Why You Should NEVER Confess Your Love

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT.
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**Alok Kanojia** (1:03)
Hey Chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Ollo Canogia, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:28)
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you. What?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:33)
Robin, you are like the brother to me.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:37)
I'm in love with you. What?

**Alok Kanojia** (1:40)
Someone asked me a question a couple weeks ago, can men and women be friends? And I did the mistake of doing some research and stumbled upon this paper, which blew my mind. One study of about 2,000 people found that 70% of people in relationships, they started out as friends. And there is actually a corner of psychological research on relationships, which talks about something called the friends to lovers pathway.
Oh my God, if you're in the friend zone, that's gonna excite all friends to lovers. That's what I want. So what's crazy is this is actually arguably the most common way that relationships form. The problem is that we don't talk about it much.
And what's really fascinating is that there is good data about how to make this transition. What's fascinating about it is making the transition requires a skill set that very few of us even think about or even aware that these are problems that we need to resolve. But first, we're gonna start with this really cool concept of why the friends to lovers pathway is so successful. And this comes down to why dating apps suck so much.
In the 70s, there was a guy named Mirstein who talked about something called the open field versus closed field way of forming a relationship. So in an open field, it's something like a party, this is back in the 70s. You have a lot of people who don't know each other, have basically no reason to interact. And what he noticed in an open field is that physical attractiveness became the most important variable about whether people connected or not, right? I'm at a party, there's 50 people there, who do I choose to go and walk up to? Who do I engage with?
Whose jokes do I laugh at? Since I have basically very few variables to select people based on, physical attractiveness climbs to the top of the list. But then Mercy also noticed something very interesting, which is that there's another way that relationships form, which is in something called a closed field. So in a closed field, people have a reason to interact. There aren't a million people there. So it's like, you and I are working on a project together at work. We have to travel together for a conference. So in this situation, there's a lot of interaction that is not based on physical attractiveness. So we're hanging out together, we get to know each other a little bit, we discover, oh, we do like the same bands. We discover, oh my god, like this person totally has my sense of humor. I've met so few people on the planet whose favorite movie is What We Do in the Shadows because they love vampire satire. Right, like, oh, what's your favorite genre? Vampire satire, oh my god, I'm into vampire satire, too. So in closed fields, first thing is there's an extensive amount of interaction and there's minimal competition and there are a lot of things that you get to know about a person that are not physical attractiveness. So what Mirstein noticed and what a lot of psychologists believe is that actually the friends to lovers pathway is the best way to form a relationship or most successful way to form a relationship. And shockingly enough, the friend zone is not a terrible place to be. Everyone's like, you have to express your intentions at the very beginning. And if you shoot your shot and you fail, actually, no, the friend zone is the best place, arguably, and we're going to go through a lot of data to become lovers from. But since people don't realize that, right, this is so contrary. But remember, 70% of people do it this way. Since it's so contrary to what we think, this explains our attitudes right now, because in an open field environment, which basically online dating apps are the largest open field that has ever existed. In that kind of environment, physical attractiveness is at the top, which is where we get all of these kind of red pill, incel kind of like attitudes, right? They're not wrong in the sense that they have the experience of, I've been on dating apps, I swiped right 1800 times and I got two matches, right? That's their experience because they're participating in an open field. The problem is that if you are in the friend zone, it requires a different set of skills to be able to transition. And that's what we're going to go over today. Loneliness is in an all-time high, sexlessness is in an all-time high, relationships are probably in the worst state they've ever been in the history of humanity. And that's why I made Dr. K's guide to love, sex, and relationships. Let's talk about who you should actually date.