December 1, 2025 • 34 mins
Dr. Wendy is giving us some Wendy wisdom with her drive by makeshift relationship advice. PLUS why are more teens are on antidepressants than ever before. All that and more on KFIAM-640.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI
AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand
on the iHeartRadio app. You can always send me a
DM on my social media. Mostly producer Kayla and I
check Instagram, but we also check tiktoks from time to time.
The handle is at doctor Wendy Walsh at dr Wendy Walsh,
(00:24):
follow me, send me a DM. I'll always keep your
identity private and we'll answer questions each week as they
come in. So let's get to it, Dear doctor Wendy.
I'm dating someone with kids and we get along great,
but I'm unsure how involved I should be. What's the
healthy pace for building a relationship with your partner's children
(00:46):
without overstepping or staying too distant. Well, first of all,
you and your partner need to build your own little
love cocoon ever before the kids ever get involved. Dating
with kids is silly. I have seen parents at the playground,
clearly having met each other on an app, going to
the playground together to meet No. No, no. First of all,
kids are a little sponges. They know what's going on,
(01:07):
and you are a threat to their parental relationship. So
we do know that a revolving door of parental figures
is the worst thing for kids. Right, Even one good,
consistent parent can do a better job than a revolving
door of parents. So you are wise to be asking
(01:27):
this question. So the next there are two parts of
the question. You said, when is it overstepping or when
are you staying too distant? You're not staying too distant
if you are working on building your relationship with a
parent separately, which means you're gonna have to make lots
of sacrifices. That includes scheduling time when the parent doesn't
(01:47):
have the kid kids scheduling to maybe offering to pay
for childcare because single parents, you know, they have to
pay twice they're paying for to replace themselves when they're
not there. It may mean have to put up with
the fact that they will cancel because there's a sick
child or something has come up. Right, But then the
overstepping part, let's talk about that they're not your children.
(02:11):
You should not be parenting them, especially if you're dating.
If you want your romantic relationship to fall apart fast,
start giving parenting advice, especially if you don't have kids. Yourself.
Don't do it all right, I think the conversations need
to happen between the adults. Hey, how would you like
to behave around the kids? Should we just act like
(02:34):
friends and no public displays of affection. Look, my husband
Julio and I met, oh my gosh whatever five and
a half years ago, and when I first met his
adult young adult children, he said to me on the
way to the first meeting at a restaurant, Hey, by
the way, I'm going to feel really uncomfortable with any
public displays of infection in front of my daughter, like
(02:56):
she was like twenty five, twenty six whatever. And he's like, so,
so is it okay if we don't hold hands or
kiss or do anything. I'm like, sure, sure, just be
friends at the table. It's gonna be fine. So anyway,
discuss it between the two adults. That's what you need
to do. Oh, here's a question. I get a lot.
(03:17):
This is important. Uh, Dear doctor Wendy. My girlfriend gets
upset when I like, no, put little heart on certain
photos on social media, but I feel like it's harmless.
Where's the line between normal online behavior and disrespect? And
how do couples build trust in the age of algorithms
and constant scrolling. You do it through conversations and setting
(03:39):
ground rooms for each other. I will tell you what
those pretty women whose pictures you are putting little hearts
on think you like them. Okay, it's a way to
keep backup mates. You may not think it consciously, but
evolutionary psychologists have always said that we all have backup mates.
We have people in our life where we're like, you know,
(04:00):
if something happened to my partner or something didn't work out,
you know, maybe I'd reach out to that person. It
might be a colleague, it might be somebody online, et cetera.
So unconsciously, you may be liking their pictures because you're thinking, well,
you know, maybe I can make a little friendship with
(04:21):
them if things don't work out. So that is not
good for your relationship.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Not good.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's obviously making your partner feel insecure. And trust me,
there are women sluice online who will go and figure
out all the people you're hearting and they'll send private
messages to your partner and go you your boyfriend is
doing online, So you know what, have a conversation, decide
what the ground rules are going to be, and be respectful.
(04:50):
If your partner says I don't like you herding other
women's pictures, especially the ones in mikini's, then respect your feelings.
That's what you need to do, all right, Move it along.
Dear doctor Wendy, I love my man. Good to know,
but we realize we have very different visions for the
next five years in terms of career location. I assume
(05:11):
where you want to live. Even lifestyle is long term
compatibility something you build together, or does love not survive
if your paths naturally diverge. Well, here's the thing about love.
It is not just a feeling. Love is an action.
It is a verb. It is the verb to give,
(05:33):
and what you give in a love relationship more than anything,
is compromise. So I should also say that human mating
is an interesting cocktail of biology, right, chemistry, sociology you
said even lifestyle is different. That's sociology and psychology, various
(05:56):
attachment style, conflict resolution, et cetera. So if you guys
are going two different directions, you can't hope that some
feeling you had of lust and love and attraction at
the beginning is going to become glue. What becomes glue
in long term relationships is ongoing emotional intimacy and vulnerability
(06:21):
and ongoing sacrifice for each other. And if you're at
the stage where nobody's willing to sacrifice anything having to
do with their career, where they're going to live, or
I don't know, when you say lifestyle, like where you
liked a vacation, how much money you spend on certain things.
We've got to tell you story ones. Back in the
very wee early days of the Internet, early days like
(06:44):
AOL rooms and people chatting long before dating apps or whatever.
I was chatting with a stranger online, as everybody did
back then. It's a long time ago. It's in like
the early nineties, right, And he was saying something about
his car, and he said, oh, I'm really it was
even before the time where you could send pictures. I
(07:05):
think we were dial up modem nonsense, right, And he
I thought this guy was really interesting. Was chatting and
then he said, I really like what I just did
to my car. I did a really interesting paint job.
And I said, really, what color did you paint it?
And he goes, oh, no, no, it's not about the color
I painted all the way down the side of my car.
(07:27):
A snake. I literally I was reading it out loud
with my roommate and we looked at each other. Our
eyes got so white, and I'm like, oh my gosh,
you can think someone so interesting until you realize you
have very divergent lifestyles. Anyway, Uh, to end that, right?
All right? I think I have time for one more
before we go to break. My partner is still very
(07:49):
close with their ex. They swear it's blatonic, and I
want to trust that, but it really stirs up insecurity.
What are healthy boundaries with exes? And how to communicate
fears without sound controlling. Well, you can communicate the career
the fears all you want and you don't have to
sound controlling. But I think if this really is platonic
(08:09):
and the two of you are socializing as a couple,
then the two of you should be socializing with this X, right,
if it's really that light listen. We were in Julio
and I went to Australia Sydney for our honeymoon, and
there's a couple that we went to visit who had
come to our wedding. So we went to visit them
for our honeymoon and on a couple occasions he brought
(08:31):
along his best girlfriend, who was just platonic friend, but
she's socialized with the couple. You could see that the
wife knewer liked her, understood her as well. Hey, we
got to go to a break. If you want to
send me a message on a DM, just go to
Instagram at doctor Wendy Walsh and send me a little
DM and we'll continue to answer your relationship questions when
(08:54):
we return.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Well Show on KFI
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
let me continue. I am. Also, I just want to
reiterate I love that so many of you are following
me on social media, and every once in a while
I go into the DMS, I find the interesting things
you send me, and so thank you for continuing to
(09:28):
send questions in. If I don't answer them right away,
it's because we're piling them up for another future week.
And also, I do always keep your identity anonymous. So
heading into the DMS, this one from TikTok. Hey, Doctor Wendy,
I have a question regarding long distance online relationships of
all places TikTok. I've had video calls with six women.
(09:50):
Six I have yet to meet any of them in person.
They all live out of state. For me, it's been
three months. Four of them say they're in love with me.
We chat a few times a day, every day. I'm
a man of a certain age. Is chatting a real relationship? Okay,
gentlemen of a certain age? No, No, this is your fantasy.
(10:11):
This is their fantasy. Although it feels sustaining, right, it
feels kind of good. Could you get in the attention?
You're also kind of cheating them on them all? Do
they all know about each other? You're having like emotional
affairs with six different women, and four of them say
they're in love with you. Okay, That just means they're
projecting their idea of love onto you. It's not real.
(10:35):
My suggestion would be, if you are looking for a
real relationship, find one in your zip code, and if not,
get on a plane, bus, train and get over to
the one that's in the state closest to you and
see if it could be a real thing. Because you
are not dating a real person, you are dating your
fantasies and they are just kind of replying a little bit.
(10:56):
Sorry to say it, but that's just the truth. And
everyone out there and those kinds of relationships listen up,
it's not real. Okay, moving on, Dear doctor Wendy. How
do you know when your relationship is ready for the
next step i e. Moving in together or engagement. Well,
there's no one right way to move forward, although I
(11:17):
like to say that a certain certain kinds of criteria
should have been met, Like you shouldn't be having a
long distance relationship and then decide you're suddenly going to
move in together or engage right kind of be in
the same city. You got to be seeing each other frequently.
I would suggest that you at least date a calendar
(11:37):
year for a full year before you consider ever moving
in together. And this goes for people of any age.
Really like just get to know each other. Also, make
sure your tribes have met. I've said this before. I
used to host this show on ID Investigation Discovery called
Happily Never After about brides and grooms that murdered each other.
(12:01):
It was usually the groom doing the murdering, but anyway,
the tribes had not met or if they had, the
family didn't approve of this person, so they usually went
off in a lope somewhere. So I'm just saying, you
need to have other eyes on this. So I'm going
to go with you here. That's where I'm going to
go with all right, moving on, dear doctor, Wendy says
this listener. I've been seeing a guy for two months
(12:24):
and we've really hit it off. Next weekend will be
the first time we spend the night together. Oh, so
you've planned it. We haven't been intimate yet, and I'm
super self conscious about my body. I haven't been intimate
in a while, and my anxiety is through the roof.
How do you handle this? How do you tell the
guy you're dating without making it awkward? Well, it's going
(12:44):
to be awkward, and that's called intimacy. It's okay, and
I think what you need to do is discuss it.
So rule number one. If it's the first time, the
onset of sex in a new relationship, you want to
make sure everybody please listen. This is so important that
you get sexual exclusivity before you have sex. Now, there's
(13:06):
a difference between sexual exclusivity and relationship definition. Relationship definition
is the what are we and where is this going? Right?
Are you my boyfriend? But sexual exclusivity is Hey, while
we're getting to know each other and deciding if we're
compatible for health reasons and emotional reasons, i'd like to
(13:29):
know that I'm the only one you're sleeping with. And
I know there are women out there. Every time I
say this, who go. But they lie?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Men lie?
Speaker 1 (13:37):
All right, then you shouldn't be having sex with them
until you trust them. Listen to your stomach, really, listen
to your summing, and listen to your friends and family
and everybody else. So it's going to be awkward, as
you describe it, awkward, but you're just going to say, hey,
it's been a while for me, I'm a little nervous
(13:58):
about my body. And they love that honesty. That's intimacy,
that's emotional intimacy. So I think you just got to
say it it's okay, and you keep the lights real dim,
that little candle or something. It's gonna be fine. You're
(14:18):
gonna have fun. Look, the first time is never great.
We know that the second time it's gonna be great.
All right, I think you have time for one more,
Dear doctor, Wendy my boyfriend and I love each other,
but I feel I'm the only one planning dates, initiating conversations,
or keeping us emotionally connected. How do you bring up
(14:38):
feeling underappreciated without sounding accusatory or do I need to
rethink the relationship entirely?
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I'm not in the relationship with you, and I don't
know if you have some kind of insecurity where you're
the kind of person where your mind is always looking
for evidence that you are unlovable or that they are
not doing enough. Remember, how we think becomes the reality.
(15:07):
Thoughts are things, So you and your therapist can try
to figure that one out. But I would start by
I mean, when you say the only one planning dates,
initiating conversations, you mean he never even calls or texts
or anything. Then that's a lot of work. I would say,
stop doing the work and see what happens. Just let
(15:30):
them be who they're going to be, and watch it
and analyze it.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
But if you say I'm feeling underappreciated, that's a little different,
because that's kind of insecurity. We shouldn't need somebody else
to tell us we're beautiful and lovable and they're committed
to us on a regular basis. Right, we should know
inside our core that we are worthy, we are worthy
(15:56):
of love, and that we are a good person. It's
life when our partners say it and when we say
it to our partners. But our entire self esteem shouldn't
be dependent on that, right, Okay, So when we come back,
move it away from questions. I read this article recently
(16:18):
about how more teenagers and young adults are using antidepressant
medications called SSRIs more than ever. Now, if you know
anything about antidepressants, you know that it can impact one's libido.
But there's not a lot of research. But there's some
questions being asked about the developing body and the developing
(16:43):
mind teenagers. Right, the question is taking antidepressants going to
disrupt teens sex lives for years? Let's break it down.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
When we come back, you're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh
on demand from KFI Am six forty.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I want you to listen to this, and I don't
really have all the answers. I just want to give
you a full some sobering statistics. More than two million
teenagers are taking antidepressants, according to research and twenty two
percent of college students have used an antidepressant also called
an SSRII selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Now, what the concern
(17:36):
is is that use of these antidepressants during development, during
those developmental years might actually impact our kids relationships and
sex lives for the rest of their lives. Now you've
(17:57):
probably heard that asriyes can impact libido, and there's research
to support that, and generally it's been felt that once
you go off them, your libido comes back. I'll tell
you that I used antidepressants two times in my life
for postpartum depression. And if you've never suffered from depression,
(18:23):
it is not always like what we think the symptoms are.
I always had this idea that if someone were depressed,
they were set, they cried a lot, they went to bed,
they wanted to be in a dark room, And indeed,
for some people, those are the symptoms. My symptoms were
(18:43):
a little different because I was dealing with a newborn
and there's a kind of also elation that comes with
being a new mother and worry and excitement about their
survival and every breath they take and whether they have
a wet diaper or need to be fed and all
that kind of stuff. And I I am the type
of person my therapist said this to me years ago.
(19:04):
The way that I internally organize is my organizing my
external environment. Everything in my house is a nice has
a nice neat parking space, I promise you. So when
I had my first daughter, I carried her almost forty
two weeks. Crazy pregnancies, if you don't know, we are
supposed to last about forty weeks. Mine was forty two weeks,
(19:27):
well forty one and a half, and so I was
walking on the street very unstable because she just kept
I stayed skinny. I swear she just grew forward and
I stepped in a pothole and boom, down I went,
and I broke my foot in a few places. So
what they could not do, and that happens is put
a cast on it because you're about to give birth.
(19:48):
So my doctor said, you know, this baby will be
safer in a bassinette than she will be with you
on crutches, So let's get this baby out, and we
did a schedulcy section. Soon after that. Part of my
depression was the fact that I couldn't get out of bed,
you know, because what happens is after you give birth,
everything swells and then shrinks, So they couldn't put a
(20:09):
cast on. I couldn't put any weight on my foot.
I could get myself into some kind of wheelchair and
get over to the shower once a day, but otherwise
I was stuck in bed with my baby. Now, the
wonderful thing of that is that we got to bond
when the breastfeeding went well and all that kind of stuff. Now,
let's get to my depression. If I'm the type of
person who internally organizes by organizing my external environment, I
(20:33):
don't know if you know, but when they had you
eight pounds of flesh to take home from a maternity ward,
they also unknowingly hand you about forty pounds of laundry
a day. I would literally look at those piles of laundry.
I had other people helping me. Of course, baby daddy,
girlfriends would come over, the next door neighbor would come over.
People were kind of helping. My parents had passed away.
We had no grandparents around, so it was just me
(20:54):
and him, and he was mostly trying to work, and
I was going insane looking at the piles of laundry
or even if the towels weren't folded all the same
way and lined up so the seam would look like it,
you know, was a bed bath, and beyond store, I
just would lose lose it, and I'd be so angry
and irritable. So I was not a depressive person who
(21:16):
would take to the bed and just cry and wallow.
I was sniping at everybody. I was so mad and
I couldn't get organized, and I was frustrated. So depression
can take many, many forms. So I went on an SSRI.
Now I stayed on it for a year. With the
second baby, the same nonsense happened. Went on it for
(21:37):
a year. I weaned myself off very slowly after a year,
as you're supposed to do, cutting them in half, cutting
them in quarters, cutting I did all that, you know.
I can't tell you if my libido went down, because
I suppose part of mother and the last thing I
was thinking about was sex. Let me tell you that.
So in my case, I don't have that experience. But
there has been documented evidence to show that some people
(21:59):
take antidepressants SSRIs have a depletion in their sexual desire, arousal,
or even performance. With rectael problems, et cetera. So there
is now this thought with so many teenagers and young
adults taking antidepressants during their developmental years, that this could
(22:20):
impact their sex drive for life. There's anecdotal evidence, you know,
anecdotal evidence when they just ask a few people. It's
not like a true study where they have all kinds
of you know, thousands of people in it. They kind
of ask a few questions of people and they say, oh, yeah,
you know, I'm still it's still not back. But you
also have to remember that antidepressants were designed to relieve
(22:42):
symptoms of depression and anxiety, and depression and anxiety are
also two things that reduce your libido. So which is it?
Is it that the SSR I took away sex drive
because people are saying even after they went off it,
it never came back, or did some degree of depression
and anxiety come back, which also reduced their libido. You know,
(23:06):
sexual function is so complex. It's partly biological, it's partly psychological,
it's partly social. So it's hard to pinpoint one or
the other. I'm gonna say this that if there are
a lot of teens and young adults on antidepressants, I
(23:26):
don't necessarily think that it's being over prescribed. And let
me tell you why. I'm a college professor. I taught
on Zoom for two years. It was hard enough for me.
I could only imagine the students at that time. I
had one college student kid, my own daughter, who was
finishing off her last semester of college on Zoom, and
then I had a high school kid who my youngest daughter,
(23:50):
who spent two years on Zoom. When these kids finally
came back to the classroom, and now I'm talking about
the ones I teach, the social anxiety was enormous. I
can see the depression, I'm sorry, in the way they walk,
the lack of eye contact. I would put them in
discussion groups and give them a study question, and they
(24:11):
would sit four or five desks together in a little circle,
and everyone just stare at their phone and say nothing,
like they were afraid to talk to each other. They
were afraid to look each other in the eye. If
I asked them to stand in front of the class
and read something they'd written, if you could have seen
the sheiks in their fingers and their knees as they
(24:32):
stood there, these were very real diagnoses, as our young
people lost a solid two years, vital, crucial two years
of social development. So let us not forget that SSRIs
or call them. Antidepressants are designed to prevent suicidality, right,
(24:55):
They're preventing tragedies, and we still don't know. There's just
not enough research to know if they've you know, if
their sex life has gone down because of social situations,
because of lack of social skills, because of that antidepressant
they took. We just don't know. You know, more research
(25:19):
will come out, and I hope a lot of that research,
and I not only hope, I suspect a lot of
that research will eventually come out of the famous Kinsey Institute.
I have a very special guest coming up. But first,
when we come back, I want to talk to you
about doctor Alfred Kinsey and his legacy from science to
(25:41):
some might say a scandal, and back to science again.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
You know, it's amazing that we talk so openly about
sex and love today. Although I always remind people like,
I'm not a sex therapist. I don't talk about sex.
I'm not a doctor. Ruth where I'm going to give
you plumbing information or talk about positions or lubrication or
any of that stuff. Because I'm a psychology professor. When
(26:19):
I do talk about sex, it's within the context of relationships,
you know, frequency, neurochemistry, the bonding effects of having sex,
et cetera. So, but we live in a time and
a culture where it's okay to be open and talk
(26:40):
about your sexual desires, your fantasies, your sexual identity orientation, right,
you know, not so long ago, it was not okay
to even say the word pregnant on television. One of
my favorite shows when I was little was a Dick
Van Dyke show, and you remember he and his wife
slept in twin beds on TV. They couldn't even show
them getting into bed together in the nineteen sixties. And
(27:04):
I want a credit a man named Alfred Kinsey to
the openness that we have today. Really beginning back in
the nineteen forties, he was the first person to really
look America straight in the eye and say, hey, everybody,
let's stop moralizing here and start measuring. I mean, he
started to collect data. Before Kinsey did his work, there
(27:28):
were assumptions people had shame around things, secrets, and there
was a complete lack of data. A little background if
you don't know who Alfred Kinsey was. He grew up
in New Jersey, Hoboken, New Jersey, and he happened to
have come from a very strict religious and it's reported
(27:48):
emotionally restrained household. His father was a devout Methodist minister
and later a professor. He supposedly ruled the home with
ridge moral expectations. So picture this. Here's this little boy
with all these questions and hormones that are going and
you can't even talk about these things. His mother was
(28:10):
known to be deeply submissive to her husband, so he
grew up in really hard traditional gender roles. He also
was a very shy and often sick child. He suffered
from scoliosis and he spent long periods alone thinking right.
This pushed him into nature and the woods, and Kinsey
(28:33):
liked to collect plants insects, So some of his biographers
would say that this part of his life was filled
with sexual suppression religious control. But then he began this
lifelong obsession with trying to understand human sexuality. Eventually he
made it to Harvard. He's a Harvard trained biologist. He
(28:55):
began his career studying nature gall wasps actually tiny insects,
elected tens of thousands of them. Right. I was watching
an interview I don't know if you've seen the Netflix
interview with Jane Goodall that's I think it's called Famous
Last Words, where they interviewed her before her death and
promised her that this would not be put out until
after she passed away. And she was talking about there's
(29:17):
nature everywhere. She just used a cute little story about
being at an airport and people walking by with their
suitcases whatever, and not even seeing that there's a courting
ritual going on between these two insects, and one male
was trying to pick up this crumb off the floor
to entice the female their version of dating, right, And
she said, it's everywhere, It's everywhere, right. Well. Kinsey eventually
(29:40):
turned sex from a taboo into a scientific question his
famous study nineteen forty eight Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Before that, there were zero large scale data sets on
sexual behavior. So he went out and just asked people questions.
But he not only asked them questions about their sexual behavior,
(30:04):
but he asked them questions about their sexual fantasies, you know,
he was One of the many things he came up
with in the area of sexuality was this idea of
the Kinsey scale, a scale of sexual orientation where at
one end of the scale you're one hundred percent homosexual
both in behavior and fantasies. But he found something else.
He found that people could be one hundred percent heterosexual
(30:28):
and behavior, but they're fantasies were almost always homosexual. Again,
the repression at the time, people unable to be authentic
and who they were. And he also found that it's
a wide scale and that most of us at Kinsey
scale is from a one to a six. A vast
maturity of us are more like a three. We're somewhere.
It's a sliding scale, right. He found that despite what
(30:52):
people thought, there were lots of rates of sex outside
of marriage. He found that same sex behavior was far
more common than people thought, that there was a whole
diversity in desire and fantasy, and that women who are
thought to be very aseexual and performative, that women had
rich varied sexual experiences. You know. Eventually the Kinsey Institute
(31:16):
evolved into cutting edge global research. Right today, the Kinsey
the world famous Kinsey Institute is under the leadership of
doctor Justin Garcia. Now it's not just about sex, right now,
they study not just lust but love. The best research
(31:40):
on attachment and pair bonding comes out of the Kinsey Institute,
dating and dating, app behavior, sexual health across the lifespan,
gender and identity, evolutionary psychology of mating. That's the area
I'm so fascinated with. The neuroscience of desire. Institute basically
(32:01):
looks at love, intimacy, and relationship structure. And they collaborate
with global labs around the world, right, and they use
all kinds of scientific neuroimaging, et cetera to test our
most intimate relationships. Now, I would be remiss if I
didn't say that there had been some controversy around Alfred Kinsey.
(32:24):
Later critics accused him of using some data that came
from like some questionable secondary sources that included reports of
sexual behavior in minors. And you know we don't like that, right,
anybody studying miners. So the institute strongly denied these claims
(32:45):
and emphasized that Kinsey himself never conducted or condoned to
any research on children. But you know, there was this scandal.
I'll say this, Alfred Kinsey's work paved the way for
modern sex therapy, LGBTQ research and education around consent. Everything
that came later, from Masters and Johnson to modern sex therapy,
to public health campaigns, to research on sexual orientation and gender,
(33:08):
all of this really sits on the foundation that Kinsey built.
It's a new era now, it's an era of relationship science,
and it's something that i am absolutely obsessed with. So
that's why I'm so excited to tell you that. Coming
(33:29):
up is my four part interview with doctor Justin Garcia,
the head, the leader of today's modern Kinsey Institute. He
has a new book coming out, The Intimate Animal, The
Science of Sex, Fidelity and Why We Live and Die
(33:50):
for Love. Coming up next my interview with doctor Justin Garcia.
You've been listening to doctor Wendy Wallace. You can always
hear us A on KFI A M six forty from
seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app
This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI
AM six forty, the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand
on the iHeartRadio app. You can always send me a
DM on my social media. Mostly producer Kayla and I
check Instagram, but we also check tiktoks from time to time.
The handle is at doctor Wendy Walsh at dr Wendy Walsh,
(00:24):
follow me, send me a DM. I'll always keep your
identity private and we'll answer questions each week as they
come in. So let's get to it, Dear doctor Wendy.
I'm dating someone with kids and we get along great,
but I'm unsure how involved I should be. What's the
healthy pace for building a relationship with your partner's children
(00:46):
without overstepping or staying too distant. Well, first of all,
you and your partner need to build your own little
love cocoon ever before the kids ever get involved. Dating
with kids is silly. I have seen parents at the playground,
clearly having met each other on an app, going to
the playground together to meet No. No, no. First of all,
kids are a little sponges. They know what's going on,
(01:07):
and you are a threat to their parental relationship. So
we do know that a revolving door of parental figures
is the worst thing for kids. Right, Even one good,
consistent parent can do a better job than a revolving
door of parents. So you are wise to be asking
(01:27):
this question. So the next there are two parts of
the question. You said, when is it overstepping or when
are you staying too distant? You're not staying too distant
if you are working on building your relationship with a
parent separately, which means you're gonna have to make lots
of sacrifices. That includes scheduling time when the parent doesn't
(01:47):
have the kid kids scheduling to maybe offering to pay
for childcare because single parents, you know, they have to
pay twice they're paying for to replace themselves when they're
not there. It may mean have to put up with
the fact that they will cancel because there's a sick
child or something has come up. Right, But then the
overstepping part, let's talk about that they're not your children.
(02:11):
You should not be parenting them, especially if you're dating.
If you want your romantic relationship to fall apart fast,
start giving parenting advice, especially if you don't have kids. Yourself.
Don't do it all right, I think the conversations need
to happen between the adults. Hey, how would you like
to behave around the kids? Should we just act like
(02:34):
friends and no public displays of affection. Look, my husband
Julio and I met, oh my gosh whatever five and
a half years ago, and when I first met his
adult young adult children, he said to me on the
way to the first meeting at a restaurant, Hey, by
the way, I'm going to feel really uncomfortable with any
public displays of infection in front of my daughter, like
(02:56):
she was like twenty five, twenty six whatever. And he's like, so,
so is it okay if we don't hold hands or
kiss or do anything. I'm like, sure, sure, just be
friends at the table. It's gonna be fine. So anyway,
discuss it between the two adults. That's what you need
to do. Oh, here's a question. I get a lot.
(03:17):
This is important. Uh, Dear doctor Wendy. My girlfriend gets
upset when I like, no, put little heart on certain
photos on social media, but I feel like it's harmless.
Where's the line between normal online behavior and disrespect? And
how do couples build trust in the age of algorithms
and constant scrolling. You do it through conversations and setting
(03:39):
ground rooms for each other. I will tell you what
those pretty women whose pictures you are putting little hearts
on think you like them. Okay, it's a way to
keep backup mates. You may not think it consciously, but
evolutionary psychologists have always said that we all have backup mates.
We have people in our life where we're like, you know,
(04:00):
if something happened to my partner or something didn't work out,
you know, maybe I'd reach out to that person. It
might be a colleague, it might be somebody online, et cetera.
So unconsciously, you may be liking their pictures because you're thinking, well,
you know, maybe I can make a little friendship with
(04:21):
them if things don't work out. So that is not
good for your relationship.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Not good.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's obviously making your partner feel insecure. And trust me,
there are women sluice online who will go and figure
out all the people you're hearting and they'll send private
messages to your partner and go you your boyfriend is
doing online, So you know what, have a conversation, decide
what the ground rules are going to be, and be respectful.
(04:50):
If your partner says I don't like you herding other
women's pictures, especially the ones in mikini's, then respect your feelings.
That's what you need to do, all right, Move it along.
Dear doctor Wendy, I love my man. Good to know,
but we realize we have very different visions for the
next five years in terms of career location. I assume
(05:11):
where you want to live. Even lifestyle is long term
compatibility something you build together, or does love not survive
if your paths naturally diverge. Well, here's the thing about love.
It is not just a feeling. Love is an action.
It is a verb. It is the verb to give,
(05:33):
and what you give in a love relationship more than anything,
is compromise. So I should also say that human mating
is an interesting cocktail of biology, right, chemistry, sociology you
said even lifestyle is different. That's sociology and psychology, various
(05:56):
attachment style, conflict resolution, et cetera. So if you guys
are going two different directions, you can't hope that some
feeling you had of lust and love and attraction at
the beginning is going to become glue. What becomes glue
in long term relationships is ongoing emotional intimacy and vulnerability
(06:21):
and ongoing sacrifice for each other. And if you're at
the stage where nobody's willing to sacrifice anything having to
do with their career, where they're going to live, or
I don't know, when you say lifestyle, like where you
liked a vacation, how much money you spend on certain things.
We've got to tell you story ones. Back in the
very wee early days of the Internet, early days like
(06:44):
AOL rooms and people chatting long before dating apps or whatever.
I was chatting with a stranger online, as everybody did
back then. It's a long time ago. It's in like
the early nineties, right, And he was saying something about
his car, and he said, oh, I'm really it was
even before the time where you could send pictures. I
(07:05):
think we were dial up modem nonsense, right, And he
I thought this guy was really interesting. Was chatting and
then he said, I really like what I just did
to my car. I did a really interesting paint job.
And I said, really, what color did you paint it?
And he goes, oh, no, no, it's not about the color
I painted all the way down the side of my car.
(07:27):
A snake. I literally I was reading it out loud
with my roommate and we looked at each other. Our
eyes got so white, and I'm like, oh my gosh,
you can think someone so interesting until you realize you
have very divergent lifestyles. Anyway, Uh, to end that, right?
All right? I think I have time for one more
before we go to break. My partner is still very
(07:49):
close with their ex. They swear it's blatonic, and I
want to trust that, but it really stirs up insecurity.
What are healthy boundaries with exes? And how to communicate
fears without sound controlling. Well, you can communicate the career
the fears all you want and you don't have to
sound controlling. But I think if this really is platonic
(08:09):
and the two of you are socializing as a couple,
then the two of you should be socializing with this X, right,
if it's really that light listen. We were in Julio
and I went to Australia Sydney for our honeymoon, and
there's a couple that we went to visit who had
come to our wedding. So we went to visit them
for our honeymoon and on a couple occasions he brought
(08:31):
along his best girlfriend, who was just platonic friend, but
she's socialized with the couple. You could see that the
wife knewer liked her, understood her as well. Hey, we
got to go to a break. If you want to
send me a message on a DM, just go to
Instagram at doctor Wendy Walsh and send me a little
DM and we'll continue to answer your relationship questions when
(08:54):
we return.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Well Show on KFI
AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
let me continue. I am. Also, I just want to
reiterate I love that so many of you are following
me on social media, and every once in a while
I go into the DMS, I find the interesting things
you send me, and so thank you for continuing to
(09:28):
send questions in. If I don't answer them right away,
it's because we're piling them up for another future week.
And also, I do always keep your identity anonymous. So
heading into the DMS, this one from TikTok. Hey, Doctor Wendy,
I have a question regarding long distance online relationships of
all places TikTok. I've had video calls with six women.
(09:50):
Six I have yet to meet any of them in person.
They all live out of state. For me, it's been
three months. Four of them say they're in love with me.
We chat a few times a day, every day. I'm
a man of a certain age. Is chatting a real relationship? Okay,
gentlemen of a certain age? No, No, this is your fantasy.
(10:11):
This is their fantasy. Although it feels sustaining, right, it
feels kind of good. Could you get in the attention?
You're also kind of cheating them on them all? Do
they all know about each other? You're having like emotional
affairs with six different women, and four of them say
they're in love with you. Okay, That just means they're
projecting their idea of love onto you. It's not real.
(10:35):
My suggestion would be, if you are looking for a
real relationship, find one in your zip code, and if not,
get on a plane, bus, train and get over to
the one that's in the state closest to you and
see if it could be a real thing. Because you
are not dating a real person, you are dating your
fantasies and they are just kind of replying a little bit.
(10:56):
Sorry to say it, but that's just the truth. And
everyone out there and those kinds of relationships listen up,
it's not real. Okay, moving on, Dear doctor Wendy. How
do you know when your relationship is ready for the
next step i e. Moving in together or engagement. Well,
there's no one right way to move forward, although I
(11:17):
like to say that a certain certain kinds of criteria
should have been met, Like you shouldn't be having a
long distance relationship and then decide you're suddenly going to
move in together or engage right kind of be in
the same city. You got to be seeing each other frequently.
I would suggest that you at least date a calendar
(11:37):
year for a full year before you consider ever moving
in together. And this goes for people of any age.
Really like just get to know each other. Also, make
sure your tribes have met. I've said this before. I
used to host this show on ID Investigation Discovery called
Happily Never After about brides and grooms that murdered each other.
(12:01):
It was usually the groom doing the murdering, but anyway,
the tribes had not met or if they had, the
family didn't approve of this person, so they usually went
off in a lope somewhere. So I'm just saying, you
need to have other eyes on this. So I'm going
to go with you here. That's where I'm going to
go with all right, moving on, dear doctor, Wendy says
this listener. I've been seeing a guy for two months
(12:24):
and we've really hit it off. Next weekend will be
the first time we spend the night together. Oh, so
you've planned it. We haven't been intimate yet, and I'm
super self conscious about my body. I haven't been intimate
in a while, and my anxiety is through the roof.
How do you handle this? How do you tell the
guy you're dating without making it awkward? Well, it's going
(12:44):
to be awkward, and that's called intimacy. It's okay, and
I think what you need to do is discuss it.
So rule number one. If it's the first time, the
onset of sex in a new relationship, you want to
make sure everybody please listen. This is so important that
you get sexual exclusivity before you have sex. Now, there's
(13:06):
a difference between sexual exclusivity and relationship definition. Relationship definition
is the what are we and where is this going? Right?
Are you my boyfriend? But sexual exclusivity is Hey, while
we're getting to know each other and deciding if we're
compatible for health reasons and emotional reasons, i'd like to
(13:29):
know that I'm the only one you're sleeping with. And
I know there are women out there. Every time I
say this, who go. But they lie?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Men lie?
Speaker 1 (13:37):
All right, then you shouldn't be having sex with them
until you trust them. Listen to your stomach, really, listen
to your summing, and listen to your friends and family
and everybody else. So it's going to be awkward, as
you describe it, awkward, but you're just going to say, hey,
it's been a while for me, I'm a little nervous
(13:58):
about my body. And they love that honesty. That's intimacy,
that's emotional intimacy. So I think you just got to
say it it's okay, and you keep the lights real dim,
that little candle or something. It's gonna be fine. You're
(14:18):
gonna have fun. Look, the first time is never great.
We know that the second time it's gonna be great.
All right, I think you have time for one more,
Dear doctor, Wendy my boyfriend and I love each other,
but I feel I'm the only one planning dates, initiating conversations,
or keeping us emotionally connected. How do you bring up
(14:38):
feeling underappreciated without sounding accusatory or do I need to
rethink the relationship entirely?
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I'm not in the relationship with you, and I don't
know if you have some kind of insecurity where you're
the kind of person where your mind is always looking
for evidence that you are unlovable or that they are
not doing enough. Remember, how we think becomes the reality.
(15:07):
Thoughts are things, So you and your therapist can try
to figure that one out. But I would start by
I mean, when you say the only one planning dates,
initiating conversations, you mean he never even calls or texts
or anything. Then that's a lot of work. I would say,
stop doing the work and see what happens. Just let
(15:30):
them be who they're going to be, and watch it
and analyze it.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
But if you say I'm feeling underappreciated, that's a little different,
because that's kind of insecurity. We shouldn't need somebody else
to tell us we're beautiful and lovable and they're committed
to us on a regular basis. Right, we should know
inside our core that we are worthy, we are worthy
(15:56):
of love, and that we are a good person. It's
life when our partners say it and when we say
it to our partners. But our entire self esteem shouldn't
be dependent on that, right, Okay, So when we come back,
move it away from questions. I read this article recently
(16:18):
about how more teenagers and young adults are using antidepressant
medications called SSRIs more than ever. Now, if you know
anything about antidepressants, you know that it can impact one's libido.
But there's not a lot of research. But there's some
questions being asked about the developing body and the developing
(16:43):
mind teenagers. Right, the question is taking antidepressants going to
disrupt teens sex lives for years? Let's break it down.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
When we come back, you're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh
on demand from KFI Am six forty.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I want you to listen to this, and I don't
really have all the answers. I just want to give
you a full some sobering statistics. More than two million
teenagers are taking antidepressants, according to research and twenty two
percent of college students have used an antidepressant also called
an SSRII selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Now, what the concern
(17:36):
is is that use of these antidepressants during development, during
those developmental years might actually impact our kids relationships and
sex lives for the rest of their lives. Now you've
(17:57):
probably heard that asriyes can impact libido, and there's research
to support that, and generally it's been felt that once
you go off them, your libido comes back. I'll tell
you that I used antidepressants two times in my life
for postpartum depression. And if you've never suffered from depression,
(18:23):
it is not always like what we think the symptoms are.
I always had this idea that if someone were depressed,
they were set, they cried a lot, they went to bed,
they wanted to be in a dark room, And indeed,
for some people, those are the symptoms. My symptoms were
(18:43):
a little different because I was dealing with a newborn
and there's a kind of also elation that comes with
being a new mother and worry and excitement about their
survival and every breath they take and whether they have
a wet diaper or need to be fed and all
that kind of stuff. And I I am the type
of person my therapist said this to me years ago.
(19:04):
The way that I internally organize is my organizing my
external environment. Everything in my house is a nice has
a nice neat parking space, I promise you. So when
I had my first daughter, I carried her almost forty
two weeks. Crazy pregnancies, if you don't know, we are
supposed to last about forty weeks. Mine was forty two weeks,
(19:27):
well forty one and a half, and so I was
walking on the street very unstable because she just kept
I stayed skinny. I swear she just grew forward and
I stepped in a pothole and boom, down I went,
and I broke my foot in a few places. So
what they could not do, and that happens is put
a cast on it because you're about to give birth.
(19:48):
So my doctor said, you know, this baby will be
safer in a bassinette than she will be with you
on crutches, So let's get this baby out, and we
did a schedulcy section. Soon after that. Part of my
depression was the fact that I couldn't get out of bed,
you know, because what happens is after you give birth,
everything swells and then shrinks, So they couldn't put a
(20:09):
cast on. I couldn't put any weight on my foot.
I could get myself into some kind of wheelchair and
get over to the shower once a day, but otherwise
I was stuck in bed with my baby. Now, the
wonderful thing of that is that we got to bond
when the breastfeeding went well and all that kind of stuff. Now,
let's get to my depression. If I'm the type of
person who internally organizes by organizing my external environment, I
(20:33):
don't know if you know, but when they had you
eight pounds of flesh to take home from a maternity ward,
they also unknowingly hand you about forty pounds of laundry
a day. I would literally look at those piles of laundry.
I had other people helping me. Of course, baby daddy,
girlfriends would come over, the next door neighbor would come over.
People were kind of helping. My parents had passed away.
We had no grandparents around, so it was just me
(20:54):
and him, and he was mostly trying to work, and
I was going insane looking at the piles of laundry
or even if the towels weren't folded all the same
way and lined up so the seam would look like it,
you know, was a bed bath, and beyond store, I
just would lose lose it, and I'd be so angry
and irritable. So I was not a depressive person who
(21:16):
would take to the bed and just cry and wallow.
I was sniping at everybody. I was so mad and
I couldn't get organized, and I was frustrated. So depression
can take many, many forms. So I went on an SSRI.
Now I stayed on it for a year. With the
second baby, the same nonsense happened. Went on it for
(21:37):
a year. I weaned myself off very slowly after a year,
as you're supposed to do, cutting them in half, cutting
them in quarters, cutting I did all that, you know.
I can't tell you if my libido went down, because
I suppose part of mother and the last thing I
was thinking about was sex. Let me tell you that.
So in my case, I don't have that experience. But
there has been documented evidence to show that some people
(21:59):
take antidepressants SSRIs have a depletion in their sexual desire, arousal,
or even performance. With rectael problems, et cetera. So there
is now this thought with so many teenagers and young
adults taking antidepressants during their developmental years, that this could
(22:20):
impact their sex drive for life. There's anecdotal evidence, you know,
anecdotal evidence when they just ask a few people. It's
not like a true study where they have all kinds
of you know, thousands of people in it. They kind
of ask a few questions of people and they say, oh, yeah,
you know, I'm still it's still not back. But you
also have to remember that antidepressants were designed to relieve
(22:42):
symptoms of depression and anxiety, and depression and anxiety are
also two things that reduce your libido. So which is it?
Is it that the SSR I took away sex drive
because people are saying even after they went off it,
it never came back, or did some degree of depression
and anxiety come back, which also reduced their libido. You know,
(23:06):
sexual function is so complex. It's partly biological, it's partly psychological,
it's partly social. So it's hard to pinpoint one or
the other. I'm gonna say this that if there are
a lot of teens and young adults on antidepressants, I
(23:26):
don't necessarily think that it's being over prescribed. And let
me tell you why. I'm a college professor. I taught
on Zoom for two years. It was hard enough for me.
I could only imagine the students at that time. I
had one college student kid, my own daughter, who was
finishing off her last semester of college on Zoom, and
then I had a high school kid who my youngest daughter,
(23:50):
who spent two years on Zoom. When these kids finally
came back to the classroom, and now I'm talking about
the ones I teach, the social anxiety was enormous. I
can see the depression, I'm sorry, in the way they walk,
the lack of eye contact. I would put them in
discussion groups and give them a study question, and they
(24:11):
would sit four or five desks together in a little circle,
and everyone just stare at their phone and say nothing,
like they were afraid to talk to each other. They
were afraid to look each other in the eye. If
I asked them to stand in front of the class
and read something they'd written, if you could have seen
the sheiks in their fingers and their knees as they
(24:32):
stood there, these were very real diagnoses, as our young
people lost a solid two years, vital, crucial two years
of social development. So let us not forget that SSRIs
or call them. Antidepressants are designed to prevent suicidality, right,
(24:55):
They're preventing tragedies, and we still don't know. There's just
not enough research to know if they've you know, if
their sex life has gone down because of social situations,
because of lack of social skills, because of that antidepressant
they took. We just don't know. You know, more research
(25:19):
will come out, and I hope a lot of that research,
and I not only hope, I suspect a lot of
that research will eventually come out of the famous Kinsey Institute.
I have a very special guest coming up. But first,
when we come back, I want to talk to you
about doctor Alfred Kinsey and his legacy from science to
(25:41):
some might say a scandal, and back to science again.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
You know, it's amazing that we talk so openly about
sex and love today. Although I always remind people like,
I'm not a sex therapist. I don't talk about sex.
I'm not a doctor. Ruth where I'm going to give
you plumbing information or talk about positions or lubrication or
any of that stuff. Because I'm a psychology professor. When
(26:19):
I do talk about sex, it's within the context of relationships,
you know, frequency, neurochemistry, the bonding effects of having sex,
et cetera. So, but we live in a time and
a culture where it's okay to be open and talk
(26:40):
about your sexual desires, your fantasies, your sexual identity orientation, right,
you know, not so long ago, it was not okay
to even say the word pregnant on television. One of
my favorite shows when I was little was a Dick
Van Dyke show, and you remember he and his wife
slept in twin beds on TV. They couldn't even show
them getting into bed together in the nineteen sixties. And
(27:04):
I want a credit a man named Alfred Kinsey to
the openness that we have today. Really beginning back in
the nineteen forties, he was the first person to really
look America straight in the eye and say, hey, everybody,
let's stop moralizing here and start measuring. I mean, he
started to collect data. Before Kinsey did his work, there
(27:28):
were assumptions people had shame around things, secrets, and there
was a complete lack of data. A little background if
you don't know who Alfred Kinsey was. He grew up
in New Jersey, Hoboken, New Jersey, and he happened to
have come from a very strict religious and it's reported
(27:48):
emotionally restrained household. His father was a devout Methodist minister
and later a professor. He supposedly ruled the home with
ridge moral expectations. So picture this. Here's this little boy
with all these questions and hormones that are going and
you can't even talk about these things. His mother was
(28:10):
known to be deeply submissive to her husband, so he
grew up in really hard traditional gender roles. He also
was a very shy and often sick child. He suffered
from scoliosis and he spent long periods alone thinking right.
This pushed him into nature and the woods, and Kinsey
(28:33):
liked to collect plants insects, So some of his biographers
would say that this part of his life was filled
with sexual suppression religious control. But then he began this
lifelong obsession with trying to understand human sexuality. Eventually he
made it to Harvard. He's a Harvard trained biologist. He
(28:55):
began his career studying nature gall wasps actually tiny insects,
elected tens of thousands of them. Right. I was watching
an interview I don't know if you've seen the Netflix
interview with Jane Goodall that's I think it's called Famous
Last Words, where they interviewed her before her death and
promised her that this would not be put out until
after she passed away. And she was talking about there's
(29:17):
nature everywhere. She just used a cute little story about
being at an airport and people walking by with their
suitcases whatever, and not even seeing that there's a courting
ritual going on between these two insects, and one male
was trying to pick up this crumb off the floor
to entice the female their version of dating, right, And
she said, it's everywhere, It's everywhere, right. Well. Kinsey eventually
(29:40):
turned sex from a taboo into a scientific question his
famous study nineteen forty eight Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Before that, there were zero large scale data sets on
sexual behavior. So he went out and just asked people questions.
But he not only asked them questions about their sexual behavior,
(30:04):
but he asked them questions about their sexual fantasies, you know,
he was One of the many things he came up
with in the area of sexuality was this idea of
the Kinsey scale, a scale of sexual orientation where at
one end of the scale you're one hundred percent homosexual
both in behavior and fantasies. But he found something else.
He found that people could be one hundred percent heterosexual
(30:28):
and behavior, but they're fantasies were almost always homosexual. Again,
the repression at the time, people unable to be authentic
and who they were. And he also found that it's
a wide scale and that most of us at Kinsey
scale is from a one to a six. A vast
maturity of us are more like a three. We're somewhere.
It's a sliding scale, right. He found that despite what
(30:52):
people thought, there were lots of rates of sex outside
of marriage. He found that same sex behavior was far
more common than people thought, that there was a whole
diversity in desire and fantasy, and that women who are
thought to be very aseexual and performative, that women had
rich varied sexual experiences. You know. Eventually the Kinsey Institute
(31:16):
evolved into cutting edge global research. Right today, the Kinsey
the world famous Kinsey Institute is under the leadership of
doctor Justin Garcia. Now it's not just about sex, right now,
they study not just lust but love. The best research
(31:40):
on attachment and pair bonding comes out of the Kinsey Institute,
dating and dating, app behavior, sexual health across the lifespan,
gender and identity, evolutionary psychology of mating. That's the area
I'm so fascinated with. The neuroscience of desire. Institute basically
(32:01):
looks at love, intimacy, and relationship structure. And they collaborate
with global labs around the world, right, and they use
all kinds of scientific neuroimaging, et cetera to test our
most intimate relationships. Now, I would be remiss if I
didn't say that there had been some controversy around Alfred Kinsey.
(32:24):
Later critics accused him of using some data that came
from like some questionable secondary sources that included reports of
sexual behavior in minors. And you know we don't like that, right,
anybody studying miners. So the institute strongly denied these claims
(32:45):
and emphasized that Kinsey himself never conducted or condoned to
any research on children. But you know, there was this scandal.
I'll say this, Alfred Kinsey's work paved the way for
modern sex therapy, LGBTQ research and education around consent. Everything
that came later, from Masters and Johnson to modern sex therapy,
to public health campaigns, to research on sexual orientation and gender,
(33:08):
all of this really sits on the foundation that Kinsey built.
It's a new era now, it's an era of relationship science,
and it's something that i am absolutely obsessed with. So
that's why I'm so excited to tell you that. Coming
(33:29):
up is my four part interview with doctor Justin Garcia,
the head, the leader of today's modern Kinsey Institute. He
has a new book coming out, The Intimate Animal, The
Science of Sex, Fidelity and Why We Live and Die
(33:50):
for Love. Coming up next my interview with doctor Justin Garcia.
You've been listening to doctor Wendy Wallace. You can always
hear us A on KFI A M six forty from
seven to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app
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