May 5, 2025 • 16 mins
Dr. Finkel, author of the bestselling book The All-Or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work—is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. At Northwestern, he also serves as the Morton O. Schapiro Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and founding co-director of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement. He studies romantic relationships and American politics. In his role as director of Northwestern’s Relationships and Motivation Lab (RAMLAB), he has published ~170 scientific papers and is a Guest Essayist for The New York Times. The Economist declared him “one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology.” Also he has an amazing podcast. Check out Love Factually
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:20):
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
(00:42):
Wendy Wall Show.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm happy to be here, Thanks for having me, and.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I am excited to hear about your take on marriage.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Before we get into.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
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
(01:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
But what was you think the advent?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
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
(04:56):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:14):
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
(06:35):
in those marriages that make it is a little lower
on average, but there is a.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Substantial minoritations are so high.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
But she was happy with the money.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
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
(07:42):
fine with that marriage. And for you it wouldn't work,
but for her it works just fine.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It works just fine. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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,
(08:13):
how did you come up with this idea for a podcast? Oh?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
To wrong ideas, by the way, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
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
(09:41):
those things.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, one of the things that I've always said about
romantic comedies is that they end at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
They end at the beginning of it really well.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Now the work comes.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And I'm taking notes here.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
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
(10:42):
are good.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
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
(11:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
And we ran a we ran a candid camera in
the room.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
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
(11:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Just imagine you're watching it going on and taking both
people's sides, like, oh, come on, you.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
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
(12:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Can I ask you about gratitude?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Is it a love hack?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:40):
we lean in on those gratitude sorts of feelings.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So I'm going to tell you a story.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
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.
(14:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Love you, Hula.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
How nice is that?
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Just to remind my brain?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yes, of course now he leaves things open more often
because he likes to hear that.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
I love you. Oh insensive, I'm kind of rewarding it.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
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
(15:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yes, so you literally being a relationship expert, a relationship researcher,
does your wife feel threatened or grateful?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Now, Julio tells his friends, if I can't have a
healthy relationship with this one, I can't have it with anybody.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Oh that's interesting, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Get It? Love Actually?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Is It?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
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
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
(00:20):
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
(00:42):
Wendy Wall Show.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm happy to be here, Thanks for having me, and.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I am excited to hear about your take on marriage.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Before we get into.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
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
(01:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
But what was you think the advent?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
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
(04:56):
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
(05:21):
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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
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?
Speaker 2 (06:14):
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
(06:35):
in those marriages that make it is a little lower
on average, but there is a.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Substantial minoritations are so high.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
But she was happy with the money.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
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
(07:42):
fine with that marriage. And for you it wouldn't work,
but for her it works just fine.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It works just fine. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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,
(08:13):
how did you come up with this idea for a podcast? Oh?
Speaker 2 (08:18):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
To wrong ideas, by the way, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
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
(09:41):
those things.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Well, one of the things that I've always said about
romantic comedies is that they end at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
They end at the beginning of it really well.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Now the work comes.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And I'm taking notes here.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
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
(10:42):
are good.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
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
(11:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
And we ran a we ran a candid camera in
the room.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
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
(11:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Just imagine you're watching it going on and taking both
people's sides, like, oh, come on, you.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
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
(12:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Can I ask you about gratitude?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Is it a love hack?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:40):
we lean in on those gratitude sorts of feelings.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
So I'm going to tell you a story.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
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.
(14:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Love you, Hula.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
How nice is that?
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Just to remind my brain?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yes, of course now he leaves things open more often
because he likes to hear that.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
I love you. Oh insensive, I'm kind of rewarding it.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
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
(15:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yes, so you literally being a relationship expert, a relationship researcher,
does your wife feel threatened or grateful?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Now, Julio tells his friends, if I can't have a
healthy relationship with this one, I can't have it with anybody.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Oh that's interesting, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Get It? Love Actually?
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Is It?
Speaker 1 (16:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
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
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