350 - Abundance and Scarcity
Abundance, scarcity, and dating
Feeling a sense of abundance, or a sense of scarcity, whether real or perceived, can affect how we approach relationships and dating.
According to the empirical book on the study of the feeling of scarcity, Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (2013), scarcity functions as a cycle. Some concepts to keep in mind relating to this are:
Tunneling: A primary or over focus on the scarcity of a resource and the resulting neglect on everything else.
Bandwidth: The amount of mental space needed to think and process problems and come up with solutions.
Slack: the leftover resources (time, money, etc.) available to someone for expenses that may arise.
The authors concluded that both real and perceived scarcity have the power to actually limit our mental and emotional bandwidth, which makes it even harder to resolve the scarcity.
In terms of dating, some studies that have been conducted regarding abundance or scarcity of partners yielded these results:
Both men and women preferred to travel farther for long-term relationships as opposed to short-term ones.
Women were more likely to abstain from undesirable partners in short-term relationships.
Men were more likely to lower their standards for short-term relationships.
Those who felt they had difficulty in relationships and attachment anxiety were more willing to travel and lower their standards when faced with a short-term mate shortage.
Those who felt they were undesirable as mates and reported attachment anxiety indicated greater propensity to travel and lower their standards when faced with a long-term mate shortage.
Attachment avoidance was associated with abstaining when faced with a short-term mate shortage.
Those who felt they had high long-term mate value were:
unlikely to abstain when facing a long-term mate shortage,
more likely to travel when faced with a long-term mate shortage, and
were unlikely to lower their standards when faced with a short-term mate shortage.
Pros and cons of attuning
Since both abundance and/or scarcity can have real effects on how people behave and choices they make, we’re covering some pros and cons of attuning to abundance or scarcity, or noticing and focusing on feelings of abundance or scarcity.
Pros of abundance attuning:
Deprogramming toxic monogamy patterns and behaviors:
Reduced pressure on needing to find the perfect ONE right this instant.
Time-sensitive pressure to scoop up someone while you or they are “available.”
Pressure to escalate a relationship quickly or immediately pursue an attraction.
Ability to have patience during dry spells or periods of loneliness.
Reframing feelings of jealousy or lack when it comes to a partner dating multiple partners (provided you are actually getting what you need).
Positive psychology, such as inspiring feelings of gratitude, luck, joy, or safety when taking stock of what’s actually present in your life.
Cons of abundance attuning:
Denial of reality, particularly when it comes to finding partners and dating:
Our culture assigns more partner value and less partner value depending on race, class, ability, visibility of disability, aesthetics, and more. Living in this kind of paradigm, not everybody has the same exact access to potential partners.
Potential denial of how you really aren’t getting your needs met in life or in relationships.
Manifestation:
Manifesting is based in the belief that if you just have enough positive thoughts, positive things will happen to you and your dreams will come true. Much of this line of thinking encourages people to connect to statements of abundance, like talking about money, relationships, or other resources they desire to have as if they already have them.
Some studies have shown that manifesting can help you feel better in the moment, but may actually sap your energy to actually take any action, making you more complacent.
Pros of scarcity attuning:
Encouragement of a realistic understanding of one’s limits around time, money, energy, etc.
Assists with careful planning and management, as well as offer insight about effective boundaries around your resources.
May help you identify real areas of lack and help you ask for what you need or take action.
Help with prioritizing choices:
Existential scarcity (realizing that life is too short to waste) can be very powerful and revolutionary.
Cons of scarcity attuning:
Relationship resources may never feel like enough:
Sometimes this can be a byproduct of toxic monogamy culture, such as the idea that if my partner isn’t spending 100% of their time and energy on me, it’s not enough or it doesn’t count.
May prevent leaving a bad relationship because of assumptions that there may not be any other partners that would want you in the future.
Can encourage hoarding behavior or hyper-boundaried behavior.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about abundance and scarcity. We've probably all heard platitudes about having an abundance mindset, which a lot of people love, but can also feel disingenuous to others. Today, we're going to be exploring the science behind feelings of scarcity or abundance, how it actually affects our behavior when it comes to dating and relationships. We'll also be looking at some ways to maybe turn the concept of the abundance mindset and scarcity mindset on its head and see if we may be able to use both to our advantage.
Dedeker: I just have to start out by giving the disclaimer that even saying the words out loud, abundance mindset or scarcity mindset, does make me throw up a tiny bit, just right in the back of my mouth subtly, just a tiny bit.
Emily: Can you talk a bit about your
Dedeker: What? The throw-ups?
Jase: Not the throw-ups.
Emily: No, no, just your aversion to those two phrases?
Dedeker: I think that these phrases often get bandied about in some groups who don't have maybe my favorite collection of orthodoxy like let's say the think-your-way-to-being-rich crowd, or where it's all about, "Oh, you just have a scarcity mindset. That's why you're poor. You got to change the way you think. You got to think like a millionaire and then everything's going to become easy."
Emily: Rich Dad Poor Dad thing?
Dedeker: No.
Jase: No, more a the think-and-be-rich thing.
Dedeker: Yes. There's maybe a tiny bit of that in Rich Dad Poor Dad, there is a little bit of this sense of, "These are the things that poor people focus on and that's what perpetuates their poverty and these are the things rich people focus on." A little bit of that. I think that this terminology also sometimes shows up just like, "Be so confident that women are going to throw themselves at you, and you're just going to be drowning in-"
Emily: Lady parts.
Dedeker: Lady parts.
Emily: For lack of a better term?
Dedeker: Yes, I could have gone more vulgar with that, but I figured I wouldn't. There's that. Also, at the same time, I think about my lived experience that feeling a sense of abundance, whether that's real or imagined, or feeling a sense of scarcity, again, real or imagined, has had undeniable effects on my own life and on my behavior at times. I wanted to tackle this topic because it feels like part of this seems like it's bullshit but then part of it seems like it's not bullshit. What lies in between? Come with me on a journey as we explore together and try to find, is there anything good at the bottom of the abundance/scarcity mindset? Well, let's go well-diving together.
Emily: This reminds me of a time in my early high school life when I was at a party with my very, very close friend, still very close friend, and she was introducing me to this guy that she liked. It ended up that I ended up flirting with him all night, and she got really angry at me and I was like, "Why can't we both flirt with him? Whatever, it doesn't matter." Clearly, I was starting my own polyamorous journey even back then.
Emily: Yes, this is something along those lines that it just didn't occur to me that, "Oh, well. Sure, this guy can like you, but he can also like me, who cares?" That that felt abundant in that way.
Dedeker: Yes, I think that there's definitely something about modern day non-monogamy and polyamory content and philosophy and thinking that does want to encourage people to think about abundance when it comes to partners or affection or getting into relationships or sex and I do think a part of that can be helpful. We'll dive into that more specifically later in the episode. I also recognize that sometimes you can't just focus on abundance just to get your way out of a crappy situation or a situation where you're really actually not getting your needs met in life or in your relationships.
Jase: Yes, exactly. I think that, like you said, Dedeker, there's been an undeniable effect in your life when you've been more focused on one mindset or the other, and I think that when people come across something that's like, "Oh, hey, look, this can have a positive effect in this situation," it's the answer to everything. This is all you have to do and all your problems are gone." It's that leap from, "This could be a really useful, interesting tool," to, "This is the solution to all your problems." Shows up a lot in all sorts of different areas because that's what sells books, I guess. I think that that's what I'm excited about this episode is to get to the bottom of that, what is the real part of it?
Emily: When I think about scarcity, I think about some of my internalized and maybe just societally internalized beliefs regarding gender, and looking at a lot of men in my life and saying, "Well, they've had huge opportunities that have come fairly easily to them simply because they're a guy and I've had opportunities that have maybe been a little bit more challenging for me to get to because I'm a woman." I don't know if either are really true, where the truth is in that, but I feel like I internally have some scarcity mindset perhaps because I view people that are not my gender, sometimes as maybe having more than I have.
Dedeker: I think that this could be a whole other branch or topic to go down. I know I've definitely read essays about the fact that because of that, because things like privilege, and structural systemic imbalances are very much a thing, the side effect of that can be, then you feel like, "Okay, I'm a woman or I'm some other minority, therefore, there's a scarcity of opportunity for me, and therefore, I'm in competition with other women, or in competition with other people," because we know only 10% of the market is open for me, or 10% of the opportunities are open for me, and therefore, now I'm competing with other people.
There's a scarcity of where I can fit in, into this system that's mostly creating room and space and money and jobs and opportunities for men or for white people or things like that. I could very much relate to that feeling.
I know, for me, it comes up a lot thinking about business, and having businesses. Sometimes I really struggle going back and forth between a sense of, "Oh my God, we really need to be able to compete." My business or the way that I'm working the world, I really need to be able to compete, I need to be aware of the competition, I need to be staying ahead of the curve, I need to be making myself relevant, and then sometimes having moments of like, "There's plenty of clients in the world," or, "There's plenty of podcast listeners in the world. There's plenty of an audience. It's okay. We don't have to be this completely cutthroat trying to take out the competition."
That's another place where I see switching back and forth between feeling a sense of abundance versus scarcity really affects how I feel about things.
Jase: Absolutely. There's a lot of books and things that we've read, such as Company of One that's talking about getting out of that mindset of the only way to be successful is to be so huge that you just destroy everyone else, and completely monopolize the market, moving away from that because it's not even sustainable. Even if you do achieve it, it's not a sustainable business model. That's interesting to put that in the frame of, it's almost like not abundance and scarcity, but just enough-ness or something like that, enough-ness that we don't have to destroy each other, even if maybe we compete some. I don't know. It's interesting to think about it that way in a business sense.
Dedeker: Well, I'm curious to hear just a little bit more from the two of you about specifically your experience with feelings of abundance or scarcity when it comes to dating or finding partners whether that's monogamously, non-monogamously.
Emily: I'm in a monogamous relationship right now, and even when I was in polyamorous relationships, I still felt that urge or that pull to compete with my metamours, I guess, and that somehow, I still had to rank in some way higher than them. That was-
Dedeker: Like competing for your partners?
Emily: Sure, affection, time, care, all of the above, just even if it was subtle, but I definitely have felt that happen. It's maybe rare when that isn't at least in the back of my mind, or that wasn't at least in the back of my mind. That's challenging even though you want to move past that and push past those feelings. I think absolutely at times in dating, it was just competing for partner's affection, or at least feeling like, "I'm getting the most amount of time or the most amount of affection," or, "I really am the one who is the best," or something along those lines.
Jase: I feel like it's something that I've definitely experienced different ends of the spectrum of feeling like there's just not any people that I could date, not enough people who are interested in me or who are willing to accept my traveling or how much I work, or name whatever reason why there's not people that I could date, and then other times where it's felt like, "That's ridiculous. Dating is so easy. What are you talking about?" I've definitely been on either side of that spectrum at different times, I think.
Dedeker: Keyanah was our researcher for this episode and something she pointed out was there's with polyamory specifically, a little bit of this duality. On the one hand, it can feel like stepping into abundance of like, "No, I can date whoever. I don't have to just pick one person like it's a job interview. I can go, and I can explore, and I can have a wide variety of types of relationships."
Then on the other side, as soon as you claim that identity and that label of polyamorous, your dating pool shrinks like schloop and that it can bring that real feeling of scarcity of like, "No, no, I can't just go on a dating app or go out to a bar or just whatever. I actually have to be very, very mindful and very careful about screening people who are going to be a good fit for me." I think that's a really interesting dual world that many of us straddle.
Anyway. That was a long intro to warm up to this topic. I wanted to acknowledge the fact that in this episode, I wanted to focus mostly on abundance and scarcity as it shows up in our behaviors around dating or partnership, and specifically, how that plays out in non-monogamy. However, of course, this can affect many, many different arenas of our lives, for instance, our sense of how much time we have, our sense of how much money or other resources that we have.
There's also the added factor of the fact that sometimes we can have real abundance, real scarcity, or we can have perceived abundance or perceived scarcity where maybe our external circumstances don't actually match the way that we feel on the inside, which throws other interesting, complicated factors into the mix. I just wanted to acknowledge all of that and invite you listening to have that bouncing around in your brain as you're thinking about these things too.
Emily: Dedeker, you talked about the fact that the word 'mindset', when it comes to abundance and scarcity is something that makes you a little hurly.
Dedeker: I like the word 'mindset'. The word 'mindset' by itself is A-okay. No nausea about that. It's just attached, abundance mindset, scarcity mindset because of all the baggage attached to that that makes me go a little-
Emily: Exactly. Let's talk a little bit about where this mindset term, that when it's attached to scarcity or abundance, where that comes from. According to this Forbes article as well as Wikipedia, Stephen R. Covey first coined the terms, 'abundance mindset' and its opposite, 'scarcity mindset' in his 1989 bestselling self-help book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Wow, I didn't realize that book was that old. That's amazing.
Dedeker: I never read the original. I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, when I was a teen, not last year or anything, but I got the teen version.
Emily: I love it.
Jase: I just read this book for the first time maybe two, three years ago. I guess three years ago. I always have to add a year to what I think something was because COVID disappeared a year from my time.
Emily: Right. At least a year, yeah. This is from Wikipedia, "Covey coined the term 'abundance mentality' or 'abundance mindset', a way of thinking in which a person believes there are enough resources and successes to share with others. He contrasts it with the scarcity mindset, i.e. destructive and unnecessary competition, which is founded on the idea that if someone else wins or is successful in a situation, it means you lose because you are not considering the possibility of all parties winning in some way or another in a given situation."
Dedeker: I think that definition doesn't sound terrible on its surface personally. I think it speaks to a lot of the stuff we were talking about of this idea of if you can avoid this very cutthroat sense-
Emily: Yes, if you get granular about it.
Dedeker: -of it's always a zero-sum game. If I win, that means someone else has to lose, or if I'm losing, that means someone else is going to be winning but that could probably be some really good life advice.
Jase: In the context of the book where he talks about this is not so much in terms of competition with maybe other companies or other people who do the same thing, but he was talking about it in the context of negotiation of like, "If I'm going to negotiate with you, the scarcity mindset way is that I've got to somehow get you to give more than you get," mentality. It's like, "I'm going to win this negotiation," versus this idea of looking for, "Where's the win-win situation? What's the way where all of us get value from this?" the argument being not only is that just a kinder better way to go into something, but also is, in the long-term, better for business.
Emily: I think as we do on the show so much, we have to ask the question, is there any scientific basis to this? or is it just self-helpy bullshit? Let's move into that and try to answer that question a little better for us.
Dedeker: I wasn't sure of, is there any evidence, anything observable that we can see about people with 'abundance mindset' versus a scarcity mindset? There's a number of interesting studies that don't quite get it that directly but talk around that. We're going to talk about a couple today that speak to this. Specifically, I'm looking at this book that was co-authored by a professor of economics at Harvard and a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, it's called Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. This was published in 2013.
This book is an empirical study specifically on the feeling of scarcity or the perceived feeling that we have less of a resource. In the book, they focus more specifically on time and money. Both of the authors examine specifically the psycho-social effects of this feeling of scarcity, and what happens to our brains, and how that affects our behavior, what actions we take as the result of feeling that scarcity.
Jase: In this, they cover a few concepts that they identified through the research that they did. The first of those is called tunneling. Essentially, tunneling, if you think of it like tunnel vision, it's like you get so focused on something such as how scarce this resource is, you get so focused on that that you neglect anything else. They suggested that having more of this scarcity mindset encourages more of this habit of tunneling, of getting ultra-focused on the lack of a thing and trying to get it at the expense of anything else.
That the underlying mechanism of this tunneling thing that goes on can lead to focusing on more immediate short-term goals at the expense of longer-term goals, even sometimes, pursuing a short-term win that would even make the longer-term goal worse or even set you back from your long-term goals rather than playing the long game or however you want to describe it.
That would be a negative trait of this tunneling or a negative effect that could happen. They also discovered that with tunneling, you can experience what they called a focused dividend. Your focus pays dividends.
Dedeker: Return on investment.
Emily: I like that. Yes. Exactly.
Jase: This is that someone can experience increased productivity because they're so focused on this one particular pursuit, which can be seen in certain situations as a positive aspect. Essentially, they saw in this way with tunneling that scarcity can have both a positive and negative effect depending on the extent to which it causes detriment or neglect of those longer-term goals versus how much benefit is gained from the focus that it can give.
Emily: Another important concept from the study is the concept of bandwidth, which definitely is thrown around this word recently like emotional bandwidth and things like that. I feel like I say that phrase a lot. Bandwidth essentially is the amount of mental space needed to think and process problems and come up with solutions. A lack of bandwidth inhibits critical cognitive functions such as fluid intelligence and executive control, which governs planning, impulses, and willpower.
Also the concept of slack, which is not just planning and I guess, Exactly. I was like for businesses, things like that, that's become very big right now. It's also the leftover resources like time or money available to someone for expenses that may arise. With fewer resources, low-income individuals experience things like juggling. A complex decision-making process by which individuals deal with crises is as they arise by constantly shifting their resources according to what is needed most imminently. That can be really difficult, I think, because you can't focus on things at large. It's just one thing at a time whatever immediate danger is happening to you at that particular moment.
Dedeker: We'll talk specifically about how this shows up with things like money, but you can see this happening with things like time, or focus on a relationship in particular that if you're just so stretched so thin that you don't have the bandwidth necessarily to be thinking about the long-term goals or maybe your bigger values, and you don't have any slack, you don't have any leftover breathing room or wiggle room, but then you end up running around and putting out fires all the time. I think I see this a lot with people in multi-partner relationships.
Jase: I was just going to say, thinking you're so hard where you're at capacity for your time and energy, and it's still somehow not enough and that your partners are getting upset about not feeling like they're getting-
Dedeker: It's just off-the-hinge problem.
Jase: Right. You're not getting enough time or attention. Then it's like, "Well, this person's having a breakdown, so I'm going to focus more of my time and energy there," at the expense perhaps of others who then they're upset, and you're shifting that around, but never finding the state of having any slack. Never finding that balance.
Dedeker: The authors lay out that scarcity and feelings of scarcity function as a cycle that functions according to how people are able to manage both their slack and their bandwidth. If they have that mental space and that bandwidth that helps for planning ahead it helps to minimize that juggling, it helps to maybe even be able to preserve some of that slack to be able to be prepared for unexpected events that come up whether that's going to call on your time or your money or other resources. They do make the argument that sometimes that's easier for some people rather than others which is why it's easier for some people to get trapped within a perpetual cycle of scarcity.
They did do a variety of different experiments to demonstrate these concepts in action. I'm just going to walk you through one example specifically focused on money. Researchers approached shoppers in a mall in New Jersey, and people were asked about their income, and then the researchers would classify them secretly. They wouldn't tell them. They would classify them basically as either rich or poor, and then they would ask them a question. They would say, "Okay, let's imagine your car needs a repair. The repair is going to cost you $150. You have the options to either take a loan or you could just pay it in full, or you could postpone getting your car repaired. How are you going to make this decision?"
They would let the participant answer, but then after they gave their answer they would test them. They would give them a test that measured their fluid intelligence and their cognitive control. In that round, when they asked people about the $150, they found that both poor people and rich people did equally well on the test after going through this process of having to think about making the decision about repairing their car, but then in the second round, they changed part of the question.
Instead of needing $150 for the repair they would actually need $1,500 for the repair. Did the same process. Would ask them the same question, "You need $1,500 to repair your car. You can take a loan or you could pay it, or you could postpone service. How are you going to make that decision?" The subjects who were rich when they got tested afterwards they did basically equally as well on the intelligence and willpower tests as they had before, but the group that was poor didn't. Their scores dropped the equivalent of losing about 13 or 14 IQ points, which was larger than the drop experienced by essentially a group that they tested of people who took these same tests after staying up all night.
Being in that situation where you don't have the resources, and then having to make that decision and figure out how you're going to solve the problem with limited resources basically took up so much of their bandwidth that it made it even harder for them to be able to work through the problem. Thinking about how to come up with $150 didn't affect the poor group as much, but thinking about the $1,500 eroded their intelligence more than if they'd been seriously sleep deprived, which is really interesting.
I think it's an interesting thing to say that basically it's not like we can come to the conclusion of like, "Oh, clearly the poor group was not smart enough to figure out the problem." It's more about the stress of being posed this question of, "There is real scarcity in your life. How are you going to solve it?" Unfortunately, it's a little bit of a double whammy of not only do you not have the resources, but also now you don't have as much mental bandwidth, or emotional bandwidth to be able to come up with effective ways to resolve the scarcity as well, which I thought was really interesting.
Jase: It makes a lot of sense. We've talked about this in other areas too where that decision-making effort can fatigue you and pile up. We've talked about this before in terms of being polyamorous or queer or something and that constant little mental work of gauging, "Who am I talking to? How much do I say? How much do I hide? Do I call this person a friend? Do I call them a partner? Do I call them a metamour?" Navigating all that can add up to taking this mental and emotional toll. I think this is just an example of another way where that can show up.
When I think about times in my life where I can relate to this question of like, "Gosh, I need this thing for work or need to get a car, but I can't afford that. What am I going to do?" those types of decisions, it does take a lot out of you, and makes it a lot harder to just, "Oh, yes. Let me just think more holistically about my finances or all the quick solutions."
Dedeker: "Oh yes. Let me just step into abundance mindset about my and then it will solve itself."
Emily: Right. "I can do it." Exactly. That was more focusing on a money question and problem in terms of scarcity, but what about scarcity in dating? We looked at another study called Solving Mate Shortages: Lowering Standards, Searching Further, and Abstaining, which is from Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences in 2020. When people are faced with shortages in desired romantic partners how do they cope? Are there any gender differences to those strategies? Do attachment styles play a role as well? This is something we talk about a lot on this show. How much does one's own self-esteem influence which strategy folks will select?
The authors of this study analyzed three specific strategies. One was lowering standards which we talked about recently on Multiamory 328 where we talked about standards in relationships. You can go back and check that out. Also abstaining from dating in the present with hopes that better options will come along in the future, I think that's definitely some people tend to do. They're like, "Well, I'm not finding anything right now so I'm just not going to date for a while," and also traveling further to find partners that people in their own vicinity are not maybe up to snuff, I guess. They want to look for other people outside of their town or the area in which they live.
Dedeker: Something we've definitely seen play out specifically with the non-monogamous community for anyone who doesn't live in a major city basically.
Jase: Right. It makes sense.
Dedeker: We see a lot of least anecdotal evidence of people being willing to travel much further to be able to find someone who's compatible and open to non-monogamy.
Jase: Just a quick background about how the study worked. This was multiple surveys sent to groups of participants, and they asked them to imagine, like, "Just imagine you're struggling to find a partner either long-term or short-term." They had different surveys for different ones, and then they asked questions about, "How would you adapt to that scarcity?" to try to determine what would affect which of these different strategies they might take? They were also asked questions about how they perceived their own value as partners as well as some questions to measure their attachment style so they could look at how these things all relate to each other.
Each of the surveys had around 300 participants, a wide range of ages, 18 to 61, and about 50/50, male and female. I don't know if they had options for other genders than that.
At least half of the participants were in some kind of committed serious relationship, and at least half the participants had had experience with long distance relationships in the past. 90% plus were heterosexual. Not a super diverse study, but still we might be able to find some interesting things from this.
Dedeker: From these surveys they glean some interesting findings about the ways that people deal when they perceive a scarcity of partners. They found that both men and women prefer to travel further if they perceive there's going to be a long-term relationship with somebody, that then they're much more willing to go further a field from their local area. I suppose anecdotally that matches up at least with my own experience. I'm like, "If it's just a hookup, unless the sex is really, really good, I'm not going to drive two hours. I'm sorry.
Jase: Sure.
Emily: I've done that though.
Dedeker: I've probably done that also, to be fair. They found that women were more likely to choose to abstain from undesirable partners if it was going to be for a short-term relationship like for a casual relationship, that if there's no one around that seemed suitable for a casual relationship, they're more likely to be like, "I'm just going to wait it out. I'll just wait until better options are available."
Men, on the other hand, were more likely to choose to lower their standards when wanting to find a short-term relationship. People who felt that they, generally, had difficulty in relationships, and also who had attachment anxiety were more willing to travel, and also more willing to lower their standards when faced with a short-term mate shortage.
Emily: Also, those who felt they were undesirable as mates and reported attachment anxiety indicated a greater propensity to travel and lower their standards when faced with a long-term mate shortage. That's interesting.
Jase: Both short-term and long-term, they were more willing.
Emily: Already. Finally, those who felt that they had high long-term mate values, the opposite of what we were just talking about, which was that they felt they were undesirable. When they had-
Dedeker: This is if you think that you're hot shit?
Emily: Exactly, yes. If you have high long-term mate value, these people were unlikely to abstain when facing a long-term mate shortage. They're not going to abstain from finding people when they had a long-term mate shortage. They were also more likely to travel when faced with a long-term mate shortage, so they're ready to go. They're like, "Yes, let's-
Jase: "I'm not going to wait. I'll travel."
Emily: No. Whatever. Finally, they were unlikely to lower their standards when faced with a short-term mate shortage. That's interesting. They were just like, "No, I'm going to find somebody who I find is worthy of me."
Dedeker: I guess the interesting takeaway being that it's fascinating how both are own-- Will we call it self-esteem or self-worth, or just your own perception of how valuable you are as a partner potentially combined with your attachment style does affect how you respond to a sense of scarcity, whether that's real or imagined, how you're going to adjust your strategy as far as finding partners goes.
The authors did recognize some of the limitations of this study. They did call it the fact that, and I appreciate that they call this out, they were like, "We only focused on these two types of relationships of either long-term serious relationship or a casual hookup." That can be helpful in certain contexts, but there's a wide variety of relationships and relationship needs. They did give a nod to same-sex relationships and polyamorous relationships as well.
At least within the research world-
Jase: Because they're aware, yes.
Dedeker: -they're learning to point out the fact that, "A lot of groups of people, we intentionally leave out of this." They can at least say that.
Emily: That's nice of them.
Dedeker: They're at least saying that.
Jase: Better than nothing I guess.
Dedeker: They also talked about the fact that they were asking people just hypothetical questions. They just asked people to imagine that "You've been trying to find a hookup partner, it's been six months and you haven't found anybody. What are you going to do now?" rather than assessing people in the real world or in real-time conditions to see what decisions people would actually make.
Jase: That's interesting too because there has actually been a fair amount of research also looking at just how bad we are as humans at evaluating how we're actually going to react in some kind of a stressful situation, that we think we're going to react one way and we totally don't. That's a whole other topic that's very interesting but that is a good point to bring up here that maybe, in reality, actually, everyone just lowers their standards and not these other things. Who knows?
Moving on to the second half of the episode, we're going to now look at this abundance way of thinking and this scarcity way of thinking, and look at what are the positives and negatives of both of those? and see how we might be able to use those in our lives. Before we go onto that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some sponsors of this show, as well as some ways that you can support us. It really goes a long way to helping us keep this show coming, keep all of this content available to everyone out there for free. We really appreciate you taking the time to check them out.
Dedeker: We are back. Here's the deal, got to just give you the real talk, the real skinny, folks.
Emily: Give it to you straight?
Dedeker: Yes. I think both real scarcity and real abundance as well as perceived scarcity and perceived abundance does have very real effects on how we behave and the choices that we make, I think for better or for worse. We want to explore those effects but we don't want to give any sense of shame or judgment for what kind of "mindset" that you have, especially because our mindset, at any given time, can be affected by so many different factors including your relative level of neurodivergence, any mental health issues that are either long-term or short-term.
Rather than talking about this like it's a mindset, we're going to explore both the pros and the cons of attuning to abundance or scarcity. When I say attuning, I mean by noticing or paying attention to, or focusing on feelings of abundance or on feelings of scarcity. For the purposes of this section, I'm going to call this abundance attunement or scarcity attunement, TM, TM, TM, when I create my next book, which is going to be Abundance: Stick the Mindset to the Man.
Jase: Okay, that's good because I was thinking Abundance Without the A-Bullshit, also as your title.
Dedeker: That's so much better.
Emily: That's pretty good too. This is going to become a Multiamory book, not just Dedeker wants to write, but I don't know. We'll see. You were the one that coined those so we'll figure that out. First, we're going to talk about how abundance attunement, TM, TM, TM, can be beneficial.
Dedeker: Just to clarify, it's just choosing to focus in a particular moment on abundance in a particular moment not permanently, not etched in stone, just when you choose to think about abundance.
Emily: I love that idea that you are in control of what it is that you are feeling and thinking potentially in these moments. That's not always the case but sometimes you can stand back and say, "Okay, I'm going to choose right now to go in the direction of abundance. Here we go. Let's go there."
Jase: I do think that's a really interesting reframing of it being temporary too, of being like, "The idea of just I'm going to suddenly think everything is abundant, even though I don't have money and I don't have partners, and blah, blah, blah, that just seems impossible and maybe it's unrealistic."
Emily: What if I shifted that way?
Jase: It's like, "For the next 30 minutes while I'm trying to do this, what if I just, for that moment of time, try to attune to abundance and see what happens if I want these benefits?" Maybe?
Emily: How can it be beneficial? For one thing, it can help you deprogram toxic monogamy patterns and behaviors. Things like, let's take a little pressure off that big old valve that is engorged at this moment when you feel like you need to find the perfect one right this instant or, "I'm going to die. Oh my God."
Dedeker: Yes, that engorged soulmate valve, like it's programmed into us.
Emily: Just release it slightly. Your tire is full of so much air and you're going to release that a little bit.
Dedeker: Your soulmate tire.
Emily: Your soulmate tire.
Dedeker: You've overfilled your soulmate tire full of air.
Emily: All I'm saying is though, recently, the cold weather, I had to go and refill all my tires and the thing on the air machine is like, "Don't overfill. Your tire will explode and you will die." In this moment, instead of dying, we're just going to slowly release that valve a little bit and little air is going to come out.
Dedeker: What this is speaking to is I do think that our cultural story about the one or about soulmates is often based in scarcity because it's like, "There's only one. There's only right person."
Emily: "There's only one and it's out of billions of people."
Dedeker: You got to find it.
Emily: "I'm not going to find them. Oh, boy."
Jase: You have people who, too, take these studies that we've criticized in the past but, "If you don't have that one, if you don't have your soulmate, you're unhappy. You can't be happy without it." That's bullshit.
Emily: Also, this time-sensitive pressure on yourself and on everybody else, and on people that perhaps you see out there in the moment, and you're like, "Oh my God, I've got to grab them. I have to find them and make sure that they're with me forever because if not, then they're going to be gone forever," or "I'm going to be not available, and then I'm going to miss out on the best person ever," something like that.
Dedeker: The window of availability, "I got to get them all, they're single. Oh my goodness, they just broke up with their boyfriend. I wonder how long I'm going to give them. I don't want to become a creeper but oh, someone's going to scoop them up." This idea that there's this scarcity of the opportunity for me to be able to approach someone or start dating somebody.
Emily: Well, I've done this before, maybe this is just how I am because I like to move things fast but this pressure to escalate a relationship quickly, or just immediately pursue an attraction like, "I need someone. I find them attractive so I got to do something right away because they might be gone the next day or something." As we said, having an abundance mindset might take the pressure off of all of these things.
Dedeker: Please, please, please, an attunement.
Emily: An attunement, sorry, you're right.
Jase:
Emily: I apologize. An abundance attunement might just take the pressure off of all these things. Also, it can help you have patience during these dry spells that may happen your periods of loneliness in your life, instead of viewing it potentially, as you're a bad person, you're not doing the thing that you're meant to do on this Earth which is, find a soulmate or something. Instead, it's like, "Hey, let's be a little more Zen about this and understand that there are wonderful things about getting to be alone, getting that opportunity to learn and grow by yourself."
Jase: Being more willing to wait for something that is truly worth your time and worth your effort I think is a big difference. That's something that whether you're optimistic or pessimistic either way, there's something that they talk about a lot in positive psychology as hope, or whatever, it's this idea that, regardless of how I tend to evaluate things, understanding that nothing is permanent, that it's not like, "Oh, this is bad right now, therefore will be bad forever, so I've got to lower my standards, or I've got accept a relationship with someone who doesn't treat me very well or something like that."
Instead, to say, "You know what? How this is right now, maybe it is scarce, but that might not be forever," just that little bit of the shift can help you avoid some of those situations.
Emily: In terms of non-monogamous relationships, that can really help reframe feelings of jealousy, or just a lack of feeling like, "Wow, I'm not getting what I need in this moment because my partner is dating multiple people, they're out all the time, and maybe I'm at home a lot, or they're dating more people right now than I am," something along those lines.
Provided that you're actually getting what you need in a relationship if you're simply just feeling like, "Wow, I'm feeling a lot of hesitancy or jealousy during these moments," maybe it can help you flip that on its head and realize, "This is, again, an impermanent situation." Also, like you just said Jase, this positive psychology feeling like, you can hopefully inspire feelings of gratitude, of luck, joy, or safety when taking stock of what's actually present in your life. You actually talked to us today, Jase, about a little bit of positive psychology and gratitude. Can you share with the audience what that was?
Jase: Well, we've talked about it before on this show. This was, gosh, probably a while ago, but basically, of doing these exercises that have been shown to essentially do gratitude attunement where you take just a couple minutes every day. I've started doing this while I brush my teeth because that also takes two minutes, so those go hand in hand. It's just to think about three things that happened today that you're grateful for. It's new things every day.
The point of it is not even identifying these great things. The point is just spending some time trying to think of what those things are because often we can get so caught up in, "I'm so focused on what I don't have, what went badly, what I screwed up," those sorts of things, and it gives you just this moment to re-attune and say, "What if my brain focused on identifying these other things?" Just doing that little bit has been shown repeatedly in many, many, many studies to have a really significant positive impact.
Dedeker: This is when we're going to break away from similarity to abundance mindset thinking because I also want us to spend some time thinking about how abundance attunement could potentially be detrimental in a particular situation. There's two sides to the coin. There's a dark side of the force going with the light side. I think that maybe in particular situations, when you're much more attuned or trying to focus more on, "Oh, it's abundant. I have plenty of what I need. Maybe even more than what I need," that can be a straight-up denial of reality sometimes, particularly when it comes to finding partners and dating.
I think that we've seen the toxic side of this with the money thing of, that sense of, "Oh, just believe that you're going to have everything that you need. Just write yourself that $20,000 check and date it for some point in the future, and then you're going to get it," and in the meantime, you're not actually doing anything or not really addressing any of the actual structural issues.
When it comes to things like dating, I want to give just a very, very brief nod to desirability politics. We're going to do a whole episode on this in the future, but just the fact that our culture assigns more value and or less value to people depending on things like their race, their class, their ability, how visible or invisible over disability they may have, their aesthetics, whether or not they match Western beauty standards and more. That means that when we're living in this kind of paradigm, not everybody has the same exact access to potential partners. Not everybody has this automatic abundance of opportunities for dating, or romance, or sex.
How that plays out in relationships is sometimes that's uncomfortable and important conversation that people have to have, particularly people who are opening up for the first time, and they're both exploring this whole weird, wacky world of dating apps and for one reason, one person is striking out all the time, and the other partner has tons of partners or tons of opportunity, or tons of interest, and looking at the fact that while it's not both people automatically started out at the same exact starting line for that but there's a lot of factors here, where we can't just say, "Oh, whatever, just believe there's an abundance of partners, and then it'll be okay."
Jase: Where I see it show up too is, one is an area where people will use this mindset to give advice to someone else to be like, "You'll have the same success as me if you just think like I do." It's just, that's not realistic. That's not actually how works. The other way I've seen this one show up is, I've seen people also use this as an excuse to not show up and do any work on their side of a relationship and instead to just be like, "No one is good enough for me because I have this abundance mindset of like 'The perfect something's going to come along.' " Again, when you go too far that side, you get into that toxic, unrealistic side, that just leads to not having any accountability or effort on your side of things.
Dedeker: Also the way this can be detrimental with relationships is, it could encourage a potential denial of the fact that maybe you really aren't getting your needs met in life or in a relationship, maybe you really aren't getting enough time with your partner, maybe you really aren't getting enough affection from your partner. It's not just a matter of, "Oh, if I just believe that there's an abundance of love and affection, then I'm going to feel okay."
Sometimes that may be the case if you're trying to quiet down maybe some jealousy or insecurity gremlins, but sometimes there may really be a problem and a vacuum and a need that needs to be met there that's not getting met.
Jase: The other downside of the whole abundance mindset, what made Dedeker want to throw up in the beginning of this episode, is the connection to the whole manifestation bullshit. I'm sorry, I apologize to any of our listeners out there who are really into the manifestation thing. I was for many years. I was very into that whole thing, that the whole thing can be rich thing, or the secret, all that kind of stuff. We're going to get into this more in the bonus, actually, so stick around for that Patreons.
Basically, it's this belief that if you just have the right positive thoughts, and if you just act like you already have the things that you want that then you're going to get them, and it's going to come true just on its own. Again, with this whole topic, there's maybe some seeds of effectiveness in changing your mindset about things, but this idea that just thinking it and receiving it, mentally, will make it happen, can actually be really harmful again because it can cause you to blame other people or blame yourself for your lack of whatever, partners, money, success, whatever it is, and that it can just be harmful in that way.
There have been studies done on this, that have been interesting because, while some of them have shown that manifestation thinking can help you feel better in the moment, they may actually sap your energy from actually doing anything toward the things that you want. Again, we're going to talk about this more in the bonus, but there have even been studies showing that this does the opposite in terms of recovering from medical conditions, or all sorts of areas where the manifesting can be detrimental. It's just something to be cautious with that there can be this dark side.
Dedeker: Now let's talk about scarcity and scarcity attunement. We're actually going to start out by talking about how scarcity attunement can be beneficial. This is the thing that not a lot of people talk about out there, especially when we hear the phrase "scarcity mindset," it's only ever bad, it's only everything you want to avoid. I do want to talk about the fact that sometimes attuning to scarcity can be a really, really good thing. For instance, it can help encourage you to have a realistic understanding of your limits around your time, around your money, or around your emotional energy.
Jase: Oh, yes, gosh. We didn't even talk about that in the downsides of the abundance mindset, is if you buy too much into the manifesting you could be just throwing money around being like, "Oh, it's all going to be fine. It's all going to come back."
Emily: Or time. Time is so limited, truly. Just saying yes to everything, I feel so often like I need to do that, but stepping back and actually looking at what is truly worthy of one's time is so important.
Jase: It can really change how you make decisions.
Dedeker: I've seen this a lot. I know I definitely went through this that sometimes people on the non-monogamy journey when they finally step into, "Okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take ownership of this identity or this practice of non-monogamy or polyamory," they jump into that, "Oh my God, I could date everybody. I'm going to date everybody. I'm going to go on all the dates."
Emily: "Seven dates a week."
Dedeker: Exactly. Then they quickly, often realize, "Oh no, I can't actually go on seven dates a week. Oh no. My time is limited." Having a scarcity attunement in that way means that it can help you with careful planning with management. It can offer insight about how to have effective boundaries around your resources. It can also help highlight actual areas of lack in your life or in your relationships that can help you ask for what you need or take action toward getting what it is that you need.
It can also just help with prioritizing your choices. This is getting a little bit deep, but there is things like existential scarcity. Sometimes, this is called a midlife crisis, but really essentially it gets down to realizing that your life is just too short to waste on stuff that isn't good to the best of your ability. Having that sense of scarcity around your time and scarcity around just your life, that can be really powerful. It can really revolutionize a lot of what you choose to do with your time.
Emily: The other end of this-
Jase: Sorry, that's just hit me. That's just so deep and it's absolutely true.
Emily: True. Absolutely. Thinking about that a lot lately. The other end of this, which is something that probably more people talk about is that scarcity attunement can be detrimental at times in things like relationships, where you feel like relationship resources are never enough. This can happen. This is a byproduct often of toxic monogamy culture, this idea that if your partner isn't spending 100% of their time and energy on you, then it's not enough, it doesn't count, they're not the ones, something along those lines, or that, somehow you are not worthy of their time because they're also encouraged, or wanting to do other things in their life. That's, in my opinion, totally understandable. We're autonomous creatures, but it can feel like, "Wow, this person should totally be invested in me only, and if they're not, then there's something wrong."
It may prevent leaving a bad relationship because there's this assumption out there that there might not be any other partner for you or any other person that might want you in the future. You got to stay with this person, even if it's not right, even if it's maybe even really toxic or potentially abusive because I'm not going to get anything better.
Dedeker: I think a lot of people fall into that all the time.
Emily: Oh yes, absolutely. Also it can encourage hoarding behavior or hyper-boundary behavior, just choosing to stay in a box that you create for yourself, that's essentially it and, "This is the only thing that I'm going to be able to live in and the only way in which I'm going to be happy. I can't move past that or broaden my horizons in different ways."
Dedeker: Thinking about the scarcity attunement in the ways it can be detrimental, I see it show up a lot in non-monogamous relationships around things like time. Sharing time and quality time among multiple partners, it's a tricky subject. There's no real one-size-fits-all because people have different needs around time and value time differently. I think that if you're coming from this attunement of, "I'm focusing on the time that I'm not getting," to an extreme degree, that can really create this cycle of, "I need more time. I need more time. I need more time."
Often the person you're asking the time from feels like, "It's never enough. It's never enough. It's never enough. It's never enough." It can create this weird, almost like hoarding behavior, or, "I really, really need to very, very carefully defend this time that I have with my partner, really try to get more when sometimes to see the issue may actually be amount of time. Sometimes it may be about quality of time or there may be something else going on in the relationship or in the attachment. That's often how I see it play out in relationships where focusing on the scarcity can be not helpful.
Jase: Right. Again, to think of it as attunement is, where is your focus going? If you think about my partner, whether we're monogamous or not, some of their time is going to be focused on me, and some of it's not. Where your attention is more focused, "Is it more focused on the time they're not paying attention to me, or the time that they are?" affects how much you enjoy that time or how much you suffer during that time.
It's that thing of, as we talked about before, maybe being too abundant in your mindsets, not right, because maybe you're not actually getting enough time or enough affection, but on the other side, if you're so focused on only the time when you're not getting something, it takes away from you appreciating what you do have and can lead you to spiral, like you said, Dedeker, where it's just never enough. Maybe they are just more and more time, but it still doesn't make any difference, could be because of that attunement.
Dedeker: Here's the takeaway, folks. I think that it can be helpful in a lot of situations to just ask yourself questions about where your attunement is, and ask yourself questions about your feelings of abundance and scarcity. It can be really simple questions like, "In this situation that I'm in right now, how might attuning to abundance help me here?" or, "How could attuning to abundance possibly be hurting me here?" Same thing on the flip side, "How could paying attention or attuning to scarcity help me here?" or, "Could it be hurting me here?" I think that's all. I really want to vacuum up the shame and judgment around--
Emily: Vacuum you are Luigi in-
Dedeker: -where your mindset, just suck it all up. Yes. Like Luigi, just suck up all those shame and judgment so it's away from this whole mindset conversation, and really is just about, "Where is my attention right now? If I switch my attention, could that help me? Could that hurt me?" It is all just inquiry, curiosity, and just getting data about the situation. I hope that you can take that, apply that to some situations in your life and see what the results is. I'm not going to throw up about it.
Jase: Good. For all you listening at home, this is a big relief for Emily and myself.
Emily: We're like, "Oh, Goodness. Thank the maker."
Dedeker: In our bonus episode, when I was reading up on manifesting, I uncovered a scientifically backed alternative to manifesting called wooping, W-O-O-P.
Emily: Oh, I thought it was whoop, like whoop, there it is.
Dedeker: Yes, whoomp, there it is.
Emily: Oh, okay. Good.
Dedeker: In the bonus-
Emily: You said, "Woop."
Dedeker: -we're going to talk about wooping/wooping and making whoopie pies.
Jase: Oh, you're going to share our recipe to the world?
Dedeker: This week we want to hear from you. Where do you feel abundance in your life? Where do you feel scarcity in your life? We're going to post that question on our Instagram stories. Go to @multiamory_podcast on Instagram, to answer that question. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners on this episode is on this episode's discussion thread in our private Facebook group or discord chat. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.