Dr. Drew Pinsky is an American Board of Medical Specialties certified physician and addiction medicine specialist better known for his work as the radio and TV personality of “Loveline” and “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” respectively. Based out of Los Angeles, Dr. Drew also makes frequent visits to college campuses to discuss topics ranging from binge drinking to the maladies of college-age relationships. In his interview with the Emerald, he discussed the current landscape of college relationships.
Oregon Daily Emerald: I just wanted to talk about a few issues that college-aged students deal with as far as relationships are concerned.
Dr. Drew: Here’s what I end up talking about at colleges all over the country as it pertains to relationships on campuses: There is a grave, grave misunderstanding about the motivations of young males and young females in terms of what they’re expecting from relationships. This is true throughout the lifespan, but it’s particularly acute in college.
So, that being said sort of as a background, I have no objective concern. You know, if you guys were all happy and everybody was healthy in college-aged relationships, I would shut my pie-hole.
But what you find when you go out and research this is that college-aged women particularly describe sort of ambivalence or unhappiness with their social life on college campuses. Not everybody, but just a general sort of tone … I look at that, and then I look at binge-alcohol on campus, and I try to figure out, well how are those things related? In other words, I worry as a clinician about the use of binge alcohol.
Here’s what I see: I see most binge drinking, most alcohol use, involved in and motivated by the “hook-up.” When people want to go find a hook-up they’re always intoxicated, virtually 100 percent of the time. So my question is: If the hook-up is the cornerstone of college life and so cool and so fun, why do you have to be fucked up to do it?
And I would urge you to examine your motivations, and you will find that the young men are motivated because they really, really, really want to hook up. But they’re drinking because they need liquid courage. They want beer goggles and they’re very anxious. It’s a tall order to do this thing. It’s really intense and unnatural.
And your assumption is that women are doing the same thing, which I assure you they are not. They are drinking for two reasons: to blame the alcohol, so they can sort of explain to their friends … and then number two, they drink so that they don’t have any feeling during the hook-up. So, they can literally medicate away past that.
ODE: So you see those gender roles as being pretty solid with not really any crossover?
DD: I don’t see that as gender roles. I don’t see that as anything. That’s what is reported to me and born out in the research. It’s just the facts. And I speak to rooms of a thousand kids every single day and in every single room, in every single campus, in every
single state, I hear the same thing.
Men are fine, men are happy. They’re kind of like, ‘whatever!’ Men will roll with it, they’re very flexible with this. When I ask the women — again the men are willing to adapt, do whatever, as long as they get the hook-up they’re fine — I ask “well what if I had infinity powers, and I could create a social fabric that really suited your needs so you wouldn’t have to medicate your feelings away?” I mean, how sad that you have to take your innate biology and suppress it with a drug.
It goes silent when I ask that question. And within about three minutes someone will raise her hand and go, “Well, I wish a guy would just sit down, just listen and talk to me.” And I’m thinking, what the fuck does that have to do with sex? Well there’s a whole body of
literature that shows that women have a disconnect in their neurobiology between arousal and drive.
And it’s always the same. If you have arousal, there’s appetite and drive that’s triggered always in combination with that. Now, I’m not saying that never happens to women, because it does happen to women in certain genetic subsets more than others. Women are a broad spectrum of biology. Because of those two giant X chromosomes, their biology is much more diverse than ours. But the vast, vast majority, in the order of 80 percent, suggest that there’s a disconnect between arousal and drive.
Having said that, there’s also good data that suggests that there’s a way to evoke drive in the female. You evoke the thalamic drive mechanisms with intimate conversation. And women will tell you that if you sit and have a meaningful, intimate conversation, that is sexy to them. And we do not teach men this. It’s just like putting in time because someone told us we have to.
ODE: Looking at the feminist movements and how they have significantly altered the concept of relationships now with women having increased independence and self-sufficiency, how do you see this having an effect on marriages and the nuclear family? I mean, when people are getting married in their late 20s and 30s, this is altering the nuclear family without a doubt. Is this an evolution of the nuclear family or is this a deterioration?
DD: There’s no straight line to success in human evolution. I think we are still working through the liabilities of the very, very positive strides that we’ve made. I think we’ve confused the reality of interpersonal landscapes with equality in the workplace. These are very different things.
And then also the issue of roles in the nuclear family, which I think, also, are a different thing than the reality of human relations. Which is something that now has to find its way into these new roles and these new circumstances. And I don’t think anyone argues that these things are good. These things are really good, but they brought some liabilities. And the liabilities are still getting sorted through.
Let me put it to you this way: One of the things I see on college campuses that really is disturbing is that the reason that the women tend to be kind of unhappy: because the standard that every woman is supposed to live up to is a 19-year-old male standard.
Rather than a female biological standard that women craft for themselves, they’ve tried to adopt the male standard.
ODE: What about cohabiting? Economically, this is a lot more feasible, but yet there’s a high failure rate of the relationship between unmarried couples. Why is this?
DD: I have no objection to cohabiting, and all being said, it’s probably a good thing.
However, an untimely cohabitation usually is what ends up in trouble. Every time I see that, the guy is sort of with this girl because she’s good enough for now, but he has no interest in getting married and she’s suppressing a desire to get married. She’s trying to wait him out and he’s just not going there … But not everybody. There’s a flip-side. A lot of these boyfriend-girlfriend relationships happen way too fast, way too rapidly.
ODE: And what would the down-the-road results of being a “fuck buddy” or a “friend-with-benefits” entail?
DD: I’m not sure. You know, it’s an interesting question. I haven’t seen any studies that tell me that, frankly. And I’m not sure that there are long-term problems associated with it; maybe short-term unhappiness. When it’s two sex addicts acting out it works fine for a while. I mean, that’s usually when you see it working, but it’s really fostering a pathology. It’s really not a healthy thing for them.
But when it’s two friends that are doing it because they don’t want to hook up with random people, someone usually develops an attachment. Now does that actually have long-term consequences? I doubt it. Other than it just further contributes to our lack of skill in relationships and really understanding ourselves and understanding what relationships are.
[email protected]