Eli Finkel || How the Best Marriages Work

and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Eli Finkel on the show. Eli is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the Psychology Department and the Kellogg School of Management. In his role as director of Northwestern's Relationships and Motivation Lab or RAM Lab for short. He has published more than one hundred and sixty scientific papers and is a guest essayist for The New York Times. The Economist declared him quote one of the leading lights

in the realm of relationship psychology. His latest book is called The All or Nothing Marriage. In this episode, I talked to Eli Finkle about how the best marriages work. The institution of marriage has evolved throughout the decades. People used to tie the knot for socioeconomic purposes, but nowadays we seek to fulfill a higher need for self actualization in relationships. According to Eli, higher expectations are not necessarily

bad for marriages if people can use them strategically. Eli also shares love hacks we can implement to approve our relationships with our partners. This episode is a long time coming. I've been willing to chat with Eli for a long time. I've been a long time admirer of his research. I find his work incredibly nuanced and incredibly relevant, and so

I really am excited to present this episode to you today. So, without further ado, I bring you doctor Eli Finkle, Doctor Eli Finkel, it is an honor to have you on the Psychology Podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. We've wanted to talk for a while. Finally it's finally the moment is here. Sure, sure it arrived.

Even going back when this piece by David Brooks came out talking about your book in positive terms, he talked about your book and positive terms, but he kind of hated more on my boy Abraham Maslow and kind of attributing this whole idea of self esteem and the movement and self expression got run a look to him, which it was not a good attribution. Yeah, that was a

that was sort of an odd experience for me. His piece came out the day the book was published, which is pretty great to get a hold David Brook's column in the New York Times on the pub date for your book. And yeah, he was complimentary about the book. But definitely I felt like I was blindsided, or was I was sort of a drive by victim in a battle that he had yet with Abraham Aslow. And I was excited because not that many days past before you

took him to task in the pages of Scientific American. Well, yeah, and then I had him on my podcast too, and we talked about it. Interesting, So why do these ideas about self expression? Why are they not necessarily bad in the realm of romantic really ships? I found the I guess you could say the conservative critique of the marrying for personal fulfillment shift, right, that was a cultural shift. It wasn't that we always married for the personal fulfillment

of the spouses. And I think people raise some good concerns about that, like the marriage is hard and it won't always be a pleasure. And so how can you simultaneously have marital commitment and you know, a long term orientation till death to us part while simultaneously saying, you know it's going to be great. I hope it's pleasurable, and you know, if it's not pleasurable, then I'm not

going to stick with it. And I actually spend a while trying to think about where I fell on that, and it was really this distinction between two different ways of living a sort of self oriented life. And again, you've talked in your book, especially in transcend about whether that's the right way to conceptualize it. But Maslow for sure was talking about self actualization in a real sense,

focusing on bringing forth the self. And that's quite a different emphasis, quite a different perspective than you see from people who are talking about self esteem and making sure that you're never having to make any compromises. And if you're not living, you know, if you're not living according to your true self, you have to leave the marriage. Right.

There's I think a couple of ways of thinking about this stuff, and so it took me a while to figure out how I thought about it, And it's pretty much the distinction between pleasure and self esteem on one

side and meaning and self expression on the other. And as far as we're focusing on meaning and self expression, and in so far as we think that one of the ways that we can live a meaningful, fulfilling, authentic life is by building and sustaining long term committed relationships, the tension between you know, wanting to live in accord with yourself and also wanting to be committed to your

marriage goes away. Well, that's so interesting. My personal philosophy is that sort of like what ever works for two people in a relationship or ten people in a relationship. There's such a thing as polyamory. It kind of whatever works for people. To me, that's my model self actualization. And I don't try to judge or say that there is one correct way, because for some people, maybe just a relationship that's just full of lots of great sex

is meaningful. Maybe that's maybe that pleasure is meaningful for them. I just don't like to like tell people how they should live their life or or say there's one best way. But there is science, and that is true. You've spent your whole career studying probabilities. You've spent your whole career studying well what tend tends to work? And I want to hear all about all that. But I also really am interested in that individual differences piece, because that is

my My field is personality psychology. So how much do you, you know, put in these moderator variables in your in your study and stuff and look to see, oh, well, actually those introverts they bow off the whole trend. Well, we certainly do. I'm certainly interested in, you know, when and for whom are certain approaches to marriage especially beneficial. So for example, there's some interesting research out there now about you brought up polyamory and nominogamy, which is something

that I deal with directly in the book. And there are certain people individual differences people hire in socio sexuality. I don't know if you're listeners will be familiar with them, but yeah, you for sure like the you know, comfort with casual sex. And it looks like, perhaps not surprisingly, people who are hiring socio sexuality really benefit from opening

up their relationship. So I'm entirely with you that there are these individual differences in terms of whether there's a more versus a less healthy way to think about this, Like, you know, are you sort of in it for the pleasure of it? Knowing full well that you know sixty year marriages don't tend to be unmitigated pleasure for every moment, right, There'll be some challenges there versus sort of more self actualization meaning based approaches. For me, I entirely agree with

you out the individual difference. Is there the challenge for me? And really the sort of the crux of the book is about calibrating your expectations to what you think the relationship can deliver. That is, who are you and who am I? And who are we? And are the things I'm looking for from this relationship likely to be things that, given our strengths, we're going to be able to deliver. And so I entirely agree with you that there's no rule that says we have to ask for self actualization

from our marriage. In fact, a fair bit of the time in the book, I'm talking about why it's a high risk choice to do it, but I also talk about why those of us who are seeking that from our marriage from our primary romantic partner, let's say, and able to achieve it, Like have a relationship that's actually

able to deliver that. For the two of us are almost certainly achieving a level of fulfillment in their marriage that was out of reach in an era before Maslow, in an era before people were even trying to that sort of connection in their relationship. Yeah, you talk about Abraham Lincoln. Yeah? Yeah? Did I mention that sometimes I get confused between Maslow and Lincoln? Did I say the

wrong name? No, you said Maslow. Now, But I'm just bringing that up because you talked about before Maslow, and my mind went to the sort of pragmatic love sort of view that you talk about in that historical period. So could you umpact that a little bit? Yeah, I mean it's hard for us today, I think, to get our heads back into a pre industrial mindset, to get ourselves back into a world where people regularly died in childbirth, giving birth, and sickness and plagues and droughts, like people

regularly died of this stuff. And so, you know, I find it useful to think of an example. So Abraham Lincoln was born a couple hundred years ago, eighteen o nine, and he was born into a one room, dirt floor log cabin I had an older sister, and then another sibling came along, but that one died, And when Abraham was nine, his mom died, and when he was still a teenager, is only remaining sibling died giving birth to

a stillborn kid. And you know, I find that interesting because I think US history is interesting, and I think Abraham Lincoln is interesting. But really I find that useful for our purposes because it helps to illustrate just how precarious life was. And so I guess I would ask you and me, all of us, like, if you lived in a world where life was fragile at that level, you didn't sort of stroll by the target to pick

up all the food that you needed. Literally your marriage was a primary means of achieving things like food, clothing, shelter, and so forth. How much would you really prioritize like this feels like a like a match that you know, I feel it in my fingertips when we kiss, or

you know, you complete me right. The way that we talk these days would have been like comedically ridiculous in you know, a couple hundred years ago, and so it was really you know, this transition from this earlier more pragmatic era when life was fragile and the relationship was just about two fundamental things, things that were too fundamental lower down Maslow's hierarchy, that we weren't really as focused on the individual fulfillment of the spouses, and certainly not

focusing on like trying to achieve a sense of self actualization through the relationship. Yes, yes, are you familiar with my revised hierarchy of needs any chance? Yeah? Well, I the one you lay out in Transcend as well. Right, Yeah. I think that that framework is it might be a good launching pad for this discussion, because you do need your basic needs meant to a certain degree in your life, or else you'll sink too much water will come in.

And certainly if you're in a relationship where you're constantly you know, there's violence in the relationship, where there's constant discord, no coherence. That's not good in any relationship, however, and I think the point you're making, which I completely agree with,

is that that's not enough in a relationship. In a romantic relationship, you eventually have to open up that sale of the sail boat metaphor and to grow and yet to move somewhere knowing there's going to be uncertainty, and the grow together model of romantic relationships is what David Brooks. What David Brooks wrote, he criticized the growth together model in more of what he sees his transcendence, which is not what I think is transcendence, which is complete self sacrifice.

And he's sort of like defending you know, complete self sacrifice overgrowing together. And the alll psychological literature I've seen shows that complete self sacrifice never ends. Well, I mean, come on, it's yeah, yeah, I understand that having this like romantic you know, Romeo and Juliet ideal is but no, that's that doesn't end well. You know, if you completely sacrifice your whole sense of self and your whole your

own needs to grow your growth needs. You're not your security to but you sacrifice your growth needs to me, that's a recipe for disaster. Well, certainly go all that well for Romeo and Juliet either. Yeah, you brought in the work on unmitigated communion, for example. And one of the things that I liked, you know this like in Meslow, but I think your book really helped to bring it to the four at least for me, was this idea

of like the vertical integration of the needs. Right. That is, it's not really like, well, you achieve the you know, safety thing and then cross that off, and then you go up to the love and belonging thing and you cross that off. It's that you're simultaneously meeting these I guess higher and lower needs. Again, yours is not necessarily a hierarchical framework because you talk about the sale boat and so forth. But yeah, it's the simultaneous integration of

those sorts of things. And one of the things that I like to address in the book is you're a personality researcher first and foremost, and I'm a relationships researcher first and foremost, and I think you're focusing on, you know, the integrated life. And one of the things that really interests me from that perspective is, well, one of the ways that we lead an integrative life is through our

close relationships. But one person doesn't have to be the source of fulfillment for all of those sorts of things. And so what is it again playing to strengths? Will I need to do a full vertical integration of my meslo Van needs, including transcendence through the marriage. Well, no, we don't have to. It is a high risk choice to put all the eggs in the basket like that. But again, it's sort of neat that it's available to us. Now.

It's sort of neat that some of us talk this way and think this way, and even as it puts a lot of pressure on this one relationship. You know, this takes us to the question of you know, what's happening with marriage today in America? Is the news good or bad? And you say that it's both, yeah, yeah, I mean the question really is about, you know, what are the functions of expectations. And you know, it's easy

to lament them. It's easy to say, well, if we didn't have such high experts, we wouldn't be so disappointed. That's totally true, right, That is that expectations serve an evaluative function. And if my marriage is providing I don't know, twenty units of goodness and I'm expecting thirty, I'll be disappointed. But if I'm expecting ten, I'll be happy. That's completely true. And so the logic that says we should be asking

less is entirely valid. What it ignores is that expectations also essentially functions as goals, right, That is, they have a motivational function. And so when we say, like, these are the things I really want to get from the marriage, and I want to have high expectations for a deep level of emotional connection, that it's not just about how I'm going to evaluate things once the information is there. It's about what I'm going to try to seek, not

just about evaluating how the outcomes are. Right now, it's those of us who are saying, you know, you shouldn't have high expectations are ignoring the fact that expectations are motivating the they get it to try to pursue a level of connection that we might not have tried to pursue before. And so, yes, we might end up disappointed today with a level of marital well being that would

have been totally fine for our grandparents. But the fact that we're shooting for a higher level of connection than than people back then we're shooting for has the upside of some of us are actually getting it. Yeah, you say the best marriages are getting better. Yes, again, I'm a little beyond the data here. Unfortunately, there hasn't been the one hundred year longitudinal study of the best marriages.

But Maslow I think is basically totally correct that surely, you know you need to have enough food to eat and not be freezing. But if you're talking about things like self actualization or really talking about transcendence or richness in your life, this profound sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you know it's fulfilling those sorts of needs, those self actualization sorts of needs that are especially important.

And so as we are looking to higher levels of need fulfillment, at least in the Maslovian sense, those of us who are able to achieve fulfillment of those needs are achieving a level of fulfillment from the marriage that was unavailable to people who weren't even trying to fulfill

those needs. So it's simultaneously harder, right nobody. Certainly you wouldn't say that it's easy to reach self actualization and transcendence, but these are worthy goals, and those of us who are able to set those goals and at least sometimes achieve them, achieve a level of life fulfillment and happiness that is profound. Wow. So it's not that we're asking more of our marriage, but we're asking for different things than people asked for in the past out of their marriages,

and then expectations mess us up. If we expect Disney movie, you know, Disney movie people who are saying and again, it wasn't until I got into the research that I really fully understood this. You know, we're saying, oh, we're asking more and more and more. People used to ask for survival, they asked, They used to ask for like literally food, right, like, how are we going to make sure that there's enough food for our family to eat?

Now I understand in some way we're still asking those things of our marriage, but not in the very literal way that people did two hundred years ago. And so for us to say we're asking more, it's like, yeah, if you ignore all the other stuff, we're asking more about the things that were higher up Maslow's hierarchy, the deeper sort of emotional connection and especially these sorts of

self actualization things. That's true. So expectations obviously play a big role in all of this in society obviously, and media can influence our expectations. So are you saying, like in Lincoln's time, like a newspaper, you know, in stories like their stories, they expected less out of romantics. So like the Disney of Lincoln's time was like, oh you saysfy my basic needs, I'm in love. Is that what

you're saying? Is that what you're saying? That was like the expectation of the society then as well, like in the media and stuff. You know, it's funny because you know, we don't focus that much on this part of Abraham Lincoln's mythos. But yeah, he was famous for like walking around with an ax. I mean very literally. He was like a handy guy to have around, and he was very strong and in his I think when he was

first running. I forget if it was for Congress or with the presidency, but there was a whole thing about how like this guy can really like split a piece of wood in a perfect way. So yeah, I mean I don't know, like was there like awkward reality TV

about Jebediah and home building or like farming. You know, probably not, but yes, yes, the cultural norm was that these practical sorts of skills were the ones that really made sense in a partner being a good provider, being somebody who's who's competent around the home to make sure that that life is livable and practical and that you you know, you don't have to worry about the fact that target wasn't invented yet. Those were the things that repealing.

It's not that people were indifferent to whether they loved their spouse. We've all read Jane Austen. She was early eighteen hundreds, and sure people wanted to love their spouse. They preferred to have a hot sex life. But those things as reason for marriage, that that would have been absurd. Yeah, no, I hear you. I hear you, even though I don't I didn't live during that time period. And then it's the same you know, sexpectations of the fifties. We weren't

much more romantic, were they, Well, they were romantic. I would say that by then you're romantic, right, So it's really starting around the eighteen fifty Yeah, women should be in the kitchen. Well that's romantic. It's not romantic. Well, you know, look, it's not romantic by our sensibility, to

our standards, by our standards. It's not like you can't tell a romance story about how she's tending the nest and he's earning the bread, and they come home and they have their moment and they love their kids, like I do think that for a lot of people, they were very happy with that. And certainly the cultural narrative was that they had little you know, each little suburban home they had carved out their little slice of heaven, and I think people thought, like, this is ideal and romantic.

And the reason why I was saying that, in some sense, you know, I do think that era prized romance in marriage is that rather than focusing on the bottom part of Maslow's needs, these really practical, basic sorts of needs, there was a big emphasis on love and really like cherishing. The weird part is like you were supposed to love and cherish your spouse. But never had people lived such different lives like that. Men and women just had these

radically gendered existences. I mean, that wasn't the case before when everybody worked around the home, nobody kissed somebody good bye to go to the office. In eighteen hundred or not many people did. And these days, of course, now

there's often a two breadwinner sort of situation. But in that period, like he had his sphere of life and she had hers, and somehow yet they were supposed to have this like deep emotional connection and it was pretty hard to bridge across the divide, even though certainly that was the cultural narrative that that's the it was supposed to go. Yeah, so I think it's time to explicitly put a name on a lot of what we're talking about. You'd call it the all or nothing theory of marriage.

That's the technical psychological literature jargon. Now, how has your theory been received with among psychologists? Among reviewer number two? What does reviewer number two think of the all or nothing theory of marriage? Well, reviewer number two is a bastard. I think it's gone okay, Like I haven't gotten any

serious pushback. In fact, I think there are reasonable critiques to offer, especially you know, we talked a little bit earlier about how in some ways I'm a little beyond the data, right, we don't have the perfect data to say the top ten percent of couples, like how happy were they in nineteen hundred versus two thousand? But no, I mean I think that that relationship scientist, that is, especially social psychologists and related fields that study intimate relationships

use data to study this stuff. I think I've appreciated that I brought in a historical more sociological, economic sort of perspective on these things. And to the degree that there have been empirical tests thus far in the literature, they've been very supportive. That is, you know, for example, Jim McNulty, who's a relationship scientist at the University of Florida, has a terrific study that looks at whether high expectations

are are good or bad. That is, whether the time that you're a newlywed, so people married about three months on average, they report on what sorts of expectations they're bringing or standards they're bringing to their relationship. And it turns out that having really high standards for the relationship are beneficial among those people who have good communication skills and handle conflict well. That is, their marriage just stays

strong over time. They almost like stay happy like newlyweds for the first at least the first several years of the marriage. But those high expectations, those same exact expectations that are so beneficial among people who have good communication skills and so forth, are actually harmful. Right So, to the degree that you don't have particularly good expectation skills, then you're actually much worse if you have high expectations rather than low expectations of the marriage. And you know,

it was broadly consistent with the idea. And this is the like related to the all or nothing theory, which is that we've arrived at a moment where we're looking to things like love, esteem, self actualization like never before from our marriage, that those are the things we're seeking

like we never did in the past. And those of us who are able to stick the landing on that stuff have a level of connection fulfillment in the marriage that was out of reach when people weren't even trying for it fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, whatever. But more and more of us are falling short because those those sorts of expectations are it's pretty hard to deliver on those and so a marriage that might have

been fine for our grandparents disappoints us today. Yes, I appreciate that nuance, but I wanted to double cook on something you said about how well your full humility. There is full evidence longitunally about changes and expectations, But I want to point something out about you, and that's that, folks, Eli is a legend in our field. Like if you go to his Google scholar page, he's got an H index that is humongous. He's got a humongous H index

at seventy seven. He's got twenty five thousand citations. You've done a lot of research. You're under selling yourself a really big time to just like say, well, we don't have evid you have so much evidence you've accumulated. Maybe not that specific, that specific point, I get it, I got it, But look, you have so much evidence you have on romantic relationships, and you've done a lot of work. I remember your one of your colleagues, Eastwick, Paul W. Eastwick.

I remember when I was in grad school, he came and gave a talk at Yale, and I remember that was my introduction to your work was through him. So I know you've done a lot with Paul, right, Yeah, No, he's a legend. He was a student of mine. But that was one of those wonderful cases where the student is the mentor. I learned a ton from Paul, and

we're you know, we're still collaborating together. Yeah, that stuff is a little bit separate from what I was focusing on in the book, but we were interested in question like you know, if people say, like I really want a certain set of characteristics and a partner. I really want somebody who's funny or who's kind or who's charming. Do they like? Are they right? Right? Like? To what degree do we have introspective accuracy insight into what it

is that we desire and a partner? And it turns out that all of us like partners who are hot rather than ugly, or ambitious rather than lazy, Like, there are qualities that are appealing. But if I think I uniquely care about somebody who's funny or somebody who's pretty or something like that, am I right? The answer seems to be no. Like. That's among the sort of that's among the work that Paul and I have been looking at.

It's like we have these deep seated feelings about ourselves, intuitions that we know what we want in a partner, and we have very little actual insight. In general, people have very little actual insight into what their preferences really are. Absolutely, you have this great paper on meat evaluation theory that came out in Psychological Review, which is along those lines without getting too technical and nerdy, can you explain two different sources of vary that you found are important to

tease apart from each other. Yeah, I'm delighted that you're asking about this. I mean, I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd. You are on top of it. I don't think that paper's officially published yet. Again, Pauli Stork was the lead author on this, and we collaborated with Samantha Joel on it. So for a long time now people have Dave Kenny in particular, a name that I'm sure you're familiar with it.

In social relations model, they've talked about questions like, you know, if Jeff has a crush on Jenny, why is that? And it turns out that there's like three statistically and conceptually independent reasons why that might be. It might be Jeff has a crush on all the girls. We're something a heterosexual case here. Jeff is a crush and all the girls could be all the boys have a crush on Jenny. So right, the first one is it's something

about Jeff. The second is it's something about Jenny. And then there's this third thing, which is what we think we're talking about but may not be, which is the relationship that is above and beyond Jeff's tendency to like dig the ladies and above and beyond the like dudes tendency to dig Jenny is there's something special about the two of them together, and you know that makes him especially interested in her relative to the other women and

relative to how other men think about her. And so one of the things that we've done in our paper is we actually split that third thing what we call what Dave Kenny calls the relationship effect. Right, this is what we think of as chemistry. There's something unique about the two of us, above and beyond who you are and who I am. And historically that was just one thing. The relationship part was just one thing special between the

two of us. But there's two versions of it. One is something that I think we could imagine gears aligning, right, something stable about Scott and something stable about Jasmine. And you like, well, look at that, oh perfect right, or look at not working right? That's something that's about you and about her, or if you wanted to think about it, somebody who's high in attachment avoidance with somebody who's dispositionally nurturing, right,

like that's the gear alignment or anxious. Research shows that pairing stays together a long time. An avoidant man with an anxious woman. That's kind of a bummer because it's hard to imagine that they're that happy in that dynamic, but serving some function for them, it's actually interesting in terms of your vertical integration of the Maslovian perspectives. It's probably serving one of what Maslow would think of as lower level stability sorts of functions rather than like expansive

sorts of functions. But anyway, so that's one way of thinking about it. But there's a totally different way of thinking about it, which is that what's happening in the relationship is irreducible to you and to me, that there's nothing that we could know in advance about like who Scott is and who Jasmine is, that would make us know whether you are going to be more versus less compatible. That it is something that emerges in the context of the relationship, and one of the things that I'm working

on right now that I'm especially excited about. It's a follow up to that made evaluation theory paper, is this idea that relationships have their own cultures. In a very literal sense, we have our own in jokes, we have our own languages, all sorts of things that would be meaningless or at least difficult to fully understand from the outside. And it's that it's that thing, that part of relationship variance.

If the first is the gear alignment and the second is no. We build a culture so that the jokes that we tell aren't about you versus me. They're about the experiences we've had together and how we've made sense of them as a pair. That tends to serve as a particularly powerful glue to hold us together, make us feel connected, give us this sense of joy and pleasure together.

Now we have this special code language that only the two of us can use when one of us is feeling amorous and trying to figure out if sexy time is going to happen. These things aren't really about him and her or him and him or whatever. It's really about the culture that has emerged in the relationship itself. So that's one of the things we're really excited about

these days. I'm excited by this paper too. I've long said on Twitter that these kind of things emerge from prolonged interactions between people that the hotness one or ten hot or not can change substantially your perceptions of that person based on actually talking to them over time. All he actually has that finding. Sorry to interject there, but he and a student his name is Lucy Hunt. They have cool studies that look at the amount of consensus

that people have, like is this person hot? Is that hot? Is this other person hot? And it turns out that if you like don't know the people, then there's pretty good consensus on who's hot or who's not. Like we can to agree that Brad Pitt is hot and that some other guy might not be hot. But as you get to know people better and you say, like, now five people rate how hot somebody is, now, there's very

little consensus about it. It looks like literally ratings of things like how physically attractive somebody is are heavily dependent on your experiences with that person. Absolutely. I wrote an article for the Greater Good Yes, summarizing some of that research. It's called is Kindness Physically Attractive? If anyone to read my article In the abstract to your paper, you say, we address puzzle a puzzle by suggesting that repeated interaction causes the target specific lens to expand. What is it

about academic language that's so and sexy? Like meat? Evaluation theory like that's not a that doesn't make you want to have sex with that theory. I think, well, oh boy, yeah, I've never tried, but huh, I'm intrigued. Now. You might

be better qualified to judge this than I am. You have like a great ability to you know, speak with the general public about sophisticated ideas, including in transcend I remember one time there's this like disc jockey in like one of those shock jocks in the Chicago area named Jonathan Brandmei or Johnny B. I was like twenty years ago or something, but I remember he was excited by something that I had done fifteen twenty years ago, like when I first became a professor, and he had me

on his show, and I think he thought I had something to plug, like something I was trying to sell. And so he was at the end of the session like we had a good time, like we're just sort

of you know, shooting the shit. And at the end he said, well, the new article is called and he read it and it was something technical, and then it had a long subtitle that was just as technical, and I think he said something like what the hell, like if you're trying to sell something like this, is not the way to do it, And it really drove home the point that you're making is that the way that we communicate amongst other eggheads, I mean, in fairness to

us are subtle distinctions that we need to get across to each other. But it's almost like we're competing to be as esoteric as possible. I got to read the sentence again. Repeated interaction causes the target specific lens to expand, so again in regular English, the idea is that something about just the two of us, we can call it chemistry. Right so early on, it's like is the person hot

or is the person not? That's something about this particular target, this particular person we're evaluating, and that tends to be pretty substantial. If we don't really know somebody, as we get to know somebody better, then it's really about us. It's really about the unique relationship that you and I have built over time that basically trounces the is there something about you or something about me types of effects

that you see in those opening moments. So really it's a story about how you relationships really just take on their own path and their own trajectory, and that they are irreducible to the people involved, and that they to a large extent, are unpredictable in advance. Yeah. Absolutely, thanks for that clarification. Well, well, I want to kind of end here today with some hacks love hacks in your book. You do have non academic jargon in that, which is great. Yeah,

you discuss eight love hacks. You would never dare put such a word in an academic right. Can I give a little context for why I think love hacks have real value? So we've talked in the course of the conversation, this two day conversation we've had, we talked about this all the nothing theory that I'm talking about, and to some degree, like it's pretty complicated and involves historical change, but it really boils down to a supply and demand

way of thinking. It's like, I don't want to scold people that they should be asking less of their marriage because asking more has these important motivational elements. It excites us, It makes us want to pursue a level of connection that has real value. And so for me, the issue really isn't about whether you should expect a lot or expect a little. It's really being about strategic the way

that you're expecting things. Are you're expecting the sorts of things that the two of you that this particular relationship can actually deliver. If so, then you should double down and expect those things and hope for greatness. And if you're expecting things that are implausible, then you're probably ill

advised to do so. And so for me, the question is, as we go through various aspects of the relationship, the emotional intimacy, the sexual intimacy, the financial support, whatever it is, to what degree are our expectations appropriate in light of what the relationship itself can deliver. So in that sense, it's supply and demand. And so for that reason I

make the two obvious sort of suggestions. One is, you can improve your relationship by investing more right, like trying to make the relationship add up to exceed your expectations by certain sorts of date nights. I talk extensively about how to communicate more effectively, how to play more effectively together, and so forth. The second option is you can try

to ask for less right. You can put your expectations in alignment with what is actually plausible given the relationship itself, and I talk very concretely about ways that we might be able to ask less of our relationship, particularly in domains where we think the relationship is going to be able to deliver. And I get into controversial stuff including consensual non monogamy. But you asked about the love hack.

This is my like, there is kind of a third option, right, So, yes, you can increase the supply that is in that's more in the relationship so it can deliver. You can reduce demand that is ask less of the relationship so that

you're not holding onto these unmat expectations. But there is a third possibility that that's not going to make a great relationship out of a terrible relationship, but really good option for cases where we don't have a huge amount of time or bandwidth or emotional resources right now do the really intensive communication stuff. Maybe there's a baby at home, maybe there's a cancer diagnosis, Maybe there's an incredibly intensive period at work and we're not ready to lower our expectations.

Are there things we can do to get us through those sorts of fallow periods that can keep the relationship strong. And this is where I talk about love hacks. And love hacks have these two properties. The first is they are simple that is they don't require much time or energy. And the second is you can do them by yourself. They don't actually require you coordinating with your partner. And so this is an option for you can't really increase the supply. You can't really invest more right now, you're

not ready to reduce the demand or reduce expectations. Are there quick and dirty things you can do to try to keep things strong with the resources that you have available? Is that a love hack? Did you just give me a love hack? There are eight love hacks that I offer in the book, but that was the context in which I think it's useful for people to think about when love hacks are especially important. Okay, so do you want to give two love hacks then and let them

read the book. Yeah. The opening quote in the book is from Marcel Proust, who says that that mystery is not about traveling to new places, but about looking with new eyes. And this is the logic of the love hack. Are there things that we can do to tilt our vantage point, to tilt our perspective, to look with new eyes at the relationship. And luckily our field has done a really good job of this stuff. So one of the more straightforward examples is, you know, our partner shows

up late to something. We have a lot of control about how we make sense of that, right, And this is again the clunky language that scholars use is positive and negative attributional biases and so forth. But it's really what sort of explanation why was he late? Is it because he's kind of a jerk who doesn't respect me? Well, okay, you're welcome to draw that conclusion. Your relationship will get worse if you do. Or he's been distracted lately because

he's working on important stuff. But I know that he loves me and he didn't mean to hurt me. You can draw that conclusion. And again this is independent of what's actually true. But this is the story that we tell ourselves, and truly, the story that we tell ourselves is a huge amount of how well the relationship is going to go. So that's one option. That's a positive attribution bias generous explanations for your partner's behavior. Another one

is one that we developed here at Northwestern. This is the idea of adopting a generous third party perspective about conflict. And what we did is we recruited one hundred and twenty married couples from the Chicago area. We asked all of them over the course of two years, seven times over the course of two years, to write about the

biggest conflict in their relationship. And then in the second year, we randomly assigned half of them to try to think, not only write about the conflict, which everybody's been doing, but now write about it also from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everybody. This could be a parent, this could be a friend,

whoever it is that wants you guys to succeed. And then what we did is we had people do that for seven minutes three times in the course of the second year of the relationship, so three times over the year, so it was twenty one minutes of writing. And what we found is that people who adopted this generous third party perspective were more satisfied over time, even had a hotter relationship over time, felt more trusting and intimate with

their marriage with their partner over time. And this is another idea of a love hack, right, This is how can we reorient our thinking about the reality the conflict is the same and in fact, our manipulation didn't affect the frequency with which people reported conflict, or how serious the conflict was, how upset they were by it. It It

didn't affect those things. What it affected is is the extent to which the conflicts that were just going to exist in their relationship anyway, we're internalized in a harmful way for the relationship, versus processed in a way that was more beneficial. So that second one, if the first one was generous explanations for your partner's negative behavior or positive attributions, this one is a sort of a third party reappraisal of conflict, a third party perspective of comment. Well,

thanks for teasing people with a couple of hacts. If they want more, they can buy your book. And your book is called the all or Nothing Marriage, right, the all and nothing marriage, How the best marriages work, and the way to live a happy life is to purchase a few hundred of those each listener, So enjoy it. Well, I'm so glad we finally wrapped this one up. We've been trying to do this for a while and then

we had some technical difficulties yesterday. Thank you so much for all the great work you've contributed to the field. Of psychology. I mean you've really you've published a lot of very important papers in our field. Thanks for saying that, and thank you for having me, and thanks all the work, for all the work you do, not only in the field, but for giving psychology away to the broader public. It's a huge service. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this

episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.