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Speaker 4: Oh hey, it's that lady in the hotel lobby who
Speaker 4: just took an apple from the bowl of decorative fruit
Speaker 4: and feels only partly guilty about it. Ali Ward back
Speaker 4: with another episode of ologies Oh, Love Oh, Who doesn't
Speaker 4: Love Love Oh? This episode is coming out a few
Speaker 4: days before Valentine's Day. Love is in the air. It's
Speaker 4: on the shelves at Walgreens. Soon it will be in
Speaker 4: the discount aisle at Walgreens. But it will still be
Speaker 4: in our hearts and on our minds until probably the
Speaker 4: day we're dead and return to the earth as scattered molecules,
Speaker 4: ready to be a frog that loves another frog. But
Speaker 4: frogs don't get married, and some people do, so let's
Speaker 4: learn about it. But first little business. So thank you,
Speaker 4: as always to the Ologies patrons. I am your grateful,
Speaker 4: humble servant. This podcast would not exist with other folks
Speaker 4: on patreon dot com slash ologies A dollar a month
Speaker 4: gets you in that club. Thanks to everyone for sporting
Speaker 4: Ologies merch from ologiesmerch dot com. I've said it before.
Speaker 4: I hope you wear an Ologies shirt or pin or
Speaker 4: hat and you find your soulmate and then I officiate
Speaker 4: your wedding and I eat free cake.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: Thanks to everyone who rates the show and hit subscribe
Speaker 4: bonus points for leaving a review for me to creepily
Speaker 4: lurk and read on the show, such as this week's
Speaker 4: Let's Do It. Ariel Lean says this podcast is one
Speaker 4: hundred percent worth writing my first ever review. I've gotten
Speaker 4: sucked into topics. I never thought I would be interested
Speaker 4: in I'm looking at you postcards. They say. The episodes
Speaker 4: on snology inspired me to take a leap of faith
Speaker 4: and eliminate two of the three sleepy medications I had
Speaker 4: been taking for years. They say, I feel better than ever.
Speaker 4: So thanks Ali for putting your heart and soul and
Speaker 4: a few brock crystals into bringing all of us so
Speaker 4: much joy. So thank you, Ariel. Everyone else consult a
Speaker 4: doctor before changing medications. Please don't sue me. Yay, okay?
Speaker 4: So matrimoniology is it a word? Come on, dad word?
Speaker 4: Don't go pull on legs here? Hot? Damn? Is it ever?
Speaker 4: Kind of okay? First off, the term matrim comes from
Speaker 4: the Latin for mother, as in to make a mother
Speaker 4: out of someone gross, But now matrimony is used as
Speaker 4: jack catchall for marriage stuff and a now deceased psychologist
Speaker 4: from the Czech Republic coined the term matrimoniology, wrote several
Speaker 4: books on marriage and relationship psychology, so it exists in literature,
Speaker 4: I say it accounts. So I enlisted the help of
Speaker 4: new intern Harrikim. They helped me track down one of
Speaker 4: the foremost American experts in the field who happens to
Speaker 4: teach not in Prague but in La So I just
Speaker 4: shimmied over to UCLA on a sunny morning and I
Speaker 4: set up a few mics. I asked this ologist questions
Speaker 4: that had both adorable and also sometimes very uncomfortable answers,
Speaker 4: just like a relationship, adorable, sometimes uncomfortable. So he is
Speaker 4: a professor of social psychology and a researcher at UCLA's
Speaker 4: marriage lab. There's a marriage lab, and he's a co
Speaker 4: author of the textbook Intimate Relationship, and has written innumerable
Speaker 4: papers on the topic, many of which have really just
Speaker 4: juicy as health titles such as quote to know you
Speaker 4: is to love you, the importance of global adoration and
Speaker 4: specific understanding for close relationships, and how stress hinders adaptive
Speaker 4: processes in marriage. Oh this is the good stuff. Okay.
Speaker 4: So we sat down to discuss romantic intimacy, how marriage
Speaker 4: differs from non married relationships, what to do if your
Speaker 4: partnership is going through a little bit of a rough batch,
Speaker 4: why divorces happen, how movies could save your relation, strategies
Speaker 4: for popping the question, the darker historical side of marriage.
Speaker 4: And then maybe per usual, I have a life changing epiphany.
Speaker 4: No spoilers, So sit back, commit to this amazing and
Speaker 4: wild ride with someone who, just technically speaking, in some
Speaker 4: parts of the world, would be considered a matrimoniologist, Doctor Ben,
Speaker 4: you are sort of a matrimoniologist.
Speaker 5: I mean technically, I'm a psychologist, yeah, And if you
Speaker 5: want to get more specific, I'm a social psychologist. So
Speaker 5: there's lots of different kinds of psychology at universities, and
Speaker 5: social psychology is a study of how human beings, individual
Speaker 5: human beings are affected by the imagined or real presence
Speaker 5: of other human beings, which is to say, is a
Speaker 5: study of the human condition.
Speaker 4: That sounds so poetic, but it's true.
Speaker 5: We are the ones who study scientifically what it means
Speaker 5: to be a human being on the planet Earth, within
Speaker 5: social psychology, in all these different ways that human beings interact.
Speaker 5: My own interest has always been in intimacy and how
Speaker 5: people develop and maintain intimate connections, specifically romantic connections, and
Speaker 5: I have studied that in the context of marriage, but
Speaker 5: my interest is broader than just marriage. Marriage is a
Speaker 5: very convenient place to study adult intimacy because it's where
Speaker 5: a lot of adults will end up practicing their adult
Speaker 5: intimacy for large portions of their lives. So I've studied
Speaker 5: marriage my whole life or my whole professional life for
Speaker 5: the last twenty five years. But for me, marriage is
Speaker 5: a case, a specific case of a broader interest in intimacy,
Speaker 5: in how people experience love and what happens to that
Speaker 5: experience over time.
Speaker 4: So quick background on Ben. He grew up in la
Speaker 4: but he got his bachelor's in psychology from just this
Speaker 4: little college called friggin Harvard, then came back to California
Speaker 4: to get his PhD in social psychology from UCLA, where
Speaker 4: he's now, of course, a professor who studies intimate relationships.
Speaker 4: But how did he know that this field was the
Speaker 4: one and why of all the different facets of social psychology?
Speaker 4: Why intimacy?
Speaker 5: Honestly, because that's what I was naturally thinking about when
Speaker 5: I when it came time to think what am I
Speaker 5: going to study. What actually happened is that I got
Speaker 5: to graduate school in nineteen ninety and I actually went
Speaker 5: to graduate school here at UCLA, where I ended up
Speaker 5: many years later on the faculty. And I didn't know
Speaker 5: what I wanted to say. I knew I loved this
Speaker 5: idea of social psychology. I knew that the ways that
Speaker 5: human beings interact was fascinating and puzzling and compelling for me,
Speaker 5: but I didn't know what I was going to really study,
Speaker 5: and I kind of drifted. And a very kind faculty
Speaker 5: member noticed that I was drifting. Her name was Anne Peplow.
Speaker 5: She's still around although she's retired. And Peplow called me
Speaker 5: into her office and said, hey, how's your first year
Speaker 5: of grad school going, which she didn't have any obligation
Speaker 5: to do, didn't need to do that, but she was
Speaker 5: just very kind and she said, I said, I no, no,
Speaker 5: I'm studying different things. And she said, well are you studying?
Speaker 5: What do you want to study? What was it that
Speaker 5: you actually came here to study? So I don't know. Ah,
Speaker 5: she goes, why don't you go think about it for
Speaker 5: a while?
Speaker 4: And how could she tell you that you were drifting?
Speaker 5: I don't know, I think because I don't know why
Speaker 5: she took an interest. It was one of the most
Speaker 5: generous things anyone's ever done for me, though.
Speaker 4: And so what did you do when you went and
Speaker 4: thought about it? Were you dating someone at the time,
Speaker 4: are you single? Were you struggling in that area.
Speaker 5: It's a good question. I had just started dating someone
Speaker 5: that I had had a long term crush on in college.
Speaker 4: Ooh nice.
Speaker 5: After college we had gotten together, and so I was
Speaker 5: thinking about intimacy. I was saying, how do these how
Speaker 5: do we fall in love with people out of a
Speaker 5: relationship change? How to someone that you know for a
Speaker 5: long time suddenly become your partner? How do two people
Speaker 5: who are strangers to each other go from strangers to
Speaker 5: needing each other?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Just see that seems like a miraculous It is. It
Speaker 5: is a miracle. It is right. There's a person on
Speaker 5: the If you're a single person right now, somewhere on
Speaker 5: the planet, there's someone and probably close by, who some
Speaker 5: years from now you'll say, oh my god, that person
Speaker 5: touched me. That person is so important to me. I
Speaker 5: couldn't live without that person. And yet now I have
Speaker 5: no idea who that person I know. That's insane.
Speaker 4: I have a friend named Kathy who she was at
Speaker 4: a birthday party. Her future husband was there. They never
Speaker 4: even talked. They met online. A year later they're at
Speaker 4: the same birthday party. So, yes, my friends Kathy and Sandon,
Speaker 4: they're in the same photos of this birthday party. This
Speaker 4: was a year before they met and started dating via
Speaker 4: Okay Cupid. So now they're married, they have a rescue poodle.
Speaker 4: Life is wild, is all I'm saying. Just go talk
Speaker 4: to everyone at every party. Maybe you can smell them.
Speaker 4: See what that does for you. I don't know. I'm
Speaker 4: not a doctor. Also, on my way to this interview,
Speaker 4: I took a lift because UCLA Parking is just a
Speaker 4: dystopian healscape. You can see the microbiology episode for more
Speaker 4: on that. And I was talking to the driver about
Speaker 4: this episode on the way to record it, and I
Speaker 4: promised him that I would ask his question right away
Speaker 4: and not chicken out. So, boy, howdy did I What
Speaker 4: about you? Now? My lift driver wanted me to ask, Nicholas,
Speaker 4: are you married? You have a wedding ring on how
Speaker 4: many times have you been married? Me?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I am married.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: I have been divorced. I was divorced.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: I was married to my first wife and we got
Speaker 5: divorced after I had been studying marriage for a long time,
Speaker 5: like many many years, and then I married again, okay,
Speaker 5: and I'm very happily married.
Speaker 4: Okay. So you've experienced literally all sides of yes, I
Speaker 4: have been nice.
Speaker 5: I have been a participant in the whole phenomenon. And
Speaker 5: people ask me, of course, they say, so, you study marriage.
Speaker 5: You literally have written a book on intimacy. So how
Speaker 5: is it that you got divorced? And my response to that,
Speaker 5: I have a ready one, is oh, I understand why
Speaker 5: I got divorced.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that I've studied, one of
Speaker 5: the things I've studied a long time is that not
Speaker 5: everything about your relationship, our relationships are controllable m M.
Speaker 5: That things happen in relationships that are beyond your control.
Speaker 5: And the idea that if you just work hard enough
Speaker 5: you can make any relationship work is not true.
Speaker 4: Not true.
Speaker 5: I don't believe that's true.
Speaker 4: And you can say that from a personal and from
Speaker 4: a scientific perspective.
Speaker 5: Yes, it turns out I could say it for I
Speaker 5: was saying it for a long time from a scientific perspective,
Speaker 5: and then I experienced it.
Speaker 4: That is great as a scientist that you have experienced
Speaker 4: all those facets. I'm sure that it is not easy
Speaker 4: as a person, but as an actual kind of objective
Speaker 4: of observer to other people's behavior, that must be very helpful.
Speaker 5: I would have preferred not to experience. Okay, if I
Speaker 5: could have chose, and I would have preferred very strongly
Speaker 5: not to experience that.
Speaker 4: But and now, what about when you were a graduate
Speaker 4: student you started turning your eye toward intimacy and then
Speaker 4: at what point did the marriage lab here at UCLA
Speaker 4: exist or how did you get involved?
Speaker 5: Well, it's an interesting it's fortuitous. It's luck. My career
Speaker 5: is a cascade of lucky breaks that I didn't do
Speaker 5: much to create or that I just fell into, and
Speaker 5: I am grateful for every day. I'm a big believer
Speaker 5: in luck and circumstance, and as my scholarly interest in
Speaker 5: the effect of luck and circumstance on marriage, and I've
Speaker 5: definitely experienced that. So what happened is I came back
Speaker 5: to end Peplow after a week or so and I said,
Speaker 5: if I could be paid to think of something that
Speaker 5: I already think about, that'd be pretty great. If if
Speaker 5: my whole life, if my job could be to ponder
Speaker 5: systematically and professionally something that I would all ponder, that'd
Speaker 5: be awesome. And what I find myself thinking about all
Speaker 5: the time that I don't have to be encouraged to
Speaker 5: think about that I already think about is love? How
Speaker 5: do people fall in love? How do people fall out
Speaker 5: of love? And that latter question is really the one
Speaker 5: that really puzzles me, because nobody wants to fall out
Speaker 5: of love, so of course everyone wants to find love.
Speaker 5: No mystery there. I am someone who is looking for love,
Speaker 5: real love. The mystery is that once two people find that,
Speaker 5: how is it so fragile? That's the mystery, because two
Speaker 5: people who fall in love experience this is amazing, this
Speaker 5: is great. Do you want to keep feeling this way?
Speaker 5: I do. Let's both do that. And if you get married,
Speaker 5: for example, you don't just want that, you actually promise
Speaker 5: to do that, and you don't promise it privately, You
Speaker 5: promise it publicly.
Speaker 4: In front of everyone, in front of everybody. Free one
Speaker 4: you've ever met that means anything to you.
Speaker 5: Is now listening to you say this is it? Count
Speaker 5: me out of the dating market. I'm gonna be with
Speaker 5: this person here forever.
Speaker 3: Nowage marriage is what wins us to deva.
Speaker 5: It would be a terrible idea to change your mind.
Speaker 5: It'd be costly, financially, cousy, emotionally costly, and it's embarrassing.
Speaker 4: You're wearing the most expensive pants you have ever.
Speaker 5: Worn, very expensive pants, and people are giving you monogram
Speaker 5: stuff you can't return it.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 4: So, then what happens from a neurological perspective in terms
Speaker 4: of like do our dopamine levels go crazy and then
Speaker 4: they weigh naturally? How do you figure that out?
Speaker 5: You know, my interest is not in the neurological level.
Speaker 5: There are people who study the neurological level and they're saying,
Speaker 5: and you know, they're saying, here's what goes on rain
Speaker 5: regions activate. I'm interested in the phenomenological level of experience.
Speaker 5: So I'm interested in how do people experience a change
Speaker 5: that they don't want that happens anyway.
Speaker 4: In case you're like, shoot, what is the brain cocktail
Speaker 4: that's making me feel like a walking hard eyed emoji
Speaker 4: slash egg plant emoji slash peach emoji slash very creepy
Speaker 4: newish drooling face emoji which they shouldn't have greenlit. Why
Speaker 4: do they make that one? It's so gross? Well, neurobiologists
Speaker 4: at the Loyola Sexual Wellness Clinic say that dopamine, adrenaline,
Speaker 4: and norapenephrin increase when two people get really smitten with
Speaker 4: each other, and then our body Dopamine makes you feel euphoric,
Speaker 4: kind of like Tom Cruise jumping on a couch, while
Speaker 4: adrenaline and norapenephrin make your heart literally go pitter pat faster,
Speaker 4: and they focus your attention on this crush you have.
Speaker 4: So evidently love lowers your serotonin levels, which these researchers
Speaker 4: say is common in people with obsessed of compulsive disorders,
Speaker 4: which tracks if you've ever refreshed someone's Instagram like you're
Speaker 4: being paid to monitor them and said like why why
Speaker 4: why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?
Speaker 4: Why am I doing this? Stop doing this? So Doctor
Speaker 4: Bencarney also says that minds are very hard to change,
Speaker 4: and we've known this for like all of time, but
Speaker 4: in the nineteen fifties a psychologist named Leon Festinger studied
Speaker 4: this and dubbed it cognitive dissonance, which is that excruciating
Speaker 4: discomfort when you're holding two very conflicting thoughts. So Festinger
Speaker 4: and colleagues studied a cult that was started by a
Speaker 4: Midwestern housewife come doomsday prophet who kept promising all of
Speaker 4: her followers that spacemen were coming very soon any minute
Speaker 4: to take them all away, and her followers kept believing
Speaker 4: in her, even though like where are these spacemen? She
Speaker 4: was like, they're stuck in like so much space traffic. Anyway,
Speaker 4: this woman's name was Dorothy Martin, and I really wish
Speaker 4: that for branding purposes she just popped an extra a
Speaker 4: in that name just went for Dorothy Marsham. Can you
Speaker 4: imagine would have been so sick? Anyway, People never tend
Speaker 4: to change their minds, except anything about I guess love.
Speaker 5: About people's love relationships or let's say, their marriages, people
Speaker 5: do change.
Speaker 4: Their mind about their partner.
Speaker 5: About their partner, I said, I was going to love
Speaker 5: you forever. I thought I was going to love you forever.
Speaker 5: I thought this is the best relationship ever. I'm totally
Speaker 5: gonna never change. And then people do, even though it's costly,
Speaker 5: even though they don't want to, even though it's embarrassing.
Speaker 5: That's a real mystery, and people do change their minds
Speaker 5: all the time about their love relationships. I thought you
Speaker 5: were the one. I thought you were my soulmates. Surprise, surprise,
Speaker 5: I must have a different soulmate because of you, Ain't it.
Speaker 4: Do you even think, as a social psychologist that soulmates
Speaker 4: exist or is that a convenient thing that we apply
Speaker 4: to one person so that we don't think about the
Speaker 4: soulmate that might be on the next train car, even
Speaker 4: though we're married.
Speaker 5: I do not believe in that their soulmates. I believe
Speaker 5: that relationships are things that people are processes that people
Speaker 5: work at, and people can work hard to have a
Speaker 5: good relationship with a variety of different people, and those
Speaker 5: relationships will be different. So the good relationship you have
Speaker 5: with some person is different than the good relationship you
Speaker 5: might have with another person. Okay, there's some research on
Speaker 5: what is it? What are the impact on what's the
Speaker 5: impact on a relationship of thinking about soulmates? Of believing
Speaker 5: in soulmates?
Speaker 4: And it's not that great.
Speaker 5: For example, if you really believe in soulmates and then
Speaker 5: you and your partner, who you think is your soulmate
Speaker 5: are having a fight, it might lead you to say, uh, oh,
Speaker 5: maybe you're not my soulmate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and now what was your what was your PhD work?
Speaker 4: You're it toward? What was your dissertation about?
Speaker 5: So after I went back to enn Peplau and said,
Speaker 5: I think I want to study you love relationships, she said, oh,
Speaker 5: That's an interesting coincidence because there's this guy that was
Speaker 5: just hired here at UCLA named Thomas Bradbury. Young guy
Speaker 5: just was his first job, and he actually studies marriages.
Speaker 5: Tom Bradbury was studying newlyweds in the community and then
Speaker 5: following him over time to see in the first few years,
Speaker 5: who stayed nearly was are pretty happy, which one of
Speaker 5: them stay happy, which ones get less happy, which ones
Speaker 5: get divorced? And he was also videotaping them, so it
Speaker 5: wasn't just asking them questions, he was videotaping them and
Speaker 5: coding what he saw in the videotapes.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 5: I met him and said, hey, can I work with you?
Speaker 5: And he said sure. And that was twenty six years ago.
Speaker 5: And we're still working together because he's still in the
Speaker 5: faculty here, and we write books together, and we get
Speaker 5: grants together, and we are still working together.
Speaker 4: What's the secret to that healthy partnership?
Speaker 5: G It is probably the longest successful adult relationship I've had.
Speaker 5: And the secret is I think that I lucked out
Speaker 5: that Tom S. Bradbury happens to be a fantastic person.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess that's part of selection.
Speaker 5: It's totally selection. Yes, Actually, that's a very good point
Speaker 5: that one of the things that's coming out from the
Speaker 5: work that we've been doing the last few years is
Speaker 5: it really matters who you choose, because where your relationship
Speaker 5: begins says a lot about where it's going to go.
Speaker 5: If I do think that some people are less fortunate,
Speaker 5: and that the person that you meet when you're feeling
Speaker 5: ready to get married and the person you're like, oh,
Speaker 5: wait a minute, I'm ready to get married and you're
Speaker 5: here and available, and we get along well enough, and
Speaker 5: I think a lot of people get married that way,
Speaker 5: and you want to be lucky.
Speaker 4: So so the selection of partners sometimes is based on
Speaker 4: opportunity and not compatibility.
Speaker 5: So the only people you can possibly judge your compatibility
Speaker 5: with are the people that you meet, the people you
Speaker 5: have the opportunity to meet.
Speaker 4: So opportunity comes first and selection and compatibility.
Speaker 5: And I actually think that that we've as a culture
Speaker 5: emphasized selection as if it's a much more active process
Speaker 5: than it is.
Speaker 4: What is happening then when someone picks a partner, what
Speaker 4: is really going on socially emotionally? What is falling in love?
Speaker 4: What is that process?
Speaker 5: All right, let's talk about that because there's a lot
Speaker 5: of do's get into that, there's a lot of I
Speaker 5: think there's a lot of confusion about that process, even
Speaker 5: though people experience it. If you believe, for example, what
Speaker 5: dating sites tell you or what matching sites tell you,
Speaker 5: and then then you'd think that finding a partner is
Speaker 5: about measuring somebody and measuring their sort of qualities and
Speaker 5: finding someone whose qualities compatible with your own qualities.
Speaker 4: Okay, quick aside. I started wondering what, let's not say
Speaker 4: the weirdest or creepiest dating sites are, let's just say
Speaker 4: the most niche. I mean, sure, you've got your data
Speaker 4: golfer dot com. There's Glutenfree Singles dot com. But what
Speaker 4: if you only want to date someone with like a
Speaker 4: speak to the manager haircut up front, but a smoke
Speaker 4: and pony in the back. Well, you can head on
Speaker 4: over to Mulletpassions dot com. You can date a goth
Speaker 4: at alt scene dot com. There's Naturist Passions. They might
Speaker 4: have your future significant other who is currently nude but
Speaker 4: wearing sandals. There's also a site for horse lovers looking
Speaker 4: for a stable relationship, as endorsed by Oprah herself. So
Speaker 4: I knew from the time, I had the idea it
Speaker 4: would put people together who love horses, and it's a
Speaker 4: perfect map.
Speaker 1: Questionings dot com.
Speaker 4: Cat enthusiasts can cuddle up via personals dot com. Can
Speaker 4: you even Maybe you're looking for love but everyone around
Speaker 4: you is dead because you're a professional in the death industry, Well,
Speaker 4: don't let your heart grow cold. Just go meet someone
Speaker 4: new at deadmeat dot com who is alive. Oh, if
Speaker 4: you're sick of clowning around on Tinder because there aren't
Speaker 4: enough clowns on it, you can flop those big old
Speaker 4: feet over to clown dating dot com, whose website makes
Speaker 4: the resonant imperative quote everyone loves a clown. Let a
Speaker 4: clown love you. So go on, get your horn honked.
Speaker 5: It turns out that a lot of those assumptions are
Speaker 5: just false. Oh no, because so For example, one of
Speaker 5: the assumptions of those algorithms is that similarity is a
Speaker 5: good thing and it's easily measured. In fact, if you
Speaker 5: think about it just a little bit, you realize that
Speaker 5: similarity doesn't help us very much because people are so complicated.
Speaker 5: I can always find ways that I'm similar to somebody
Speaker 5: if I like that person, and I can find ways
Speaker 5: I'm dissimilar to somebody if I don't like that person.
Speaker 4: So we can find similarity where we want to find it. Essentially,
Speaker 4: similarities aren't what's at the heart of attraction and romance.
Speaker 5: So what is. But the best research says that romantic,
Speaker 5: sort of initial romantic chemistry comes from an interaction between
Speaker 5: two people that involves responsiveness that makes both people feel
Speaker 5: sort of understood and heard and excited. Oh but it
Speaker 5: is a behavior, it's a dance. So it's not that
Speaker 5: there's a kind of person in the world that always
Speaker 5: makes you feel excited. But there might be a sequence
Speaker 5: of behaviors that makes me feel good. And if you
Speaker 5: and I, or me and somebody, or you and somebody
Speaker 5: show up at the right context and have the right interaction,
Speaker 5: you might say, Hey, this is this interaction. It's making
Speaker 5: me feel interesting and excited and aroused. But if I
Speaker 5: had met you at a birthday party whereas kids were around,
Speaker 5: we wouldn't have had that interact and I wouldn't have
Speaker 5: had that feeling. Oh my god, you see the point.
Speaker 4: Yes, so it's really about kind of like a feedback loop.
Speaker 5: Oh yes, absolutely absolutely, and that that leads like the
Speaker 5: best dating advice nowadays, based on research, is don't worry
Speaker 5: about people's profiles. You know, find somebody that you think
Speaker 5: is cute enough, and go and interact with them as
Speaker 5: soon as possible, because the way you evaluate the way
Speaker 5: that people naturally evaluate romantic chemistry is through how an
Speaker 5: interaction makes them feel. We don't choose partners the way
Speaker 5: we choose furniture, okay, because furniture doesn't have to choose
Speaker 5: us back, that's true what partners do. So it has
Speaker 5: to be an interaction, a give and take, and that's
Speaker 5: actually where romantic chemistry emerges from. I said something, I told,
Speaker 5: I disclosed something. Oh you know, I came from La.
Speaker 5: Oh you come from La. And your enthusiasm or your
Speaker 5: lack of enthusiasm makes me feel a certain way about
Speaker 5: the fact I disclosed something. And maybe if you're enthusiastic
Speaker 5: in the right way, makes you feel good about the
Speaker 5: fact I shared something, it makes you want to share
Speaker 5: something else, or makes you want to And then if
Speaker 5: I go too long without asking you a question, you
Speaker 5: might say, huh, I was enthusiastic, but now I'm not
Speaker 5: so enthusiastic. But if I then ask you a question,
Speaker 5: and now you've shared something. Now suddenly we're building a
Speaker 5: little bit of the beginnings of intimacy because it feels
Speaker 5: good to share, and now we're doing the dance. But
Speaker 5: it can break down so many different ways.
Speaker 4: Well, is that what happens in marriages that are maybe
Speaker 4: starting to crumble is you're not getting the feedback loop
Speaker 4: that you expected to get. Maybe your partner seems disinterested
Speaker 4: or you're disinterested, so you're not giving back to them
Speaker 4: and they pick up on that. Is that kind of
Speaker 4: what happens.
Speaker 5: Okay, so that's so that's a great question. So we're
Speaker 5: talking about, you know, how does romantic interest emerge? And
Speaker 5: your question is is it the same process in reverse
Speaker 5: as romantic interest declines.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I don't mean to bomb you out. This
Speaker 4: just might be good to know for long term relationships.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I'm being a realist here.
Speaker 5: My sense is there's a lot going on as romantic
Speaker 5: interest declines. And here's one of the things. One of
Speaker 5: the things is that the same behaviors that can be
Speaker 5: exciting when they're new are not necessarily exciting when they're old. Okay,
Speaker 5: first kiss doesn't feel the same as the five hundredth kiss.
Speaker 5: If you're lucky enough to get to the five hundred. Right, So,
Speaker 5: if what you're in it for is the sense of
Speaker 5: escalating excitement, escalating excitement is likely to fade. Now, what
Speaker 5: happens in good marriages is two things. So let's talk
Speaker 5: first about not about merges, the climate mergeres last.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. Okay, Yes,
Speaker 4: let's look at the positive. How do we keep things cute?
Speaker 4: One thing that happens is people, good couples, happy couples,
Speaker 4: find ways to the excitement alive. They keep growing together,
Speaker 4: they keep exploring both each other and the world together,
Speaker 4: and that keeps they're always wait a minute, even though
Speaker 4: we've been together fifteen years, even though we've been together
Speaker 4: fifty years, we just still did something yesterday we never
Speaker 4: known before. So there's still something new. There's still something.
Speaker 5: New that's that's possible. But that takes effort, and it
Speaker 5: takes it takes you know, effort and opportunity, right, and
Speaker 5: like not if you're working very, very hard, if you're
Speaker 5: struggling financially, you don't have time to say, hey, let's
Speaker 5: go do something we've never done before.
Speaker 4: Right, let's go horseback roun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's so that'd be so fun. And you know,
Speaker 5: rich people do that, right, But people who are struggling
Speaker 5: can't do that. They have to you know, it's just
Speaker 5: just getting by is hard. But that means that opportunities
Speaker 5: for novelty is hard. So another thing that that successful
Speaker 5: couples do in the long term is they find other
Speaker 5: bases for their bond.
Speaker 4: The doc says that thinking someone is foxy is nice, but.
Speaker 5: That's the only thing people want from their companions. I
Speaker 5: also want someone who's dependable. I want someone who's reliable,
Speaker 5: someone who understands me and will support me when I'm sick,
Speaker 5: when I'm really in trouble, when it's middle of the
Speaker 5: night and our kids are throwing up because there's sick.
Speaker 5: I want to know that you're going to be there
Speaker 5: and can watch my back. So good marriages can both
Speaker 5: keep excitement alive that's totally possible, but also can find
Speaker 5: a broader base for why the relationship is around with
Speaker 5: the functions of relationship serves and is it.
Speaker 4: Good for partners to sit down and make lists of
Speaker 4: those interests or check in.
Speaker 5: It's great, but most people don't do that. Okay, most
Speaker 5: people don't do that for a couple of reasons, maybe
Speaker 5: a handful of reasons. One is, you know a lot
Speaker 5: of people think, oh, this is just should come naturally,
Speaker 5: we shouldn't have to talk about it, right, And I
Speaker 5: don't think that's true, but there it is in the
Speaker 5: culture that why should we have to talk about it?
Speaker 5: A good relationship just happen as opposed to a good relationship,
Speaker 5: Like so, if you believe in soulmates, you're like, well,
Speaker 5: if we're soulmates, why should we have to discuss it?
Speaker 5: My soul should just recognize your soul. But if relationships
Speaker 5: are an action a process that you have to contribute to,
Speaker 5: then you know, if you're a whole you're a whole
Speaker 5: different person. I need to understand who you are and
Speaker 5: what and that's gonna take work. It's gonna ta communication.
Speaker 5: Another reason people don't do it is it can be scary.
Speaker 5: I'm assuming that we agree about a lot of things.
Speaker 5: I don't necessarily want to know if we don't, right,
Speaker 5: because that would be a hard conversation. Why when is
Speaker 5: the right time to have a hard conversation?
Speaker 4: Never?
Speaker 5: Never, Like I'm not like, let's see, we could watch
Speaker 5: British Great British baking show tonight, or we're gonna have
Speaker 5: a really difficult possibly a difficult conversation. You know, I
Speaker 5: think Netflix is.
Speaker 1: Better slight, soggy books from there.
Speaker 4: There are so many people out there who think that
Speaker 4: you're just a witch who's read their read their minds.
Speaker 5: Like, wait a minute, you watch the Grape Bridge. Of course,
Speaker 5: the third reason is that lots of people don't have
Speaker 5: the time. Like the truth is that life is very
Speaker 5: hard and challenging for many many people that it's a
Speaker 5: privilege to have the time to look at your partner
Speaker 5: and say, hey, let's talk for a while. You That
Speaker 5: happens when your life is under control. Many people have
Speaker 5: multiple jobs, bills to pay, sick family, all sorts of
Speaker 5: stress in their lives that they're barely staying on top of.
Speaker 5: And now it's a lot to ask to say, Okay,
Speaker 5: by the way, put all that aside and have a
Speaker 5: heart to heart talk with your partner about their hopes
Speaker 5: and dreams. There's many people in the world who for
Speaker 5: whom that would be a luxury that they cannot afford.
Speaker 4: So, as Teagan and Sarah have asked, where does the
Speaker 4: love go? Ben says that day by day, other things
Speaker 4: just take priority, like work and paying bills and taking
Speaker 4: care of the kids. And then at the bottom, at
Speaker 4: the dusty end of the to do list is connect
Speaker 4: on a meaning full level with your life partner.
Speaker 5: So my memories of the excitement of the things that
Speaker 5: kept us together are fewer and farther between. I still
Speaker 5: remember them, but I'm like, wow, it's actually been a
Speaker 5: while since we've been intimate, since we've laughed or told
Speaker 5: a joke because life has been hard for us, or
Speaker 5: we've done other things. And then if that's true, if
Speaker 5: our connection is weaker, then when something's hard or we
Speaker 5: need disagree, and it's harder to have those disagreements, my
Speaker 5: empathy for you is weaker. If I'm stressed, I'm paying
Speaker 5: more attention to my own needs. It's harder for me
Speaker 5: when i'm stressed to get out of my own head
Speaker 5: into your head. And all these factors combined, and so
Speaker 5: now we're busy, I'm less empathetic. I'm very aware of
Speaker 5: my own unmet needs. I can't read your mind, and
Speaker 5: I'm not trying to read your mind, so I don't
Speaker 5: know what your unmet needs are. It's easy to say
Speaker 5: if my own needs. But if my needs are unmet,
Speaker 5: whose fault is it? It's not my fault. I know
Speaker 5: I'm working hard. I don't know what's in your head,
Speaker 5: but I can tell you're right here. It must be
Speaker 5: your fault. So now I'm mad at you. And now
Speaker 5: the next time we disagree, well, I get madder. And
Speaker 5: instead of each interaction building us up, making us more connected,
Speaker 5: each interaction breaks us down, makes us feel a little
Speaker 5: bit less connected. And unless we make explicit efforts to
Speaker 5: try to restore that connection, unless we're able to make
Speaker 5: those efforts again, the world has to be supporting us.
Speaker 5: We might come to a point where you know, I
Speaker 5: don't feel what I felt, and I don't and you
Speaker 5: don't feel what you felt, and we don't feel like
Speaker 5: we can connect even if we wanted to, and so
Speaker 5: now we feel helpless. And then eventually the costs of
Speaker 5: staying in the relationship, the emotional costs outweigh the cost
Speaker 5: of leaving, And though for different people, that calculus is different.
Speaker 5: Some people will stay in a bad relationship for a
Speaker 5: long time because they haven't no where to go, or
Speaker 5: because they have kids, or they have financial connections, or
Speaker 5: they feel like I'll never find another partner, so I'd better.
Speaker 5: I'd rather stay with this partner, even though I'm not
Speaker 5: very happy. It takes two people to get together, only
Speaker 5: takes one person to break up.
Speaker 4: Oh that's true, And where is the line there? Because
Speaker 4: I think everyone probably thinks no relationship is perfect. True,
Speaker 4: So everyone probably thinks that about their own relationship.
Speaker 5: Right, I would hope, So I think that is true. Actually, people,
Speaker 5: you can evaluate a relationship on two levels. And what
Speaker 5: we find is that people like newlyweds, if you ask
Speaker 5: them very specific questions about their partner, even newlyweds are
Speaker 5: willing to say, well, my partner's good at some things,
Speaker 5: not so good at others. Knowing somebody means knowing that
Speaker 5: person's strengths and their limitations.
Speaker 4: Ah, that old adage, the advice handed down countless generations.
Speaker 4: To truly love someone is to know in what ways
Speaker 4: they are useless pains in the ass.
Speaker 5: So most people will say, oh, yeah, yeah, ourlish isn't perfect,
Speaker 5: but it's a great relationship. I love the imperfections of
Speaker 5: this really relationship.
Speaker 4: Like four and a half stars on YELP, maybe.
Speaker 5: Exactly, or something like I wouldn't want you know, you know, very,
Speaker 5: very smart couple. My wife is a couple's therapists and.
Speaker 4: She Oh my god, your wife is a couple's therapist
Speaker 4: and you're a marriage researcher.
Speaker 5: No, we have some interesting conversations.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, you guys are never getting divorced.
Speaker 5: I hope that's true. I think that's true. I think
Speaker 5: that's true. I think that it's a great relationship. And
Speaker 5: you know, it took a long time for us to
Speaker 5: get to this point, but we have good conversations. And
Speaker 5: one of the things that that she says is, you know,
Speaker 5: when you commit long term to a partner, you're committing
Speaker 5: to a set of strengths and limitations. And so if
Speaker 5: we get back to the idea that the extend that
Speaker 5: you have a choice and that you make choices, one
Speaker 5: of the things to think about is can I live
Speaker 5: with these limitations right forever? Don't forget You're here for
Speaker 5: another sort of insight. I think mostly from talking to
Speaker 5: my wife, not from research, which is I use okay.
Speaker 5: I used to think that the purpose of communicating in
Speaker 5: relationships was to solve problems, to solve disagreements. I now
Speaker 5: think that disagreements do not get solved. Oh they just
Speaker 5: get managed.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, but what in a scientific matrimoniological sense does
Speaker 4: that mean?
Speaker 5: The purpose isn't that I'm never going to convince you
Speaker 5: or anyone else of anything. So once you decide okay,
Speaker 5: convincing another person is just off the table, then it's
Speaker 5: just a matter of saying, how will we deal with
Speaker 5: our disagreement? How will we manage Yes, we're going to
Speaker 5: always disagree about this, and how we're going to manage that.
Speaker 5: Maybe we'll take turns. Maybe we'll compromise on this issue
Speaker 5: in my way, but we'll compriise on in this other
Speaker 5: issue in your way. We hope it balances out. But
Speaker 5: once you realize, I think it takes a lot of
Speaker 5: pressure off a relationships to say, oh, we are not
Speaker 5: in the convincing business. Oh that's we are not in
Speaker 5: the convincing business. We are not in the convincing business.
Speaker 5: We are not in the resolving problems business. Like, oh,
Speaker 5: this is gonna go away and they will never talk
Speaker 5: about this again. No, no, no, this is the thing we
Speaker 5: talk about. That's what kind of relationship this is. This
Speaker 5: is the relationship where this is our issue. If I'd
Speaker 5: been another relationship, we'd have a different issue, but this
Speaker 5: is our issue. And as you think about the future,
Speaker 5: you think, can I live with this because we're gonna
Speaker 5: be talking about this forever or whatever? I love, I
Speaker 5: can this is a good relation, like this is. I'm
Speaker 5: very happy with this set of limitations and strength.
Speaker 4: But I feel like a lot of people find that
Speaker 4: their marital discord is financially based, or at least that's
Speaker 4: what I hear from people. I'm not married. But do
Speaker 4: you find that in your research or do you find
Speaker 4: that the finances are really just kind of like a
Speaker 4: red herring for other lifestyle choices people make.
Speaker 5: There's two ways to answer that. I do a lot
Speaker 5: of research on the effect of financial circumstances on marriage,
Speaker 5: and the effects are enormous, enormous. We live in a
Speaker 5: country where there's a great deal of income inequality that
Speaker 5: has been increasing over over my adult life lifetime. What
Speaker 5: we've shown in multiple studies is that where you are
Speaker 5: in the socio economic ladder greatly affects the nature of
Speaker 5: your intimacy.
Speaker 4: What shit also no surprise.
Speaker 5: Like, in very specific kind of private ways, the way
Speaker 5: people interact with their partners very privately is affected by
Speaker 5: where they are socioeconomically, so that you know, people who
Speaker 5: are affluent, who have good jobs and good educations, they
Speaker 5: can evaluate their relationships in a different way that people
Speaker 5: who are financially struggling and disadvantaged and under resourced can
Speaker 5: evaluate their relationships in different ways. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 5: it's fundamental to specifically talk about finances, like how are
Speaker 5: we going to spend money, because even couples that are
Speaker 5: financially struggling, if you're financially struggling, every disagreement is more
Speaker 5: of a struggle. And if you're affluent, you might talk
Speaker 5: about finances, but you might also disagree about. Whatever you
Speaker 5: disagree about is going to be what you disagree about it.
Speaker 5: I would say that the context of having or not
Speaker 5: having adequate resources in your life is fundamental. It changes
Speaker 5: the kind of time you have together, It changes what
Speaker 5: you do with the time you have together, and it
Speaker 5: changes the sort of personal resources you have to do
Speaker 5: the work of empathy and the work of understanding and
Speaker 5: compromise everything, all the work that we would call intimate work,
Speaker 5: trying to get outside your own head and catch capture
Speaker 5: partner's perspective, deciding when to compromise and when not to compromise.
Speaker 5: All that work is harder if you're financially stripped, which
Speaker 5: is why divorce rates are much higher in low income
Speaker 5: communities than an upper income community.
Speaker 4: Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: Oh, it's a huge effect.
Speaker 4: So one of Ben's studies, titled communication that is maladaptive
Speaker 4: for middle class couples is adaptive for socioeconomically disadvantaged couples
Speaker 4: showed that depending on where you are socioeconomically, different intimate
Speaker 4: behaviors produced negative or positive results. So middle class couples
Speaker 4: who withdrew in conflict had worse conflicts later, while socioeconomically
Speaker 4: disadvantaged couples who withdrew found more comfort in that as
Speaker 4: like a de escalation technique. Now, as for divorce stats,
Speaker 4: they are definitely higher in lower income families, and some
Speaker 4: folks would try to say that must be because those
Speaker 4: demographics don't value marriage as much, and that is a
Speaker 4: crock of horseshit. So low income and high income people
Speaker 4: value marriage similarly. But being broke and working several jobs
Speaker 4: and being stressed and not being privileged is just really
Speaker 4: hard on people.
Speaker 5: So what's striking is that poor communities have lower rates
Speaker 5: of marriage when they do married, they're higher rates of divorce.
Speaker 5: So intimacy is challenged by challenging circumstances, right, and intimacy
Speaker 5: is encouraged by good circumstances, which is why people fall
Speaker 5: in love on cruise ships because it's easy to have
Speaker 5: a relationship on a cruise ship. It's much easier to
Speaker 5: feel romantic when someone's giving you a cocktail that has
Speaker 5: an umbrella in it.
Speaker 4: Well, what about the fact that, or at least the
Speaker 4: study I read that the more expensive a wedding is,
Speaker 4: the more likely a couple is to get a divorce. Yeah,
Speaker 4: is that filim flam so side note. This news broke
Speaker 4: in twenty fourteen with a published paper entitled quote A
Speaker 4: Diamond Is Forever and Other fairy Tales the relationship between
Speaker 4: wedding expenses and marriage duration. So researchers studied three thousand
Speaker 4: couples in the US and they found that marriage duration
Speaker 4: is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and
Speaker 4: the wedding ceremony. So spending between two and four grand
Speaker 4: on the engagement ring is associated with one point three
Speaker 4: times greater hazard of divorce. Same goes for the ceremony.
Speaker 4: Weddings that costs less than one thousand dollars were significantly
Speaker 4: less likely to end in divorce than nuptials costing twenty
Speaker 4: grand and up now twenty thousand dollars. Remember from the
Speaker 4: paleontology episode could fund two dinosaur diggs. I'm just saying
Speaker 4: this two dinosaurs. Now, don't tell this to a guy
Speaker 4: named said gustarev, son of a Russian oligarch who married
Speaker 4: his twenty year old sweetheart Hadya Zakhova in a celebration
Speaker 4: that cost one billion, yes with a B dollars in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen. So instead of having like your college roommate
Speaker 4: make a Spotify playlist, their reception entertainment included Jennifer Lopez
Speaker 4: and Sting, which was definitely selected by their parents. I mean,
Speaker 4: come on. Also Enrique Iglesias, who, according to simplerry Instagram photos,
Speaker 4: was wearing jeans and a wallet chain to a billion
Speaker 4: dollar wedding. Enrique egregious also ps I googled how to
Speaker 4: even get married for under one thousand dollars though, and
Speaker 4: mostly just came up with articles that said literally like
Speaker 4: take the bus to the courthouse, dummy, or a lopen
Speaker 4: secret like a celebrity for whom money is no object,
Speaker 4: or get married in the backyard and have your cousins
Speaker 4: bring a salad. So it's starting things off without a
Speaker 4: lot of money, stress and debt a good strategy for
Speaker 4: staying married.
Speaker 5: It doesn't feel fundamental to me. I haven't gone over
Speaker 5: those data, but it's unlikely whatever's going on there. It's
Speaker 5: not about spending money on a wedding. It's about other things, right,
Speaker 5: So you know, maybe if you have a lot of
Speaker 5: money spent in a wedding, then you also have a
Speaker 5: lot of financial independence. And people who have financially independent
Speaker 5: are able to leave their marriages when they got should
Speaker 5: they go back? Nobody's arguing that, uh oh, don't spend
Speaker 5: a lot of money on your wedding because that's going
Speaker 5: to break up your marriage.
Speaker 4: That's unlikely, and our marriage rates going up? Are divorce
Speaker 4: rates going up? What's happening now in the year that
Speaker 4: we're in twenty.
Speaker 5: Nineteen and the year that we're in twenty nineteen. Here's
Speaker 5: the trend. The trends are very different for college educated
Speaker 5: and non college educated people. So if you look at
Speaker 5: the national trend, it would be misleading because there's two
Speaker 5: totally different trends. Happening. College educated people are marrying at
Speaker 5: high rates. They're delaying marriage, so they're marrying later. And
Speaker 5: that has to do with people postponing child bearing and
Speaker 5: family formation in order to get their education and their
Speaker 5: careers on track. And the evidence of this is pretty clear.
Speaker 5: So still high rates of marriage, relatively low rates of divorce,
Speaker 5: even declining rates of divorce, but it's all happening later.
Speaker 5: So people who went to college or saying, hey, I
Speaker 5: have men and women are doing this. I have a
Speaker 5: good education. That means I can setup myself up for
Speaker 5: a good career. I know that if I can get
Speaker 5: that career up and running, it's going to have benefits
Speaker 5: for my family. So I'm going to get that career
Speaker 5: up and running. And then once I have enough money
Speaker 5: and I have you know, my career is where I
Speaker 5: want it to be, then it's time to settle down.
Speaker 5: That's what the college educated people are doing. Non college
Speaker 5: educated people are doing something totally different. They're less likely
Speaker 5: to marry at all. They when they do marry, they
Speaker 5: marry earlier. Oh, they have kids prior to marriage and
Speaker 5: high rates, and they have very high rates of divorce
Speaker 5: and repartnering and sort of what's called sort of marital churning,
Speaker 5: which is multiple partners, multiple long term partners. A totally
Speaker 5: different thing is happening there, and why because people who
Speaker 5: didn't go to college they have less reason to invest
Speaker 5: in education and employment because their opportunities are much more constrained.
Speaker 5: So like, well, why should I postpone fertility? What am
Speaker 5: I waiting for?
Speaker 4: Am I?
Speaker 5: Why should I postpone fair parenthood? So they're much more
Speaker 5: likely to have kids early. But having kids early and
Speaker 5: marrying early is associated with higher rates of divorce.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, know that, and getting married early and having
Speaker 4: kids early, I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: It's true. It's very strong, very these are sort of
Speaker 5: big effects. It's not psychological effects, sociological that people who
Speaker 5: marry younger. As you can imagine, if you marry in
Speaker 5: your very early twenties, I mean I was a puppy,
Speaker 5: when I was.
Speaker 3: A garbage fire, I whatever. People are still figuring things out.
Speaker 3: So if you get married at that age, there's still
Speaker 3: a lot of change happening that might that your relationship
Speaker 3: might not survive.
Speaker 5: People who marry later are more stable, their personalities are
Speaker 5: more stable, their careers are more stable. So the person
Speaker 5: that they meet at that later point, is the relationships
Speaker 5: are less likely be buffeted by significant change.
Speaker 4: And now, what about the difference between getting married versus
Speaker 4: just long term partnership. What happens in the brain Once
Speaker 4: there's a certificate in a ring and pictures and a
Speaker 4: photo album and a registry. What happens to people's relationships?
Speaker 5: Okay, so I think that there's a lot of continuity.
Speaker 5: So I personally, again, as I said from the very beginning,
Speaker 5: I care about intimacy, and I think that people can
Speaker 5: have intimacy that feels the same. And if we define
Speaker 5: it as I'm committed to somebody, I support that person,
Speaker 5: I care about that person, and that can happen inside
Speaker 5: or outside of marriage. So what does marriage do? What
Speaker 5: does a marriage do to change intimacy? Mostly it changes
Speaker 5: how you as a couple are treated by the world
Speaker 5: around you.
Speaker 4: This revelation is something that even the most well meaning
Speaker 4: hetero couples likely take for granted all the time, just
Speaker 4: how important outside support is. And it applies to married
Speaker 4: and non married couples as well.
Speaker 5: So if you present as we're partnered, but we're not married,
Speaker 5: then the world says, oh well, then you're not participating
Speaker 5: in an institution, and it's hard for us to know
Speaker 5: what to do with you at the hospital when you're
Speaker 5: visiting your sick partner. Legally, what is your responsibility the
Speaker 5: world that is structured in a way that privileges marriages
Speaker 5: and people know this. Also, it's harder to break up
Speaker 5: a marriage than to break up intimate partnership.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can walk away from intimate partnership, but a
Speaker 5: marriage you've got to fill out paperwork. And yeah, it's
Speaker 5: an extremely expensive and unplaced process. Yeah, from every perspective,
Speaker 5: it sucks afforded if you can. So what does it
Speaker 5: do to get married, Well, one thing it does is
Speaker 5: it says it's claires to the world. We want to
Speaker 5: be treated as a couple, as a legal unit, as
Speaker 5: a social unit. Also, from the couple's perspective, if I
Speaker 5: get married, I'm saying I want it to be harder
Speaker 5: to leave. Yeah, I want it to be harder to leave,
Speaker 5: which says something about your level of commitment, like, I'm
Speaker 5: more motivated to work through it because uh, divorce sucks exactly,
Speaker 5: Whereas my motive to work through the hard parts that
Speaker 5: come up in relationships might be a little weaker, not necessarily,
Speaker 5: but but it might be a little weaker on average
Speaker 5: for people who are not participating in the legal institution.
Speaker 5: So the process of what does it mean to connect
Speaker 5: to somebody, to understand somebody, that's the same between any
Speaker 5: in any intimacy, but the institutional context makes a difference,
Speaker 5: makes certain behaviors harder and certain behaviors easier.
Speaker 4: And how have you seen in your research, because you've
Speaker 4: been researching this for twenty years, but same sex marriage
Speaker 4: hasn't been legal the entire time, So in the LGBTQ community,
Speaker 4: how how have you seen changes sociologically?
Speaker 5: Well, I wish I knew more about that. When I
Speaker 5: started studying intimacy and marriage, same sex marriage was not
Speaker 5: legal anywhere in the United States, which is that crazy?
Speaker 5: Which is crazy, But that all happened in my lifetime,
Speaker 5: which is terrific and a welcome development. One of the
Speaker 5: interesting things about the rapid change and rapid acceptance legal
Speaker 5: acceptance of same sex marriage is that lots of couples,
Speaker 5: same sex couples who were together for a long time,
Speaker 5: who never had the option of getting married, suddenly had
Speaker 5: the option of getting married. And so there was an
Speaker 5: interesting process which is if we've already been together twenty years.
Speaker 5: I knew I was going to be with you forever,
Speaker 5: but I didn't marriage wasn't on the table. Now that
Speaker 5: marriage is on the table, do we do it or
Speaker 5: do we not do it? And there's a study that
Speaker 5: is left to be done. There's a study that needs
Speaker 5: to be done there about how that decision is made. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I haven't gathered that data.
Speaker 4: Ben does say that other countries have gathered data on this,
Speaker 4: and overall, same sex marriages are much less likely to
Speaker 4: end in divorce than opposite sex marriages, and in Belgium
Speaker 4: between two thousand and four and two thousand and nine,
Speaker 4: the average annual divorce rate for same sex marriages was
Speaker 4: less than two percent and the total rate of divorce
Speaker 4: was eleven percent. Now, in Norway and Sweden, the same
Speaker 4: sex marriage divorce rates are fifty percent lower than opposite
Speaker 4: sex marriages, but among those lesbian couples do divorce more
Speaker 4: than same sex marriage among men. Researchers find that women
Speaker 4: across all types of marriages tend to be the ones
Speaker 4: to initiate splits because their needs typically aren't being met.
Speaker 4: So in the US, over two thirds of all divorces
Speaker 4: in all couples are initiated by wives because I think
Speaker 4: women are more socialized to pay attention to their relationships
Speaker 4: and are more financially dependent on a partnership, so being
Speaker 4: in a bad marriage has greater emotional consequences for women essentially. Also,
Speaker 4: if you're wondering where the data is, the twenty twenty
Speaker 4: senses will a long last have a space for same
Speaker 4: sex couples to mark for marriages, which is a tiny victory,
Speaker 4: especially in light of the current US administration trying to
Speaker 4: add in a question about citizenship while leaving out questions
Speaker 4: about sexual orientation and gender identity, which leaves a lot
Speaker 4: of LGPTQ people, especially the unmarried folks, unrepresented and underfunded,
Speaker 4: essentially invisible, which sucks and needs fighting. Speaking of fighting,
Speaker 4: but in a less valiant sense, I also asked him
Speaker 4: about what happens when couples, any couples get back together
Speaker 4: and break up and back and forth, back and forth,
Speaker 4: kind of like a Richard Burton Elizabeth Taylor married and
Speaker 4: divorced situation. Elon Musk married actress Tallulailey twice, divorced her twice. Also,
Speaker 4: so as a person who has gotten back together with
Speaker 4: my exes. I asked him for selfish reasons. Ben said
Speaker 4: that beyond the obvious reasons of absence making the heart
Speaker 4: grow fonder and forgetting how boring or annoying someone is
Speaker 4: when they're not around to bore or annoy you, there
Speaker 4: are some other factors at play when you break up
Speaker 4: and get back together with someone.
Speaker 5: Another explanation is there's certain people who between themselves are
Speaker 5: managing are struggling to balance closeness versus independence. So they're
Speaker 5: people who struggle. There's another theory called attachment theory, the
Speaker 5: idea that different people have different comfort levels with closeness
Speaker 5: and independence. Some people want really a lot of closeness.
Speaker 5: Some people really aren't comfortable with being too close and
Speaker 5: too dependent on another person, really value their independence, and
Speaker 5: so there are some people who, in their struggle to
Speaker 5: balance that, find themselves drawn to a person, but they
Speaker 5: don't want to be too close, so they push away,
Speaker 5: but they don't want to be totally close. They come
Speaker 5: back together, and those people often dance around each other
Speaker 5: for a long time trying to form that balance.
Speaker 4: How important is human and laughter in easing conflict, in
Speaker 4: establishing those bonds and that feedback.
Speaker 5: It's really important. Actually, we've done some of our research
Speaker 5: has touched on that. And what we did was in
Speaker 5: one of our studies is videotape newlyweds talking about problems,
Speaker 5: and you can call these tapes. You can watch the
Speaker 5: tapes and actually count how many positive behaviors and how
Speaker 5: many negative behaviors, And you can even say how many
Speaker 5: positives or verbal behaviors and how and you can also
Speaker 5: code the sort of nonverbal behaviors the emotional expressions. But
Speaker 5: generally people who exchange negative behaviors anger, blaming, in celts, well,
Speaker 5: that's going to be a bad thing. But what we
Speaker 5: found was that if those negative behaviors happened in the
Speaker 5: same interaction where people are being positive as well, and
Speaker 5: most of the positivity we see as humor and affection,
Speaker 5: then it didn't matter what kind of the negative behaviors
Speaker 5: had much less of an effect. So and why here's why.
Speaker 5: If we're disagreeing and I'm mad at you, I'm super mad,
Speaker 5: but at the same time that we're having this mad disagreement,
Speaker 5: I'm definitely angry. I can also throw in a little
Speaker 5: joke or a little affection. What's the message? The message
Speaker 5: is the fact that we're mad doesn't mean I don't
Speaker 5: still like you. Oh, But that's the point, is that
Speaker 5: that's an incredible important message, which is you've hurt me,
Speaker 5: you've disappointed me, but I still obviously we're still connected
Speaker 5: and I'm and the positivity is a reminder of that connection.
Speaker 5: So I think humor can serve an incredibly important function.
Speaker 5: And you know, positivity can be especially important if you
Speaker 5: convenge to find it where it's most needed, which is
Speaker 5: in the context of a disagreement, being able to say, yes,
Speaker 5: we're disagreeing and I don't want to let this go,
Speaker 5: but I'm keeping in perspective like, but still, I think
Speaker 5: you're cute, and I think that this is fine, and
Speaker 5: I you know, obviously we're gonna be dealing with this
Speaker 5: forever because I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, that can be
Speaker 5: a very powerful message, is a way of reassuring your partner,
Speaker 5: even in the midst of the hard part. So again,
Speaker 5: I think it's complicated, but that humor is potentially an
Speaker 5: incredibly powerful tool, along with affection, that can help people
Speaker 5: through the rockiest parts of relationships.
Speaker 4: I bet my parents have been married for forty nine
Speaker 4: and a half years.
Speaker 5: That's incredible, I know.
Speaker 4: And they're still there. I hear them yucking it up,
Speaker 4: laughing to themselves, joking with each other.
Speaker 5: That's amazing, I know.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, and they'll go to bed and then
Speaker 4: I'll hear just giggling, laughing about what. You know.
Speaker 5: The other thing is think about what a joke. A
Speaker 5: joke is something that surprises you, like a good joke
Speaker 5: is something that is novelty. So what they're doing is
Speaker 5: they're surprising each other, right, They're still telling you that,
Speaker 5: like if I can make each other laugh, they're saying, oh,
Speaker 5: it tickles me because you're telling me something I didn't know.
Speaker 5: So they're still finding new things. And a half years later,
Speaker 5: I know. That's amazing. They're amazing. I know, bottle it up,
Speaker 5: sell it.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 4: Well, the reason why they got married is my mom
Speaker 4: just thought my dad was hot and then it turned
Speaker 4: out they were both good people.
Speaker 5: Okay, so they're lucky too.
Speaker 4: I know, they got engaged after a month.
Speaker 1: What am I.
Speaker 4: Supposed to do with that?
Speaker 5: It's well, be lucky, I mean, and try to be lucky.
Speaker 5: And of course you can't try to be lucky, so
Speaker 5: you do what you can.
Speaker 4: Just appreciate when you are. I guess, but I.
Speaker 5: Think the story you know. So if you ask you,
Speaker 5: there's a lots of research asking long term married couples
Speaker 5: what's the secret to your success? And I think you know,
Speaker 5: people will say long term couples will say sense of humor.
Speaker 5: We worked really hard at it. We just decided we're
Speaker 5: going to be together, and we were committed and we
Speaker 5: would never let anything break us up. And that's all true.
Speaker 5: It's all good, but it's hard to recognize, is how
Speaker 5: lucky the long term couples are. I really try to
Speaker 5: not say, well, it's just it's all hard work, because
Speaker 5: the implication then is and if your relationship went bad,
Speaker 5: you didn't work hard enough. Yeah, or maybe you're just
Speaker 5: too stupid. You just didn't know how to have a
Speaker 5: better relationship. Believe me, if if it's all about knowing
Speaker 5: what to do, relationship scientists would all have perfect relationships, right,
Speaker 5: And I know a lot of relationship scientists. My best
Speaker 5: friends are relationship scientists, and we don't always have perfect
Speaker 5: relationships because it's not only about knowing so i'd be
Speaker 5: able to it's not enough to read the book. And
Speaker 5: so it says here I should tell a joke. It's
Speaker 5: about being able to actually find that joke in the moment,
Speaker 5: about having problems that are that you can joke about,
Speaker 5: and everyone's lucky.
Speaker 4: Can I ask you questions from listeners? Okay, oh my gosh, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna run through is it because I know that
Speaker 4: you're busy.
Speaker 5: Go for it. Lightning round?
Speaker 4: Okay, lightning round you ready?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Okay? Before this lightning round with listener questions from Patreon
Speaker 4: quick break to chat about ologies sponsors, so you may
Speaker 4: hear a few phone calls in which I ring up
Speaker 4: a patron one on one to tell them about the amazing,
Speaker 4: handpicked and word approved sponsor of the show. Also, please
Speaker 4: know that a portion of the proceeds from ads goes
Speaker 4: to a cause of the ologists choosing. And I'm going
Speaker 4: to tell you about this week's in the show outro
Speaker 4: so you have more context after the interview because it
Speaker 4: doesn't matter this week, So I encourage you to listen
Speaker 4: to the whole episode, including the outro. It's really important stuff. Okay.
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Speaker 4: Now onto your matrimoniological questions. These are from patrons. Okay, Oh,
Speaker 4: so many great questions, and I done some of them. Okay.
Speaker 4: Savannah Martin Collins and Sonya Karpolovic and some other people
Speaker 4: wanted to know what's up with common law marriages? Do
Speaker 4: you see any differences between people who are common law
Speaker 4: and people who aren't.
Speaker 5: Not a lot of great research on that, okay, But
Speaker 5: let's speculate for a second. What is a common law marriage?
Speaker 5: It's a marriage that is recognized as a legal partnership
Speaker 5: even though they've not because of the length of time
Speaker 5: people have been together. Not every state recognizes common law marriages.
Speaker 5: I think California, where we're currently having this conversation, doesn't,
Speaker 5: but I could be wrong about that. I could be
Speaker 5: wrong about that.
Speaker 4: Now, according to legal Zoom, who I imagine is just
Speaker 4: helping folks navigate through Splitsville, most states do not recognize
Speaker 4: common law marriages. This was news to me. So the
Speaker 4: states that right now do recognize common law marriages include,
Speaker 4: and I encourage you to do just a tiny imperceptible
Speaker 4: butt dance if you feel excited to hear your state
Speaker 4: called ready, Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana,
Speaker 4: New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas,
Speaker 4: and Utah buzzkill. Same sex relationships are never recognized as
Speaker 4: common law. Also, there's no such thing as a common
Speaker 4: law divorce, so you need not below in the public square.
Speaker 4: Thou hast been ousted from my heart. The law doesn't care.
Speaker 4: Just pack up and go, Just divvy up. The blu
Speaker 4: rays crying to some nachos, spend what you would have
Speaker 4: spent on legal fees on a solo trip to cantcuon
Speaker 4: don't get beach braids.
Speaker 5: We were talking about this essentially, is that the intimacy
Speaker 5: is the same two people who've never had a wedding
Speaker 5: ceremony but decided, uh, you're my person and I'm just
Speaker 5: not going anywhere. The challenges of how we're going to
Speaker 5: understand each other, how were we going to address our disagreements,
Speaker 5: how we're going to compromise the same. Intimacy is the same,
Speaker 5: but the world the support you get is probably less
Speaker 5: because if you're not wearing a ring, if you don't
Speaker 5: if you haven't been saying to the world my wife,
Speaker 5: my husband, then the world doesn't treat you as a
Speaker 5: social unit or legal unit, which means you don't have
Speaker 5: that kind of support. So that's going to be I
Speaker 5: think a challenge for the challenges come from outside, and
Speaker 5: that might and they might be more challenging for common
Speaker 5: law marriages than for legal and I don't know what
Speaker 5: the alternative phrase is. Again, the challenges of intimacy are
Speaker 5: the same, but you're in a slightly different circumstance because
Speaker 5: people don't recognize the institution you're participating in.
Speaker 4: That makes sense. And on the topic of intimacy, many
Speaker 4: people have this question. Carla Kennedy Wendy Fick said, any
Speaker 4: hell full tips for salvaging sexual intimacy if one partner
Speaker 4: isn't interested anymore. Wendy asked what typically happens to the
Speaker 4: physical part of a relationship? Do some relationships become platonic?
Speaker 5: Well, clearly some do, because the answer to the question
Speaker 5: does this ever happen is always yes, yes, but and
Speaker 5: if two people are okay with that, then no problem.
Speaker 5: But if two people aren't okay with that, then a
Speaker 5: big problem.
Speaker 1: So then.
Speaker 5: The first step, it seems to me, is to figure
Speaker 5: out is to communicate, you know, is to talk. There's
Speaker 5: a lot of research that shows that sexual connection is
Speaker 5: a subset of emotional connection, and so developing an emotional
Speaker 5: connection is one really important way to develop us to
Speaker 5: revive a sexual connection, to say, hey, what's going on?
Speaker 5: Are we emotionally connected? There's research that shows that you
Speaker 5: knoweople who can people communicate more effectively have more sex.
Speaker 5: So if one partner is unsatisfied with the amount of
Speaker 5: sex that they're having or the quality of their sex life.
Speaker 5: Communication is going to be the first step. The other
Speaker 5: thing that comes up with sexual connection is the role
Speaker 5: of novelty and self and expansion. There's a theorist, a
Speaker 5: guy named Arthur Aaron, social psychologist, who has a theory
Speaker 5: called self expansion theory. Okay, self expansion theory is the
Speaker 5: idea that the thrill of relationships comes from the thrill
Speaker 5: of becoming more than we are. That that's a fundamental motivation,
Speaker 5: says doctor Aaron. And when I get to know somebody
Speaker 5: else and we become a unit, well I used to
Speaker 5: be me, Now I'm us. So now I'm much I'm
Speaker 5: more than I was, and that's thrilling. But once I
Speaker 5: become us, if we don't continue to grow, well then
Speaker 5: we're not expanding anymore. I've expanded to I'm definitely part
Speaker 5: of us, but we're just who we've always been and
Speaker 5: that can get boring. So the way to deal with
Speaker 5: that is what can we how can we become more?
Speaker 5: What can we do that's new, what can we do
Speaker 5: that's different? And that often is a place where sexual
Speaker 5: excitement comes from too, Like, wow, I see you in
Speaker 5: a new light because we've done something new. That we
Speaker 5: haven't done before, even if it's not something necessarily something
Speaker 5: sexual that we've that we haven't done before. So I've
Speaker 5: seening opportunities for growth, seeing opportunities for connection. That's a
Speaker 5: good way talking directly. The other thing that often gets
Speaker 5: in the way of sex is people are tired, people
Speaker 5: are stressed. And if I say, hey, how come we're
Speaker 5: not having enough sex and I'm not acknowledging what the
Speaker 5: obstacles that are that are getting in the way for you, well,
Speaker 5: and that's not going to be a great route because
Speaker 5: now I'm making another demand. It's actually now another demand.
Speaker 5: So sometimes you have to take a step back and say, hey,
Speaker 5: what's going on with my partner? And sometimes sex is,
Speaker 5: you know, really a side issue to other issues. People
Speaker 5: are unhappy or tired or overburdened, and those are the
Speaker 5: obstacles that have to be addressed first before we can deal.
Speaker 4: With sex, which dovetails to a great question from Jessica Chamberlain,
Speaker 4: Kirsty Chippindale, Elizabeth Goyne, and Lauren Kelly. What role do
Speaker 4: you find children are the lack they're all playing in marriage.
Speaker 4: Do you find them more rewarding with or without children?
Speaker 4: And then other people are like, what do you do
Speaker 4: when your kids are draining you of your energy?
Speaker 5: Right, Well, the transition to parenthood is one of the
Speaker 5: most profound changes that a person can experience, let alone
Speaker 5: a marriage. So it is it is a profound change.
Speaker 5: So there's research on the effect of transition to parenthood
Speaker 5: on relationships. One of the one of the findings of
Speaker 5: that research is that the early years of having kids
Speaker 5: that are very challenging because kids are very demanding, and
Speaker 5: that most relationships bounce back after a while once and
Speaker 5: return to where they were prior to their transition to parent.
Speaker 5: An implication of that is that having a strong solid
Speaker 5: connection prior to becoming parents is a great thing. Like
Speaker 5: that becomes a really important resource because even though you're like, well,
Speaker 5: this is a difficult period. We're up all night, our
Speaker 5: kids are not sleeping, we have a lot of demands.
Speaker 5: I'm with one kid, you're with the other kid. But
Speaker 5: we're connected. I know that this is relatively temporary. The
Speaker 5: other thing that's true nowadays is the expectations for parents,
Speaker 5: especially college educated parents, are higher now than they were
Speaker 5: you know a generation or two ago. That parents expect
Speaker 5: to spend more time with their kids and do more
Speaker 5: with their kids, and that means there's less time for
Speaker 5: the adult relationship. There's less time for the parental relationship.
Speaker 5: They're only twenty four hours in a day, so something
Speaker 5: has to give. So the question is, can is making
Speaker 5: a balance between Let's say you're a great parent. You
Speaker 5: want to be a great parent. You want to say, hey,
Speaker 5: I want to give my kids as many hours as
Speaker 5: I can, but I also want to give my kids
Speaker 5: access to a great adult relationship between me and my
Speaker 5: other caregiver. So that might mean investing in the relationship
Speaker 5: and putting my kids somewhere, you know, with the grandparent
Speaker 5: if you're lucky enough to have a grandparent that you trust,
Speaker 5: or another kind of caregiver, if you're lucky enough to
Speaker 5: have one, let him go run in a field or
Speaker 5: let them go run in the street, exactly right, So
Speaker 5: I mean this is the thing. Of course, we don't
Speaker 5: let kids run in the street anymore.
Speaker 4: So I grew up.
Speaker 5: It's how I grew up, you know, And yet that's
Speaker 5: not considered a lot of things that I did as
Speaker 5: kid would be considered child abuse now, and oh yeah, neglect.
Speaker 4: We just ran into a field and it scraped our
Speaker 4: knees on barberre offences.
Speaker 5: Nobody knew where we were exactly and now, so this
Speaker 5: is the challenge. It really is a challenge. And so
Speaker 5: modern parents, especially college educated parents, really do struggle. Have
Speaker 5: to struggle with how am I going to invest each hour?
Speaker 5: And the investment in the relationship is still vital and
Speaker 5: it takes investment. You have to find time to maintain
Speaker 5: that connection so that you will have that connection to
Speaker 5: show your kids and to make you better parents for
Speaker 5: your kids.
Speaker 4: Right because it's going to be harder if they're parents.
Speaker 4: It's going to be harder for them to model a
Speaker 4: good relationship if they didn't see one exactly.
Speaker 5: So people think, oh, well, it's now all about the kids,
Speaker 5: and I owe that to my kids. You also owe
Speaker 5: to your kids having a good relationship.
Speaker 4: That's good advice, that's great advice.
Speaker 5: I tried not to be in the advice business, but
Speaker 5: I think that's consistent with research.
Speaker 4: I got a few questions about proposing. Tina Raudio wants
Speaker 4: to know why won't my partner of four years propose?
Speaker 4: And then Kelly Brockington asked, why doesn't Tina propose? And
Speaker 4: so what Madeline Rogers says, this isn't a question, but
Speaker 4: it would be pretty great if someone proposed to the
Speaker 4: certificant other in a patrion question for this episode, also,
Speaker 4: someone wrote in saying that she is proposing to her
Speaker 4: partner today. Congratulations, I know that's exciting.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 4: So Lexi Ganie is getting proposed to by Chalise today.
Speaker 4: Good job Lexi and Chalise. That's wonderful. Ps I called
Speaker 4: that listener Schalise after we recorded this. Lexi said, yes,
Speaker 4: they sound amazing and adorable. Yay, okay, But in proposing,
Speaker 4: how does a partner, especially in a patriarchal society, who
Speaker 4: maybe is a woman or is waiting to get proposed, like,
Speaker 4: how do we decide who decides it's time to ask?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Uh, not a lot of good research on this. Yeah,
Speaker 5: most of most of my research always to place with
Speaker 5: couples that have that are married. Yea, even if they're
Speaker 5: most of them a lot of more workers on newlyweds
Speaker 5: they were recently married. So we asked them though, how
Speaker 5: did you propose?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 5: And the couples that we talked to say this, they say, oh,
Speaker 5: we knew we were going to get married, and the
Speaker 5: proposal was essentially, you know, theater, like the proposal was
Speaker 5: a ritual that we liked, but it wasn't fundamental to
Speaker 5: the relationship, or rather, it was a symptom of the relationship.
Speaker 5: We have a relationship where he does romantic things to
Speaker 5: me all the time or she does romantic things, and
Speaker 5: the proposal was another romantic thing, but it wasn't the
Speaker 5: romantic thing. So I think we've built up proposals in
Speaker 5: the same way we've built up weddings and proms and
Speaker 5: a lot of sort of rituals as if, oh, it's
Speaker 5: that's got to be special, and there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 5: it being special. But a relationship is not about one day,
Speaker 5: no matter how special it is. It's not about what
Speaker 5: happened on your marriage on your wedding day, it's not
Speaker 5: about even what happened on your proposal day. You know,
Speaker 5: it can go great or it can go poorly, but
Speaker 5: what keeps a relationship alive is the day to day
Speaker 5: process of connection, of managing difference. And so I don't
Speaker 5: think that it I fundamentally don't think it matters that much.
Speaker 5: It's nice, it's wonderful, and if you celebrate Valentine's a
Speaker 5: and it's nice and wonderful, that's great. And if you
Speaker 5: celebrate Valentine's a and it doesn't work and it rains,
Speaker 5: that's also okay, because that's not where the relationship rises
Speaker 5: and falls. Relationship riz and falls on what happens each day. Now,
Speaker 5: that doesn't address the question of why people propose or
Speaker 5: not propose, or what happens when one partner says I
Speaker 5: want a proposal and the other partner says I'm not ready.
Speaker 5: And that's an old story, and that's a story about
Speaker 5: different people being at different places in terms of escalating
Speaker 5: commitment and different levels of comfort with participating in the
Speaker 5: institution of marriage. So it's a complicated institution. It's been
Speaker 5: many times a very very patriarchal institution. And different people
Speaker 5: are like, you know, how are we going to define it?
Speaker 5: What's it going to mean? Is our relationship going to change?
Speaker 5: These are hard conversations to have. It's often the case
Speaker 5: that one person's ready and the other person isn't ready,
Speaker 5: and that's a difference that has to be managed like
Speaker 5: any other difference. And some people will say I can't
Speaker 5: handle this difference and I'm going to leave. I don't
Speaker 5: want this, this is difference is too much for me,
Speaker 5: And other people are going to say I can handle
Speaker 5: this difference, but I do think and this is now
Speaker 5: me speaking not as a scientist, but as a person
Speaker 5: who thinks a lot about relationships. We can't be in
Speaker 5: the convincing business with our partners. And if you need
Speaker 5: to convince your partner about committing to the relationship, that's
Speaker 5: probably not a game you want to be in, right, Okay,
Speaker 5: So two side notes. I will say that New Years
Speaker 5: seems to be a time when the old Instagram just
Speaker 5: fills up with a bunch of marriage proposal pictures. And
Speaker 5: I was so tickled this year to see two of
Speaker 5: my dude friends propose to by their ladies and they
Speaker 5: both said yes, and it was so cute. And I
Speaker 5: asked Ben if he had heard any crazy engagement stories
Speaker 5: at the Usale Marriage Lab, because you figure tons of them,
Speaker 5: and he said, because of scientific confidentiality, he couldn't tell me.
Speaker 5: So I asked the Internet and found stories online of
Speaker 5: folks who proposed these ways you ready, okay, asking forty
Speaker 5: eight friends to dress up in carrot costumes and chant
Speaker 5: marry him.
Speaker 4: In Unison. There was a zero gravity proposal on a
Speaker 4: vomit comet plane, so hopefully no onlookers were just kind
Speaker 4: of barfed from the sentimentality of it. The professional stunt
Speaker 4: person lit himself on fire, safely but still. And then
Speaker 4: the worst proposals, the ones I couldn't ever even dream up,
Speaker 4: involved oh my god, partners faking their own deaths and
Speaker 4: then having their beloveds called to the scene of this
Speaker 4: fake motorcycle or pedestrian crash and then springing up live
Speaker 4: with a ring on one knee. And yes, more than
Speaker 4: one asshole on planet Earth thought this was charming and
Speaker 4: cute to make his future spouse grieve above his fake
Speaker 4: blood smeared body before then just asking for her hand.
Speaker 4: And they go from like crying to awkwardly really angry
Speaker 4: to crying again. It's just too much of a whirlwind.
Speaker 4: It's too much for the human nervous system. But that
Speaker 4: being said, I do cry at every wedding I attend
Speaker 4: all of them. Do you cry at weddings?
Speaker 5: I uh cried at my wedding.
Speaker 4: You did, sure, that's a good time, right.
Speaker 5: I did. I was crying with joy and gratitude and
Speaker 5: just an emotion because I was very, very grateful and
Speaker 5: I'm grateful today. I'm very very I feel very, very
Speaker 5: lucky that I found someone who I think is an
Speaker 5: incredible person, and I'm grateful every day.
Speaker 4: How did you propose?
Speaker 5: I proposed. I proposed privately in our house. No jump,
Speaker 5: there was no JumboTron, there was no flash mob. I
Speaker 5: had given the matter a great deal of thought. I felt, like,
Speaker 5: you know, as a scholar of marriage, I had to,
Speaker 5: you know, make a good case because we were already together,
Speaker 5: we were already having a good relationship, and I had
Speaker 5: to say I now have to. I don't want to.
Speaker 5: I'm not trying to convince you, because I'm not in
Speaker 5: the convincing business. But here's why I think we should
Speaker 5: do this, and why I'm dying to do it, and
Speaker 5: i want to do it so bad.
Speaker 4: I'm a fury. First time question asker, what do you
Speaker 4: think the essential things a couple must know about each
Speaker 4: other before getting married?
Speaker 5: I think that, uh, at first, you know more, more
Speaker 5: is better. It's good to know about your partner, okay,
Speaker 5: but the most important thing you need to know about
Speaker 5: your partner is how you and your partner interact together.
Speaker 5: And I would actually say that the most important thing
Speaker 5: is how you manage difference. It's easy to get along
Speaker 5: on the things you care about the same it's easy
Speaker 5: to get along a cruise ship with a cocktail, right,
Speaker 5: as we've already covered. So in terms of the future
Speaker 5: of the relationship, what you want to know is how
Speaker 5: do we disagree? Are you able to compromise? What you
Speaker 5: want to know what your partner is is your partner
Speaker 5: capable of empathy? That's what you want to know. The
Speaker 5: most important thing. In other words, the most important thing
Speaker 5: you know about your partner is how your partner engages
Speaker 5: in the process of intimacy with you. It's not about
Speaker 5: your partner's sexual history. It's not about your partner's score
Speaker 5: on a personality scale. It's not about whether your partner
Speaker 5: likes Chinese food or opera or ballgames. None of that
Speaker 5: is the most important thing. The answer your question, Emma
Speaker 5: is what you want to know about your partner is
Speaker 5: how does your partner do intimacy? And the fundamental part
Speaker 5: where intimacy is tested is in difference, and you will
Speaker 5: be tested because you are different from your partner. Everyone's
Speaker 5: different from everyone. So how does your partner manage difference
Speaker 5: with you? And how do you feel in those moments
Speaker 5: that's the most important thing you can know.
Speaker 4: Empathy is that's such a good point. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: such a good that's such a fundamental thing. Liz Tong
Speaker 4: also first time question asker, why does everyone say the
Speaker 4: first year of marriage is the hardest and do you
Speaker 4: find that that's true in studying newlywed development.
Speaker 5: Yes, it is hard. Well, yeah, it's hard because circumstances
Speaker 5: tend to be hard. So the transition into marriage involves
Speaker 5: challenges that once they're overcomes, sort of fade away. So
Speaker 5: one of those challenges a lot of times it involves
Speaker 5: some kind of move Moving is always stressful. A lot
Speaker 5: of people get married, like, oh, we both got jobs
Speaker 5: in the same city, so we're going to get married,
Speaker 5: and we're going to move in the same place. We're
Speaker 5: both graduating from college or grad school, and so we're
Speaker 5: getting married and moving in the same place. So that
Speaker 5: first year is you're not just getting married. Not only
Speaker 5: are you planning a wedding, often planning a wedding, but
Speaker 5: you're you've got other transitions. So the first year often
Speaker 5: has other transitions in it that make it challenging. Oh
Speaker 5: that's one. Number two, when people get married. There are
Speaker 5: not just merging two people, they're merging two big social
Speaker 5: networks and especially their families.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you haven't talked about in laws, but in
Speaker 3: laws are a big issue.
Speaker 5: So a lot of times when people get married, that
Speaker 5: first year is where you suddenly think, oh, wait a minute,
Speaker 5: where are we going to spend Thanksgiving, where we're going
Speaker 5: to spend Christmas? Whose family? And that. So there's things
Speaker 5: to negotiate in that first year that some couples have
Speaker 5: never negotiated. When couples get married, they often will to
Speaker 5: some degree merge finances, and so now they've got to
Speaker 5: have conversations about finances that perhaps they didn't have before.
Speaker 5: So there's all sorts of new issues raised by getting
Speaker 5: married that have to be addressed for the first time
Speaker 5: during the first year. And that's what makes the first
Speaker 5: year challenging. What we see is newly woods tend to
Speaker 5: be very happy and then they you know, it tends
Speaker 5: to decline. It doesn't necessarily become unhappy, but it declines
Speaker 5: from its peak, and the biggest declines are early on
Speaker 5: and then couples sort of find their level, and many
Speaker 5: couples still find a very high level, but you're it's
Speaker 5: great that newly whether as happy as they are, because
Speaker 5: that happiness helps them through those inevitable challenges of that
Speaker 5: first year of transition.
Speaker 4: And then if you are maybe in a little bit
Speaker 4: of a slump, say you've been married for a while,
Speaker 4: try to find new experiences together.
Speaker 5: New ways of connecting, yes, new ways to discover your
Speaker 5: partner and to discover the capabilities of yourself as a couple. Now, again,
Speaker 5: that's kind of a bourgeois piece of advice because it
Speaker 5: implies all sorts of flexibility that many people do not have,
Speaker 5: and which is why it's you know, for any people,
Speaker 5: marriage is hard and it's hard to stay just to
Speaker 5: keep it fresh and exciting. But if you have, if
Speaker 5: you are privileged, and you have the capability, remembering to
Speaker 5: invest in your marriage, remembering to nurture that connection is
Speaker 5: a very important thing.
Speaker 4: And how do you feel about movie tropes where at
Speaker 4: the end there's a marriage or are there any movies
Speaker 4: about marriage that you think are really valuable for people
Speaker 4: to watch. Oh so, there was a study conducted by
Speaker 4: some friends of Ben at the University of Rochester and
Speaker 4: Ron Rogi was the lead author on the study, which
Speaker 4: had one hundred and seventy four couples watch romantic movies
Speaker 4: and then talk about them after. This sounds like a genius,
Speaker 4: cunning plan, right.
Speaker 5: The interesting thing about that study is that what they
Speaker 5: did was they tested three different kinds of matal interventions.
Speaker 5: One that focused on conflict resolution skills, one that focused
Speaker 5: on social support skills like how do you support each other?
Speaker 5: And the third one was just a trivial intervention that
Speaker 5: they made up. And they said, you know what for
Speaker 5: the third one, just as a comparison group, we'll just
Speaker 5: make up the stupidest intervention we can. Oh my god,
Speaker 5: this and what we'll do is we'll just say, oh,
Speaker 5: just watch there's a list of romance romance movies. Just
Speaker 5: watch them and talk about them, and then we don't
Speaker 5: can give you any other advice. Whereas the other two
Speaker 5: interventions that gave people a lot of advice, here's how
Speaker 5: to deal with the conflict, here's how to deal with
Speaker 5: so support, hours and hours of advice. The third one
Speaker 5: was this silly one, and it worked just as well
Speaker 5: as the other one. The result, the divorce rate for
Speaker 5: those couples was cut in half. So I don't know,
Speaker 5: watch movies and just talk about them.
Speaker 4: You love parts. Now, are there any romance movies that
Speaker 4: he likes?
Speaker 5: Well, there is a movie. There is a movie called
Speaker 5: The Five Year Engagement, Okay, with Emily Blunt, and I
Speaker 5: forgot Jason Siegel, and the director of that movie as
Speaker 5: he was making it, came to our lab and hung
Speaker 5: out and you know, we got to We talked to
Speaker 5: him in a little bit and he got to see
Speaker 5: and so in the in the movie, the Emily Blunt
Speaker 5: character is a social psychologist, and so she has a lab.
Speaker 5: She goes to her labbing. She's a grad student social psychology.
Speaker 5: She goes to labing, and he wanted to see what
Speaker 5: elateral labining was like. So we sat in So I
Speaker 5: like that film. It's pretty fun.
Speaker 4: Oh that's good to know. I've never had anologist who's
Speaker 4: had a personal connection like that.
Speaker 5: Well, it's fun to be in la. Yeah, because when people,
Speaker 5: when Hollywood wants relationship scientists to say occasional, give us
Speaker 5: a call because we're local, not because we're the greatest,
Speaker 5: because we're lucky enough. This is another example of luck.
Speaker 4: Now, what do you hate the most about partnership, about
Speaker 4: your work about marriage? What is the shittiest thing about
Speaker 4: the institution of partnership or studying it.
Speaker 5: The shittiest thing about marriage or about studying marriage. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's a tough question. Generally speaking, I am pro marriage
Speaker 5: when it's good. The shittiest thing about marriage is that
Speaker 5: it occasionally traps people in bad relationships. And that's super shitty. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 5: the worst thing about the institution is that it can
Speaker 5: be a trap. There are privileges that we associate with
Speaker 5: marriage because we privilege marriage over other relationships legally, and
Speaker 5: the lots of evidence that that's true, but it means
Speaker 5: that there are people. And the shittest thing about marriage
Speaker 5: is that for a lot of its history it's been
Speaker 5: a pretty oppressive institution for women, and in lots of
Speaker 5: parts of the world it still is, where women are
Speaker 5: treated as property of their husbands. The fact that for
Speaker 5: so long, you know, the men who were married to
Speaker 5: their wives had a right to sexually molest their wives,
Speaker 5: the end abuse their wives. The fact that still to
Speaker 5: this day, you know, a ton of abuse happens in
Speaker 5: secret in marriage. So I mean, seriously, the shittiest thing
Speaker 5: is that marriage are incredibly bad, are fatal, and especially
Speaker 5: to women.
Speaker 4: Obviously, marriage is different in so many parts of the world,
Speaker 4: and because Ben's studies essentially westernized thoughts on marriage and intimacy,
Speaker 4: we focused on that. But still in so many countries,
Speaker 4: marriage law contradicts basic international human rights laws, with wives
Speaker 4: needing permission from husbands to work a job or sign
Speaker 4: legal documents, and even the nineteen seventies in France and
Speaker 4: Spain and America, husbands had to give permission for things
Speaker 4: like applying for credit cards or a business loan, or
Speaker 4: just a woman's right to leave the house alone. This
Speaker 4: acide gets even harder to hear, so a little warning
Speaker 4: for the next minute or so. In the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 4: here in the US, husbands were entitled to domestic discipline
Speaker 4: of their wives, and judges were fine with it, just
Speaker 4: as long as the whip or stick they used to
Speaker 4: beat their wives was no wider than a judge's them.
Speaker 4: This was called the rule of them. Now, in some
Speaker 4: countries it's still legal and acceptable for a husband to
Speaker 4: use violence to discipline 's partner. A UNICEF studies showed
Speaker 4: that large percentages of women in Afghanistan and Jordan Maali
Speaker 4: laos have been socialized to agree that a husband is
Speaker 4: justified in beating his wife if she argues or goes
Speaker 4: out without asking him. And of course there are practices
Speaker 4: like child marriages and other brutality, women and girls forced
Speaker 4: to marry their sexual abusers to save their reputations. So
Speaker 4: while one person's associations of marriage might be just pinterest
Speaker 4: wedding boards of rustic mason jar cocktails, another's association could
Speaker 4: be financial tension, or deep commitments to not only a
Speaker 4: partner but to a shared religion, or the celebration of
Speaker 4: having their love finally legally recognized, or trying to change
Speaker 4: the expectations of both partners to a union that's more
Speaker 4: balanced and safe and continues.
Speaker 5: I'd like to believe that as a society we are
Speaker 5: moving away from that, maybe not quickly enough, but still substantially,
Speaker 5: so that more and more people believe that marriage should
Speaker 5: be an institution where of equality, where both partners are
Speaker 5: treated as independent human beings who are choosing to connect
Speaker 5: to each other, but neither one is property of the other.
Speaker 5: And I do think that that many people would describe
Speaker 5: their marriage as that way and try to live that way.
Speaker 5: It's not true for everyone, and that is a bad
Speaker 5: thing as far as the worst things about studying marriage.
Speaker 5: That'd be much harder because it's a privilege to study marriage.
Speaker 5: I am super lucky. I mean this on the theme
Speaker 5: of this conversation is that I just feel fortunate that,
Speaker 5: like the luckiest guy in the world, that I get
Speaker 5: to do this, that I get to think about and
Speaker 5: talk to people like you about something that I care about,
Speaker 5: and then everybody cares about. You know, I don't have
Speaker 5: to convince anybody. What do you studying marriage? Oh that
Speaker 5: doesn't matter. Why would you do that? No, everyone cares.
Speaker 5: People really care about marriage. You know, I'm not studying
Speaker 5: you know, some weird thing I have to even define.
Speaker 5: You know, it exists. Everyone knows that relationships matter. Everyone's
Speaker 5: thinking about them, They're surrounded by them. And I get
Speaker 5: to do that for a living. That's only good.
Speaker 4: You get to study other people's distractions. Yes, it's your distraction.
Speaker 4: Other people's distractions are your focus.
Speaker 5: It's true. Well again, I don't think that relationships are
Speaker 5: a distraction people. I think that's where most people live
Speaker 5: and work is a distraction. Oh right, areat many people?
Speaker 5: Their work is a distraction. What they care about is
Speaker 5: their family. They care about their love, they care about
Speaker 5: the connection. I want to get back to the couch
Speaker 5: where I can cuddle with the person that I'm closest to,
Speaker 5: and work is you know, a means to that end.
Speaker 4: We just exposed a fundamental flaw in my whole parents.
Speaker 5: Oh wait, I thought a relationship a distraction. I don't
Speaker 5: think they are. There's many there's life is complicated and
Speaker 5: people can care about their I also love my job.
Speaker 5: I do. I love my job, but I I but
Speaker 5: I wouldn't pick it over in my relationship.
Speaker 4: Please picture me right now with those black and white
Speaker 4: hypnosis spirals for eyes, just falling down a thought chasm,
Speaker 4: reflecting on my life. Okay, let's move on, and what
Speaker 4: is your favorite thing about relationships? Your work, marriage? Best thing?
Speaker 5: The best thing about the best of about my job
Speaker 5: is that I get to ask the questions that occur
Speaker 5: to me, and somehow I have the freedom and flexibility
Speaker 5: to pursue them in any way that I want. It's again,
Speaker 5: an incredible privilege that I feel grateful for every day.
Speaker 5: The best thing about intimacy is that it solves sort
Speaker 5: of an ex essential problem, which is that each of
Speaker 5: us are alone. That the truth is, I can't escape
Speaker 5: my own skin that fundamentally there's a separation between me
Speaker 5: and the rest of the world that ends my epidermis.
Speaker 5: But intimacy is a way of emotionally bridging the gap,
Speaker 5: of connecting being not just in my own head, but
Speaker 5: somehow connecting through our skin to somebody else and even
Speaker 5: across space with somebody else. And that's a miracle, And
Speaker 5: it's kind of a miracle that exists, but that we've
Speaker 5: evolved to have that happen. That right now there's people
Speaker 5: in the world that I'm connected to that I can feel,
Speaker 5: I mean, not in a supernatural way, but that they
Speaker 5: matter to me right now, even as I'm sitting in
Speaker 5: a room far away from them. And that's an incredible
Speaker 5: metaphysical miracle.
Speaker 4: It's a little magic.
Speaker 5: It's a little bit magical. And I believe that it's
Speaker 5: that a lot of the natural and material world is magical,
Speaker 5: not because it's supernatural, but because the natural world is
Speaker 5: pretty amazing.
Speaker 4: And where can people find you? Where can they read
Speaker 4: your words and see your studies?
Speaker 5: They can find me at UCLA. They can google my
Speaker 5: name Benjamin Carney with a K k ar n e y.
Speaker 5: Our lab is the UCLA Marriage Lab, And that's also googleable,
Speaker 5: and we have a website where a lot of our
Speaker 5: work is published.
Speaker 4: Cool and oh, for every episode I donate to a
Speaker 4: particular charity or nonprofit that's related to your field.
Speaker 5: I would be delighted. I would be delighted to do that.
Speaker 5: And there are you know a lot of charities that
Speaker 5: I think help, you know, victims of abuse escape bad relationships,
Speaker 5: and I think that they'd be I would love to
Speaker 5: be able to support them.
Speaker 4: Okay, great, well, good, oh well, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: For doing this a pleasure.
Speaker 4: Ally, Oh I love this so once again doctor Ben
Speaker 4: Carney of the UCLA Marriage Lab. He's the co author
Speaker 4: of Intimate Relationships and all around fascinating cool dude, So
Speaker 4: do google his work. You can look in the show
Speaker 4: notes and I've put links to find him. Also, more
Speaker 4: links about things we've discussed are up at aliward dot
Speaker 4: com slash ologies Now. This week, per his directive, a
Speaker 4: portion of ad proceeds was donated to care dot org
Speaker 4: to support their work to end gender based violence, which
Speaker 4: affects at least one in three women worldwide. So care
Speaker 4: dot org says that ending poverty requires addressing the power
Speaker 4: inequalities between women and men. Girls and boys that underpin
Speaker 4: gender based violence, and Caro dot org supports the empowerment
Speaker 4: of poor women and girls in their challenges to enjoy
Speaker 4: happy and healthy lives and to change the contexts in
Speaker 4: which they live, learn, work, and raise families. So you
Speaker 4: can find out more about their programs at care dot
Speaker 4: org or at the link in the show notes. So
Speaker 4: thank you Ben Carney for choosing that. You can find
Speaker 4: Ologies at Ologies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm Ali Ward
Speaker 4: with one L on both. Thank you to everyone on
Speaker 4: Patreon for making this podcast possible. Thanks to the sponsors
Speaker 4: you can find links to them in the show notes too,
Speaker 4: and to everyone getting ologies merch at ologiesmerch dot com.
Speaker 4: Thanks Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. Thanks
Speaker 4: Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for adminting the Ologies podcast
Speaker 4: Facebook group full of wonderful people. The theme song was
Speaker 4: written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands.
Speaker 4: Interns are the wonderful Harry Kim and Caleb Patten, who
Speaker 4: hosts You're Never Too Old podcast about anime and comics. Also,
Speaker 4: I accidentally called Caleb Patten a finch last week because
Speaker 4: my brain was done with Thinky Time at that point,
Speaker 4: so assistant editing and clutch research this week was done
Speaker 4: by Jared Sleeper of mind Jam Media. And thanks of
Speaker 4: course to my right hand man editor Stephen Ray Morris
Speaker 4: for piecing this all together.
Speaker 5: What would I do without you?
Speaker 4: At the end of the show, I tell you secret,
Speaker 4: and this week's secret is that your old dad has
Speaker 4: been to a lot of weddings and I'm usually very
Speaker 4: very shy about dancing, like weirdly, so like you can't
Speaker 4: make me do it. I'll hide behind a plant, or
Speaker 4: I'll grab onto a doorway. I cannot be dragged. I
Speaker 4: am mortified. And then I swear to God one and
Speaker 4: a half shardonnay's later, I can't stop dancing. I don't
Speaker 4: know chemically how that happens. That is not enough shardonnay
Speaker 4: to change someone's behavior so drastically, But when it's on,
Speaker 4: it's just on. So thank you, and I'm sorry if
Speaker 4: I've ever danced in the back of your wedding videos.
Speaker 4: Okay for mind Packaderman College Mombiology, zoology, mythology, meteorology, pathology, apology, serology.
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