Ologies with Alie Ward - Matrimoniology (MARRIAGE) with Ben Karney

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

Love! Romance! Intimate relationships! Marriage! Divorce! Remarriage! Clowns! This episode has it all. The wonderfully warm Dr. Benjamin Karney of the UCLA Marriage lab has been studying romance and intimate relationships for 20 years and sits down to chat about being single and the mechanisms behind finding a partner, what behaviors foster intimacy, why some couples stay together vs. splitting up, some bananas proposals, wedding budgets, how parenting affects marriage, historical problems with matrimony and his own experiences with marriage and divorce. These behaviors are also so applicable to friendships, work partnerships and as it turns out...professional clowns.Dr. Ben Karney at the UCLA Marriage LabThis week's donation was made to Care.org, which works to end gender-based violence.Sponsor links: TheGreatCourses.com/ologies, Linkedin.com/ologies, TrueandCo.com/ologiesMore links at alieward.com/ologies/matrimoniologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarrett SleeperTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's that lady in the hotel lobby who just took an apple from the bowl of decorative fruit and feels only partly guilty about it. Allie Ward, back with another episode of Allergies. Oh love, oh who doesn't love love. Oh, this episode is coming out a few days before Valentine's Day. Love is in the air, it's on the shelves at Walgreens. Soon it will be in the discount aisle at Walgreens, but it will still be in our hearts and on our minds until probably the day we're dead and return to the earth as scattered molecules. Ready to be a frog that loves another frog, but frogs don't get married and some people do, so let's learn about it.

But first, little business. So thank you as always to the Allergies patrons. I am your grateful humble servant. This podcast would not exist without the folks on patreon.com. A dollar a month gets you in that club. Thanks to everyone for sporting Allergies merch from allergiesmerch.com. I've said it before, I hope you wear an Allergies shirt or pin or hat and you find your soulmate. And then I officiate your wedding and I eat free cake.

Okay, thanks to everyone who rates the show and hit subscribe. Bonus points for leaving a review for me to creepily lurk and read on the show, such as this week's. Let's do it. Ariel Lean says, this podcast is 100% worth writing my first ever review. I've gotten sucked into topics I never thought I would be interested in. I'm looking at you postcards, they say. The episodes on seminology inspired me to take a leap of faith and eliminate two of the three sleeping medications I had been taking for years, they say. I feel better than ever.

So thanks, Ali, for putting your heart and soul and a few Brock crystals into bringing all of us so much joy. So thank you, Ariel. Everyone else, consult a doctor before changing medications. Please don't sue me. Yay. Okay. So matrimonialogy. Is it a word?

Come on, dad word. Don't go pulling legs here. Hot damn. Is it ever? Kind of. Okay. First off, the term matrimony comes from the Latin for mother as in to make a mother out of someone. Gross.

But now matrimony is used as a catch-all for marriage stuff. And a now deceased psychologist from the Czech Republic coined the term matrimonialogy, wrote several books on marriage and relationship psychology. So it exists in literature. I say it counts. So I enlisted the help of new intern, Herakim. They helped me track down one of the foremost American experts in the field who happens to teach, not in Prague, but in LA. So I just shimmied over to UCLA on a sunny morning and I set up a few mics. I asked thisologist questions that had both adorable and also sometimes very uncomfortable answers, just like a relationship.

Adorable, sometimes uncomfortable. So he is a professor of social psychology and a researcher at UCLA's marriage lab. There's a marriage lab and he's a co-author of the textbook Intimate Relationships and has written innumerable papers on the topic, many of which have really just juicy as hell titles, such as, quote, to know you is to love you, the importance of global adoration and specific understanding for close relationships. And how stress hinders adaptive processes in marriage. Ooh, this is a good stuff. Okay, so we sat down to discuss romantic intimacy, how marriage differs from non-married relationships, what to do if your partnership is going through a little bit of a rough batch. Why divorces happen, how movies could save your relays, strategies for popping the question, the darker historical side of marriage, and then maybe per usual, I have a life changing epiphany, no spoilers.

So sit back, commit to this amazing and wild ride with someone who just technically speaking in some parts of the world would be considered a matrimoniologist, Dr. Ben Carney. You are sort of a matrimoniologist? I mean, technically I'm a psychologist. Yes. If you want to get more specific, I'm a social psychologist. Oh. So there's lots of different kinds of psychology at universities and social psychology is a study of how human beings, individual human beings are affected by the imagined or real presence of other human beings. Oh.

Which is to say, it's a study of the human condition. That sounds so poetic. It's, but it's true. We are the ones who study scientifically what it means to be human being on the planet Earth. Within social psychology and all these different ways that human beings interact, my own interest has always been in intimacy. And how people develop and maintain intimate connections, specifically romantic connections. And I have studied that in the context of marriage, but my interest is broader than just marriage. Marriage is a very convenient place to study adult intimacy because it's where a lot of adults will end up practicing their adult intimacy for large portions of their lives.

So I've studied marriage my whole life or my whole professional life for the last 25 years. But for me, marriage is a case, a specific case of a broader interest in intimacy and in how people experience love and what happens to that experience over time. So quick background on Ben. He grew up in LA, but he got his bachelor's in psychology from just this little college called Friggin Harvard. Then came back to California to get his PhD in social psychology from UCLA where he's now, of course, a professor who studies intimate relationships. But how did he know that this field was the one? And why of all the different facets of social psychology? Why intimacy?

Honestly, because that's what I was naturally thinking about when I, when it came time to think, what am I going to study? What actually happened is that I got to graduate school in 1990 and I actually went to graduate school here at UCLA where I ended up many years later on the faculty. And I didn't know what I wanted to study. I knew I loved this idea of social psychology. I knew that the ways that human beings interact was fascinating and puzzling and compelling for me. But I didn't know what I was going to really study and I kind of drifted. And a very kind faculty member noticed that I was drifting. Her name was Anne Peplau.

She's still around, although she's retired. And Anne Peplau called me into her office and said, hey, how's your first year of graduate school going? Well, she didn't have any obligation to do. She didn't need to do that, but she was just very kind. And she said, I said, I'm studying different things. And she said, well, are you studying what you want to study? What is it that you actually came here to study? I said, I don't know.

She goes, well, why don't you go think about it for a while? And how could she tell you that you were drifting? I don't know. I think because I don't know why she took an interest. It was one of the most generous things anyone's ever done for me, though. And so what did you do when you went and thought about it? Were you dating someone at the time? Were you single?

Were you struggling in that area? That's a good question. I had just started dating someone that I had had a long-term crush on in college. Oh, nice. And after college, we had gotten together. And so I was thinking about intimacy. I was thinking, how do we fall in love with people? How do relationships change?

How do someone that you know for a long time suddenly become your partner? How do two people who are strangers to each other go from strangers to needing each other? Right. That seems like a miraculous. It is. It is a miracle. It is. If you're a single person right now, somewhere on the planet, there's someone and probably

close by who some years from now, you'll say, oh my God, that person touched me. That person is so important to me. I couldn't live without that person. And yet now I have no idea who that person is. I know. That's insane. I have a friend named Kathy who she was at a birthday party. Her future husband was there.

They never even talked. They met online a year later. They were at the same birthday party. So yes, my friends, Kathy and Sandin, they're in the same photos of this birthday party. This was a year before they met and started dating via OKCupid. So now they're married. They have a rescue poodle. Life is wild, is all I'm saying.

Just go talk to everyone at every party. Maybe you can smell them. See what that does for you. I don't know. I'm not a doctor. Also, on my way to this interview, I took a lift because UCLA parking is just a dystopian hellscape. You can see the microbiology episode for more on that. And I was talking to the driver about this episode on the way to record it.

And I promised him that I would ask his question right away and not check it out. So boy, howdy, did I. What about you? Now, my lift driver wanted me to ask Nicholas, are you married? You have a wedding ring on. How many times have you been married? Me? Yeah.

OK. I have been divorced. I was divorced. You have. OK. I was married to my first wife and we got divorced after I had been studying marriage for a long time. Really? Many, many years.

And then I married again. OK. And I'm very happily married. OK. So you've experienced literally all sides of this dice. Yes. I have been a participant in the whole phenomenon. And people ask me, of course, they say, so you study marriage.

You literally have written a book on intimacy. Right. So how is it that you got divorced? And my response to that, I have a ready one is, oh, I understand why I got divorced. Yeah. And one of the things that I've studied, one of the things I've studied a long time is that not everything about your relationship, our relationships, are controllable. That things happen in relationships that are beyond your control.

And the idea that if you just work hard enough, you can make any relationship work is not true. Not true. I don't believe that's true. And you can say that from a personal and from a scientific perspective. Yes. It turns out I could say it for, I was saying it for a long time from a scientific perspective. And then I experienced it.

That is great as a scientist that you have experienced all those facets. I'm sure that it is not easy as a person, but as an actual kind of objective observer to other people's behavior, that must be very helpful. I would have preferred not to experience. Okay. If I could have chosen, I would have preferred very strongly not to have experienced that. But. And now what about when you were a graduate student, you started turning your eye toward

intimacy and then at what point did the marriage lab here at UCLA exist or how did you get involved? Well, it's interesting. It's fortuitous. It's luck. My career is a cascade of lucky breaks that I didn't do much to create or that I just fell into and I'm grateful for every day. I'm a big believer in luck and circumstance.

And as my scholarly interest in the effect of luck and circumstance on marriage and I've definitely experienced that. So what happened is I came back to Ann Peplau after a week or so and I said, if I could be paid to think of something that I already think about, that'd be pretty great. If my whole life, if my job could be to ponder systematically and professionally something that I would already ponder, that'd be awesome. And what I find myself thinking about all the time that I don't have to be encouraged to think about that I already think about is love.

How do people fall in love? How do people fall out of love? And that latter question is really the one that really puzzles me because nobody wants to fall out of love. No. So of course, everyone wants to find love. No mystery there. I am someone who is looking for love.

Real love. The mystery is that once two people find that, how does it, how is it so fragile? That's the mystery because two people who fall in love experience, this is amazing. This is great. Do you want to keep feeling this way? I do. Let's both do that. And if you get married, for example, you don't just want that.

You actually promise to do that and you don't promise it privately. You promise it publicly in front of everyone in front of everybody. Everyone you've ever met that means anything to you. Is now listing you say this is it. Count me out of the dating market. I'm going to be with this person here forever. Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today.

It would be a terrible idea to change your mind. It'd be costly, financially costly, emotionally costly, and it's embarrassing. You're wearing the most expensive pants you have ever worn. Very expensive pants and people are giving you monogram stuff. You can't return it. I know. So then what happens from a neurological perspective in terms of do our dopamine levels go crazy and then they wane naturally?

How do you figure that out? My interest is not in the neurological level. There are people who study their neurological level and they're saying, here's what goes on. Here's what rain regions activate. I'm more interested in the phenomenological level of experience. So I'm interested in how do people experience a change that they don't want that happens anyway.

In case you're like, shoot, what is the brain cocktail that's making me feel like a walking hard-eyed emoji slash eggplant emoji slash peach emoji slash very creepy, newish drooling face emoji, which they shouldn't have green lit. Why did they make that one? It's so gross. Well, neurobiologists at the Loyola Sexual Wellness Clinic say that dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine increase when two people get really smitten with each other. And then our body dopamine makes you feel euphoric, kind of like Tom Cruise jumping

on a couch. Well, adrenaline and norepinephrine make your heart literally go pitter-patter faster and they focus your attention on this crush you have. So evidently, love lowers your serotonin levels, which these researchers say is common in people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, which tracks if you've ever refreshed someone's Instagram like you're being paid to monitor them and said like, why, why, why, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?

Why am I doing this? Stop doing this. So Dr. Ben Carney also says that minds are very hard to change. And we've known this for like all of time. But in the 1950s, a psychologist named Leon Festinger studied this and dubbed it cognitive dissonance, which is that excruciating discomfort when you're holding two very conflicting thoughts. So Festinger and colleagues studied a cult that was started by a Midwestern housewife, cum doomsday prophet, who kept promising all of her followers that space men were coming

very soon any minute to take them all away. And her followers kept believing in her, even though like, where are these space men? She was like, they're stuck in like so much space traffic. Anyway, this woman's name was Dorothy Martin. And I really wish that for branding purposes, she just popped an extra A in that name, just went for Dorothy Martian. Can you imagine? Would have been so sick.

Anyway, people never tend to change their minds, except anything about, I guess, love. About people's love relationships, or let's say their marriages. People do change their mind. About their partner. About their partner. I said I was going to love you forever. I thought I was going to love you forever. I thought this is the best relationship ever.

I'm totally going to never change. And then people do, even though it's costly, even though they don't want to, even though it's embarrassing. That's a real mystery. And people do change their minds all the time about their love relationships. I thought you were the one. I thought you were my soulmate. Surprise, surprise.

You must have a different soulmate because you ain't it. Do you even think as a social psychologist that soulmates exist, or is that a convenient thing that we apply to one person so that we don't think about the soulmate that might be on the next train car, even though we're married? I do not believe that they're soulmates. I believe that relationships are things that people are processes that people work at. And people can work hard to have a good relationship with a variety of different people. And those relationships will be different.

So the good relationship you have with some person is different than the good relationship you might have with another person. There's some research on what's the impact on a relationship of thinking about soulmates, of believing in soulmates. It's not that great. For example, if you really believe in soulmates and then you and your partner, who you think is your soulmate, are having a fight, it might lead you to say, uh-oh, maybe you're not my soulmate.

And now, what was your PhD work geared toward? What was your dissertation about? So after I went back to Ann Peplow and said, I think I want to study love relationships. She said, oh, that's an interesting coincidence because there's this guy that was just hired here at UCLA named Thomas Bradbury. He's this young guy who just is his first job and he actually studies marriages. Tom Bradbury was studying newlyweds in the community and then following them over time to see in the first few years who stayed, you know, newlyweds are pretty happy, which

one of them stay happy, which ones get less happy, which ones get divorced. And he was also videotaping them. So it wasn't just asking them questions, he was videotaping them and coding what he saw on the videotapes. Oh my God. So I met him and said, hey, can I work with you? And he said, sure. And that was 26 years ago and we're still working together because he's still in the

faculty here and we write books together and we get grants together and we are still working together. What's the secret to that healthy partnership? Uh, gee, it is probably the longest successful adult relationship I've had. Um, the secret is I think that I lucked out that Tom Bradbury happens to be a fantastic person. Well, I guess that's part of selection. It's totally selection.

Yes. Actually, that's a very good point. Okay. Uh, that one of the things that's coming out from the work that we've been doing the last few years is it really matters who you choose because where your relationship begins says a lot about where it's going to go. I do think that some people are less fortunate and that the person that you meet when you're feeling ready to get married and the person you're like, oh, wait a minute, I'm ready

to get married and you're here and available and we're getting along well enough. And I think a lot of people get married that way and you want to be lucky. So, so the selection of partners sometimes is based on opportunity and not compatibility. So the only people you can possibly judge your compatibility with are the people that you meet, the people you have the opportunity to meet. So opportunity comes first and then compact and then selection, selection and compatibility. And I actually think that that we've as a culture emphasized selection as if it's a much more active process than it is.

What is happening then when someone picks a partner, what is really going on socially, emotionally? What is falling in love? What is that process? All right. Let's talk about that because there's a lot of confusion about that process, even though people experience it. If you believe, for example, what dating sites tell you or what matching sites tell you,

and then you'd think that finding a partner is about measuring somebody and measuring their sort of qualities and finding someone whose qualities are compatible with your own qualities. Okay. Quick aside, I started wondering what let's not say the weirdest or creepiest dating sites are. Let's just say the most niche. I mean, sure.

You've got your data golfer.com, there's glutenfree singles.com, but what if you only want to date someone with like a speak to the manager haircut up front, but a smoke and pony in the back? You can head on over to mulitpassions.com. You can date a goth at altscene.com. There's naturist passions. They might have your future significant other who is currently nude but wearing sandals. There's also a site for horse lovers looking for a stable relationship as endorsed by Oprah

herself. I knew from the time I had the idea, it would put people together who love horses and it's a perfect match. Cat enthusiasts can cuddle up via personals.com. Can you even? Maybe you're looking for love, but everyone around you is dead because you're a professional in the death industry. Well, don't let your heart grow cold.

Just go meet someone new at deadmeat.com who's alive. Oh, if you're sick of clowning around on Tinder because there aren't enough clowns on it, you can flop those big old feet over to clowndating.com whose website makes the resonant, impressive imperative, quote, everyone loves a clown. Let a clown love you. So go on, get your horn honked. It turns out that a lot of those assumptions are just false. Oh, no.

Because, so for example, one of the assumptions of those algorithms is that similarity is a good thing and it's easily measured. In fact, if you think about it just a little bit, you realize that similarity doesn't help us very much because people are so complicated, I can always find ways that I'm similar to somebody if I like that person. And I can find ways I'm dissimilar to somebody if I don't like that person. So we can find similarity where we want to find it, essentially. Similarities aren't what's at the heart of attraction and romance.

So what is? But the best research says that sort of initial romantic chemistry comes from an interaction between two people that involves responsiveness that makes both people feel sort of understood and heard and excited. Oh my gosh. But it is a behavior, it's a dance. So it's not that there's a kind of person in the world that always makes you feel excited, but there might be a sequence of behaviors that makes you feel good.

And if you and I or me and somebody or you and somebody show up at the right context and have the right interaction, you might say, hey, this is this interaction is making me feel interesting and excited and aroused. But if I had met you at a birthday party where his kids were around, we wouldn't have had that interaction and I wouldn't have had that feeling. Oh my god. You see the point. Yes.

So it's really about kind of like a feedback loop? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Oh my god. And that leads to like the best dating advice nowadays based on research is don't worry about people's profiles. Find somebody that you think is cute enough and go and interact with them as soon as possible because the way that people naturally evaluate romantic chemistry is through how an interaction

makes them feel. We don't choose partners the way we choose furniture because furniture doesn't have to choose us back. Oh, that's true. But partners do. So it has to be an interaction, a give and take. And that's actually where romantic chemistry emerges from. I said something, I told, I disclosed something, oh, you know, I came from LA or you come

from LA. And your enthusiasm or your lack of enthusiasm makes me feel a certain way about the fact that I disclose something. And maybe if you're enthusiastic in the right way, it makes you feel good about the fact I shared something. It makes you want to share something else. And then if I go too long without asking you a question, you might say, huh, I wasn't enthusiastic, but now I'm not so enthusiastic.

But if I then ask you a question and now you've shared something, now suddenly we're building a little bit of the beginnings of intimacy because it feels good to share. And now we're doing the dance. But it can break down so many different ways. Well, is that what happens in marriages that are maybe starting to crumble is you're not getting the feedback loop that you expected to get. Maybe your partner seems disinterested or you're disinterested, so you're not giving back to them and they pick up on that.

Is that kind of what happens? So that's a great question. So we're talking about how does romantic interest emerge and your question is, is it the same process in reverse as romantic interest declines? I'm sorry. I don't mean to bum you out. This just might be good to know for long-term relationships. I'm sorry.

I'm being a realist here. My sense is there's a lot going on as romantic interest declines. And here's one of the things. One of the things is that the same behaviors that can be exciting when they're new are not necessarily exciting when they're old. First kiss doesn't feel the same as the 500th kiss if you're lucky enough to get to the 500th. If what you're in it for is the sense of escalating excitement, escalating excitement is likely to fade.

Now, what happens in good marriages is two things. Let's talk first about not about marriages, decline of marriages at last. That's a good way of looking at it. Okay. Yes. Let's look at the positive. How do we keep things cute? One thing that happens is people, good couples, happy couples find ways to keep

the excitement alive. They keep growing together. They keep exploring both each other and the world together. And that keeps, they're always, wait a minute, even though we've been together 15 years, even though we've been together 50 years, we just still did something yesterday we never done before. Aw. So there's still something new.

There's still something new that's possible, but that takes effort and it takes effort and opportunity. If you're working very, very hard, if you're struggling financially, you don't have time to say, hey, let's go do something we've never done before. Right. Let's go horseback riding. Yeah. Ooh.

That'd be so fun. And rich people do that. Right. But people who are struggling can't do that. It's just getting by as hard, but that means that opportunities for novelty is hard. So another thing that successful couples do in the long term is they find other bases for their bond. The doc says that thinking someone is foxy is nice, but...

But that's not the only thing people want from their companions. I also want someone who's dependable. I want someone who's reliable, someone who understands me and will support me when I'm sick, when I'm really in trouble, when it's middle of the night and our kids are throwing up because they're sick. I want to know that you're going to be there and can watch my back. So good marriages can both keep excitement alive, that's totally possible, but also can find a broader base for why the relationship is around, what the functions relationship

serves. And is it good for partners to sit down and make lists of those interests or check-in? It's great, but most people don't do that. Okay. Most people don't do that for a couple reasons, maybe a handful of reasons. One is if a lot of people think, oh, this just should come naturally, we shouldn't have to talk about it. Right.

And I don't think that's true, but it is in the culture that why should we have to talk about it? A good relationship just happens as opposed to a good relationship. So if you believe in soulmates, you're like, well, if we're soulmates, why should we have to discuss it? My soul should just recognize your soul, but if relationships are an action, a process that you have to contribute to, then if you're a whole different person, I need to understand who you are and that's going to take work, it's going to take communication.

The other reason people don't do it is it can be scary. I'm assuming that we agree about a lot of things. I don't actually want to know if we don't. Right. Because that would be a hard conversation. When is the right time to have a hard conversation? Never. Never.

I'm not like, let's see, we could watch Great British Baking Show tonight or we could have a really difficult, possibly a difficult conversation. I think Netflix is better. It's like soggy bottom there. There are so many people out there who think that you're just a witch who's read their mind and knows their life. Wait a minute, you watched the Great British Baking Show. Of course.

The third reason is that lots of people don't have the time. Like the truth is that life is very hard and challenging for many, many people. That it's a privilege to have the time to look at your partner and say, hey, let's talk for a while. That happens when your life is under control. Many people have multiple jobs, bills to pay, sick family, all sorts of stress in their lives that they're barely staying on top of. And now it's a lot to ask to say, okay, by the way, put all that aside and have a heart-to-heart

talk with your partner about their hopes and dreams. There's many people in the world for whom that would be a luxury that they cannot afford. So as Tegan and Sarah have asked, where does the love go? Tegan says that day by day, other things just take priority, like work and paying bills and taking care of the kids. And then at the bottom, the dusty end of the to-do list is connect on a meaningful level with your life partner. So my memories of the excitement of the things that kept us together are fewer and farther

between. I still remember them, but I'm like, wow, it's actually been a while since we've been intimate, since we've laughed or told a joke because life has been hard for us. And or we've done other things. And then if that's true, if our connection is weaker, then when something's hard or when we disagree, now it's harder to have those disagreements. My empathy for you is weaker. If I'm stressed, I'm paying more attention to my own needs.

It's harder for me when I'm stressed to get out of my own head and into your head. All these factors combine. And so now we're busy. I'm less empathetic. I'm very aware of my own unmet needs. I can't read your mind. I'm not trying to read your mind, so I don't know what your unmet needs are. It's easy to say, if my needs are unmet, whose fault is it?

It's not my fault. I know I'm working hard. I don't know what's in your head, but I can tell you're right here. It must be your fault. So now I'm mad at you. And now the next time we disagree, well, I get madder. And instead of each interaction building us up, making us more connected, each interaction breaks us down, makes us feel a little bit less connected.

And unless we make explicit efforts to try to restore that connection, and unless we're able to make those efforts, again, the world has to be supporting us, we might come to a point where I don't feel what I felt, and you don't feel what you felt, and we don't feel like we can connect even if we wanted to. And so now we feel helpless, and then eventually the costs of staying in the relationship, the emotional costs, outweigh the costs of leaving. And for different people, that calculus is different. Some people will stay in a bad relationship for a long time because they have nowhere

to go. Right. Or because they have kids, or they have financial connections, or they feel like, I'll never find another partner, so I'd rather stay with this partner even though I'm not very happy. It takes two people to get together. It only takes one person to break up. Oh, that's true.

There is the line there because I think everyone probably thinks no relationship is perfect. True. So everyone probably thinks that about their own relationship, right? I would hope so. I think that is true, actually. Okay. People, you can evaluate a relationship on two levels, and what we find is that people, like newlyweds, if you ask them very specific questions about their partner, even newlyweds

are willing to say, well, my partner's good at some things, not so good at others. Knowing somebody means knowing that person's strengths and their limitations. Oh, that old adage, the advice handed down countless generations to truly love someone is to know in what ways they are useless pains in the ass. So most people will say, oh, yeah, yeah, our relationship isn't perfect, but it's a great relationship. I love the imperfections of this relationship. Like four and a half stars on Yelp, maybe.

Exactly. I wouldn't want, you know what, very, very smart couples, my wife is a couples therapist and she... Oh, my God. Your wife is a couples therapist and you're a marriage researcher? I know. We have some interesting conversations. Oh, my God.

You guys are never getting divorced. I hope that's true. I think that's true. I think that's true. I think that it's a great relationship. That's amazing. And it took a long time for us to get to this point. But we have good conversations and one of the things that she says is, you know, when

you commit long term to a partner, you're committing to a set of strengths and limitations. And so if we get back to the idea that to the extent that you have a choice and that you make choices, one of the things to think about is, can I live with these limitations forever? Right. Don't forget, you're here forever. Another sort of insight, I think, mostly from talking to my wife, not from research, is I used to think that the purpose of communicating in relationships was to solve problems, to

solve disagreements. I now think that disagreements do not get solved. They just get managed. Okay. Okay. But what in a scientific, matrimonial logical sense does that mean? The purpose isn't that I'm ever, I'm never going to convince you or anyone else of anything. So once you decide, okay, convincing another person is just off the table, then it's just

a matter of saying, how will we deal with our disagreement? How will we manage? Yes, we're going to always disagree about this. And how are we going to manage that? Maybe we'll take turns. Maybe we'll compromise on this issue in my way, but we'll compromise on this other issue in your way. We hope it balances out.

But once you realize, I think it takes a lot of pressure off a relationship to say, oh, we are not in the convincing business. Ooh, let's repeat that. We are not in the convincing business. We are not in the convincing business. We are not in the resolving problems business like, oh, this is going to go away and then we'll never talk about this again. No, no, no.

This is the thing we talk about. That's what kind of relationship this is. This is the relationship where this is our issue. If I had been in another relationship, we'd have a different issue, but this is our issue. And as you think about the future, you think, can I live with this? Because we're going to be talking about this forever. Forever. Beloved.

I can. This is a good relationship. I'm very happy with this set of limitations and strengths. But I feel like a lot of people find that their marital discord is financially based. Or at least that's what I hear from people. I'm not married. Sure, okay. Do you find that in your research, or do you find that the finances are really just kind

of like a red herring for other lifestyle choices people make? There's two ways to answer that. I do a lot of research on the effect of financial circumstances on marriage. And the effects are enormous. Okay. Enormous. We live in a country where there's a great deal of income inequality that has been increasing over my adult lifetime.

What we've shown in multiple studies is that where you are in the socioeconomic ladder greatly affects the nature of your intimacy. What? Oh, shit. Also no surprise. Like in very specific kind of private ways, the way people interact with their partners very privately is affected by where they are socioeconomically. So that people who are affluent, who have good jobs and good educations, they can evaluate

their relationships in a different way that people who are financially struggling and disadvantaged and under resourced can evaluate their relationships in different ways. That doesn't mean that it's fundamental to specifically talk about finances, like how are we going to spend money? Because even couples that are financially struggling, if you're financially struggling, every disagreement is more of a struggle. And if you're affluent, you might talk about finances, but you might also disagree about whatever you disagree about is going to be what you disagree about.

And I would say that the context of having or not having adequate resources in your life is fundamental. It changes the kind of time you have together. It changes what you do with the time you have together. And it changes the sort of personal resources you have to do the work of empathy and the work of understanding and compromise, everything, all the work that we would call intimate work, trying to get outside your own head and capture your partner's perspective, deciding when to compromise and when not to compromise.

All that work is harder if you're financially strapped, which is why divorce rates are much higher in low-income communities than in upper-income communities. Oh, I didn't know that. It's a huge effect. So one of Ben's studies titled, Communication that is Maladaptive for Middle Class Couples is Adaptive for Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Couples showed that depending on where you are socioeconomically, different intimate behaviors produce negative or positive results. So middle class couples who withdrew in conflict had worse conflicts later, while socioeconomically

disadvantaged couples who withdrew found more comfort in that as like a de-escalation technique. Now as for divorce stats, they are definitely higher in lower-income families. And some folks would try to say that must be because those demographics don't value marriage as much, and that is a crock of horseshit. So low-income and high-income people value marriage similarly, but being broke and working several jobs and being stressed and not being privileged is just really hard on people. So what's striking is that poor communities have lower rates of marriage. When they do marry, they're of higher rates of divorce.

So intimacy is challenged by challenging circumstances. And intimacy is encouraged by good circumstances, which is why people fall in love on cruise ships. Because it's easy to have a relationship on a cruise ship. It's much easier to feel romantic when someone's given you a cocktail that has an umbrella in it. Well, what about the fact that, or at least the study I read, that the more expensive a wedding is, the more likely a couple is to get a divorce?

Yeah. Is that film flam? So side note, this news broke in 2014 with a published paper entitled, quote, a diamond is forever and other fairy tales, the relationship between wedding expenses and marriage duration. So researchers studied 3,000 couples in the US and they found that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and the wedding ceremony. So spending between two and four grand on the engagement ring is associated with 1.3 times greater hazard of divorce.

Same goes for the ceremony. Weddings that cost less than $1,000 were significantly less likely to end in divorce than nuptials costing 20 grand and up. Now $20,000, remember from the paleontology episode, could fund two dinosaur digs. I'm just saying, it's two dinosaurs. Now don't tell this to a guy named Sed Gusterev, son of a Russian oligarch who married his 20 year old sweetheart, Hadya Uzakova, in a celebration that cost $1 billion, yes, with a B, dollars in 2016.

So instead of having like your college roommate make a Spotify playlist, their reception entertainment included Jennifer Lopez and Sting, which was definitely selected by their parents, I mean, come on. Also, Enrique Iglesias, who according to some blurry Instagram photos was wearing jeans and a wallet chain to a billion dollar wedding, Enrique Igregias, also PSI Googled. How to even get married for under $1,000 though? And mostly just came up with articles that said, literally like, take the bus to the courthouse dummy or a lopin' secret, like a celebrity for whom money is no object, or

get married in the backyard and have your cousins bring a salad. So it's starting things off without a lot of money stress and debt, a good strategy for staying married? It doesn't feel fundamental to me. I haven't gone over those data. But it's unlikely, whatever's going on there, it's not about spending money on a wedding. It's about other things. So maybe if you have a lot of money to spend on a wedding, then you also have a lot of

financial independence and people who have financial independence are able to leave their marriages when they go back, should they go back? Nobody's arguing that, uh-oh, don't spend a lot of money on your wedding because that's going to break up your marriage. That's unlikely to be true. And our marriage rates going up, our divorce rates going up. What's happening now in the year that we're in, 2019? In the year that we're in 2019, here's the trend.

The trends are very different for college educated and non-college educated people. So if you look at the national trend, it would be misleading because there's two totally different trends happening. College educated people are marrying at high rates, they're delaying marriage, so they're marrying later. And that has to do with people postponing childbearing and family formation in order to get their education and their careers on track. And the evidence that this is pretty clear.

So still high rates of marriage, relatively low rates of divorce, even declining rates of divorce, but it's all happening later. So people who went to college are saying, hey, men and women are doing this. I have a good education. That means I can set up myself up for a good career. I know that if I can get that career up and running, it's going to have benefits for my family. So I'm going to get that career up and running.

And then once I have enough money and I have my career is where I want to be, then it's time to settle down. That's what the college educated people are doing. Non-college educated people are doing something totally different. They're less likely to marry at all. When they do marry, they marry earlier. They have kids prior to marriage and high rates and they have very high rates of divorce and repartnering and sort of what's called sort of marital churning, which is multiple

partners, multiple long-term partners. There are totally different things happening there. And why? Because people who didn't go to college, they have less reason to invest in education and employment because their opportunities are much more constrained. So they're like, well, why should I postpone fertility? Why am I waiting for? Why should I postpone parenthood?

So they're much more likely to have kids early, but having kids early and marrying early is associated with higher rates of divorce. Oh. I didn't know that. And getting married early and having kids early, I didn't know that. It's true. It's very strong. These are sort of big effects.

It's not psychological effects, it's sociological. People who marry younger, as you can imagine, if you marry in your very early 20s, I was a puppy when I was in my early 20s. I was a garbage buyer. Whatever. People are still figuring things out. So if you get married at that age, there's still a lot of change happening that might, that your relationship might not survive.

People who marry later are more stable, their personalities are more stable, their careers are more stable. So the person that they meet at that, at a later point, is the relationships are less likely to be buffeted by significant change. And now what about the difference between getting married versus just long-term partnership? What happens in the brain once there's a certificate in a ring and pictures and a photo album and a registry? What happens to people's relationships?

Okay. So I think that there's a lot of continuity. So I personally, again, as I said from the very beginning, I care about intimacy and I think that people can have intimacy that feels the same if we define it as I'm committed to somebody, I support that person, I care about that person. And that can happen inside or outside of marriage. So what does marriage do? What does marriage do to change intimacy?

Mostly it changes how you as a couple are treated by the world around you. This revelation is something that even the most well-meaning heterocouples likely take for granted all the time. Just how important outside support is. And it applies to married and non-married couples as well. So if you present as we're partnered but we're not married, then the world says, oh, well then you're not participating in an institution and it's hard for us to know what to do with you at the hospital when you're visiting your sick partner, legally, what is your responsibility?

The world is structured in a way that privileges marriages and people know this. Also it's harder to break up a marriage than to break up an intimate partnership. You can walk away from an intimate partnership but a marriage, you've got to fill out paperwork and it's an extremely expensive and unpleasant process. From a scientific perspective. Yeah, from every perspective, it sucks, afforded if you can. So what does it do to get married? It declares to the world we want to be treated as a couple, as a legal unit, as a social

unit. Also, from the couple's perspective, if I get married, I'm saying I want it to be harder to leave. Yeah. I want it to be harder to leave, which says something about your level of commitment. Like I'm more motivated to work through it because divorce sucks, exactly. Whereas my motive to work through the hard parts that come up in relationships might be a little weaker, not necessarily, but it might be a little weaker on average for

people who are not participating in the legal institution. So the process of what does it mean to connect to somebody, to understand somebody, that's the same between any, in any intimacy. But the institutional context makes a difference, makes certain behaviors harder and certain behaviors easier. And how have you seen in your research, because you've been researching this for 20 years, that same-sex marriage hasn't been legal the entire time. So in the LGBTQ community, how have you seen changes sociologically?

Well, I wish I knew more about that. When I started studying intimacy and marriage, same-sex marriage was not legal anywhere in the United States. Which is crazy. Which is crazy. But it all happened in my lifetime, which is terrific and a welcome development. One of the interesting things about the rapid change and rapid acceptance, legal acceptance of same-sex marriage, is that lots of couples, same-sex couples, who were together for a

long time, who never had the option of getting married, suddenly had the option of getting married. And so there was an interesting process, which is, if we had already been together 20 years, I knew I was going to be with you forever. But marriage wasn't on the table. Now that marriage is on the table, do we do it or do we not do it? And there's a study that is left to be done. There's a study that needs to be done there about how that decision is made.

I haven't gathered that data. Ben does say that other countries have gathered data on this. And overall, same-sex marriages are much less likely to end in divorce than opposite-sex marriages. And in Belgium, between 2004 and 2009, the average annual divorce rate for same-sex marriages was less than 2%. And the total rate of divorce was 11%. Now in Norway and Sweden, the same-sex marriage divorce rates are 50% lower than opposite-sex

marriages. But among those, lesbian couples do divorce more than same-sex marriage among men. Researchers find that women across all types of marriages tend to be the ones to initiate splits, because their needs typically aren't being met. So in the US, over two-thirds of all divorces in all couples are initiated by wives, because we think women are more socialized to pay attention to their relationships and are more financially dependent on a partnership. So being in a bad marriage has greater emotional consequences for women, essentially.

Also, if you're wondering where the data is, the 2020 census will at long last have a space for same-sex couples to mark for marriages, which is a tiny victory, especially in light of the current US administration trying to add in a question about citizenship while leaving out questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, which leaves a lot of LGBTQ people, especially the unmarried folks, unrepresented and underfunded, essentially invisible, which sucks and needs fighting. Speaking of fighting, but in a less valiant sense, I also asked him about what happens when any couples get back together and break up and back and forth, kind of like a Richard

Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, married and divorced situation, Elon Musk married actress Tallulah Riley twice, divorced her twice also. So as a person who has gotten back together with my exes, I asked him for selfish reasons. Ben said that beyond the obvious reasons of absence making the heart grow fonder and forgetting how boring or annoying someone is when they're not around to bore or annoy you, there are some other factors at play when you break up and get back together with someone. Another explanation is there are certain people who between themselves are managing, are struggling

to balance closeness versus independence. So there are people who struggle, you know, there's another theory called attachment theory, the idea that different people have different comfort levels with closeness and independence. Some people want really a lot of closeness and people really aren't comfortable with being too close and too dependent on another person and really value their independence. And so there are some people who in their struggle to balance that find themselves drawn to a person, but they don't want to be too close, they push away, but they don't want to be totally close, they come back together and those people often dance around each other

for a long time trying to form that balance. How important is humor and laughter in easing conflict and establishing those bonds and that feedback? It's really important. Actually, we've done some of our research has touched on that. And what we did was in one of our studies is videotape newlyweds talking about problems and you can code these tapes, you can watch the tapes and actually count how many positive behaviors and how many negative behaviors and you can even say how many positive sort

of verbal behaviors and how and you can also code the sort of nonverbal behaviors, the emotional expressions. Now, generally, people who exchange negative behaviors, anger, blaming, insults, well, that's going to be a bad thing. But what we found was that if those negative behaviors happen in the same interaction where people are being positive as well, and most of the positivity we see is humor and affection, then it didn't matter what kind of the negative behaviors had much less of an effect. Really?

So why? Here's why. If we're disagreeing and I'm mad at you, I'm super mad. But at the same time that we're having this mad disagreement, I'm definitely angry. I can also throw in a little joke or a little affection. What's the message? The message is the fact that we're mad doesn't mean I don't still like you. That's the point is that that's an incredible important message, which is you've hurt me,

you've disappointed me, but I still obviously we're still connected and the positivity is a reminder of that connection. So I think humor can serve an incredibly important function and positivity can be especially important if you can manage to find it where it's most needed, which is in the context of a disagreement. Being able to say, yes, we're disagreeing and I don't want to let this go. But I'm keeping in perspective, but still, I think you're cute and I think that this is fun and obviously we're going to be dealing with this forever because I'm not going anywhere.

That can be a very powerful message, a way of reassuring your partner even in the midst of the hard part. So again, I think it's complicated, but that humor is potentially an incredibly powerful tool along with affection that can help people through the rockiest parts of relationships. I bet my parents have been married for 49 and a half years. That's incredible. I know and they're still there. I hear them yucking it up, laughing to themselves, joking with each other.

That's amazing. I know and I'm like, they'll go to bed and then I'll hear you just giggling, laughing about what are they talking about? The other thing is think about what a joke, a joke is something that surprises you like a good joke is something that is novelty. So what they're doing is they're surprising each other. They're still telling you, like if I can make each other laugh, they're saying, it tickles me because you're telling me something I didn't know.

So they're still finding new things 49 and a half years later. That's amazing. They're amazing. I know. Bottle it up. Sell it. I know. Well, the reason why they got married is my mom just thought my dad was hot and then

it turned out they were both good people. Right. Okay. So they're lucky too. I know. They got engaged after a month. What am I supposed to do with that? Well, be lucky and try to be lucky and of course you can't try to be lucky so you do

what you can. You just appreciate when you are, I guess. But I think the story, so if you ask you, there's a lot of research asking long-term married couples, what's the secret to your success? And I think people will say, long-term couples will say, sense of humor, we worked really hard at it. We just decided we were going to be together and we were committed and so we would never let anything break us up.

That's all true. That's all good. But what it's hard to recognize is how lucky the long-term couples are. I really try to not say, well, it's just, it's all hard work because the implication then is, and if your relationship went bad, you didn't work hard enough. Or maybe you just were too stupid, you just didn't know how to have a better relationship. Believe me, if it's all about knowing what to do, relationship scientists would all have perfect relationships.

Right. I know a lot of relationship scientists. My best friends are relationship scientists and we don't always have perfect relationships because it's not only about knowing. It's about being able to. It's not enough to read the book and so it says here, I should tell a joke. It's about being able to actually find that joke in the moment about having problems that are that you can joke about and everyone's lucky.

Can I ask you questions from listeners? Okay. Oh my gosh. Okay, I'm going to run through, isn't it? Because I know that you're busy. Go for it. Lightning round. Yeah.

Okay. Before this lightning round with listener questions from Patreon, quick break to chat about ology sponsors. So you may hear a few phone calls in which I ring up a patron one-on-one to tell them about the amazing, hand-picked, and ward-approved sponsors of the show. Also please know that a portion of the proceeds from ads goes to a cause of the ologist's choosing. And I'm going to tell you about this week's in the show, Outro.

So you have more context after the interview because it does matter this week. So I encourage you to listen to the whole episode, including the Outro. It's really important stuff. Okay. Now, on to your matrimonialogical questions. These are from patrons. Okay. Oh, so many great questions and I did some of them.

Okay. Savannah Martin Collins and Sonia Karpolyevich and some other people wanted to know, what's up with common law marriages? Do you see any differences between people who are common law and people who aren't? Not a lot of great research on that. Okay. But let's speculate for a second. What is a common law marriage?

It's a marriage that is recognized as a legal partnership, even though they've not, because of the length of time people have been together. Not every state recognizes common law marriages. I think California, where we're currently having this conversation, doesn't, but I could be wrong about that. I'll look into it. I could be wrong about that. Now, according to LegalZoom, who I imagine is just helping folks navigate through Splitsville.

Most states do not recognize common law marriages. This was news to me. So the states that right now do recognize common law marriages include, and I encourage you to do just a tiny, imperceptible butt dance if you feel excited to hear your state called. Ready? Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah.

Buzzkill. Same-sex relationships are never recognized as common law. Also, there's no such thing as a common law divorce. So you need not bellow in the public square. Thou hast been ousted from my heart. The law doesn't care. Just pack up and go. Just divvy up the Blu-rays, cry into some nachos, spend what you would have spent on

legal fees on a solo trip to Cancun. Don't get beach braids. We were talking about this, essentially, is that the intimacy is the same. Two people who've never had a wedding ceremony but decided, you're my person and I'm just not going anywhere. The challenges of how are we going to understand each other, how are we going to address our disagreements, how are we going to compromise, the same, intimacy is the same. But the world, the support you get is probably less.

Because if you're not wearing a ring, if you haven't been saying to the world, my wife, my husband, then the world doesn't treat you as a social unit or legal unit, which means you don't have that kind of support. So that's going to be, I think, a challenge. The challenges come from outside and they might be more challenging for common law marriages than for legal, I don't know what the alternative phrase is. Again, the challenges of intimacy are the same, but during a slightly different circumstance because people don't recognize the institution you're participating in.

That makes sense. On the topic of intimacy, many people have this question. Carla Kennedy, Wendy Fick, said, any helpful tips for salvaging sexual intimacy if one partner isn't interested anymore, Wendy asked, what typically happens to the physical part of a relationship? Do some relationships become platonic? Well, clearly some do because the answer to the question, does this ever happen, is always yes.

And if two people are okay with that, then no problem. But if two people aren't okay with that, then a big problem. So then the first step, it seems to me, is to figure out, is to communicate, is to talk. There's a lot of research that shows that sexual connection is a subset of emotional connection. And so developing an emotional connection is one really important way to revive a sexual connection. What's going on? Are we emotionally connected?

There's research that shows that people who communicate more effectively have more sex. So if one partner is unsatisfied with the amount of sex that they're having or the quality of their sex life, communication is going to be the first step. The other thing that comes up with sexual connection is the role of novelty and self-expansion. There's a theorist, a guy named Arthur Aaron, a social psychologist, who has a theory called self-expansion theory. Self-expansion theory is the idea that the thrill of relationships comes from the thrill of becoming more than we are, that that's a fundamental motivation, says Dr. Aaron.

And when I get to know somebody else and we become a unit, well, I used to be me, now I'm us. So now I'm much more than I was and that's thrilling. But once I become us, if we don't continue to grow, well, then we're not expanding anymore. I'm definitely part of us, but we're just who we've always been and that can get boring. So the way to deal with that is how can we become more? What can we do that's new? What can we do that's different?

And that often is a place where sexual excitement comes from too. Like, wow, I see you in a new light because we've done something new that we haven't done before, even if it's not something necessarily something sexual that we haven't done before. So seeing opportunities for growth, seeing opportunities for connection, that's a good way. Talking directly. The other thing that often gets in the way of sex is people are tired. People are stressed.

And if I say, hey, how come we're not having enough sex? And I'm not acknowledging what the obstacles that are getting in the way for you. Well, and that's not going to be a great route because I'm making another demand. Sex is now another demand. So sometimes you have to take a step back and say, hey, what's going on with my partner? And sometimes sex is really a side issue to other issues. People are unhappy or tired or overburdened. And those are the obstacles that have to be addressed first before we can deal with sex.

Which dovetails to a great question from Jessica Chamberlain, Kirstie Chippendale, Elizabeth Goyne, and Lauren Kelly. What role do you find children or the lack they're playing in marriage? Do you find them more rewarding with or without children? And then other people are like, what do you do when your kids are draining you of your energy? Right. Well, the transition to parenthood is one of the most profound changes that a person

can experience, let alone a marriage. So it is a profound change. So there's research on the effect of transition to parenthood on relationships. One of the findings of that research is that the early years of having kids, it's very challenging because kids are very demanding. And that most relationships bounce back after a while and return to where they were prior to their transition to parenthood. An implication of that is that having a strong, solid connection prior to becoming parents

is a great thing. Like, that becomes a really important resource because even though you're like, well, this is a difficult period. We're up all night. Our kids are not sleeping. We have a lot of demands. I'm with one kid, you're with the other kid. But we're connected.

I know that this is relatively temporary. The other thing that's true nowadays is the expectations for parents, especially college educated parents, are higher now than they were a generation or two ago, that parents expect to spend more time with their kids and do more with their kids. And that means there's less time for the adult relationship, there's less time for the parental relationship. They're only 24 hours in a day. So something has to give.

The question is, is making a balance between, let's say you're a great parent. You want to be a great parent. You want to say, hey, I want to give my kids as many hours as I can, but I also want to give my kids access to a great adult relationship between me and my other caregiver. So that might mean investing in the relationship and putting my kids somewhere with the grand parent, if you're lucky enough to have a grandparent that you trust, or another kind of caregiver if you're lucky enough to have one. Let them go run in a field.

Or let them go run in the street, exactly right. So I mean, this is the thing. Of course, we don't let kids run in the street anymore. Right. That's how I grew up. That's how I grew up, you know? And yet that's not considered, a lot of things that I did as a kid would be considered child abuse now and neglect.

We just ran into a field and it scraped our knees on barbed wire fences. Nobody knew where we were, exactly. So this is the challenge. It really is a challenge. And so modern parents, especially college educated parents, really do struggle, have to struggle with how am I going to invest each hour. And the investment in the relationship is still vital. And it takes investment.

You have to find time to maintain that connection so that you will have that connection to show your kids and to make you better parents for your kids. Right. It's going to be harder if they're parents. It's going to be harder for them to model a good relationship if they didn't see one. Exactly. So people think, oh, well, it's now all about the kids and I owe that to my kids. You also owe to your kids having a good relationship.

That's good advice. That's great advice. I tried not to be in the advice business, but I think that's consistent with the research. I got a few questions about proposing. Tina Radio wants to know, why won't my partner of four years propose? And then Kelly Brockington asks, why doesn't Tina propose? And then also, so what Madeline Rogers says, this isn't a question, but it would be pretty great if someone proposed to this or can bring another in a Patreon question for this episode.

Also someone wrote in saying that she is proposing to her partner today. Congratulations. I know. That's exciting. I know. So Lexi Gagnier is getting proposed to you by Chalice today. Good job, Lexi and Chalice. That's wonderful.

I called that listener, Chalice, after we recorded this, Lexi said, yes, they sound amazing and adorable. Yay. Okay. But in proposing, how does a partner, especially in a patriarchal society, who maybe is a woman or is waiting to get proposed, how do we decide who decides it's time to ask? Yeah. Not a lot of good research on this.

My research always takes place with couples that have, that are married, even if they're most of them. A lot of more workers on newlyweds are recently married. So we asked them though, how'd you propose? And the couples that we talked to say this, they say, oh, we knew we were going to get married and the proposal was essentially theater, like the proposal was a ritual that we liked, but it wasn't fundamental to the relationship or rather it was a symptom of the relationship. We have a relationship where he does romantic things to me all the time or she does romantic

things and the proposal was another romantic thing, but it wasn't the romantic thing. So I think we've built up proposals in the same way we built up weddings and proms and a lot of sort of rituals as if, oh, that's got to be special and there's nothing wrong with it being special. And our relationship is not about one day, no matter how special it is, it's not about what happened on your marriage, on your wedding day, it's not about even what happened on your proposal day. You know, it can go great or it can go poorly, but what keeps our relationship alive is the

day to day process of connection, of managing difference. And so I don't think that it, I fundamentally don't think it matters that much. It's nice. It's wonderful. If you celebrate Valentine's Day and it's nice and wonderful, that's great. And if you celebrate Valentine's Day and it doesn't work and it rains, that's also okay because that's not where the relationship rises and falls. Relationship rises and falls and what happens each day.

Now that doesn't address the question of why people propose or not propose or what happens when one partner says, I want a proposal and the other partner says, I'm not ready. And that's an old story and that's a story about different people being at different places in terms of escalating commitment and different levels of comfort with participating in the institution of marriage. So it's a complicated institution. It's been many times a very, very patriarchal institution. And different people are like, you know, how are we going to define it?

What's it going to mean? Is our relationship going to change? These are hard conversations to have. It's often the case that one person's ready and the other person isn't ready. And that's a difference that has to be managed like any other difference. And some people will say, I can't handle this difference and I'm going to leave. I don't want this. This difference is too much for me.

And other people are going to say, I can handle this difference. But I do think, and this is now me speaking not as a scientist, but as a person who thinks a lot about relationships, we can't be in the convincing business with our partners. And if you need to convince your partner about committing to the relationship, that's probably not a game you want to be in. Right. Okay. And people will say that New Year's seems to be a time when the old Instagram just fills

up with a bunch of marriage proposal pictures. And I was so tickled this year to see two of my dude friends proposed to by their ladies and they both said yes. And it was so cute. And I asked Ben if he had heard any crazy engagement stories at the UCLA marriage lab because you figure tons of them. And he said, because of scientific confidentiality, he couldn't tell me. So I asked the internet and found stories online of folks who proposed these ways.

You ready? Okay. Asking 48 friends to dress up in carrot costumes and chant marry him in unison. There was a zero gravity proposal on a vomit comet plane. So hopefully no onlookers were just kind of barfed from the sentimentality of it. The professional stunt person lit himself on fire safely, but still. And then the worst proposals. The ones I couldn't ever even dream up involved partners faking their own deaths.

And then having their beloveds called to the scene of this fake motorcycle or pedestrian crash and then springing up alive with a ring on one knee. And yes, more than one asshole on planet Earth thought this was charming and cute to make his future spouse grieve above his fake blood smeared body before then just asking for her to cry. And they go from like crying to awkwardly really angry to crying again. It's just too much of a whirlwind. It's too much for the human nervous system.

But that being said, I do cry at every wedding I attend. All of them. Do you cry at weddings? I cried at my wedding. You did? Sure. That's great. That's a good sign, right?

I did. I was crying with joy and gratitude and just emotion because I was very, very grateful. And I'm grateful today. I'm very, very, I feel very, very lucky that I found someone who I think is an incredible person and I'm grateful every day. How did you propose? I proposed privately in our house. No jumbotron.

There was no jumbotron. There was no flash mob. I had given the matter a great deal of thought. I felt like, you know, as a scholar of marriage, I had to, you know, make a good case because we were already together. We were already having a good relationship and I had to say, I now have to, I don't want to, I'm not trying to convince you because I'm not in the convincing business, but here's why I think we should do this and why I'm dying to do it and why I want to do it so bad.

M.F. Urie, first time question asker, what do you think the essential things a couple must know about each other before getting married? I think that, of course, you know, more is better. It's good to know about your partner. But the most important thing you need to know about your partner is how you and your partner interact together. And I would actually say that the most important thing is how you manage difference.

It's easy to get along on the things you care about the same. It's easy to get along on a cruise ship with a cocktail, right, as we've already covered. So in terms of the future of the relationship, what you want to know is how do we disagree? Are you able to compromise? What you want to know about your partner is, is your partner capable of empathy? That's what you want to know. The most important thing, in other words, the most important thing you know about your partner is how your partner engages in the process of intimacy with you.

It's not about your partner's sexual history. It's not about your partner's score on a personality scale. It's not about whether your partner likes Chinese food or opera or ball games. None of that is the most important thing. The answer to your question, Emma, is what you want to know about your partner is how does your partner do intimacy? And the fundamental part where intimacy is tested is indifference. And you will be tested because you are different from your partner.

Everyone's different from everyone. So how does your partner manage difference with you and how do you feel in those moments? That's the most important thing you can know. Empathy is such a good point. I mean, that's such a good point. That's such a fundamental thing. Liz Tong, also, first-time questionnaire asker, why does everyone say the first year of marriage is the hardest?

And do you find that that's true in studying newlywed development? Yes. It is hard? Well, yeah. It's hard because circumstances tend to be hard. So the transition into marriage involves challenges that once they're overcome sort of fade away. So one of those challenges. A lot of times it involves some kind of move.

Moving is always stressful. A lot of people get married, like, oh, we both got jobs in the same city, so we're going to get married and we're going to move in the same place. So we're both graduating from college or grad school, and so we're getting married and moving in the same place. So that first year is you're not just getting married. Not only are you planning a wedding, often planning a wedding, but you've got other transitions. So the first year often has other transitions in it that make it challenging.

That's one. That's two. When people get married, they're not just merging two people. They're merging two big social networks, and especially their families. Oh. Yeah. You haven't talked about in-laws, but in-laws are a big issue. So a lot of times when people get married, that first year is where you suddenly say,

oh, wait a minute, where are we going to spend Thanksgiving? Where are we going to spend Christmas? It's family. So there's things to negotiate in that first year that some couples have never negotiated. When couples get married, they often will to some degree merge finances, and so now they've got to have conversations about finances that perhaps they didn't have before. So there's all sorts of new issues raised by getting married that have to be addressed for the first time during the first year, and that's what makes the first year challenging.

What we see is newlyweds tend to be very happy, and then they, you know, it tends to decline. It doesn't necessarily become unhappy, but it declines from its peak, and the biggest declines are early on, and then couples sort of find their level, and many couples still find a very high level, but it's great that newlyweds are as happy as they are, because that happiness helps them through those inevitable challenges of that first year of transition. And then if you are maybe in a little bit of a slump, say, you've been married for a while, try to find new experiences together. New ways of connecting, yes.

New ways to discover your partner and to discover the capabilities of yourself as a couple. Now again, that's kind of a bourgeois piece of advice, because it implies all sorts of flexibility that many people do not have, and which is why it's, you know, for any people marriage is hard, and it's hard to stay, just to keep it fresh and exciting. But if you have, if you are privileged, and you have the capability, remembering to invest in your marriage, remembering to nurture that connection is a very important thing. And how do you feel about movie tropes where at the end there's a marriage, or are there any movies about marriage that you think are really valuable for people to watch?

Oh, so there was a study conducted by some friends of Ben at the University of Rochester, and Ron Rogie was the lead author on the study, which had 174 couples watch romantic movies and then talk about them after. This sounds like a genius cunning plan, right? The interesting thing about that study is that what they did was they tested three different kinds of marital interventions. One that focused on conflict resolution skills, one that focused on social support skills, like how do you support each other.

And the third one was just a trivial intervention that they made up. And they said, you know what, for the third one, just as a comparison group, we'll just make up the stupidest intervention we can. Oh, my God. And this and what we'll do is we'll just say, oh, just watch. Here's a list of romance, romance movies. Just watch them and talk about them. Then we don't give you any other advice.

Whereas the other two interventions, they gave people a lot of advice. Here's how to deal with conflict. Here's how to do with source support. Hours and hours of advice. The third one was this silly one, and it worked just as well as the other two. The result, the divorce rate for those couples was cut in half. So I don't know, watch movies and just talk about them. You love birds.

Now, are there any romance movies that he likes? Well, there is a movie. There is a movie called The Five-Year Engagement with Emily Blunt and, I forgot, Jason Siegel. And the director of that movie, as he was making it, came to our lab and hung out. And, you know, we got to, we talked to him and a little bit and he got to see. And so in the movie, the Emily Blunt character is a social psychologist. And so she has a lab. She goes to her lab.

I mean, she's a grad student in social psychology. She goes to the lab. And he wanted to see what a lecture lab meeting was like. So he set in. So I liked that film. It was pretty fun. Oh, that's good to know. I've never had anologist who's had a personal connection like that.

Well, it's fun to be in LA. Yeah, that's true. Because when people, when Hollywood wants relationship scientists, they occasionally give us a call because we're local. Not because we're the greatest, but because we're lucky enough. That's just another example of luck. Now, what do you hate the most about partnership, about your work, about marriage? What is the shittiest thing about the institution of partnership or studying it?

The shittiest thing about marriage or about studying marriage. I mean, it's a tough question. Generally speaking, I am pro marriage when it's good. The shittiest thing about marriage is that it occasionally traps people in bad relationships. And that's super shitty. The worst thing about the institution is that it can be a trap. There are privileges that we associate with marriage because we privilege marriage over other relationships legally.

And that's lots of evidence that that's true. But it means that there are people, and the shittiest thing about marriage is that for a lot of its history, it's been a pretty oppressive institution for women. And in lots of parts of the world, it still is. Where women are treated as property of their husbands. The fact that for so long, men who are married to their wives had a right to sexually molest their wives and abuse their wives. The fact that still to this day, a ton of abuse happens in secret in marriage.

So, I mean, seriously, the shittiest things about marriage are incredibly bad. Are fatal and especially to women. Obviously, marriage is different in so many parts of the world. And because Ben's studies essentially westernized thoughts on marriage and intimacy, we focused on that. But still in so many countries, marriage law contradicts basic international human rights laws with wives needing permission from husbands to work a job or sign legal documents. And even in the 1970s, in France and Spain and America, husbands had to give permission for

things like applying for a credit cards or a business loan or just a woman's right to leave the house alone. This aside gets even harder to hear, so a little warning for the next minute or so. In the 1800s here in the U.S., husbands were entitled to domestic discipline of their wives. And judges were fine with it. Just as long as the whip or stick they used to beat their wives was no wider than a judge's thumb. This was called the rule of thumb.

Now in some countries, it's still legal and acceptable for a husband to use violence to discipline his partner. A UNICEF study showed that large percentages of women in Afghanistan and Jordan, Mali, Laos have been socialized to agree that a husband is justified in beating his wife if she argues or goes out without asking him. And of course, there are practices like child marriages and other brutalities. Women and girls forced to marry their sexual abusers to save their reputations. So while one person's associations of marriage might be just Pinterest wedding boards of

rustic mason jar cocktails, another's association could be financial tension or deep commitments to not only a partner but to a shared religion or the celebration of having their love finally legally recognized or trying to change the expectations of both partners to a union that's more balanced and safe. Ben continues. I'd like to believe that as a society, we are moving away from that. Maybe not quickly enough but still substantially so that more and more people believe that marriage should be an institution of equality where both partners are treated as independent

human beings who are choosing to connect to each other but neither one is property of the other. And I do think that many people would describe their marriages that way and try to live that way. But it's not true for everyone and that is a bad thing. As far as the worst things about studying marriage, that'd be much harder because it's a privilege to study marriage. I am super lucky. The theme of this conversation is that I just feel fortunate, like the luckiest guy in the world, that I get to do this, that I get to think about and talk to people like you about

something that I care about and that everybody cares about. You know, I don't have to convince anybody. What are you studying? Marriage? Oh, that doesn't matter. Why would you do that? No, everyone cares. People really care about marriage. You know, I'm not studying, you know, some weird thing that I have to even define.

You don't even know what exists. Everyone knows that relationships matter. Everyone's thinking about them. They're surrounded by them. And I get to do that for a living. That's only good. You get to study other people's distractions. Yes, it's true.

Your distraction, other people's distractions are your focus, which is great. Well, again, I don't think that relationships are a distraction for people. I think that that's where most people live and work is a distraction. Oh, that's a great point. For many people, their work is a distraction. What they care about is their family. They care about their love. They care about the connection.

I want to get back to the couch where I can cuddle with the person that I'm closest to, and work is, you know, a means to that end. We just exposed the fundamental flaw in my whole paradigm of life. Oh, wait, I thought relationships were a distraction. I don't think they are. That's what's happening. There's many, there's, you know, life is complicated, and people can care about that.

I also love my job. I do. I love my job, but I wouldn't pick it over in my relationship. Please picture me right now with those black and white hypnosis spirals for eyes, just falling down a thought chasm, reflecting on my life. Okay, let's move on. And what is your favorite thing about relationships, your work, marriage, best thing? The best thing about, about the best thing about my job is that I get to ask the questions that

occur to me, and somehow I have the freedom and flexibility to pursue them in any way that I want. It's, again, an incredible privilege that I feel grateful for every day. The best thing about intimacy is that it solves sort of an existential problem, which is that each of us are alone, that the truth is I can't escape my own skin, that fundamentally there's a separation between me and the rest of the world that ends at my epidermis. But intimacy is a way of emotionally bridging the gap of connecting, of being not just in my own head, but somehow connecting through our skin to somebody else and even, even across space with somebody else.

And that's a miracle. And it's kind of a miracle that it exists, but that we've evolved to have that happen, that right now there's people in the world that I'm connected to that I can feel. I mean, not in a supernatural way, but that they matter to me right now, even as I'm sitting in a room far away from them. And that's an incredible metaphysical miracle. It's a little magic. It's a little bit magical, and I believe that it's,

that a lot of the natural and material world is magical, not because it's supernatural, but because the natural world is pretty amazing. And where can people find you? Where can they read your words and see your studies? They can find me at UCLA. They can Google my name, Benjamin Carney, with a K, K-A-R-N-E-Y. Our lab is the UCLA Marriage Lab, and that's also Googleable, and we have a website where a lot of our work is published.

Cool. And oh, for every episode, I donate to a particular charity or nonprofit that's related to your field. I would be delighted. I would be delighted to do that. And there are a lot of charities that I think help victims of abuse, escape bad relationships, and I think that I would love to be able to support them. Okay, great.

Well, good. Oh, well, thank you so much for doing this. My pleasure, Allie. Oh, I love this. So once again, Dr. Ben Carney of the UCLA Marriage Lab. He's the co-author of Intimate Relationships, and all around fascinating, cool dude. So do Google his work. You can look in the show notes, and I've put links to find him.

Also, more links about things we've discussed are up at alleywar.com. Now, this week, per his directive, a portion of ad proceeds was donated to care.org to support their work to end gender-based violence, which affects at least one in three women worldwide. So care.org says that ending poverty requires addressing the power inequalities between women and men, girls and boys that underpin gender-based violence. And care.org supports the empowerment of poor women and girls in their challenges to enjoy happy and healthy lives and to change the contexts in which they live,

learn, work, and raise families. So you can find out more about their programs at care.org or at the link in the show notes. So thank you, Ben Carney, for choosing that. You can find oligies at oligies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm Ali Ward with 1L on both. Thank you to everyone on Patreon for making this podcast possible. Thanks to the sponsors.

You can find links to them in the show notes too. And to everyone getting oligiesmerch at oligiesmerch.com. Thanks, Shannon Feltzis and Bonnie Dutch, for managing that. Thanks, Erin Talbert and Hannah Lippo, for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group full of wonderful people. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thwerburn of the Ban Islands. Interns are the wonderful Harry Kim and Caleb Patton, who hosts the You're Never Too Old podcast about anime and comics.

Also, I accidentally called Caleb Patton Caleb Finch last week because my brain was done with thank you time at that point. So assistant editing and clutch research this week was done by Jared Sleeper of MindChamp Media. And thanks, of course, to my right hand man, editor Stephen Ray Morris, for piecing this all together. What would I do without you? At the end of the show, I tell you secret. And this week's secret is that your old dad has been to a lot of weddings.

And I'm usually very, very shy about dancing, like weirdly so. Like you can't make me do it. I'll hide behind a plant or I'll grab onto a doorway. I cannot be dragged. I am mortified. And then I swear to God, one and a half Chardonnay's later. I can't stop dancing. I don't know chemically how that happens.

That is not enough Chardonnay to change someone's behavior so drastically. But when it's on, it's just on. So thank you. And I'm sorry if I've ever danced in the back of your wedding videos. Okay, goodbye. Nephology. Seriology. Seminology.