Warm, Fuzzy Feelings and Relationships with Rose Wesche

Travis Williams (01:09.327)

I'm curious when people first enter a romantic relationship or they meet somebody for the first time, those warm, fuzzy feelings that we, many of us often experience.

What are those? What's going on there?

Rose Wesche (01:42.882)

Yeah, your brain is changing when you meet somebody new. And there are chemicals that are released in your brain that are similar to the chemicals that you get with other pleasurable things, including drugs. So things like dopamine and norepinephrine that give you a rush.

Travis Williams (02:03.642)

Okay, so in a way love is like a drug?

Rose Wesche (02:08.446)

Yeah, infatuation for sure is like a drug.

Travis Williams (02:10.838)

Yeah. I think there's a song about that, or maybe like a pop song, maybe, I don't know.

Rose Wesche (02:15.318)

Yep, I think it's Kesha, Your Love Is My Drug. And when I talk about this in my classes, I put that lyric up on the screen.

Travis Williams (02:23.307)

I'm showing how unhip that I am that I could kind of halfway remember that, but not completely.

Rose Wesche (02:29.217)

I'm sure my students think that I'm very old for referencing Kesha.

Travis Williams (02:34.703)

Well, I'm curious then, this happens, we have this feeling. Sometimes it kind of fades a little bit, even if you stay in a relationship, that I guess infatuation, those warm fuzzy feelings, they can get a little less warm and fuzzy. Why does that happen?

Rose Wesche (02:50.518)

Yeah, well, you wouldn't necessarily want to be in that state of intense feeling all the time for the rest of your life, right? So it's probably a good thing that they're fading. We have kind of two different systems in our brain when it comes to forming an infatuation and then forming an attachment.

Rose Wesche (03:20.466)

euphoric feelings, but they also do things like keep you from sleeping and make you not want to eat and those things are not really sustainable. So as those feelings are fading, you're also experiencing an increase in other chemicals in your brain that are more of an attachment or bonding system. So while we're getting these returns to normal levels of norepinephrine, which is a bonding hormone that you get when you hug somebody or when you give birth or when you're breastfeeding and really helps form an attachment bond. So, it's, those initial feelings are fading, right? They're less, the intensity is fading, but the attachment is growing.

Travis Williams (04:09.827)

Okay, so they're being replaced, I guess, by other, maybe more sustainable chemicals.

Rose Wesche (04:15.974)

Yeah, yeah. So instead of like a rush, you're just getting a different kind of warm, fuzzy feeling.

Travis Williams (04:22.991)

That makes a little bit sense because you're probably right. I don't know that some of those early first few weeks of a relationship, they can be a little bit, what's the right word, tiring. They can be a lot.

Rose Wesche (04:40.95)

Yeah, they can be a lot and they can really keep you from staying on track with other things that you need to do in your life.

Travis Williams (04:47.995)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to ask you how folks could maybe keep those intense feelings going or some level of those going, but maybe it's best that we don't. I'm not really sure.

Rose Wesche (05:05.306)

Well, you definitely want to still have a level of passion and intimacy in your relationship, right? Even if it doesn't rise to the level of what you were experiencing in the early days, you still want to feel excited about your partner. And there are things that people can do to help increase their feelings of novelty in a relationship or their excitement for wanting to spend time with somebody.

I probably should tell you about some of those.

Travis Williams (05:34.717)

Okay. I would love to know what those are.

Rose Wesche (05:40.006)

Yeah, so we all want, right, intimacy and passion in our relationships to different degrees. And when we have competing priorities and busy lives, it can be really hard to get those. But there are things that we can do to make time for our partners and not take them for granted and keep them central in our focus. One thing that we can do is to make time to do things with a partner. And that includes things that you already know you love, like maybe they're shared hobbies or interests that you have. Maybe you wanna go to a movie or just have a good conversation over dinner. And that helps keep someone central in your focus. You can also try doing new activities together. And getting out of your comfort zone can help you bond with your partner a little bit more.

You also want to make sure that you're appreciating the positive qualities of your partner and not taking them for granted. And sometimes that's just a mental exercise that you do so that you're not thinking about, you know, after 10 years it really bothers me when your partner does this or this behavior. But you're also thinking about after 10 years I really appreciate all of the nice things that my partner does for me. How they wash the dishes, how they take care of kids, how they...peel my orange for me before they put it on a plate and bring it to me. All of those things. And of course, in any relationship, communication is really important. So, we can communicate in general with each other and make sure that we're not going days without talking. But you can also communicate with your partner about your relationship specifically and take stock of what's going well and what's not going so well, or what could use a boost.

And maintaining curiosity about the state of your relationship is something that can motivate you to try to improve it.

Travis Williams (07:34.899)

That's fascinating. I think those all sound super helpful. I feel like especially that sometimes just in general, it's easy, especially like when you know anybody, like a friend or anybody for a long time, like thinking about the negative things that irritate you are a lot easier to do than thinking about all the like little nice things that you just kind of start to take as the norm.

Rose Wesche (07:55.306)

Yeah, and when somebody is a constant in your life, you start to reach kind of a state of stasis sometimes. But in order for a relationship to grow, you have to make an effort to do different things, do new things, and to continue appreciating the good things.

Travis Williams (08:15.475)

That is awesome and that's a lot of great advice. I'm curious if you know the answer to this because this is kind of how these conversations go. I just get curious about things. I'm curious, do you think or do you know if couples that talk more about their relationship end up having better relationships?

Rose Wesche (08:39.102)

Oh, that's a really great question. And when it comes to communication, it's not just about the frequency, it's a lot about the content of that communication as well. So there are some people, some couples, where they talk a lot, but it's all complaining. I don't know if you've ever known a couple like this.

I watch a lot of reality TV shows and you can definitely tell there are some people who are always like kind of ruminating on the worst parts of their relationship or constantly criticizing somebody else and that's not helpful. Communication can be helpful when it's approached with an attitude of teamwork of like what are we doing well as a team, where can we improve as a team and also mutual support.

Travis Williams (10:19.727)

Well, I'm curious too, you've done some work, or you told me some of your more, let me back that question up. I'm curious about some of your more recent work related to casual sexual relationships or experiences and kind of what we're learning about those, what you're learning about those that you could share with us. So, what are you studying there?

Rose Wesche (10:48.846)

That's a, thank you for that question. I love talking about casual sex. So when I initially started my research career, this was what I wanted to study. I was a college student, I was a peer health counselor, and I noticed that a lot of my peers were coming into the counseling center after having casual sexual relationships. And some of them were not super happy with how they were turning out, and there were a lot of emotional complications.

And I was curious about whether that's true on a larger scale, that people have emotional issues with their casual sexual partners, and also how those might compare to romantic relationships in a lot of different ways. So, in 2021, long after I started this career, I published a review article that examined the emotional outcomes of casual sex. So, we looked at 71 different quantitative articles that asked people how they felt after having a casual sexual experience with someone. So that's anything outside of a committed romantic relationship. So, it could be a one-night stand, it could be a friend situation. And there's a lot of diversity there, of course. And so, everybody's experiences were different. In general, what we found was that people had positive evaluations of those experiences. So after coming out of them, they felt like it was a good experience. But of course, not everybody felt that way. There were some things that were related to having a bad experience. So we learned that on average, women tended to rate their experiences worse than men did. We learned that people who drank a lot beforehand tended to have worse experiences, which might seem like an obvious outcome, but it's not always obvious to the people who are engaging in those experiences. And we learned that it's important for people to have attitudes that are consistent with their behaviors. Casual sex serves a very specific purpose in that it can be physically gratifying, but it's not always the best way to meet your intimacy needs.

Rose Wesche (13:08.638)

So people who approached casual sexual relationships with the goal of forming a romantic relationship or getting emotional intimacy, and also those people who didn't have really positive attitudes about casual sex, they all tended to have worse experiences than those who wanted to get something physical out of it, who weren't really seeking an emotional fulfillment, and people who had positive attitudes towards casual sex, they tended to feel better.

Travis Williams (13:40.479)

It sounds like some of that is just kind of knowing yourself. Sounds like that has a lot to do with maybe the outcomes.

Rose Wesche (13:46.755)

Yeah. Absolutely.

Travis Williams (13:52.013)

Okay. Well, that's awesome. That's fascinating. That's fascinating work that you're doing there. Well, I guess maybe to kind of round this conversation out, I'm curious, what's one piece of advice you could give for anybody that's in a relationship right now?

Rose Wesche (14:15.826)

A piece of advice that I could give to anybody who's in a relationship right now.

Rose Wesche (14:24.906)

I think what you said about knowing yourself is really important. It's always important to take stock of how your relationship is serving you. I think we want to be in relationships that make us happy and we want to know when to exit relationships that are not making us happy or keeping us healthy and keeping us safe. So it's always important to monitor your relationship for the good things and also the bad things and be intentional about your transitions so that you don't end up staying in a relationship that's not fulfilling you, or that you don't end up staying in a relationship that needs work without putting that work in. I think that's my big piece of advice is to be introspective and curious so that you can make intentional transitions into and out of relationships.