The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Keep Your Relationship Healthy

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

The health of our romantic relationships is in peril thanks to the many stresses and strains of the pandemic lockdown. Couples might be facing huge emotional and financial challenges at the same time as being tightly confined to their homes. But psychologist Eli Finkel (author The All-or-Nothing Marriage) says there are ways to weather the crisis without destroying your partnership - and there might even be opportunities to hit the reset button and address problems that in normal times you just let slide. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Welcome to a special set of episodes of The Happiness Lab. The now global spread of coronavirus is affecting all of us. This disease has brought a host of medical, economic, and political problems. But it's also given us a ton of uncertainty and anxiety, which are beginning to have an enormous negative impact on our collective well-being. But whenever I'm confused or fearful, I remember that looking for answers in evidence-based science is always the best way

to go. And that's where I'm hoping this podcast can help. One of the most common questions I've gotten from listeners about how to handle this awful COVID-19 crisis is how we can all protect our relationships during this crazy time. Lots of us are facing the completely novel situation of being forced to shelter in place with our partners. And while it's really good to be with the people we love during a scary period, it can also be really, really tough and way more aggravating than I expected. Which is kind of ironic. I mean, I've dreamed about having some work-related stuff get canceled

just so I could stay home and have some quality time with my husband. But I was thinking fuzzy socks and a nice glass of wine some weekend. Being forced to shelter in place for months was not part of the fantasy. It's much harder to prioritize our marriages while also running a babysitting service, or a middle school, or an elderly care facility. What does science say we can do to make sure we get out of this mess with our marriages

intact? To help me figure out best practices for love in the time of COVID, I put a call out to one of my favorite relationship experts. I am Eli Finkel, a professor at Northwestern University. I'm in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management, and I am the author of the All or Nothing Marriage. So Eli, today I wanted to start with the following question. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, what does forced togetherness in a horrible pandemic do to relationships? Well, I suspect on average it makes them worse. What's sort of good about it is that it affords new opportunities

to try to make things even better. And so let's talk through what's really happening. What are the particular stressors we're all facing in our relationships right now? Yeah, I mean, relative to what life felt like a month ago, I would say almost all of us have a higher level of stress, at least when it comes to things like worrying about the health of ourselves and our loved one, worrying about the state of the economy in general and our own personal livelihood in particular, again, maybe it's not true for 100% of us, but almost all of us are facing additional amounts of rather significant

stress. And I'm guessing when you put two individual people who are really stressed out together, that can't be good for a romantic relationship. Yeah. So it can be the case that I'm going through a stressor and you're not going through a stressor. In fact, I think this commonly happens in relationships. It's indeed one of the nice things about relationships is, you know, if you have a significant other that you're going through life with, you guys can serve as sort of buffers for each other. And you have a major deadline at work. I can step up the amount of responsibility I'm taking for the children. But yes, this particular blend of stressor, this love in the time of the coronavirus thing, is hitting almost everybody at exactly the same time. And that has the downside of adding a whole lot of stress at the exact same time when our partner might not have as much bandwidth as we wish he or she had.

It has the upside of we often have a pretty good sense of what our partner is going through, which isn't the case with all stress. And so we as psychologists must have seen this before, right? What actually happens to romantic relationships during these stressful times? One of my favorite studies is the very famous study of Hurricane Hugo. This is a 1989 hurricane. And what the researchers did is they compared the counties that were harder hit and the counties that weren't harder hit. And they found that there was a surge in the divorce rate, which may not be all that surprising. People were dealing with a huge amount of additional stress, often not only the hurricane

itself, but the financial issues associated with it. But what I found especially enlightening is, yes, a lot of the relationships that had to endure something like that ended in divorce. There was also a big boost in the marriage rate and in the fertility rate. That is the number of people who decided to have a baby. So it looks like these sorts of stressors have a major impact on people's lives and people's relationships, but the news isn't all bad. And so I guess the one thing we can do is to try to scientifically figure out what makes for good stress and bad stress in relationships and the kinds of things we can do to boost things right now when things are so stressful. So I wanted you to talk a little bit about what you work through in your book, which is the kinds of features that make for a

happy and unhappy relationship. Because my take on your book is a lot of what a good marriage boils down to is having the right kinds of expectations. That's right. And I'd like to contrast what I say in the book and what I believe is relevant here from the broader thing that we often hear, which is stop expecting so much. Your expectations are too high. That's pretty good advice, but not as a general principle, right? If that advice were find the ways that you and your partner are really struggling right now and try to tamp back a little bit on those expectations, then that advice is terrific. But what the advice, when it's applied more generally, tends to forget is that in the absence of expectations, we usually aren't even trying. And so one of the things that I find exciting about how marriage exists today, like we're here in 2020 and we can contrast what marriage was like

in 1950 or even 1800 or whatever. And what we can see is that there are opportunities for a different sort of connection today than existed in the past. And the only way you can really try to achieve those sorts of connections is by bringing these expectations, bringing certain understandings about what a marriage is supposed to be. And so, for example, in the 1800s, people really didn't even marry for love. And even by around 1950, when they married for love, they weren't really looking to the marriage for personal growth or self-expression to the same degree as now. And so what we see in 2020, this is independent of the coronavirus, that the best marriages today are particularly good, even while at the same time,

the average marriage is worse than it was, say, 50 years ago. And the reason why is because we're trying to look to our marriage to do these much more difficult, much more emotionally complicated sorts of things. And for those of us who get it right, the satisfaction is very, very strong. But the pressure can also be really high, which is maybe tough. The pressure is high. And a lot of us are unhappy today with a marriage that would have been totally adequate for our grandparents. And so I want to dig into this historical difference. It's one of the things I found most fascinating when I first read your book. So give me a sense in our

last pandemic. So let's like scroll back to the flu of 1918. What was the typical marriage like back then? And what were those how were those expectations different than what we expect now? The marriage was very, very different. So there existed by that time a vision of how marriage could be, which was that the man would go off and do his, you know, breadwinning and the woman would stay and do her homemaking. And that that was the vision and that they would love each other and that that was sort of the basis or foundation of marriage. That idea existed circa 1918, but almost no couples in America could actually make that work. The only time really that most Americans would be able to do that was, you know, maybe the 30 years following the second world war when a high school graduate boy could go out and get a union card and actually kind of support a family of five. But that wasn't true before and it wasn't true now. And so the idea that your spouse

was supposed to help on a voyage of self-discovery, like you would have been laughed at in 1918 America, but not so today. Whereas right now, some of the expectations, even in the midst of this crisis are like, you know, you're not completing me or you're not making me a better person. Yeah. Yeah. Look, in fairness, we don't have the full information yet about how people are responding. And it is difficult to be not only confronted with a major stressor, but to be confronted with a major stressor with somebody else who also is forced into close isolation with you. And so you're dealing with lots of things at once. And some marriages will actually really flourish under those circumstances that like some of us, that's like the thing we've always wanted. We're sick of having to do all this travel or having to work so many hours or having to work three jobs. All we've been wanting for the last three years is a little bit of quiet time

together. And lo and behold, through the worst of circumstances, we get it. And now look how happy we are. But on average, I don't think that's the story we're going to see. On average, I think the story is going to be about how incredibly disrupted our lives are and the amount of forced alone time together, but not under the best of circumstances. So it seems like one of the changing expectations is just what we're doing when we spend time together. You know, I know my husband and I are used to like going out to a nice restaurant to have a meal. And now we're spending time together where he's teaching in the next room and I'm podcast zooming in one room. And it just feels different. So talk about what these changes to our daily routines and our daily activities together might

be doing and how it might be stressful. Most of us underappreciate the role that luck or circumstances play in how happy or unhappy we are in our relationship. It could be that the way that you have forced to change your life and he has been forced to change his life is a recipe for bliss. And that really all he's wanted is to have some nice educational quality time with his children. And all you wanted is to do some podcast recording and then walk outside into the familial bliss that is taking place in your living room. And those people lucky enough to have those sorts of preferences will obviously handle the stress and the quarantine better. Most of us have kind of built a life and gotten used to a life that has elements that we

like in it. I mean, you talked about enjoying dinner dates. I think most of us, at least with the means, like to do that. We like to go to the theater and we like to talk about those things. And we have an enormous restriction on the opportunities that we have, on the range of different activities that we can do together. And so can we find a way to continue to connect at the same level, possibly even more, even though we're now confined to our homes? Yeah. And this raises a different question, which is I think that all of this is stressful for people who are incredibly privileged, but it's much worse for people who are facing like real economic challenges and real financial challenges during this time? The biggest concern by far is mass sickness and death. But second to

that, I think we're going to see a pretty significant exacerbation of what was already significant inequality. People like me and other people that I know are weathering this thing okay. And we have the internet access that our kids require to do school the way that the teachers are trying to get them to do school. And we have the money. It's particularly relevant in the context of relationships, because it's true that divorce rates have been skyrocketing, but really only among people with less education. I'm talking about American data here. So in the 60s and the 70s, divorce rates skyrocketed for people with a college degree, without a college degree,

without a high school degree. But starting around 1980, you see this huge shift. People who lack a high school degree, the divorce rates are still skyrocketing. And that's the case, even though fewer and fewer of them are marrying in the first place. But if you look at people with a college degree and you compare us today versus the people like us in 1980, our divorce rates are way down. Like we seem to be building a, on average, a pretty effective system that's working for us in terms of marriage. And one of the major reasons why it's working for us and not working for people who don't have the same amount of resources is how easy is it to build a marriage, especially a sort of self-expressive marriage when you are working three different jobs at three different

Starbucks and you're trying to wake up at four in the morning to do some tutoring for your kid before you go off to catch the buses? Like, it's not a system that works well. Now, how's that going to change as a result of the coronavirus and the job loss and the economic calamity? It's going to hit the worst off people the hardest. And so all of this is pretty bad. But when we get back from the break, I'm going to demand that Eli get us out of this mess. I'm going to have Eli walk us through some of the ways we can set the right expectations

and make sure we're protecting our love interests in this time of coronavirus. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. We'll be for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Sheltering in place during a deadly pandemic can put a huge strain on our romantic relationships. But there are active strategies that all of us can take right now to protect our partnerships.

And that's what I wanted social psychologist and relationships expert Eli Finkel to share with us next. Even when we're stuck in an incredibly stressful time, basically in something that loosely approximates a home prison, it's not quite the same, but we're in forced quarantine or forced isolation, there are things that if we assume that there's a general decency to our partner and a general decency, some foundation somewhere in the relationship, there should be things that we're able to do to cultivate a sense of strength in the relationship, not just mitigating or battling away downsides, but really playing up to the upsides. And it may be the sorts of things like, boy, when we were dating, we used to play games and we used to have a, like split a bottle of wine. And then the kids came and we sort of just forgot that that was fun. Like go back through the repertoire and remember what are the things that we've enjoyed together that because of the

pace of regular life, we forgot how to do. And it might be hard given the amount of stress to sort of kick back with wine and try to relax, but it is certainly worth an attempt. And it might be hard given the amount of stress to sort of kick back with wine and try to relax, but it is certainly worth an attempt. And so we can use this really incredibly unfortunate situation to find ways to connect or reconnect with our partner that at least make it possible that for some of us, we will end this corona chaos with a deeper and stronger connection with our partner than when we started. Because that's, I think, really great news, right? Which is that if we can figure out the things in our relationship that are really good and reform those habits now, ideally, those habits won't go away when we're through this mess. They'll stick around.

Yes. Ideally, they won't go away. But at the very least, it'd be nice to sort of reboot everyday life. I presume we'll eventually reboot everyday life, and doing it from a place of strength with our spouse or a significant other is going to be a massive difference. And if it turns out that then a year hence, things are chaotic and we forget that some of these things were important to us, we can at least look back and say, well, why do we need a global pandemic to figure out or to remember that sharing a glass of wine and playing cards together is a recipe for laughter and good sex? And so you mentioned the kind of wine and the cards and the good sex. But I mean, other couples of my friends have said that this time of preschooling their kids together can also

be a form of bonding, right? Like they feel like in their relationship, the thing that drives them together are the kids. And this is a time that they can focus on the kids in a way that we've never been able to before because we've all been at work and they've been at school. Yes, that's true. The challenge of parenting in the time of coronavirus is that playdates are gone. There are now virtual playdates, but in general, if you're being responsible, your playdates are probably done even with the next door neighbors or good friends. And that leaves children and their parents feeling cooped up and wondering how to fill the time and fighting over how much screen time people get. And so, yes, it is immensely stressful and

frustrating. And there will be times when we want to pull our hair out. And we can be excused for feeling that way. But at the same time, if we never take a moment to say, yes, I don't like these circumstances, I wish they were different. But how cool is it that it's the five of us here and that there's no distraction and we're going to watch a movie together and we're going to work on arithmetic together. It really is an exciting opportunity. And when our lives get busy again, we might miss it. And so one piece of advice is to leverage the upsides, both in our circumstances, but also in our relationships. But you've also given the advice that we need to do the opposite, too, which is to kind of make sure we're paying attention to the not so great parts of our relationships. Yes. Help to identify for yourself

and together with your partner, what is it that we're good at in these circumstances? Like we didn't ask for these, we didn't want these, but here we are, what are we good at? How can we make the most of those? And then you're absolutely right. What are we bad at and how can we hold it together? Because we're going to be locked in like this at least for weeks and possibly for months. And if we don't figure out a way to mitigate or reduce the amount of frustration, it's going to get bad here. And here, I don't mean to be cavalier when I say it could get physically bad. Like I'm actually concerned that alongside various other consequences of the virus and the quarantine, that one of them will be a spike in domestic violence.

There is a huge amount of stress and a huge amount of conflict and very few routes to escape. And I am concerned that not 50% of couples or anything like that, but that we'll see some type of problem like that. And so we need to attend not only to the places where we can really connect with our partner, maybe it's the wine and the game of cards, but also to those specific handful of things that are real danger spots. And so how do we handle those danger spots? Because I'm sure there are lots of folks and couples listening who are like, yeah, communication's not really great. Or like, yeah, kind of doubling down on my husband when I know I'm kind of nagging him, not so great. Like, how do you actually address those? Well, there's three options. One is we can have the sort of conversation that

solves the problem. Oh, I didn't realize that was frustrating to you. Thank you for sharing with me. Now it's better. And that does happen. I'm not claiming that that's going to be the solution to everything. There's another possibility. A second option is to expect less, to say, you know what? There's a virus spreading the world and killing people, and we are stuck here in close proximity with some recalcitrant little people. Of course, we're going to feel frustrated. It's normal to feel frustrated. I'm not going to catastrophize these experiences to say, how did we ever end up

together? And maybe we can't be together any longer. There is a third possibility, which is sort of related to the second one. And it builds on this observation that I love from Marcel Proust, who says that mystery is not about traveling to new places, but about looking with new eyes. Well, right now the planes are grounded. The trains aren't running. We're not traveling anywhere. So we can test his idea. Like, can we look with new eyes when we think about our partner? And the research in psychology is really promising here. That is, yes, your partner said that thing. And yes, maybe it was a little snippy, but we have a lot of power in how we interpret what she said or he said. We get to determine, did he or she do that because he's disrespectful and doesn't appreciate me?

Well, that's going to have consequences for your relationship if you draw that conclusion. Or is it that he's really overwhelmed and trying to do the best he can in difficult situations? That, too, will have consequences for the relationship and much better ones. I love this idea of kind of looking with new eyes. It seems like it's part and parcel of something else you've argued for, that this is the time for love hacks in our relationship. So talk to me about what these love hacks look like. So love hacks have two properties.

They are things that you can do by yourself. So they don't have to be date nights or conversations or, you know, trying to have more sex or anything like that. They're things that you can just do to reorient how you think about things and they don't take much work. So the question is, can we look with new eyes at these things? And so one of the things that I think is, if we can do it, a very, very effective thing to do is try to develop more generous explanations for why our partner was snippy with us. But there's a range of these things. In fact, one of the studies from our lab looked at this idea of trying to think about conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everybody. And what we did is we recruited 120

couples from the Chicago area. And we, every four months for two years, asked them to report on the biggest fight they'd had over the previous four months. And in the second year, we randomly assigned half the couples to do an additional task. They wrote for seven minutes about that conflict, but from this neutral third-party perspective, and then we tracked their relationship quality over time. And what we saw is that relative to people who were just in the control condition, people who were trying to think not only about the conflicts that they were having, but also trying to think about them from this generous third-party perspective, their relationships actually were better off afterward, not just in terms of satisfaction, but also in terms of things like trust, intimacy, and even passion.

So have you used the strategy of going all in in your own relationship? Yes, for sure. There's no specific way that you have to do it. The idea is, is there something that we could do together? Is there something that would be nice? Has it been kind of longer than it probably should be since we last had sex? Has it been kind of longer than it probably should be since we talked about anything other than the kids? Has it been kind of longer than it probably should be since we last played a game or played anything together? For most of us, the answer to at least one of those questions is yes. And so going all in says, okay, I don't have the bandwidth for this all the time. I don't have the time for this all the time, but I'm going to

make sure it's a priority at least some of the time because I don't want a marriage that always fits in to the little leftover time slots that I give it. And that's a particularly useful strategy right now, in part because, you know, we need to work on our relationships now during COVID more than ever. But also, a lot of us are experiencing time windfalls that we've never had before. You know, those of us who aren't working have lots of time. Those of us who are working still aren't spending time on commute. And often the work is less than it was before. This is a way to use our time windfall in a super positive way for our relationships. For many of us, not the people who are shopping for $11 an hour for everybody else, but for many of us, this is an incredible opportunity. And I think you're right. It's a windfall that if you'd said to us a couple months ago, you're going to have a

few weeks, it's going to be inconvenient and it's going to be scary. But you are going to have a suite of hours open for you and your spouse, you and your spouse and your children or your significant other. And you can use that to do anything that kind of doesn't drive you crazy. And how do you want to spend that time? We would have been thrilled with that deal to get a month like that or whatever. So the circumstances are terrible, but some of the details are amazing. And boy, it would be it would be regrettable to miss this opportunity. And I think it's a nice way to sum up one of the last things you said in your Twitter feed, which is that if you had to sum up your advice, it would just be to tell everyone to be kind to the people that are stuck with them in this crisis.

Sympathy and kindness, generally a good strategy in life. Again, not necessarily the one that will always protect you from exploitation, but the one that will generally make your life better. It's more important now than usual. It's a time when we're all going through something pretty intense. There's no rule book and all of us will make some false steps.

All of us will say something that didn't come out like we meant it. And all of us will feel frustration and being kind to the other members of our family and frankly being kind to ourselves is a pretty good way of making sure that the difficult stuff doesn't spiral into something seriously bad. Are you hopeful that if people know these tips that come from science, then we'll do better than we've seen in past crises? Like people can really apply them in ways that

push you more towards the positive outcomes in this crisis and less towards the yucky ones? Oh, yeah. I think a huge amount of what happens to relationships, a huge amount of the destruction or the corrosion, erosion maybe, that happens to relationships is inattention. It's like not necessarily inattention to each other, but inattention to slow erosion erosion and failure to think, I'm not okay with us being thrilled on our wedding night and like one or 2% less happy every year after that. That eventually adds up even if we don't notice it in any given year in the same way that most of us eventually gain weight, even though we didn't notice that we gained a given pound. And so I hope the people listening will take a few extra minutes, a few extra like neuronal firings to say, I do care about my relationship. I do care about my family.

And there's something in there. Like, I don't know which one strategy is no like the seven tricks to make every relationship great. But there are ways of thinking about these things that absolutely can help the vast majority of us have a better relationship. So there you have it, some best practices for loving the time of COVID. I, for one, plan to use some of Eli's strategies with my own husband, Mark. I'm going to try to double down even more during this challenging time, and I hope you will too. And I also hope that you'll come back for the next special COVID-19 episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is a Pushkin podcast.

It's co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley and mastered by Evan Theola. Our original music is written by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Ben Davis, Heather Fane, Carly Migliore, Julia Barton, Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, and the rest of the Pushkin crew. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want.

And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.