Modern Wisdom
#931 - Arthur Brooks - Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness
Mon, 21 Apr 2025
Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, and an author. Can romance and love be decoded? From falling in and out of love to finding “the one,” what does the science say about what makes someone a good partner, best friend, and lifelong companion? Expect to learn if men need marriage more than women do, why women tend to leave bad relationships faster than men, why falling in love makes us do crazy things, what the brain chemistry of love is, if we should be careful about who we let ourselves fall in love with, how you can tell if you’re a compatible romantic partner, but not a compatible best friend, how to overcome contempt and insecurity in a relationship and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the three key traits for success?
I think if I was to give myself the three traits that I've managed to hold on to, I pay a lot of attention to detail. I have an unusual capacity for suffering or doing a delaying gratification might be an easy way to put it. Uh, and I'm just consistent. And those three things seem to be like pretty fucking potent fuel, no matter what industry you try and get into.
Yeah. But then of course there's the natural level of curiosity, high level of cognitive ability. Right. I mean, those are table stakes though. That's your point, right?
You've got to have that to play the game.
Yeah.
yeah because otherwise you have that to play the game but then when things are slow at the very beginning that's when you stop your podcast right and you didn't a lot of a lot of questions come through from people who say stuff like um hey man in the beginning when you didn't have any plays or anything like you know what motivated you to keep going that to be honest my motivation waned way more instead of your three and four and five because you're getting bored yeah it's like well i've been there this isn't
you're trying to inject novelty into what you do and you're trying to, even less than that, you're just trying to not let it get stale. And, you know, how many books deep are you now?
Uh, 15. 14 and 15 are coming out in the next year. Uh, there's a new one about meaning. The one that's coming up about meaning is coming out one year from the 14th. Unreal. April 14th.
I'm so fired up for that. I've been thinking about me. I remember I read this Roy Baumeister.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: Why do people focus on happiness and become less happy?
As opposed to if you just stayed at stage one, which path a lot of people who have real pathologies in their relationships, it's just basically stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two, stage one, stage two.
That's hookup culture is one or one and two over and over again, or the emophilic problem of careening through and then the other person going, whoa, and then starting again and starting again and starting again.
So you're looking for somebody, people who go through the stages together and wind up bonding together permanently, but they need to go deeper and deeper and their brains need to imprint on each other in these particular ways. That's how the psychology of falling in love is really just a biology of falling in love.
Okay. Talk to me about the fellow dopamine norepinephrine addicts out there about how they can... It sounds to me like biology is psychology. We're along for the ride here. We don't really get to choose much of the time who we fall in love with. If you spend enough time around the person and you go, fuck, all of the things I said I wasn't going to fall for and
So this is true. And there's a really interesting research going back to the 90s on this. You know the work of Arthur Aaron at SUNY Stony Brook. This actually got news because it was covered in the New York Times and it became sort of pop social psychology research. This was Love in the Lab. where he was actually simulating the neurochemical cascade. And here's how he did it. ALEX LANGSHUR Yeah.
So here's how he did it. He brought people into his lab. And it was people who didn't know each other, but who, based on surveys beforehand, were theoretically capable of falling in love with each other. So it wasn't people who were 30 years apart in age. And it was people who were opposite sex attracted and who would rate pictures of attractiveness more or less the same. So it was men and women.
It was all heterosexual potential couples. And they came into the lab. They come in opposite doors. They sit down at a table across from each other. And they don't know each other at all. They've never seen each other. Of course, it's undergraduate students because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. And he starts asking him questions. He asked him 36 questions that escalate in terms of intimacy.
So question one is, if you could have lunch with anybody or dinner with anybody in the world, who would it be and why? That's like an icebreaker at a party, right? Steve Jobs, you know, whoever it happens to be. Well, why? Question 30 is, when's the last time you cried?
And why now your mom doesn't know that your actual partner probably doesn't know that, but you have to answer the question and you're going super deep. So this is simulating. You're just, you're screaming through the process of intimacy with this person. And then, ha ha. Now it's when it gets really good.
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