Moment 163: Happiness Expert Reveals The One Type Of Person You Should NEVER Date

Arthur Brooks (0:03)

The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone, you should look for your compliment.

Steven Bartlett (0:13)

Why?

Arthur Brooks (0:14)

Because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert, if they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not hammer and tongs all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people satisfactory dating experiences, people have more and more and more choice, but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating. It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way, I like this music, I live here, I like these things, I want somebody with these preferences, and they get somebody who's their sibling, which is, as my adult children remind me, is not hot. Difference is hot.

Steven Bartlett (0:56)

It's so true because I never would have said, I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies, and she just believes in it all. And it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted, but I absolutely love it. And that means that she's actually pulled me into her world. She's made me more spiritual, she's made me believe in things I never would have believed before. And she's completing me in that regard.

Arthur Brooks (1:23)

It's really great. It's really great. I mean, you crack the code in that way. And finding all the ways that you're different, and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a good relationship. And not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important that this is a relationship killer. Is that wishing that your partner were more like you is just a form of egotism.

Steven Bartlett (1:43)

Everyone tries to change their partner, don't they? Yeah.

Arthur Brooks (1:45)

Well, I mean, it's interesting.

There's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't. And husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change and they do. I don't know.

Steven Bartlett (2:00)

There is truth in that. Relationships and love. How important is this as a subject for happiness?

Arthur Brooks (2:06)

It's the number one area of interest of my students.

Steven Bartlett (2:08)

Really?

Arthur Brooks (2:09)

My average student is 28 years old. So they're MBA students, they're master's students. They've all gone through college, they've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School. You have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree.

And this is the number one thing they want to talk about, they want to learn about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates. I mean, it's a classic theme. And the last line of the case study is always that the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, I don't know what happened. And so we look at brain scans and say, this is what happened.

Steven Bartlett (2:50)

And you can see it in the brain.

Arthur Brooks (2:51)

Kind of. I mean, somebody who's really in love has brain activity. It looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict's brain scan. I mean, your brain is, if you're at a certain point in the falling in the process, your brain is captured. So I mean, in the beginning, when people meet, there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen, which are sex hormones, obviously. And when people see somebody who's really attractive, that's why they want to look attractive because that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that, you see a big increase in noradrenaline, aka norepinephrine and dopamine levels. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade that's going on when you're falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is really interesting. So serotonin, we think about as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate. When they feel that it's an imbalance, some people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin. And that's all really controversial still, I mean, because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, that does rumination, it'll be more active when serotonin is low.