 In the early 1900s in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, there was this sense that relationships were just a means to an end. The baby loved the mom because the mom gave the baby milk. The husband loved the wife because the wife gave him sex. They have the various sort of kind of transactional nature to it. One of my kind of academic heroes is this guy named John Bulby, who was a psychiatrist, a British psychiatrist, and who really kind of gave rise to this attachment theory. And he worked with, he worked not only people who studied humans, but people who studied animals and he recognized even in animals, relationships were not just a means to an end, that animals would engage in behaviors to strengthen relationships just for the purposes of strengthening relationships. And the way that he characterized this is the root of this comes from the parent-child attachment, right? And our offspring are probably the most extreme example of this is that they are extremely helpless when they are born. So everything a human baby does, cry, coo, smile is meant to draw the parent to the child and that Bulby reason was adaptive. And it had to be like that because the infant was so helpless. Those who study infant development sometimes refer to the first, say three to six months of life as the fourth trimester because our babies are born half-baked. And so conversely the parent had to develop this deep kind of love and attachment towards the child. It's not just a one-way street here. Certainly the child looks out for the parent's watchful care, but the parent, anyone who's been a parent, you're looking at your three-year-old making sure they're not running in the street, that sort of thing. There's this kind of like, they're a small attachment of you and there's kind of an evolutionary link to that, that becomes somewhat obvious that the strongest form of attachment and love and altruism so forth comes from the way that, the way that nature shaped our family relationships. Something I think is really interesting about that is that it's kind of inevitably linked with the challenge that is right. If you ask a parent, what is the most challenging thing you've done, nine times out of 10, they'll say, raise my kid. If you say, okay, what's the most rewarding thing you've done? They'll say nine times out of 10, raise my kid, right? And you can't kind of get away from those. Let me just, if it's all right, drive this point home with this a kind of kooky thought experiment. Imagine what our social lives would be like if we were say seahorses, okay? So seahorses are different and they have male pregnancy, which would probably automatically lead to some very different parental leave policies. But also the ways they're different is that they have like 2,000 babies at once. Part of that that's different is that they don't have any investment in their kids once they're born. It's kind of like, okay, they leave the male womb and goodbye, good luck. Hope you don't get eaten. Please make me proud. No human being knows exactly what it's like to be a seahorse, but it's a good bet that they don't really care, have the same deep love and concern for their children, their offspring that human parents do. And so kind of at this confluence of psychology and evolution, there can't be this deep love without compelling sacrifice. It's almost like a cosmic near spiritual truth. Does that make sense? Yeah, there's another aspect to that as well. Sam, perhaps you could cite the study. We've talked about it on the show, but there is a certain level of happiness that we're all able to achieve and that's going to go up and down as things change and we get older and there's going to be those hurdles. But those who do have children have much higher ends of happiness due to having that relationship, but their overall quality of life isn't as high in happiness as the person without the child. And I laugh about this, because of course when I was younger I never thought about having children. And now that I'm older and there's certain aspects of that that I do wish that I would get to experience and perhaps I will. But that shows exactly of that attachment and what that delivers in our quality of life. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of studies about this and I think this is where it's kind of really important to try to parse out our terms, right? We use these things like happiness, well-being, good emotion, right? So parenting is not, like if you think of happiness as like reading a book on the beach, that's not parenting. I have five children that are 14 and under. So it's a busy life. But when you use terms like rewarding, that seems to kind of really get to this matter more. There's a great book. It was written by a woman named Jennifer Sr., 2014 or so. And I really liked the title. It said, all joy and no fun, the paradox of modern parenting. And the only qualm I have with that is the word modern, because as I've kind of laid out here it's always been a challenge. It's kind of like evolutionarily written into our nature is that raising children is gonna take a lot of sacrifice and effort.