Speaking of Psychology - Making Love Last and Dating in the Digital Age (SOP66)

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Love. We all want it but sustaining that spark can be difficult in our hectic world, especially with life stressors beyond our control. How do we find love and keep the passion alive throughout the years? Relationship expert Benjamin Karney, PhD, from the UCLA Marriage Lab shares valuable insights. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Benjamin Carney, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of the UCLA Marriage Lab. Dr. Carney is a leading scholar of social relationships and marriage who studies change and stability in intimate relationships with a particular. emphasis on minority populations, including low-income couples and military families. Welcome, Dr. Carney. Oh, thanks for having me. Happy to have you here today. So you're a co-author of a study that was recently published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined what's known as Demand-Witrae behavior. And so to summarize that, that means one partner in a relationship asks the other to change something, and the partner who's asked to make that change basically shuts

down and withdraws. And in this study, you looked at how that behavior is impacted based, impacts the couple's relationship satisfaction based on their income levels. So what did, can you explain what you found? Sure. What we're building off of is an existing literature on the negative implications of the demand withdrawal pattern. So there's been a lot of research on marriage that shows that when one partner seeks change and the other partner is inventing, in the status quo, you get this negative cycle where the person who wants change has to turn up the volume and ask more and ask more. And the person who loves the status quo, which is often the male partner, but not always, has to withdraw to maintain the status quo. And then that means that the

person who wants change has to get louder and louder. The person who withdraws has to get worse and worse. And a lot of research that's been done shows that this pattern has negative implications for marriage. But couples that fall into this sort of negative cycle of demanding and withdrawing, experience lower marital satisfaction, experience declines of marital satisfaction, experience higher rates of divorce. So that's the conventional wisdom. The limits, the problem with that conventional wisdom is that all of that research,

and I mean all of it, has been conducted on middle class or more affluent, mostly white, college-educated couples. Okay. So the advice that's available for all couples is based on research on a very narrow range of couples. And the assumption is, well, demand withdrawal is going to be equally bad for everybody. So it doesn't matter that we actually have never studied it in anyone except for a bunch of college-educated white couples. Our work questions that assumption and says, well, wait a minute. What if we think about couples that are not affluent that we're not affluent that we're not,

might not have gone to college, that might not have the same options that affluent college-educated couples have. What were the implications of that cycle in that other context? And what we were thinking is that what makes demand withdrawal so negative for affluent couples is the presumption, the implicit assumption that people can change things if they want to in their lives. So if I'm asking you for change. I'm saying, you could change if you wanted to. And so you're not wanting to, you're not changing means you don't want to, which means a baby, you don't love me, you don't care about me. Right. In non-affluent couples, in couples that might be poor or disadvantaged, that assumption isn't true. You can't assume that people who don't change would,

don't change because they don't want to change. Couples that don't have resources might not be able to change. So let's say I'm a spouse and I'm asking my partner hey, you know, you should make more money. You should get a better job. You should work harder for this family. Well, if I'm an affluent couple, I'm like, well, your failure

to do so means you don't care enough. But if I'm a poor couple, your failure to do so might mean that you can't. I might be asking you for something that you cannot do. So for a poor couple, withdrawing in the face of that kind of demand might actually be adaptive.

that was the idea. An adaptive meaning it's... It might actually help the relationship. That that might be the best available way of dealing with your demand would be to withdraw because I can't address it any other way. Okay. So we tested it. We were one of the, I think the first study ever that got a diverse set of couples and

actually used observational data on poor and affluent couples. Most observational research on marriage took place only with the affluent couples. But we had a diverse, we went out of our way to sample couples in low-income neighborhoods and couples that were more affluent. So we had a range of couples. We videotape talking about problems. And we identified the demand withdrawal pattern. And here's what we showed.

We showed this in two different samples that the couples who were more affluent, the more did this demand withdrawal cycle, the worse off they were. But the couples who were less affluent, the more that did demand withdraw, the better off they were. Demand withdraw that every advice column says, don't do this. You know, don't allow yourself to fall into the cycle. That advice would have been bad advice for the low-income couples.

The poorest couples in our sample actually benefited from engaging in a demand-withdraw pattern. And so that's the news here. And the broader lesson is the advice that we give to couples has to be tailored to their circumstances. The same advice that applies to couples that have a lot of resources might not apply. It might even be counterproductive for couples that don't have a lot of resources. And that's what we found. And a lot of your research, as I mentioned, when I was introducing you, does include minority populations, I would say,

and not necessarily racial, ethnic minorities, but income, minorities, military families. So why do you think it's important to include such a diverse sample in your research? Can you explain your commitment to that inclusivity? Absolutely. There's two ways about it. I mean, for me personally, it's a sort of an ideology that says science has not done a good job of representing the broader population or diverse populations. It's easier for a scientist, and I, you know, I have to, I have empathy for social science, which is a hard thing to do, to try to make it a little easier by studying conveniently available samples. Because, boy, science is hard, so at the least I can do is study an easy sample to get. The problem is that the easiest sample to get is white people, is people who hang out around universities who tend to go to college.

It's a lot of extra expense, an extra effort, if I want to try to find people who are different than that, who are somewhere else. It's only okay to look at convenient samples if the conclusions of that research apply broadly to everybody. Here's the problem. They don't. So my thought is that to be a good scientist, you actually have to directly examine whether, your findings generalized to diverse populations. And now there's a political reason to do this as well, or a policy-based reason, especially for me a family researcher.

And this is about 15 years ago, the early 2000s, there were policies put into place by our federal government to try to promote low-income families and promote the health of low-income families. And this was known as the Healthy Marriage Initiative. And it was developed in the second Bush administration to, with a very noble goal, let's help poor families that are struggling. The question is, what kind of help was offered? And the answer is, the help that was offered was help based on the research. Again, very admirable. The only problem is that research had only been conducted on affluent white middle class couples.

So millions of dollars, what I mean is hundreds of millions of dollars. What I really mean is almost a billion dollars was spent over the next 10 years on programs to help low-income families based on research on high-income families. You can imagine what the risk is for that, is that the advice and all that money got spent on programs that proved ineffective. So there's real consequences, like a billion dollars worth of consequences of not knowing what's really going on in the those low-income couples. That is what motivates my commitment to studying the couples that haven't been studied. And going back to the results of that other study, in those low-income couples, is too much withdrawal, demand behavior unhealthy? Did you see how it was prolonged? I believe the study was over 18 months, correct, the period of time? It was. Again, there were two different

samples there, and we found the same general pattern in both. We did not see, what you're suggesting is a curvilinear effect, an effect that a little bit of demand-withdraw might be good for those couples, but too much would be bad. We didn't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not there. It just means that one of the things is true

in that in both of these samples, we were studying younger couples, and it's quite possible that the couples that we're seeing weren't the most distressed couples. It might be that if you're really studying maybe couples that have been together longer, or couples that were,

were really struggling with distress, that at the extremes, demand withdrawal might be bad, or too much withdrawal might be bad for a lot of couples. But we didn't see it. In the younger couples, the couples who were still together, who were moderately satisfied and committed to each other, we saw that a modest level of the demand withdrawal pattern was okay. By the way, to be clear, there's an effect, the way we looked at it, there's an effective of withdrawal. Withdrawal generally isn't a great thing. But withdrawal in the face of demand

turned out to be an adaptive thing for the low-income couples only. Yeah, sort of giving that partner who is withdrawing a chance like save face, if you will, as you say, maybe not face the reality, the very basic realities they're dealing with. That's beautifully said. That's beautifully said, actually. That in a condition where you cannot, your face of the demand that you cannot meet, withdrawal might be the best of a bad set of options. Think of what the other options are. The other options are disappointing you directly or denying your demand or confronting you or getting mad or getting defensive. If those are your options, withdrawal starts to look better and better.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned also, too, in the bottom of the study, you know, at the end of it usually concludes saying where future research could go. And you did note that the future research could possibly be on the same-sex couples or could be on older couples to see how it would play out in different, you know, maybe not necessarily from the UCLA Marriage Lab from other researchers. Exactly. Our habit and our expertise is on the earlier years of marriage. and in the same way that I am very reluctant to generalize to diverse couples from the only from the couples that have been studied, I would be reluctant to generalize from what I know about the early years of marriage to studying the later years of marriage.

You could easily imagine that demanding the demands, the meaning of demand and the meaning of withdrawal might evolve over the course of relationship. Couples have been together 25, 30 years. What does it mean to withdraw in the face? of a demand then, if the demand is somebody like, oh, you know, I've heard this hundreds of times and it's not going to change, that my withdrawal might be interpreted differently, it might have different implications. Right.

And that's a future direction that we pointed out at that paper. So what can couples, what can couples do with this information? So they have this study saying that, you know, sometimes this behavior is helpful, sometimes it's not helpful, but what can the average person in a relationship reading this, what might they take away from it in their own lives? There are implications of this work for couples, which is, but I think the strongest implications of this work are for policymakers. I think the real audience for this paper isn't couples themselves, but policymakers.

Because for too long, policymakers have said, again, admirably, let's find the research and base our policy on the research. Unfortunately, the question they haven't asked is, is there available research that applies to the population we want to target. So policymakers, the audience for this paper is to say to policymakers, you can't assume that a program that might work in an affluent population is going to work in a low-income population. That's really the lesson of this. So the implication is if I, as a policymaker, want to improve or target a particular population,

I need to research this explicit of the population because this paper shows that relationships might function quite differently in those two different contexts. So I think that's really the primary audience and the primary value of this paper for making the world a better place, is that we might have hopefully be able to start developing policies that are more targeted and based on more specific research that acknowledges the real differences in the way these intimate relationships, play out at different levels of socioeconomic status. Okay, great. And moving on to your general research with the marriage lab, how do you advise couples to deal with the inevitable conflicts that come up throughout a relationship? So, right, a big issue, and that's just true in all the couples we studied, low income, middle income and high income, is conflict. Now, the way social psychologist, I'm a social psychologist,

The way social psychologist defined conflict really generally is any time that my pursuit of my goals gets in the way of your pursuit of your goals. So whenever that happens, we've got a conflict. And if you define conflict that way, it follows that conflict's inevitable. It's always going to be conflict. We're always getting each other's way. And the closer we are, the more we get each other's way. Think about, you know, dancing. If the closer we are, the more we're going to separate each other's toes.

a good analogy. So the issue in relationships isn't why do we have conflict because conflict's part of the game. We're not going to want the same thing at the same time all the time. We're going to have different desires for when to be on the couch and how often have sex and what do we have for dinner and what time we have kids and all of that. The issue for couples is what do we do what do we do when we hit those conflicts? What do we do when we encounter those conflicts? And our research has talked a lot about what do the what a couples do that makes it makes those couples makes those conflicts easier to manage and what a couples do that makes them harder to manage so and there's a lot on this you know we could go on and on but there's one big issue that's come up

is there are different structures of conflict and we distinguish between vertical conflicts and horizontal conflicts okay what's the difference a vertical conflict is a conflict where one side is objectively right and the other side is objectively wrong. Let me give an example. If you and I start arguing about what the capital of Portugal is, I actually don't know what the capital of Portugal is, but let's assume that we disagreed about it. One of us might be right and the other one would be just wrong. And we could discuss it until we convinced each other, like this is the right answer, that's the wrong answer. Now, the problem with vertical conflicts is that we're almost never in them. our conflicts are not typically vertical conflicts.

The conflicts that relationship partners have are typically horizontal conflicts. And a horizontal conflict is a difference in values or preferences where there isn't an objectively right or wrong answer where both sides are valid. Here's an example of a horizontal conflict. Let's go to dinner. I want to go to Chinese. You want to go to Italian. Yeah. Okay, that's a conflict.

We want different things, but you're not wrong. It's not wrong to one Italian. And it's not like, no, Chinese is just objectively better. It's just we want different things. Right. Almost all conflicts are horizontal conflicts in relationships, but people approach them as if they're vertical conflicts. So if couples disagree in, you know, where should, what religion should we raise our kids? You know, one person's like, well, I, my religion's right and yours is wrong.

And maybe if I, see, if I think that I'm right and you're wrong, or how often do you, how often should we have sex? You know, what's the most appropriate time? Like, well, we should have sex the amount that I want it. And you're wrong to want it your amount. You're like weird, it's for too much or too little. Like, that's wrong. When I think I'm in a vertical conflict, I'm going to try to debate you. I'm going to try to convince you that you're wrong. I'm going to try to instruct you, teach you. None of that works. Yeah, it's not going to get you anywhere. It's not going to get you anywhere. Nobody wants to be convinced by their partner or debated by their partner or instructed by their partner.

And yet, if I think that there's a right answer and I've got it, that's what it leads me to do. So the advice that we often give couples is, remember that you're in a horizontal conflict. Remember that you can disagree and both sides are still valid. You just want what you want. Your partner wants something different. If you start from there, now you're in a negotiation. If you start from there, you're not in a debate, but you're now in a, just go, okay, you want what you want now we're going to have to talk can we compromise can we take turns it's you still

might not get what you both want but it feels a lot better to start from a position that both of our positions are valid and that's what thinking about horizontal conflicts does so that's like one thing that couples can do to address the inevitable conflicts that kind of sounds like politics too i guess even that could be really. It's most likely a horizontal conflict and not a vertical con, even though we try to paint it as a vertical conflict. I know we're going off in a different territory, but as soon you said that, that's immediately what I thought of. It's like, is it really one side right or wrong? It's more so different values and how do you compromise? Absolutely. Now, it's a little of the topic of couples and it's not merely, but there are social

psychologists who've been studying the deep structure of political conflict. And of course it is a values discussion that the two sides are having. One side says, you know, the most important value is, let's say, equality. And another side says, quality, I'm not against equality, but the most important value is security. Well, you're not wrong to like security. I'm not wrong to value equality. We're just valuing different, we're prioritizing different things. But that's not how it's, that's not how it plays out.

in the political realm. It plays out in the political realm. Not that, oh, we want different things. How are we going to negotiate this? It plays out as, I'm right and you are evil Satan. Yeah. The same thing happens in couples, bringing it back. Yeah, bringing back to the relationships.

But there's a lot of parallels. I mean, it's human interaction. Absolutely. Express couple, an unhappy couple. They don't just say, oh, we want different things. The unhappy couples say, why do you want? How dare you want what you want? You're wrong.

and mean and malevolent for wanting something different than what I want. That is not a road towards compromise. That's not a road towards connection. Thinking about it as a difference of values allows you to say, oh, I'm not going to debate you, I'm not trying to convince you. Let's just negotiate, which always feels better, even though it's still hard. Is this advice you give to couples to how to stay together for the long haul, for a long period of time, is to how to navigate these conflicts?

to see them in a different light? I mean, yes. Now, generally, my lab is a research lab. I'm a social psychologist, not a clinical psychologist. I'm not really in the advice business. That said, I do do research that I think matters for people and I think has implications for how we live our lives. So, you know, we always give the advice with a very light touch

because it's, I'm basically saying this is an implication of the observations we've made in our lab. A second observation we've made in our lab around conflict also has to do with the psychological framing of the conflict. And it is, you can frame a discussion with your partner or even a disagreement with your partner as a specific problem or a global problem. And a lot of times we have flexibility in how we do that. And so, you know, if we're arguing about the toilet.

seat. It could be, I want it raised and you want it lowered. Or it could be, I think that I've asked for something and you don't care enough to give it to me. So the fact that you aren't lowering the toilet seat is actually a sign that you don't love me. You don't care about me. You're not paying attention to me. Yeah.

Well, that second one is more global. Right. And it's got a lot harder a problem to solve. Right. It's not a simple thing. It's applied to a much larger issue. Exactly. The happier couples, the couples that manage conflict more effectively are the couples that keep it specific.

Interesting. We have a dishwasher problem. It's a dishwasher problem. I'm not going to link this to, I'm not going to say that the problem is you're a selfish bastard. Because how am I going to solve that one? Let's just focus on the dishwasher. So another piece of advice that sort of comes out of this work is the more that you can keep your specific disagreement specific, the better for your relationship.

Containing the disagreements, containing conflict, is a good skill to practice. And shifting gears a bit, but you also have studied health and in relationships, not health of the relationship, but being healthy together as a couple. And you and your co-director wrote a book called Love Me Slender, which is very cute play on words. But can you explain the importance of, for couples, for being healthy, and how that helps a relationship? I mean, where is that correlation?

Sure. That's a book. My co-director and collaborator is a guy named Tom Bradbury, who's a clinical psychologist at UCLA. And Tom, I wrote this book several years ago called Love Me Slender. And it came out of work that we had done on how couples support each other. And we'd studied for years. What makes couples more or less effective at supporting each other's goals? And it wasn't. until some years later that we asked, hey, what are those goals? What are they supporting each other doing? So we went back to, we had thousands of videotapes. And we went back and said, in those discussions where they're given an opportunity to support each other, what are they supporting each other with? And what we found out is that over half of the couples were asking each other for support about one issue. And that was health and fitness and diet and weight. In other words, their bodies. Couples, when they look to each other for support, half the time are saying, I want you to help me be healthier, either to lose weight or to eat better or to go to the gym more.

So we looked at those tapes and we said, are couples doing a good job at helping each other do this thing that they really want help with? And what we noticed in the tapes was, on one hand, all these couples, we tend to study together, we tend to study. of younger couples who are pretty happy, they're committed to each other. These couples wanted to help each other. Like they wanted to, you look at me and you're like, I want to be healthy and I'm like, oh my God, I'm committed to you, we're going to be married for years. I want you to be healthier. I want to help you with your thing. And yet, it turned out to be a very hard thing to do. Providing effective support around health turned out to be fraught with difficulty. Let me give an example. If I say to you,

do you think I look fat? Do you think I need to go to the gym? What's the helpful response? No, you look great. No, you're fine. Yeah. Now I don't go to the gym. I don't get healthy.

Yeah. Here's another option. Yeah. Yeah, you are getting some weight. We should go to the gym. Yeah. Oh, yeah? How's that feel?

Yeah, right. It's tough. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. It's tough. So that's why we wrote the book. We're like, oh, man, it's not easy. Even the couples who love each other.

It's not easy. So we started really looking into it. And what came out of the book was a couple big insights. And one is health is not individual. If you're in a relationship, there's no such thing as individual health. There's those just things, I'm just going to be healthier because so much of our lives are interdependent. You know, if you have a spouse or a coat, if you live with somebody, how many kitchens does the average house have? Calas has lots of bathrooms, only one kitchen.

So you're going to be eating from the same fridge. So there's no way that you could just say, oh, I'm just going to have my fridge over here. You're going to have your fridge over here. That's just not how couples work. Yeah, cooking, meals and going to the grocery store and everything. Absolutely. These are social events.

And so when somebody says, I want to eat differently, it affects their partner. And yet, that's not how diet books are written. That's not how diet books are written as if you make a change. You can't make a change that doesn't affect your partner. Yeah. So once you acknowledge that, you're like, wait a minute, I'm not going to be successful unless my partner's part of it. And that's a big part of the book. Another thing that we pointed out is that providing support is thorny because people want help, but they don't want bad help.

And there's lots of help that is the kind of help we all can do without, as my childhood book said. So in the book, we have all sorts of examples from our tapes of couples that are trying to be helpful and kind of failing. And, you know, one way is exactly what you came up with, which is, no, honey, you look beautiful. You don't have to change the thing. Aren't I being loving? And I am being loving, but I'm not being helpful. Yes. So, you know, we talked about how you can thread that needle and say, hey, I love you.

But did you say you want to do something? Well, if that's what you want to do, I'm going to help you. Not because I think you need to change, but because I hear you saying that you think you need to change, and I'm validating your goal. And we've seen couples do that. The example that we talk about in the book is a wife who says to the husband, and she says it with real sadness, I feel bad about my body and I don't feel attractive. And he says, oh, that's a big problem. It's a huge problem that you don't see the beautiful woman that I see when I look at you.

That's terrible. What can we do about that together? How can we work on this problem? And that's a real deft move that he did. Because he was able to say, that's a serious problem. I'm totally on board with helping you solve that problem. At the same time, they were saying, I don't share the opinion.

I don't. It's not a problem for me. And that's skillful. And so we wrote the book to sort of try to articulate that skill and share it with others. So that's what that book was about. Great. And you've, so switching gears at dating. Sure.

Dating. You know, many people are looking for love on apps today, like Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid. And you and I spoke a bit about this. And you said that how we're dating? has changed. So we're not maybe necessarily meeting someone at a bar or at work as often, perhaps we're using apps. But you said how we're dating changed, but the actual dating, dating actions and dating itself has not changed. Can you explain that? Sure. It seems like I think it would people say, oh, it's totally different now than it was 20 years ago. You know, different people

focus. You can focus on continuity and you can focus on change. And there's a lot that's changing and there's a lot that's staying the same. So what's changing? So as technology, what's changing in the domain of how do people find intimate partners? This is of interest to us. We study intimacy,

so we're interested in how do people find intimate partners? And clearly, the technology available to do that is changing and is changing a lot. Whereas before, to find it to 20 years ago, 25 years ago, before we had smartphones, if you wanted to find into it partner, you had to go somewhere where people were likely to be, talk to a lot of people,

and hope that you find the available people. But nobody is wearing a T-shirt saying, I'm available. Some people might. Some people might, and good for those. But for the most part, they weren't. You'd have to sort of like say, hey, hi, are you interested? Like, no, I'm gay. Or no, I'm married.

Look at my ring or whatever. But now, with apps, you have a way of identifying people who are definitely available and local and willing to talk. All before you get in the room, that's amazingly convenient. That's for some people life altering. So, you know, if you were at a job or a circumstance where you meet a lot of people, maybe it doesn't make that much different. But if you're a modern person that works long hours, doesn't meet that many people at work, but you want to meet someone socially, how do you do it? You know, the old advice is join a club, and that's still good advice. But now there's a new way, which is I can actually go online and multiple apps will give me a long list of people who are interested in dating me, who are relatively my age, and who are within a short drive of my house.

That's astonishing. Yeah. That's incredible. It's a marvel of modern technology. Absolutely. It's as astonishing as the fact that I can order on Amazon something in the morning and it will be delivered to my house at night if I live in a major city. So this is incredible earth shattering. The convenience of it, that's the good news.

The bad news is that some things haven't changed. And the establishing of romantic chemistry, well, that's not anything. that hasn't changed at all. And we haven't discovered any magic bullets for that. And now, there was a period where the dating apps were promising a magic bullet that didn't really exist. You had dating apps like chemistry.com and eharmony.com that were advertising very heavily with the promise that they had a magic algorithm that could select partners from the pool better than you could by yourself.

They would say, we're going to ask you some questions, do a magic mathematical equation, and spit out people that you are guaranteed or at least have a high likelihood of matching with. That turned out to be snake oil. That has now been very well established to be bunk. But it was a persuasive idea.

It was an appealing idea. Lots of people paid a lot of money for it. And the reason they paid a lot of money for it is that there's something compelling. about the idea that if I give you a list of what I want in a partner, I want someone who votes like me, who likes Chinese food, who enjoys watching HBO limited series, and, you know, likes modern jazz. And if I find someone like that, great, I'm probably going to like that person.

That assumption turns out to be false. Yeah, you said that it doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit it off just because you have the same interests. At all. Yeah. It doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is that we have. thousands of interests.

And anyone you meet, it's not that if I share the right interests with you, I'm going to like you. It's the opposite. If I like you, we'll gravitate towards the interests that we have in common and will gravitate a way towards the interests that we don't have in common. Within a broad circle, I want someone who's nowadays, somebody who generally shares my politics. Nowadays, it's being of the opposite or being of the wrong political party is more stigmatized in dating than being of a different race or religion. Wow.

That's a new development. Yeah, how long has that been happening, do you think? In my lifetime, in the last 20 years, that kind of polarization, people have said, I wouldn't mind if my child came home with a partner of a different race, but I would never want my child to come home with a partner of a different party. Wow. So it's not super recent, but that's the same. It is super recent and it's decades, but not necessarily in the past like two or three years. It speaks to the divisions in the country. Yeah. But there's lots of people who share your political persuasion in the world. There's lots of people who share your religion. And within that,

it turns out that a list of things you like, a list of your hobbies, doesn't predict who you're like romantically. Because it turns out that romantic attraction is not about these sort of stable characteristics or interests. Romantic attraction has a lot more to do with behavior, interaction in the moment. Romantic attraction arises from how the exchange of behavior makes me feel. And if it makes me feel, you know, understood in the moment, and your capacity to behave in a way that makes you feel understood and excited and interested, has to do with what you do, not what foods you like to order in from.

Once that feeling arises of romantic chemistry, then people look for, well, what do we have in common? Oh, we have this in common. Great, let's go do that thing. And people are complicated. We'll find something we have in common. So that's why, no matter how much you work on your profile, I wonder how many hours you study the other person's profile.

You're not going to know what's going to happen when you meet until you meet. So dating apps can do something great and there's something they can't do. They can find people who are available. Which is helpful, obviously. Which is very helpful. It's amazing. But they can't tell you who you're going to like. Only interaction can tell you who you're going to like.

So the apps are great. Use them, find people, and then get in front of them. So is that your advice to dating in 2018 and moving forward? That's just still to get away from your phone. Yes. Meet in person. Or even Skyping. Like there's, you know, this interaction, the face-to-face, the face-time, as it were.

But I wouldn't spend that much time working out of profiles because profiles are not where it's happening. Great. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? Any other research you wanted to talk about or other topics? Back to the policy issue. The things that I'm interested in pursuing are one of the other hidden ways, invisible ways that public policy affects intimacy. Because this is not something that gets discussed a lot. When we talk about public policies like health care, like tax increases or decreases, like the minimum way. age, all of those big public policy discussions are discussed in terms of, well, how will it affect income? How will it affect employment? How will it affect, you know, debt? The implication of some of the work we're doing lately is that all of those policies should affect intimacy as well. Intimacy, the decisions people make, should I get married, should I have a kid, am I satisfied

with you, are very much affected by the policy environment in which it takes place, in which these decisions take place. So one of the things that we're interested in pursuing is looking at the very private, intimate implications of these very public global policy changes. And so that's something that we're pursuing now, and we're something that we're pursuing now, and We're specifically doing analyses on what happens to marriage and divorce in states that raise the minimum wage. Interesting. You'd think that for poor couples, there might be an effect, and it seems like there is.

But that's really, you know, I shouldn't talk about that too much because that's still work we're working right now. That sounds fascinating. But the odd applications, it follows from the paper that we started talking about, which is if you want to help couples, you can help them by trying to teach them stuff. You can help poor couples by trying to teach them stuff. Or you can help them by making their lives easier. And it turns out that there's some evidence that if you make people's lives easier, intimacy improves even if you don't teach people anything. Huh, that's very interesting. So it's like, so it's like much, you think of relationship as just a small thing here, but it can obviously expand out more and to include a lot of other factors.

You've heard the expression that personal is political. the political turns out to be personal as well. And I actually just off the top of my head, I read an article recently about how the divorce rate from millennials is going down. Yeah. I mean, you know, you know, it's just new information shared, but, you know, basically it was saying people are choosing to marry later, you know, changing their habits in that way.

So that's interesting as well. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely. I read that same article. and the analysis showed very clearly that divorce rates are declining for millennials who went to college. Okay. It's not true of couples who didn't go to college. And so, and here's the point, is that nowadays, people who have access to education and have access to good careers are delaying marriage until their education and careers are in place.

So people who get married once their education and careers are in place have more stable marriages. Makes perfect sense. People who don't go to college are marrying less but marrying earlier. And when they marry, they don't have careers in place, then their lives are going to be harder. And they struggle and their marriages struggle too. Makes perfect sense. That's really fascinating. Interesting.

I'm interesting to see what comes of that and more studies are done or what news comes that as we move forward. Absolutely. I'm very interested in as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Carney. It's been a really fascinating talk. Caitlin, thank you for having me. I'll have this chat with you any time. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts like APA journals dialogue about the latest and most exciting psychological research and progress notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit at speakingof psychology.org to find more episodes and to view resources on the topics we

discuss. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna, for the American Psychological Association.