Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty, live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Well, my next guest is someone I am very excited to have on the show. He's the author of the best selling book The All Are Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work. Now, He's not just some dating coach sitting on TikTok. He's a professor at Northwestern University and also
Kellogg's School of Management. He studies romantic relationships and American politics. Whoop, that's a collision, and The Economist once declared him one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology. Doctor Eli Finkel, thanks so much for joining the Doctor Wendy Wall Show.
I'm happy to be here, Thanks for having me, and.
I am excited to hear about your take on marriage.
Before we get into.
What I like to call news, you can use tips for people and love hacks. Can we talk a little bit about the whole idea of marriage. Some people think that marriage is becoming extinct. Can we remind people the history of marriage and what its cultural reason for being even is.
Yeah, I love the question. Most of us, right, we live in one particular historical and cultural moment, and we think that marriage just is that that's what it always was. But of course marriage is a social institution. It changes over time. And one of the things that I learned a lot from doing is tracking how marriage has changed
over time, the expectations that we bring. And it turns out that we are in an era where we have changed the institution of marriage in a way that makes it more fragile but also makes the best marriages better than the best marriages of earlier eras, right.
And I actually have one of those great marriages. Now I just got married and obvious, so I'll let you know in five years. But let's go back into history. So let's go back to way back. So in our anthropological past, obviously marriage didn't exist.
But what was you think the advent?
Do you think it was when we moved into agriculture or when did this whole concept of one heterosexual male, one heterosexual female to gather in one abode, helping offspring that came from both of them.
Only, well, there's been you know, it has formed in all sorts of cultural contexts, in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of structures. The thing that I found especially useful to do was to unpack how it was structured when you know, Europeans first started colonizing this land and then track it up until the present day. And if you look at that first era, it was an agricultural era, and the way we think about marriage today
just would not make much sense. People of course, preferred to love their spouse, and if the sex was good, that was even better. But people didn't say things like, you know, gosh, Jeff is a good man, and yet I don't feel the pitter patter when I, you know, when we kiss, and therefore I'm not going to marry him. Because marriage was too important. It was literally about things like food, clothing, and shelter and these more psychological sorts
of needs. People just couldn't really prioritize them back in that era.
You know, I remember one time touring a former plantation down in the south in Louisiana, and I found it really interesting. Forget about the tragic parts of history. But one of the things they had in the ladies bedroom was a glass case that had letters that she had written to her sister, who was a wife on another plantation down the way. And they really looked like quite
love letters. And when I asked the tour guide about this, she said, well, often Irish and English girls were sent over to the New World to be wise of the plantation owners, and their closest relationship was often with their sibling. It wasn't any form of romantic marriage. And yet she talks about, you know, my dear sister, you are in my heart at all times. I love you, I can't wait and see you. It was a love letter to her because that was really her secure attachment more than her husband.
Yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's also you know, heartbreaking in its own way, but it is true that again we stand up in front of our loved ones and you know, a minister of the faith and say I want to marry you because you're my best friend or you complete me. And that just isn't what it used to be about.
Right.
That's why it wasn't crazy for people back in an earlier era to marry people they had never met, or have families sort of set up the whole arrangement for us, because it wasn't primarily about the individual fulfillment of the spouses. And that's really changed. I mean, it started changing in a widespread way around the middle of the eighteen hundreds when we had industrialization and then a bunch of young people for the first time ever anywhere where graphically and
economically independent of their parents. And it was then that they started to think, well, I would like to marry based on my own personal fulfillment. And we've continued to see that trend up until the present day. And like I said, I don't want to sound like I'm judging
or castigating people. I'm delighted that I live in this era of marriage, and you know, it is more fragile because there are marriages that would have been totally sufficient for our grandparents, and today we say no, not for the expectations I'm bringing, not for the things I'm looking
to get from the marriage. But what we forget is along with those expectations comes something positive, which is we're seeking a deeper emotional, spiritual, psychological sort of connection than people were seeking, say a few hundred years ago, but even fifty or seventy five years ago, and some of us are sticking the landing on that. And it's pretty great when we're able to do that.
When it does happen. Now, your book is called the all or nothing marriage. Does that allude to the fact that today people want not just a you know, protector, provider, caregiver, a survival marriage, but they also want a best friend, They want intellectual stimulation, they want emotional support. Is this the part of the all that we want in our marriage?
Yes? And really the all or nothing marriage is. What has happened as a result of those changing expectations is that the average marriage, at least in the US, if you track this stuff over time, the average marriage has gotten worse. You know, divorce rates are much higher than they were one hundred years ago or three hundred years ago and so forth. And our level of satisfaction, even in those marriages that make it is a little lower on average, but there is a.
Substantial minoritations are so high.
That's right, that's right, because we end up disappointed with the things aren't The marriage isn't delivering everything we'd ask. But again, some of them are pretty good. And so when I say the all or nothing marriage, I'm referring to this current era where the average marriage is worse than before, but the best marriages are better than ever.
You know, I had a friend, I have a friend, and she was in a terrible marriage for years, and I always you say, you gotta leave them, you got to leave them, And she said, you know, you just like things to be better than I need them to be. Like it was struck from the outside. I was like, I wouldn't put up with it even for all that money he's thrown in there.
But she was happy with the money.
Wichard. You know what's fascinating about that is I think that that the two of you have you've just described your temperaments, you are more likely to have a truly extraordinary connection because of how demanding you are, what your expectations are. But at the same time, you're more likely to be disappointed in a marriage that's like kind of okay and like pretty good. But she's she's doing just fine with that marriage. And for you it wouldn't work, but for her it works just fine.
It works just fine. Exactly.
Listen, when we come back, we have to go to a break. I want to talk about some of your must try love hacks from your book, and also I'm going to ask you if you tried any of these hacks with your wife. My guest doctor Eli Finkel, author of The All or Nothing Marriage, how the best marriages work. And also, I forgot to say, co host of one of my favorite podcasts, Love Factually, Love Fact Doctor, Eli, how did you come up with this idea for a podcast? Oh?
So this is a podcast I'm doing with Paul Eastwick. I think he's been a guest on your show recently as well. He and I are both relationships researchers, and we came to this sort of disconcerting realization that, you know, there are literally hundreds of people who devote their careers to trying to use the methods of science that is, developing hypotheses and collecting data and evaluating the evidence with regard to what makes relationships good or bad, and most
of those findings are cloistered in like academic libraries. And so we had this idea that, like, what if we could get those insights, the best scientific insights, out to the public in a way that was just really fun for everybody. And so what we decided to do is is do that through the realm, or through the mechanism of movies. Popular romance movies like When Harry Met Sally, or La La Land or you know whatever else Jerry Maguire.
These movies inject into the culture ideas about how relationships work. Well, we have the data.
To wrong ideas, by the way, Yeah.
That's right, that's totally right. But one thing it's been satisfying. Each episode is about a particular movie, and one thing that we force ourselves to do in each episode to say, like, what does the movie get right and what does the movie get wrong? And it is it is definitely a mixed bag. It's our opportunity to you know, fact check Hollywood, and sometimes they do get it right also, so it's been fun to try to take a sober lens to those things.
Well, one of the things that I've always said about romantic comedies is that they end at the beginning.
They end at the beginning of it really well.
You're right, you are absolutely right. It's like, well, we worked through that, we had the meat too, and then we had the conflict, and then we like realized it was all okay, and we fell in love, and then the movie ends, right, well, there is the next sixty years and.
Now the work comes.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, anyway to everybody, if you're listening, Love Factually is available on the iHeartRadio app as well. Okay, let's get back to the all or nothing marriage, how the best marriages work? What are some of your must try love hacks for all of us?
And I'm taking notes here.
Well, the idea of the love hack is, you know, you get people like me to, you know, talk on shows about how to make relationships good, and mostly it's conversations about a lot of work. Right. It's like, here are the ways that you can invest, and here's how to have a more active sex life to work at it, and here are the communication things you need to do, and it's going to be hard, and all those things are good.
Right.
In the book and the All and Nothing Marriage, I talk about those things, but I also spend the chapter basically saying, are there any quick and dirty things we can do? Not the things that are going to make a bad marriage a good marriage. You need to work hard to do that. But are the things that we can do to make things just a little bit better regardless of how good the marriage is. And yeah, there's a bunch of sort of quick and easy things we can do. One of my favorites, I've actually called it
the marriage hack. Right. It's trying to think about conflict in our relationship, not through our regular vantage point, not through our own two eyes, but from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everybody.
And we ran a we ran a candid camera in the room.
That's exactly right, a fly on the wall or something. Yeah, it's a more friendly than candid camera perhaps, But we ran a study where we randomly assigned couples to do this, and then we tracked them versus a control condition of couples who didn't get this advice, and we found that
their marriage was literally better over time. And all they had done throughout the course of the study is they'd written for twenty one minutes over the course of the year trying to think about conflict in their relationship from this neutral third party perspective. And so that's one of those quick and dirty things we can do to make ourselves a little bit happier in our marriage.
Just imagine you're watching it going on and taking both people's sides, like, oh, come on, you.
Guys, that's exactly right. It's just like a reorientation. A reorientation sometimes people call it self distancing, because from our own perspective, it's really easy to understand why everything we did was reasonable and why the other person is being totally outrageous. It turns out you just force yourself to be like, well, what would this look like if I were watching the two of us right now? Would I be able to see his perspective a little bit better?
Would I be able to understand maybe I'm being a little hypocritical? We can do that if we try, and it's not much work.
Can I ask you about gratitude?
Is it a love hack?
I think it is. Yes. So there's lots of different ways you could go about this, but the love hack version of gratitude is simply reminding ourselves of the nice things that our partner has done for us. And one place that I like to start to think about gratitude again.
I don't know what everybody's sort of worldview is or religious background, but the best that the scientists can tell us is that the universe started thirteen point eight billion years ago, the Earth started around four and a half or five billion years ago, and we emerged from that
and we are literally stardust. When I say literally, I mean the best the scientists can tell us is that we emerge from some big cosmic explosion and from that point of view, the amount of grievance that we allow ourselves to feel that we indulge in seems to be
a little excessive. Can we remember that, yes, there are ways that our partner wasn't perfect, absolutely, but there are certainly nice things that our partner is doing as well, and we can make ourselves and our partner happier if we lean in on those gratitude sorts of feelings.
So I'm going to tell you a story.
So one of the things my husband does is he leaves drawers open an inch or two in a halfhaszard way as well as closet doors crack. And one day it occurred to me that this was my problem, not his, that it's not his job to make me happy. If I need an organized environment, that is my issue, not his. And so I decided to reframe it and turn it into a little workout. Sometimes I do squats as I'm closing his drawers, and doing it with any so that
I'm getting some benefit. I try to get into weird contorted body positions as I close ers, so that least I'm getting work out. But also every time I close a drawer, I say I love you, Julio I.
Love you, Hula.
How nice is that?
Just to remind my brain?
Yeah, because you just as easily could have said what a jerk. How easy would it be for him to have closed this? I've asked him thirty times. He knows it's important to me. You would have been totally within your rights. It would have been a reasonable way to respond, and yet you chose this other way to respond, and both of you are much happier.
Yes, of course now he leaves things open more often because he likes to hear that.
I love you. Oh insensive, I'm kind of rewarding it.
Okay, we have very little time left, but I do want to ask you for one more quick hack. And have you tried them all on your wife?
Have I tried all of them? One of my favorite hacks is really straightforward one. It's related to what we were talking about here, which is, there are circumstances that exist in the world. Those are real, but what the circumstance means that's up to us. The world like facts exist, but they don't interpret themselves, and so we get to interpret what we want to do. And you have just offered a great example with regard to the open drawer.
You get to interpret that however you want. Have I used all eight of the love hacks in my own marriage? My guess is that I have. I haven't been systematic, I haven't gone one to eight to do it, But if I look through the list of eight, I'm confident that I have tried to use them in my own marriage as well.
Yes, so you literally being a relationship expert, a relationship researcher, does your wife feel threatened or grateful?
She just rolls her eyes. She just thinks this idea. I mean, the dedication of my book is to my wife, Allison, who thinks it's hilarious that I'm a marriage expert.
Now, Julio tells his friends, if I can't have a healthy relationship with this one, I can't have it with anybody.
Oh that's interesting, that's interesting.
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. The book is the All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work, and the podcast is Love Factually?
Get It? Love Actually?
Is It?
Love Actually is one of my favorite movies, by the way, But Love Factually there's an f in there, Doctor Eli Finkle, Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
And that brings the Doctor Wendy Wall Show to eight Clothes. I'm always here for you every Sunday night from seven to nine. You can also follow me on my social media at doctor Wendy Walsh. You've been listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app