Is Having a Boyfriend Cringe Now? - Rob Henderson - #1016

**Chris Williamson** (0:02)
I miss the Cambridge recording studio, the dark hovel that you used to be in.

**Rob Henderson** (0:10)
Yeah, I think we've recorded in every single place I've lived in, yeah, since my start at Cambridge. So I was living in this, yeah, it was a hovel, like the smallest dwelling I'd ever lived in. Smaller than the barracks in the Air Force, believe it or not.

**Chris Williamson** (0:24)
Oh my God.

**Rob Henderson** (0:26)
It was a shoebox and it was such a step down, because when I was living in New Haven in undergrad, I was getting a stipend from the GI Bill. I had a pretty nice apartment. It was spacious, high ceilings, but Cambridge required all the post-grad students for their first year to live in their college. I was like, oh, it's Cambridge, it's going to be grand, it's going to be Hogwarts, and I get there, and it's a shoebox with a single bed and a tiny little desk, and that's where you and I recorded the first one for Modern Wisdom.

**Chris Williamson** (0:54)
I think it's very important for you to keep your feet on the ground. I don't want you to get too big for your boots. Published author, tons of books sold, very highly followed on Substack. Remember where you came from, a hovel in Cambridge.

**Rob Henderson** (1:06)
Yeah, that's what I tell people. When I was at Cambridge struggling, sleeping in that 12 by 12 prison cell. But yeah, now I finally have the background.

**Chris Williamson** (1:17)
The foster care system had nothing on this. The foster care system was a walk in the park.

**Rob Henderson** (1:22)
No, I'd always like this when I would watch other podcast guests, and they had the beautiful background with the books and everything. I'm working my way up to that. This is like stage one. Eventually, I'll have the grand library behind me. Yeah, one step at a time.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
What do you make of this is having a boyfriend cringe now article?

**Rob Henderson** (1:42)
Yeah, that was going around. I first came across that Vogue magazine article. It was a reel on Instagram, and someone was commenting on it. Then I saw that this magazine article is having a boyfriend embarrassing. I've inspired 1,000 Instagram reels, TikTok, all these commentaries. I went back and read the actual piece. It was a striking headline.
The first thing it made me think of was intersexual competition because as I'm reading this article, the author, she's talking about influencers and podcast hosts, these women with a lot of influence and status, and they're talking about how they try to not talk about their boyfriends that much, or they try to discourage other women from entering relationships, this idea of hetero-fatalism.
But of course, the funny thing to me was these women themselves are in relationships, and she would ask, well, why are you promoting these ideas? And these women would say, well, I don't want to seem boastful. I want to show solidarity with single women. And I understand how difficult the dating market is right now. And so it is a little embarrassing to post about my relationship online and this kind of thing. And yeah, to me, connecting it with evolutionary psychology, I think there are some interesting principles here around competition, reproductive suppression and that kind of thing. So I wrote this sub-stack article, which is one of my... I very rarely come up with titles that I'm proud of. Usually they're serviceable. Kind of gets the idea of the piece. But this one, Girl Boss Gatekeeping, was the one I came up with. And it captures this idea that if you're a woman with power, status, influence and so on, you have some non-trivial effect on the behavior of other women. And if you are telling them that maybe it's not worth it to date anymore, men are trash, it's so hard out there, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now anyway. But then privately, you're in a relationship and you are following those conventional life script patterns. You're kind of indirectly suppressing other women's ability to find partners, to reproduce and that kind of thing.

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)
Is this a luxury belief using your nomenclature?

**Rob Henderson** (4:08)
Yeah, I think it's almost there. So I listened to this very interesting discussion by this evolutionary behavioral scientist, Dani Silekowski, and she's done a few interviews on this question of reproductive suppression. And one thing she points out is a lot of this anti-natalist messaging comes from elite institutions, people with platforms, journalists, and academics, and corporate leaders.
I see this a lot in social science journals, for example, like the motherhood penalty, that kind of thing. Oh, if you have children, you're going to be penalized in the labor market. But you never see the reverse framing, where if you choose to work and not stay with your kids, this is also a penalty in a way, because there's a limited window of your child's life where you can spend a lot of time with them, and where you're like literally the number one person in their world. And so every hour you spend in the workplace is an hour you're not watching your child grow and develop and learn and form that kind of attachment. And so if elite institutions and elite high status individuals are promoting this idea, but then privately you see that marriage rates are the highest among highly educated people. Privately they're more likely than others to have children now. This was an interesting analysis by The Economist magazine last year, which found that a lot of the... So if you break down the results by socioeconomic status, it's actually low-income women whose fertility has declined the most, whereas college-educated women's fertility has declined slightly, but not by very much. But the lower you go on education and income, the higher the kind of fertility decline. And so is it a luxury belief? Well, I define luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society. And you see, I believe, people promoting one set of views that makes them look compassionate and understanding and I understand how hard it is out there and maybe this isn't worth it anyway. But then by promoting these views, they're actually reducing pathways to happiness for other people. This is like consistent finding Brad Wilcox and others, so I know you've had on the show. There's a ton of data in sociology showing that the happiest people are married people with children. People get women. Single women without children are the least happy. They report the lowest levels of happiness. Married women report slightly higher levels of happiness than that, and then married women with children report the highest levels of happiness of all. So if I'm trying to promote an idea, trying to shape your behavior in such a way that will reduce your happiness, then there is an element of a luxury belief there.