Welcome back, everybody, to the solved podcast. I am best selling author Mark Manson, and this is my

intrepid co-host producer. And today, opponent, your adversary, Drew Burney. Here we go.

And today, we are putting love on trial. Now, there's a few reasons for this. We just did a massive, solved episode on

dating, and we went through all of the different factors that bring people together, why

human courtship is so strange and long and complex and socially varied, why people date the

wrong people for themselves, why they date the right people for

themselves, what causes attraction.

But one of the things that was conspicuously missing from that episode was a deep discussion

of romantic love.

And that's because we wanted to do this episode and ask the question, is love overrated?

You hear all these tropes, all these cliches that love is all you need, that love, all you need is love overrated. You hear all these tropes, all these cliches that love is all you need,

that love, all you need is love. Love fixes everything. Love is blind. Love, love, love, love.

Is it true, though? So we're going to do something a little bit different and interesting this episode,

everybody. We are putting love on trial. I am going to be the prosecutor, and I'm going to be making the argument that love is completely overrated and causes, of course, I'm just, I'm just a bucket of fucking glee over here. I'm going to be arguing that love arguably causes more problems than it solves. And then Drew, famous for being a romantic. Resonant romantic. Yes. Is going to be defending love. That's right. We're going to go back and forth. Each of us, we're going to take turns, making arguments, and then the other person will have a rebuttal. And then at the end end we will try to come together and find some sort

of compromise and decide is love overrated or am I just a cold blackhearted soul?

Jury's out on that. Stay tuned. Yeah. More at six. That's another episode, but yeah.

Yes.

So getting right into it, as the prosecution, I will begin with one damning claim against love.

And that is that love is our brains con man.

Love is a neurochemical hijacking that is designed, specifically designed, to override our

better judgment and cause us to become delusional and misrepresent the people that we care

about in our minds. In 2005, Helen Fisher, who's somebody that we're going to be talking about

...