection and deep friendship. And this really is the goal of a successful pair bond mate is it's not, I mean, there's plenty of passion, you know, in 30, 40, 50 years, but it's deep friendship. That's the secret to a pair bond mate that, that, that lasts forever is deep friendship. That's what it's all about. And that has to do with this neurochemical bond where this person is your kin and is going to be your kin for the rest of your days. And, and when it doesn't happen, by the way, when you get the early stages, but not those late stages of kinship, that's when you get this deep, deep, deep disappointment. And that's one of the reasons that people can be just like madly in love and then it doesn't work out. And a year later, they hate each other. What's up with that? And the answer is they didn't get to the friendship stage. The friendship stage has a particular coinage in the world of social science. It's called companionate love. So there's passionate love, which is the early stages of this companionate love, which is where you want to get, again, plenty of passion and companion at love, but you want your companion. You want the person that you're walking into the sunset with, holding hands, the person you're going to be looking at as your closest friend, the person who is the other you as you take your dying breath. That's what really we're talking about with companion at love. I know it doesn't sound that, you know, thrilling as, you know, my kids said, companion at love, dad, that's not hot. I mean, I get it, but that's just the term. And that's what we're talking about. When people actually don't get there, the disappointment from that can actually lead to real bitterness. toward each other, as a matter of fact. Almost always the process is truncated, which is why there's so much bitterness in relationships that don't work out. Now, why don't they work out? Frequently, it's because this neurochemical cascade that proceeds through very distinctive stages, people do it at a sync. They're not going through it at the same speed. So you can see how that's a problem or that somebody doesn't go through the whole thing. And there's a real pathology with a lot of men, and again, this is a hypothesis. You can't really test this directly, but it's a pretty sound hypothesis nonetheless, that some guys, they can't get through all four stages. They can only go from sex hormones for attraction to thrill, right? One, two, stop. One, two, one, two. You've met guys like this, probably. Some women, but it's really quite common with guys. And these are a lot of guys who tend to be dark triads, by the way. And you know what that is If you've watched the show for any length of time, I'll put a link here to the episode on how to spot a dark triad. And they tend to go, you know, they're really attracted and they get a thrill, but they stop there because they don't fall in love. So it's one, two, one, two, one, two. It's all about seduction. These are the worst guys that women typically get involved in. As a matter of fact, they just can't get through the whole neurochemical cascade all the way to a loving, committed relationship, which by its nature is companion at love with tons of oxytocin is how that works. So that's the way to understand how all this works. But it's also, it shows that when, for example, somebody tends to go through this really, really fast, they can scare other people off. And there is a phenomenon called hemophilia. I don't mean hemophilia. It's a blood disorder without the H. Hemophilia is a syndrome in which people fall in love almost instantaneously. instantaneously. And it tends to be more common in women than it is for men. And so women who fall in love really, really, really quickly, they often have problems because they're going like lickety split through this neurochemical cascade and guys can't keep up and the guys get scared off. Right. So I would say that one problem is guys who don't get through the whole cascade and women who go too quickly through the cascade. But these are common problems that we see. And especially in the second case, if you're emophilic, if you go too quickly, knowledge is power. This is not some sort of deterministic path where you're going to be stuck on this for the rest of your life. On the contrary, once you know this, the knowledge can actually help you slow this down and metacognitively, in other words, using your executive centers to decide on how you're going to behave, saying, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm doing that thing. I'm doing that thing. I'm feeling that thing, but I'm not going to do that thing, notwithstanding my feelings. And once again, How do you manage your feelings so they don't manage you? Go back to the episode on managing your emotions, and that's what you'll be able to use if you tend to be quite an amophilic person. You know, amophilic people are so emotive, they're so empathetic, they're so lovely, but they suffer. They suffer. And if that's you, then figure out ways to manage yourself. Go back to that episode, and you'll see ways to actually do that. Okay, so there's lots of unbelievably useful information in this little primer on the neurobiology of falling in love, to be sure. But it's not just about neurobiology. Most religious traditions believe that there's a kind of a mystical sense in romantic love. I mean, in Hinduism, in the Bhagavad Purana, the authors elegize earthly love in the deity of Lord Krishna as a symbol of divine love. In other words, there's something divine about earthly love. It's a simulacrum. It's a model in the Hindu religion. It's a beautiful thing. In the Jewish and Christian Bible, this is now the bone of my bones, the flesh of my flesh, said Adam about Eve. And you often think that it's like, we become one flesh as kind of a reference to sex, but you know, it's one brain, man. And again, all the work that I've done talking about the hemispheric lateralization, the right hemisphere of the brain is, this is really where communication happens between two people who are falling in love. And, you know, after 34 years, I'm in love with my wife. I just am. And how do we communicate? We communicate beyond the level of just words. I mean, our language centers are in the left side of our brain, the Broca's area and the Wernicke's area and the left cortex. No, we're, man, it's like we're one pulsing right hemisphere. It's the most, and especially when things are working well, but even when they're not, even when we're fighting a lot, it's like, why are you so mad at me? I don't no. That's classic case of one flesh right there. Celebrate it. I mean, it's crummy sometimes, but the whole point is that's the way it's supposed to work. That's the divine sense of what it is. Now, you might say like Brooks is such a romantic. No, no, no. I'm a scientist. I'm both. Because when it comes to love, iron sharpens iron. The romance and the science, boy, do they ever meet up. This is also one of the reasons, by the way, when we get into the divinity of this thing, that people who regularly practice their religions, they have so much more success, generally speaking, in their relationships than those who don't. Now, again, I'm not saying that if you're not religious, you can't have success. I'm just saying that the odds go up if you do. Way lower divorce rates, way lower disillusion rates, and much, much higher levels of marital satisfaction. And Brad Wilcox, University of Virginia, the Institute for Family Studies, also shows that married couples, happily married couples who are religious, they tend to have a lot more sex than married couples who are not religious, which probably for secular couples sounds pretty surprising, or it might, I don't know. Why is this? Because romantic love for really devout people in almost every religion, it's a manifestation of the divine. It's almost as if your marriage, your relationship is an intent to God. It's the craziest thing. And some of you watching will know what I'm talking about, and some will be really baffled by this. But long married couples that have a strong religious faith my faith or sort of any faith they feel it kind of like those old nuclear submarines where you have to have the first and second officers have a key to launch nuclear missiles You have two keys in different parts of the sub, turn them both on, and then you can launch the missile. That's kind of how it feels like to have a connection to God, you need to have both keys turning, is how that feels. And there's this really strong sense for a lot of religious couples that when I deny my spouse love, I'm denying her God's love. And again, if you're not religious, you're going, that's crazy. But those of you who are religious, you'll know what I'm talking about. Einstein himself, by the way, who was not a traditional religious believer, but he was actually quite spiritual, the master theoretician of the universe's ultimate forces, he believed that it was love, romantic love, not science. That was how we would understand the meaning of the world and our place in it. The guy who invented the theory of relativity didn't say that, you know, these equations are going to help us understand the world and our place in it. It's romantic love, which was beyond his ability to articulate meaningfully. Okay. So what is it? What is love? What is love? You know, I should have defined it from the very beginning, but it goes back to, you know, good old Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Averroes and Maimonides and a lot of people in between would have defined love as to will the good of the other. Okay, so this might sound like I'm kind of getting off base here because I'm talking about a lot of sentiments, a lot of emotions, a lot of brain activity, and now I'm talking about the will, right? That the love is the will, the good of the other, as other. But that is actually the definition of what it means to be pair-bonded with somebody. You know, if love, even romantic love, were just about a feeling, well, a feeling is evidence of love. It isn't love itself. The feeling of love is evidence of love. Just like the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, kind of like happiness. Kind of works the same way. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Well, the feeling of love is evidence of love. So love is an act of will and a commitment toward another person's good. They're good as them is the way that that turns out. If love were just a feeling, man, I wouldn't have been married 34 years. I wouldn't have been married 34 minutes because that's probably when he had our first big argument. I mean, my wife is Spanish. Fighting is like a basic form of communication for them. So yeah. So what is it? It's to will the good of the other. The trouble is that we don't have good vocabulary for it, especially in English. I mean, the fact that we got one word for love is pathetic, I have to say, in English. You can love your wife. You can love your husband. You can love your dog. You can love your job. You can love the Red Sox. You can love Chicago deep dish pizza. But if you're loving all those things in the same way, well, there's some problems here. We need to talk. Obviously, you don't love everything in the same way. And we have a diminished vocabulary for the thing that we most want, at least most of us most want. Now, Spanish, which is my other language at this point, because Mrs. B and I, we kind of grew up together. And so we now speak a melange, a 50-50 melange of Spanish and English, a Spanglish, you might say. Spanish is marginally better for talking about love. It has two words that really mean that, querer and amar. Amar is sort of deep, passionate, romantic love. Querer is, it really means to love another person, to be sure, but you wouldn't use them interchangeably. You wouldn't say te amo to your sister. You wouldn't say that. You'd say te quiero because I love you as a person, if that's how you express yourself, your sister, and that wouldn't be weird. So differences, right you know who got it right was the ancient greeks and and i wish i wish i could speak authoritatively about i don't know sanskrit or that you know the dravidian languages of southern india which are so unbelievably rich in deep deep psychology i i bet that they have great vocabularies in it but i can't speak to that with any sort of authority but but greek is unbelievable there's seven words for love eros which is romantic passionate love philia which is brotherly love or friendship, deep friendship. Agape, which is unconditional selfless love, including for the divine. Storga, which is between family members. Ludus, which is playful love or flirtation, which can lead to eros. Pragma, which means practical love and companionship. And phalautia, which is self-love. And of course, all those things are really, really different and they have a different verb for it, a different word for it in Greek for each one of those things. And this is really interesting because it turns out that that's not just intellectual stuff. On the contrary, if we had a better understanding or a better vocabulary for different forms of love in English, we would be able to explain, for example, the friend zone, the dreaded friend zone. Sounds so nice, doesn't it? Not nice, right? That's where two people are together and who could conceivably be fall in love, eros, mutually, but they don't. One has eros and the other has philia. One has passionate romantic love for the other and the other has friendship love. And that's just, it's sad for the one who, you know, philia is great. I love, I have tons of friends. I'm really glad they have philia for me, but I wouldn't want my wife to have philia for me. I mean, she does at this point because we have a deep kind of enduring love. On the contrary, we have all seven. That's what a long relationship is all about. But eros is the bedrock of it because we're husband and wife. This explains the mismatches that actually lead to heartbreak, as a matter of fact. Okay, now speaking of the Greeks, the reason I wanted to bring up the Greeks really is that the Greeks are the ones who help us understand this link between romantic love and the meaning of life. The meaning of life. And here's how it works. In Plato's Symposium, which for those of you who haven't read it, Plato's Symposium is really what it's doing is kind of, it's describing the words of Socrates. Socrates was Plato's teacher, but Socrates never wrote anything. So everything we know about Socrates' words actually comes from Plato. And so we don't know. I mean, did Socrates really say it? Was he taking dictation? Was he kind of working from memory? Probably working from memory. But the whole point is that in Plato's symposium, he tells the story of Socrates when Socrates was recounting a time in his own youth that he went to a prophetess named Diotima of Mantinea. Diotima of Mantinea this prophetess this really wise woman who and he asked her about love how does love work and it's this young guy and he wants to fall in love he's really romantic and the whole thing he says how does it work how does it work prophetess and Diotima of Mantinea talks to him about describes to him what's called the ladder of love okay now the ladder of love is something you can google it if you want in my new book The Meaning of Your Life you get a bunch of stuff on the ladder of love so I think it's awesome and read the, by the way, read the Symposium on Plato if you haven't done that, because that's actually a really, really good use of your time, that talks about how romantic love leads to the deep meaning of life. It's the entry point. I'm not saying that falling in love instantaneously gives you the meaning of life. Here's how it works. The first rung of the ladder for most young people, most young adults who are most eager to fall in love, although don't get me wrong, I've met people in their 80s who fall madly head over heels in love. We're made to love because we're not supposed to be alone. Most of us aren't, at least. That the first rung of the ladder is physical attraction to a single beautiful person. And by a single beautiful person, I don't mean who's objectively Madison Avenue, on an ad, beautiful. I'm talking about who in all the ways, in their soul, their heart, and the way that they look to you in your eyes as a beautiful person. And your physical attraction to that person for all the things about them that make them who they are, that you have this. When I say physical attraction, that means you've got the attraction. And I describe the neurobiological origins of attraction. You know how this works. That first feeling that you have is not, you're not an animal. You're not a dog. You're a human that's being initiated in the rites of deep philosophical meaning of what it means to be a human. That's really what Diotima of Mantinea was telling Socrates. Why? Because that is the first rung of the ladder, the second of which you need the first to get to the second. And the second is the love of the actual soul. So first you have the admiration of somebody's physical beauty, and then you have the love of their soul. So there was the initiation that brought you in contact with somebody, and then you can actually go deeper with the person. from that only when you have a love of somebody's soul do you have an appreciation for something good that's not you see how that works it's like so it's not all me me me me me and i have a i know a bunch of grandsons at this point it's and and and they're awesome they're great but they're little they're teeny tinies they're babies and like the most egotistical people in the world are babies they kind of have to be to stay alive part of what it means to grow up and to become even an adult is to realize deeply in your soul, realize that as you looking at it, a world of other beautiful things and beautiful people, the way that's initiated is by saying, wow, she's so stunning. And then to say, and she's got a gorgeous soul. And only when you appreciate the depth and beauty of somebody else's soul, can you appreciate the depth and beauty of all of the good things in society that are not you. That's rung number three. From there, it's not just good things in society. Then you can go to the abstract and develop, according to Socrates, a love of ideas, of abstract concepts, that the love for things that are not you doesn't have to be limited to people and stuff. It's abstract ideas, which isn't easy. It requires maturity. It requires experience, to be sure. But only from there, from the love of actual beautiful ideas, can you move to the love of what is most beautiful and what's actually meaningful in life. You can understand the meaning of your own life. That's the ladder of love. That actually starts by, you know, looking at somebody across the, you know, down the church pew or across the bar or, you know, in class and go, man, what a knockout. And then, you know, yada, yada, yada, as they used to say in Seinfeld, you know, four or five steps later, maybe a couple of decades later, you understand the meaning of your life, but you got to start somewhere. That's what Socrates' point. But that's one of the reasons that I find in my own research, that people always say, how do I know the meaning of their life? And they always just spontaneously start talking about the love of their life, their soulmate, is how that actually works. So how do you do it? How do you initiate appropriately the neurochemical cascade, one that proceeds in an orderly fashion, more or less in the same speed that leads to companion at love can allow you to climb the ladder of love toward the meaning of your life. How do you solve the love depression that I talked about at the very beginning, looking at the data in your own life? Now, to begin with, to do this requires risk, taking risk. One of the characteristics that I find that's actually inhibiting falling you love the most, and this once again gets back to the literature that I look at every single day and what I write about, is that younger people, believe it or not, are actually less risk-taking than people were when they were young who are now my age. And this gets a lot to the work of Jean Twenge, a wonderful social psychologist at San Diego State University, who talks about how young adults are growing up much more slowly. And the way that she measures that is with risk-taking behavior. Now, some of it's pretty innocuous and healthy, like driving. Some of it's less healthy, like drinking and using drugs, which, you know, everybody says, oh, young people, they're drinking and taking drugs more than ever. No, wrong. A lot less, as a matter of fact. They're also less likely to fall in love. They're also less likely to have sex. And it has everything to do, she says, of a lower willingness to take personal risk. Now, risk is funny because there's bad risks and there's good risks. But risk in general is not an unhealthy thing. On the contrary, that's characteristic of being an entrepreneur with your life. And I don't recommend being an entrepreneur with your life by taking dangerous drugs and driving 100 miles an hour. That's stupid. But risks with your heart? It's another matter. That's the most entrepreneurial thing that you can do. Years ago, not that many years ago, I was giving a speech on Capitol Hill for a bunch of Capitol Hill staffers, people in their 20s. Now, for a little bit of background, Washington, D.C. is the world's most dysfunctional dating market. I mean, it's everybody's climbing and it's all about power and it's just not a healthy way for people to fall in love, I have found. And so they were really deeply interested when I was talking about this topic. And I said, look, if you really want to be an entrepreneur, real entrepreneur with your life, give your heart away, take a risk. That's the ultimate risk of, you know, putting at risk valuable resources in search of explosive returns. That's the definition of entrepreneurship. Thought it was clever anyway. a couple of weeks later, a guy comes up to me on a plane and, um, cause I'm always on a plane and he says, professor Brooks. I said, yeah. He says, I was at that talk you gave on Capitol Hill about being an entrepreneur with my life and to give my heart away and take a risk. And I said, yeah. He says, and I can't get it out of my head. I said, yeah. He said, so I'm on my way right now to tell a woman I've been secretly in love with for two years, how I feel. I'm going to spill it. and I'm like, dude, it was only a speech. I'm not trying to ruin your life. I was kind of worried about that because I'm thinking, yeah, I mean, this could have consequences. And I said, you know, here's my email. Let me know how it turns out. He said, okay. And I didn't hear from him, which seemed like not great. Well, I did see him some months later at a party, a holiday party, at the company that I was running. And he showed up and he said, remember me? And I said, yeah. And I said, how did it go? How'd it go with that woman that you were in love with? And he said, she shot me down. She wasn't in love with me. Not at all. She was in love with another guy. She introduced me to him. It was horrible. And I was very contrite. I said, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to ruin your life. And he said, no, no, no, no. He said, the reason I came is because I wanted to thank you. I said, thank me for what? And he said, because, you know, That was the thing I was most afraid of in my life. I mean I just couldn I couldn bear the thought of that happening And it did And I didn die And I not afraid anymore You get the point right This makes you stronger. Now, to be sure, it is unbelievably painful to be rejected. I have studied the pain of social rejection. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain is designed in the limbic system to make you hate social rejection. Even in little games when they put people in machines to look at the activities of their brains, and they simulate rejection by having a ball-tossing game that you're looking at on a screen, and two other people start excluding you from the game, it starts to feel painful in this dorsal anterior cingulate cortex brain. Imagine when somebody says to you, you love me, but I don't love you. It's going to be unbelievably painful. It's intensely painful. as a matter of fact. And I've talked about this kind of pain in past episodes in the past. But here's the thing. That's how you learn. That's the only way that you learn. What do you learn? You learn about what went wrong. You learn that you won't die. You learn more what you're looking for. You learn that that wasn't the person for you and why. That's why it's so critically important to get into the cycle of try, fail, suffer, try, try again. Now, I've got a lot of data on how long it actually takes for people to get over their heartbreak. And the answer is usually a few months, not a few years. It's very unusual that you have a breakup and it lasts years and years. On the contrary, you will actually get over it sooner than you think. And six weeks from now, you'll be on a date with somebody else going, I can't believe I was on. I love that loser so much. That's the typical thing that we actually find. But you also, the learning that you get is really the big, big benefit from this. There's a really interesting paper on this, a 2018 study that looked at 160 daters who were in their 20s, and then they broke up around the age of 22, which is kind of the modal age to have your first big breakup of somebody that you're truly in love with, it turns out. and then ask them what they learned. And it turns out that those who actually believe they learned from their breakup, they had much higher relationship satisfaction subsequently and lower relationship conflict in their next relationship. In other words, learn, learn, learn. Do the postmortem. Figure out what actually went wrong and you will benefit from this. But you have to fail as part of the process here so that you can get better. That means take a risk and be willing to fail. What do they learn, by the way? They learn three things. Here's what breakups teach you. Social cognitive maturity, right? That's like, I know why I behaved like an idiot and I won't do that again because I matured. Number two is romantic agency. I know what I want now. And number three is coherence. You all know what that is because you've been following the show. That means why things happen the way they do. I know why my last relationship failed and I'm going to fix those mistakes in the future. You only get that from experience. This is why, you know, people, they tend to do best in marriages, for example, after they've had a few breakups, not 50 breakups, not 200 breakups. We're talking about a few breakups. It's kind of like a mature startup is the way that that works. A couple of false starts along the way. Mature startups, not mergers. Certainly not hostile takeovers. Anyway, I'm not going to press that metaphor. All right. That's number one. Take more risk. that's the first of the protocols of how to fall in love and stay in love. Number two, don't look for your body double. Look for your compliment. This is really important. Now, you know, I'm really interested in how technology is affecting how people fall in love and stay in love. 62% of long-term relationships now are starting on the apps. That's kind of how people meet. I talk to young people and I say, you know, why don't you just go up and, you know, when you're having a drink after work, go up and talk to somebody because they're like, because I don't want them to think I'm a serial killer. Yet, I mean, society is very complicated and how people meet actually changes. And I've got a lot of thoughts on that. It's very important if you can to meet people in real life. And usually that's actually not in a bar. That's around common interests, whether it's a running club or church or whatever your thing actually happens to be. But probably for those of you who are watching this and you're in the dating pool, you're probably using the apps because most people are. what should you be looking for? The answer is not somebody who's exactly like you. And one of the problems with many of the apps, the apps are getting better at this, and I'm very bullish on what the apps are going to be able to do. I'm not anti-technology, but what they've often done in the past is allowed you to curate your dating profile to eliminate everybody who doesn't have a lot of overlap with you beyond just some basic values. To we vote the same way, we listen to the same music. We want to go live in the same city. We work in the same industry, everything. And pretty soon you're looking in the mirror and that is truly not hot. I hope that's not hot to you. Why is it that more and more people often say, who curate their dating profiles very, very studiously and very, very, in a very careful way, that they get a lot of dates, but they don't have much attraction? And the answer is because it's too much compatibility and not enough complementarity. Complementarity is difference and difference is hot. That's really where it comes down to. And again, this is a neurobiological phenomenon. Famous study. Many of you have heard about this. This is the Wettekind et al. study in biological sciences. An old study, 1995. This is the famous t-shirt sniffing study. And what it was, was in a nutshell really quickly, is that guys on the college campus, these experiments always use undergraduate dudes because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. They had to wear a t-shirt around for 48 hours, working out, going to class, no showers. And then they would take those t-shirts and put them in shoeboxes and drill holes in the shoeboxes. And undergraduate women who didn't know them or didn't know who they were, there's no identifying characteristics in the boxes, had to sniff, I know it's gross, bear with me, sniff the t-shirts and say, who's most attractive simply on the basis of the smell? What do they find? that those who are immunologically most dissimilar from them, the women, were most attractive to them. Now, there's a reason for this. This is called the MHC, the Major Histocompatibility Complex. You know, based on smell, you don't know. It's an indication to you because your brain knows so much more than you're consciously aware of. Who is dissimilar enough from you such that if you hypothetically have offspring, who's going to have a wider immunological repertoire? You want people who have different defenses than you. That's what the major histocompatibility complex actually is, which you ascertain through the olfactory bulb in your brain, among other ways of ascertaining that. You can do it through sight and a lot of other ways as well. The bottom line is this. More different, hotter, right? But we're not curating for that when we're spending too much time looking for the body double. We're very narcissistic as creatures. I get it. But the more narcissistic you are and the more that you're picking your dating partners, as opposed to somebody who actually loves you and said, I'd be the perfect person for her. They're not saying it's just like her. They're saying it's enough like her and then enough different than her as well. That's principle number two of the protocol. Look for difference, not just similarity. Number three, don't fear breaking up. Don't fear the breakup. I've talked about this a little bit before, but if you're paralyzed by the possible pain, you won't do what you need to do. So this really is tied to step one of the protocol. You know, if you're going into business and you're horribly, horribly afraid of having a mishap in business, you're going to make bad business decisions. Now, if you're not afraid at all, you're also going to make bad business decisions. But all of us are a little bit afraid. I'm not worried about that. But people who are paralyzed by fear almost always make non-entrepreneurial decisions. And that's fatal when it comes to romance. Don't fear. Now, or let me be a little bit more specific about this. Have courage, even if you do feel fear, because that's really what it's all about. Feel the fear and act anyway. Say, bring it on. Bring on the risk. When a relationship dissolves, that they have a tendency to rate mental pain at a pretty significant level. It's slightly more than three on a one to seven scale of mental pain severity. People have actually looked at that, measured that. But it falls. It falls much faster than you think. Your brain is designed to make you think that when you're in pain, it's never going to go away. The reason for that is because your brain wants you to avoid doing things that are painful to you. These things are threats. But you know beyond your just basic troglodyte limbic system that there's lots of things that you need to do. And that means you need to understand that whereas your limbic system is saying this pain is permanent, it's lying to you. It's transient. And therefore, you will walk into a situation in which there is possible pain. What do we know about that? Three on a one to seven scale. It goes down on average by about 0.07 points on that scale each week. So if you're a 3.5 in pain after a breakup on average, you can expect to feel a little bit better each week. where after six weeks, you're going to feel less than half as bad about it. And by that point, less than half as bad is a pretty normal level of pain in your life. And you're probably going to be dating again. And that's within six months. Okay. Now, one of the quick way to deal with this, by the way, really interesting literature that talks about how mental pain is affected by taking acetaminophen in Europe. If you're in Europe, that's called paracetamol. The brand name in the United States is Tylenol. And it turns out that it has an impact on this. Now, I'm not recommending you do this, see your healthcare professionals, but extra strength Tylenol, it tends to lower heartbreak. Don't take more than it says on the label, folks, obviously, to do that. But that's an interesting thing because once again, psychology is biology. Okay, now I've gone a long time on this. I'm going to go more on this. As a matter of fact, let me go back to where I started, which is the love of my life, my wife, Esther. She's the person on whom I'm going to be laying my eyes as I take my dying breath. Oh, this is really a big part of who I am as a person. We've grown up together, you know, through music and graduate school, having kids, career changes. We've moved 20 times. We're like, you know, wanderers, but together. You know, we always joke, look, if you leave me, it's fine, but you got to take me with you, you know? And so I want you to meet her because we're going to talk about this together. And we do this a lot. We work with couples. She does it more differently than I do because she is actually, her graduate work was not in behavioral science like mine. Hers was in philosophy and theology. And so we're going to get together and talk to you a little bit about how we talk together as a couple, two couples that are just getting together or in some very stage of falling in love or staying in love or getting married. And you're going to see how she thinks about it. Okay. Now a couple of quick emails and then we'll say goodbye. Linda Bittner by email. Thanks, Linda. I know people arrive at decisions differently, but I don't know if there's a right or wrong way or if there are patterns or types of decision makers. What can you tell me about this? There are different kinds of decision makers. Now, I've done work briefly and there's a lot more coming on hemispheric lateralization of the brain where the right and left hemispheres do different things. There are some people who are more right hemisphere decision makers, which is to say they rely more on intuition and gut than their decisions. There are some who are more left side decision makers, which is that they rely more on data. Men tend to be more data oriented and things oriented in their decision making, women more on intuition and on their gut. Obviously the best way to do it, I hope obviously at this point, if you're a fan of the show is you gotta use both. And if you're a natural left side decision maker, rely more on the right, consult more your gut. Think more that way and vice versa is the way that I think about it. But those are the two ways to do it. And neither one is actually better. One of the things that the best couples, the most successful couples do is that they wire their hemispheres together so they can make smart decisions based on each other's point of view. And especially true if they're more different, not more the same. Tom Fitzsimmons by email. Quick question on the wellness front. This is a good biology one. I've been using cold plunges as a coffee replacement. Why choose between them, Tom? Anyway, 39 degrees in the tub for two minutes. Tom, you're a tough hombre. First thing in the morning. And I'm loving the effects. A lot of people do. I'm curious what your take is on cold plunges and what the data actually say. Worth it? We're overblown. People love it just like you. Phenomenal. The reason that you like it instead of your coffee is because it's actually doing a lot of the things that coffee does. Most specifically, it's spiking your dopamine and your cortisol, which is a stress hormone produced in the cortex of your adrenal glands sitting above your kidneys. Great, but there's no long run studies yet. Very, very few studies are actually tracking even beyond a few months versus sauna, which is very, very well studied and extremely beneficial and totally safe. I'm not saying that cold plunge isn't safe. I'm just saying that it's not very well studied. And so you do it and you like it and that's great. But we don't know if long-term exposure to spikes of cortisol have effects on aging. There's a lot that we don't know yet with respect to elevated cortisol. So, you know, proceed with caution. Proceed with your eyes open. And as always, be your own lab. Well, that's it. We've come to the end. Let me know your thoughts on this or anything else. OfficeHours at ArthurBrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, wherever you're watching or listening to this. And leave a comment. I promise I'll read it. do follow me on socials on Instagram on LinkedIn on all the other platforms because that's where I leave a lot of my content that's actually not even here order the meaning of your life to learn more about everything I've talked about today and everything I'm going to be talking about the next few weeks and in the meantime as you're waiting for my book to come to you have a great week spread these ideas lift other people up in bonds of happiness and love and I'll see you next week Thank you.