Josherich's Blog

The Rules of Attraction and the Psychology of Romance

Today, the psychology of romance. In the last few months, a story I’ve been paying a lot of attention to is the decline of dating among young people. Coupling rates among 20-somethings are falling. In the first 20 years of this century, dating app usage exploded, replacing almost every other way of meeting a boyfriend or girlfriend. But today, online dating is clearly in decline.

Tinder downloads have been falling since 2020. Dating app use generally seems to be in a recession. Optimistically, you could say that maybe young people are just going back to meeting in person. Realistically, I think it’s more likely that they’re just dating less, period. This trend, by the way, seems to go all the way back to high school.

According to an analysis by the psychologist Jean Twenge, the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85% in the 1980s to less than 50% in the early 2020s. It’s not just young people. As I’ve reported on this podcast and in my essays about the antisocial century, adults of every age are much less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near an all-time low.

Poor folks in the U.S. and other high-income countries seem especially unlikely to be coupled or in stable relationships. In England, for example, the marriage rate for people under 30 declined by more than 50% in the last 30 years.

I love writing about these sorts of trends. I love thinking about these sorts of trends—how we live and why the way we live changes over time. It’s easy to be judgmental about something like coupling or marriage. But I like to be judgmental about subjects in which I feel some kind of expertise.

When we’re talking about dating and marriage, we’re talking about romance. And when it comes to the psychology of romance, it’s not clear to me that anybody is truly an expert. Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one crazy or crazily complex person. Romance psychology is particularly hard because you’re trying to understand what’s going on between two crazy or crazily complex people, or in some cases, three or more.

It occurred to me that in all this time thinking about the decline of coupling, I had never actually asked and had satisfyingly answered these underlying questions about how romance works.

• What do people actually want in a partner?
• Are we any good at selecting romantic partners?
• Are we any good at predicting the sort of people we’ll fall in love with?
• Does the quality of the first few dates really predict the quality of our long-term relationships?
• How do the stories that we tell each other about romance, historical or modern romantic comedies, actually match up to the stories of how strangers become 50-year partners?

These are the questions I wanted to answer today.

Eli Finkel is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, and Paul Eastwick is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Today, we talk about why we’re wrong about attraction, dating, marriage, and romance, and what these two guys, who I would certainly consider close to experts in this mysterious field of romance, think we should do about the decline of relationships in the modern world.

I’m Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

Eli Finkel, welcome to the show. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Paul Eastwick, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for bringing me on.

So I’m going to let you guys in on a little podcasting secret of mine, which is that whenever I identify any story that has a beginning, middle, and end, I always try to tell that story chronologically. And relationships have a natural arc. People have ideas about what they want from a relationship, then they meet, then they start dating, then maybe they break up, then maybe comes marriage.

And so we’re going to go through your work and this field of romance psychology in precisely that linear order from meet cute to matrimony. Does that sound okay, first of all?

Yeah, sounds great.

Excellent. First, in the spirit of romance, I am going to utter the sexiest five words in the English language. Can we talk methodology, fellas? You got us.

We had a show a few months ago with a social psychologist, Adam Astriani, about why psychology is such a difficult subject. He made a couple of points that I really want to carry over to this interview. The first was that psychology is really damn hard. You are dealing with subjects, that is to say, human beings who lie constantly, and most importantly, lie to themselves. We don’t know what we want. We are exquisitely sensitive to our environment.

You do one study in the lab, Paul, and it might not replicate in some low-income area. Or you do some study, Eli, and it doesn’t replicate in Japan. So I want to start here. Paul, what makes the psychology of romance so damn hard?

There’s a couple of things. One thing is that now we’re talking about two minds rather than one perceiving each other. Sometimes even more than that, right? If now we’re trying to figure out why is she going out with him but not with me, now we’ve got three minds in the picture that we’re trying to disentangle.

And now add on top of that, we’ve got timelines to worry about. We’ve got how do these things evolve and change over long periods of time. There are some branches of psychology that also have to deal with that first thing. And there are some branches of psychology that also have to deal with that second thing. But as relationships researchers, we are in the unique position of getting to deal with both of those challenges always at the same time. It’s very exciting, but it can make for some tricky business when you’re trying to figure out how to conduct these studies.

Eli, what is it exactly that makes these dynamics hard to study? The fact that there’s always a dyad, I suppose that’s the nerdy term for this. We’re talking about ideas and feelings happening between two people rather than between two ears. And we’re also talking about things that evolve over time. So you’re not just studying someone’s opinion about, say, marketing in one moment. You’re studying someone’s opinion, people’s opinion within a dynamic relationship that are evolving over time.

Just take me a little bit inside the lab here. Like, how do you try to meet the challenges of more people and more hours in relationship psychology?

Most fun question ever for me. So think about this. If I wanted to know whether you’re happy, I might study that in a bunch of different ways. I might look at how often you smile. I might look at your self-reports of how happy you are. It’s a bunch of things I could do.

Now, let’s imagine that instead of wanting to find out whether you’re happy, I want to find out whether you are attracted to Jenny. There’s actually three different questions embedded in there without us really noticing it.

• One is, to what degree do you tend to be attracted to people? Let’s say attracted to the women you meet, for example.
• To what degree do the people who meet Jenny tend to be attracted to her?
• And there’s a third question, which is above and beyond your tendency to dig people and her tendency to be dug by the people she meets, is there something special about the two of you?

And then, yes, then you have the standard sorts of complexities we have everywhere else, which is, yes, but what about when it’s too hot outside? Or what about when you’re in Bangladesh rather than New York? But what’s fun is, how do you go about studying those things?

So one of the things that Paul and I have done a lot of is we’ve studied these things by conducting our own speed dating events. So we introduce you, not just to one person that you might like, but in the events where men dated women, we also had some same-sex events.

But in the events where men dated women, you would go out with 12 different women and 12 different women would go out with you. And what’s cool about this, that you just can’t do if you’re interviewing individuals, is you can tell to what degree is Derek lusty for the ladies, right? To what degree did he like everybody he met versus nobody he met? And to what degree did the women of the event like you a lot? And then to what degree was there… Is there something special about the two of you? And those are the sorts of complicated methods to do these sorts of speed dating things that you don’t have to do if you’re studying simpler sorts of social phenomenon or psychological phenomenon.

Well, Eli, you’ve already accused me of being lusty for the ladies and also trying to create a relationship with Jenny. So I might have to warn my wife before she listens to this particular episode about all the things flying in my direction.

Another point from that Mastroianni interview, which was really influential on my attitude towards psychology, is that arguably the most important contribution of your entire field, the entire discipline of psychology, is that it points us toward how and why our minds lie to us. Our assumptions about the world are not the world itself.

In that vein, I want to kick us off with a really big, dumb, open-ended question. We have so many common ideas about dating, romance, and marriage. Some of these ideas are inscribed in movies, like, say, Opposites Attract, which I think is a very common, if not most common cliche of romantic comedies.

Some of these assumptions about romance are reflected in the cliches that we tell ourselves and tell our friends. I’m thinking of lines like:

• I have a type.
• I know what I want.

In your research, what broad assumption about romance do you think is most certainly disproved by the data with which you’re most familiar? Or to put it more simply, what’s the most important way that we’re wrong about romance?

Well, one of the ways that we’re wrong, and it’s important for me to correct it because of how widespread this idea is in the general public, is this idea that people are or are not meant to be. You might call this soulmate beliefs. You might call this destiny beliefs.

Paul and I do this movie podcast where we analyze romantic films, and we have been staggered by how common that conceit is. So we can ask.

We can ask empirically:

• Well, okay, to what degree does believing in romantic soulmates make your relationship better or worse?

It turns out that if your relationship is going extremely well right now, especially in the early stages, then believing in soulmates is just fine. The movies get this right because they usually just stop at the engagement and then it’s all happily ever after, right?

But the fact is, in real relationships, then you have the next 40, 50, 60 years, and you’re going to have some problems. What happens when you have problems in your relationship, but you believe in the idea of soulmates? You start to believe not that we have a problem here, but that we are not destined to be together.

This conceit, this assumption that a lot of us have been fed and a lot of us hold—that there are soulmates, that you can tell there’s the one for you—is troubling and problematic at a time when you’re going to have difficulties.

Newsflash for everybody: At some point, you’re going to have difficulties in the relationship. You’re going to have a hard time dealing with them. Well, if you think that relationships are about soulmates, that creates a problem.

I want to ask one follow-up question of you, Eli, before I go to you, Paul. One way that I hear what you just said, Eli, is that we have this instinct, which is clearly reflected in movies, to think about love as a kind of redemption arc.

Sometimes something I hear about romance is that the relationship is like a shark. It always has to keep moving forward or it’s dead. Many relationships are sinusoidal. There are good weeks, and then there are bad weeks, and then there are good weeks, and then there are great weeks, and then there’s a hard week.

That’s not a redemption arc. That’s not a hero’s journey. There’s nothing Joseph Campbell about this up, down, up, up, up, now down again, now down again, now up, up, up again. That’s not a good story, but it might be the graph of a good relationship.

So, is there a way that even our attempts to narrativize our lives and narrativize our relationships and think about our relationships as if they might be a movie is one of the things that’s getting us into trouble here?

I think so. And I have to tell you, I don’t think I have done an interview with the word sinusoidal before. In fact, did I get it right?

I said sinusoidal.

Sinusoidal? I love it.

I might have to look up exactly how this word is pronounced because I think I’ve used it before, and I might be embarrassing myself.

I totally love it. Yes, this is a good way to think about it, that relationships are going to go through ups and downs. It doesn’t tend to be, we had a meet cute, and then we didn’t like each other for a while, and then we had some heroic moment where somebody did a grand romantic gesture, and now we’re at the wedding, and of course, we’re just going to be fine for the next 60 years. have the misimpression that that’s how it goes, we can excuse them because culture has been force-feeding them that. But you are absolutely right that these things are going to go through ups and downs that aren’t going to follow the standard hero’s journey.

And one of the main things that I think we’ve learned from the relationship space is being sensitive to, “wait, we’re going through a hard time right now, one of us just got a cancer diagnosis, the first baby just arrived,” and calibrating our expectations in light of those things is a really good idea. Because all relationships, more or less, are going to go through those difficult times, and if we’re expecting the same level of connection, regardless of the circumstances, we’re going to find ourselves disappointed.

If we calibrate our expectations in light of what life is delivering to us right now, we can sort of soldier those periods better. Then when we’re ready or when the circumstances are better, then we go for the deeper sort of connection again.

Paul, how are we most wrong about romance?

So, I think there’s a common belief, and I suspect that the apps are reinforcing this to some extent, that we need to find somebody who is perfectly prepackaged for us right at the start. They share our interests, they share our values, they look like what we would have drawn up on paper as the perfect partner for us.

And, you know, the apps make it easy to keep swiping until you find somebody who looks like you or looks not like you in all the right ways. The reality is, whether you’re looking at initial attraction, whether you’re looking at what will eventually become the building blocks of a good relationship over time, the extent to which you’re similar to someone, it actually doesn’t really matter that much.

It’s not that it’s bad to be similar on average, but it just doesn’t really predict the trajectory of where this thing is going to go one way or the other. I think it’s very easy to get overly fixated on a few must-haves, a few deal-breakers, a few core similarities that you really want somebody else to have.

What it ends up doing is it kind of gets people very narrowly focused on a particular part of their pool, probably keeps them from broadening their horizons in some ways. This is one of the things that we’ve seen, not just in our research, but in the research of many other people who are doing what we’re doing. We find it over and over again, those kinds of similarities just tend not to predict that much.

I have a follow-up question for you as well, Paul. It seems to me like you’re interrogating this idea that when people say, “I have a type,” they know what the F they’re talking about.

This is interesting to me because I want to ask you sort of a double-barreled follow-up.

• What can you say most concretely about the way that our stated preferences fail to predict our revealed preferences in relationships?
• Number one, like how are we wrong about our types? Is there something more detailed we can say there?
• Number two, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve told about my life. I was single for much of my 20s. For most of my 20s, I was single. I met my wife when I was 29 years old. A story that I tell is that it took me a while to understand, “what I want from a relationship.” But that implies that I got smarter about my type as I got older.

It occurs to me that maybe that’s also a myth. Maybe I just got lucky meeting my wife at 29, and many people actually don’t necessarily get smarter about what they want. They still retain some illusion of need and some illusion of romance.

So how exactly can we say concretely that our stated preferences aren’t our revealed preferences in romance? And do we learn? Do we get better over time at refining our type?

Okay. So on the first point, here’s where I think a lot of people will say they have a type. They have this idea of what it is they’re looking for. Where is this coming from? I think this is real and meaningful in the sense that what people are often doing is they’re describing the milieu around them.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that I could pick you up from whatever sort of social class you’re in and drop you somewhere else and then you’re going to thrive. Different kinds of social groups are real. There are different norms, different rules you have to learn. So we’re not moving people between groups like that.

But within that group, essentially, people seem to be picking partners randomly with respect to the kinds of traits and attributes that we associate with similarity. So a concrete example that I really love, and this is from a paper of ours a few years ago, is we look to see whether these are like older adolescents, early 20s folks who are actively dating. And we look at how similar their former partners were in terms of various characteristics. Partners are relationships that have lived and died, but how similar are your former partners in terms of their religiosity? Okay. And you see similarities. So you, Derek, will have tended to date women who were similarly religious. Okay. And Eli, you would date women who were similarly religious. Okay. Maybe they’d all be similarly high, similarly low.

Then we look at, okay, but where were you when you were meeting these women? It turned out all of that similarity was being driven by your milieu, the people around you, right? You weren’t doing anything specific within that context to find the people of a similar level of religiosity. So it was all driven by where you are and where you’re from.

I think that is capturing a lot of why we think similarity is important. When we look around, couples look similar to each other. When you look at your exes, you’ll see similarities there, but it’s largely because you met these people in particular social contexts that shape people to act and behave a certain way and to value these things, but not other things.

And Derek, on the issue of whether we gain better self-insight as we get older and start dating more people, I guess I’d say, there’s evidence that people change what it is they want as they age and go through relationships.

• That worked in a prior relationship.
• So I’ll try to repeat that.
• That didn’t work.
• I’m going to now try to get away from that.

I view it more as people are just trying different things and eventually they get in a relationship where it kind of works rather than the growth towards wisdom and having to achieve a certain amount of self-insight before the relationship will come to you. I think about it more the first way.

I want to talk about online dating in just a second, but I want to make sure I ask you this question about the stories we tell ourselves about romance, because I know this is a passion point for both of you.

Something that I’ve noticed is that not just in the last few decades of moviemaking, but really over the last hundred years of storytelling, there’s this archetype of romance as the inversion of power.

For example, in Beauty and the Beast, it starts off with the beast being brutally powerful and Belle as this helpless farm girl. But by the end of the film, the beast is wounded, and Belle nurses him back to life. Therefore, the powerless becomes the powerful, and that’s how love is possible.

This, by the way, is the exact same story as Jane Eyre. In the beginning, Jane is humble, and Rochester is powerful. Then Rochester is injured in a fire, and they fall deeply in love when Jane has to nurse him back to health.

Notting Hill is the exact same story with the roles reversed. In the first scene, Julia Roberts is the celebrity, and Hugh Grant is just a guy.

By the end of the movie, it’s Julia Roberts who essentially has to lower herself to his status, right? The most famous line from the movie isn’t, “I’m a hot movie star. Why the fuck wouldn’t you date me?” It’s, “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.”

So over and over in romance, you have this archetype, and the durability of the archetype tells me there’s something really powerful about it. I guess it’s like a little bit of a Jungian point here, but the fact that the archetype is durable is like evolutionarily proving its success at working to explain human relationships.

Why is this archetype powerful? Why is this idea that what begins as inequality can end as equality? And that’s what love is. What deep truth is this touching on?

Paul, then Eli.

Yeah, it’s a great question. And look, I’ll take a stab. When we think about our evolved heritage, this is a component of the human evolved story that at least really resonates with me. It’s the idea that over the course of human evolution, basically, the men chilled out.

We got less aggressive, we got calmer, we got better able to reason and talk things through. It’s because that’s what the women did to us. Okay, the women wanted the men who were kinder, gentler, and good around kids.

A lot of the other apes you don’t want those males around the children. But men are perfectly capable of real caregiving, even for the youngest infants. This is part of our evolutionary story.

As bonding became more important among adults, often between romantic partners, we softened up, essentially. I don’t know if these stories are tapping into some of that evolutionary history, but there’s certainly logic to it. You can point to the particulars of human evolution to kind of get there.

One gloss on that that I love before I get to you, Eli, is this: we are a little bit in the realm here of just-so stories, but telling stories about our stories, I think, is inherently interesting. One thing that you just said is that all romances and romantic comedies are actually about parenting. What you said is that mating habits made us fit fathers, right? Mating habits made us caregiving people. And if mating habits are evolutionarily fit for producing fit parents, then these romances are sort of secretly disguised stories for explaining how rough men become suitable fathers. That’s kind of, I’m a new dad. So I’m helplessly biased to think that everything is just about being a new dad. But that’s a really interesting frame.

Eli, what did you take?

You know, I’m intrigued by the whole discussion here. I’d like to talk about it more in the realm of like, when she says, “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy,” that classic line from Notting Hill, what function does that serve for them? There’s a lot of work in our field on love, including passionate love, right? This sort of like, I can’t stop thinking about her and infatuation sort of love.

One of the things I find especially interesting about it is that it requires a blend of what Dorothy Tenoff calls hope and uncertainty. So the idea is, if I know that you’ll never be into me, I’m going to lose love for you. I’m going to fall out of this passionate love for you. I need some sort of promise that it could happen. But also, if I’m totally convinced that you eternally love me and nothing could ever shake that love for me, I’ll still love you in some ways. But the sort of passionate butterfly stuff will also go.

I think what Julia Roberts is doing in that scene is she’s lowering herself to the point where she’s gettable for him. Because the anxiety that he had about whether he could ever really match up to this like Julia Roberts-looking movie star was beyond what was going to work. I think she had some, her character had some intuitive understanding that for him to love her, he was going to have to believe not only that he wanted her and that she might reject him, but that he actually had a shot with her and that she liked him as well.

So I think this isn’t about the source of where that sort of bridging the power difference comes from. I found Paul’s analysis there quite intriguing. But the function of why would I, as somebody who’s clearly a superstar, lower myself in this sense? Well, because you need to, in order to be able to sustain the other person’s interest in you.

I want to talk about online dating. You were talking a little bit earlier about how we’re filtering for certain presumptions of what we want.

• Here’s my type: I want a guy who’s open.
• I don’t want a girl who’s neurotic, right?

We tell ourselves that we have a type that might be violated by our actual experience of dating. Dating apps filter for faces. That’s fundamentally what they’re really good at doing. They are very good at filtering for faces.

Of course, when you’re meeting people at a bar, you’re also filtering for faces, but there’s more than just a face. When you meet someone at a bar, there’s the bar, their entire body, the people that they’re with, how they move their body, their limbs. When they gesticulate in front of you, there’s a lot of data that comes from meeting someone live. You don’t get that data online. You basically get a face, and people are swiping very quickly for faces.

How does that change romance? Paul?

Well, it’s going to make the market more competitive and more painful for everybody who’s not at the top of that hierarchy. That’s the part of online dating that I think is kind of a bummer for a lot of people. If you don’t stack up amazingly well on those rather surface-level details, then you’re going to have a harder time.

The reality is in milieus where people are meeting each other over time—often in cases where they’re forced to interact over time, like with friends of friends—you might keep running into each other at the same party, whether you wanted to or not. If you’re going to classes or at a workplace, you might be running into these same people over and over again, regardless of your choice.

In those milieus, the market is not so powerful. What I mean by that is that it’s not a place where the haves get to dominate over the have-nots because as people meet and get to know each other, opinions change. Sometimes you’ll find somebody more appealing than you did when you first met them. Sometimes you’ll find somebody less appealing than you did when you first met them. That permits all of this idiosyncrasy and gives more people a chance to find somebody that they really like, who’s also really into them.

And online dating really strips a lot of that away. you can make it work for you by making sure that you date a variety of people that you meet on the apps. Maybe you use the apps as leverage to meet people who you then introduce to other people. There’s ways of making it work. But when the game is swiping, it’s just the worst kind of market and actually reflects very badly, I think, on how people have traditionally looked for and found partners.

Eli, two pieces of that that I want to pick up on before I throw to you. Number one is that online dating, I think, involves an order of magnitude more rejection than traditional offline dating, so to speak. I mean, there’s no way that when we were meeting each other through church and family and work predominantly before OKCupid existed, that someone was being told no implicitly or explicitly hundreds of times before they were finding a partner. So I want to hold on to this idea of this surge of rejection that’s become normalized in dating. And I’m interested if you want to comment on that.

The other piece I picked up from Paul is that we’re familiar maybe with this graph of how couples meet over time. And basically, it’s the decline of church, the decline of workplace, the decline of bars, and the rise of online dating. This idea that we used to meet people in the physical world meant that you learned who people were before you agreed to date, to a certain extent. And now it’s reversed. You agreed to date before you learn who people are. And that’s really interesting, too. So pick up maybe from one of those threads or anything else that Paul put down about what we’re losing and winning as we move from offline to online dating.

I also have some serious concerns about the advent of online dating, and I’d love to talk about them. Let me just start with some praise. Online dating is amazing. It does one thing spectacularly well, and all you have to do is ask people what it was like to be 40 and single in 1980 versus today. You really do have access to a whole bunch of people that you wouldn’t have had access to in the past. And these people have already identified themselves as on an online dating site and therefore potentially interested in meeting partners. So they have massively expanded the pool of people that you can potentially meet. Huge appreciation for that.

Now, how have they done it? Most of this is disappointment to me. And, you know, Paul has done enormously important work where he talks about the amount of consensus that we tend to have about a potential romantic partner as a function of how well we know that person.

So it turns out this idea that some people are tens and some people are threes and that mating is basically a market — like we all talk this way. There’s a lot of truth in that. If you’re talking about the opening seconds or if you’re looking at a photo, I mean, the truth is we do tend to agree that like this person is hotter than that person. You know, you know when the consensus really starts to fall is as we get to know people better, as we develop our own unique inside jokes, as we understand that like the way that you play wiffle ball is hilarious in ways that I could never have known I cared about before we ever met.

What online dating has done is relative to the other older forms of dating that you talked about in terms of meeting through work or at a church or whatever is you’re basing it almost exclusively on that really small subset of things where everybody has this sort of consensus. You’re neglecting all of those idiosyncratic things that are unique to the two of us.

In the real world, as we get to know people better, it’s not really about tens and twos. It’s about finding somebody who’s a 10 for you or at least an eight for you who might not be an eight for me. She might be a three for me. But when you’re only looking at faces and swiping, you’re really in this world where the haves and the have-nots, that difference in physical attractiveness is going to be significantly exacerbated, leaving a bunch of us to deal with the sort of rejection you’re talking about, finding ourselves huddled in a little corner. But if we just got to know each other and met people more organically, we would be able to solve a lot of that problem.

Most of us can end up with somebody who’s an eight or a nine for us. A really critical question in terms of determining whether online dating, quote unquote, works for lots of people is pretty falsifiable. Does initial attraction predict long-term happiness in relationships? Is that a question that we have an answer to?

Derek, the brief answer is not only do we not have a great answer to that question, but Paul and I have known for quite a while now that this is a pretty significant limitation of our field. In defense of our field, there are basically two ways that are straightforward to study relationships. One is You take strangers and you introduce them to people like at speed dating events and you find out who’s attracted to whom. That’s terrific. Great. We love doing that sort of work.

There’s another thing also terrific that people in our field do, which is recruit people who are already in relationships. This is a whole separate line of research, but the problem is if you have this first line of research that studies people in the opening minute and sees how attracted they are to each other, and in the second line of research, you take people who are already together, what you have very, very rarely is people’s initial reaction to a stranger when they first meet and follow them long enough to know that a year later they were still together and happy.

Nonetheless, there is a little bit of research that looks at this stuff, including we’ve done a little bit of follow-up from our speed dating, and yes, you see that these initial impressions do tend to linger. And I think a major reason why they linger is because, as you’ve noted, we tend to interpret reality in a way that aligns with what we want or expect it to be.

So if I like you, I rate you as like a nine when I first meet you rather than a three, then when you tell that joke that might have been a little off-color, I think it’s funny. But you tell the same joke when I didn’t like you to begin with, and it’s not funny. These early impressions do tend to stick, not so much because people are objectively correct in those opening moments, but because those initial impressions have residue that affects the rest of how we interact with each other.

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Paul, let me restructure this question for you because I can see on this Zoom that your mind is worrying, thinking about this question of predictiveness. Let me put it to you this way: A common question of couples is “when did you know?”

Was it the first date? Was it the second date? I’ll say this for my wife and I; I knew on the second date. I met my wife on Bumble and deleted the app after the second date. But for some people, it’s maybe the 10th or the 15th.

This question of when did you know implies that at some early junction, most couples do have this moment where people can tell that they’re dating “the one.” In 2018, you published this paper that reconstructed the life cycle of hundreds of relationships to see essentially if the short term predicted the long term. I would love you to share the results of that study, whether or not it comports with my particular experience: Is early chemistry predictive?

Not exactly. I think here’s a useful way to think about it: the average relationship in the beginning goes through an incredible period of uncertainty where you kind of don’t know where this thing is heading. going. This is what’s happening on average. Now within that average, you got people like yourself who are super confident from moment one and you end up being right. And you got a lot of people who at the first moment are like, absolutely not, absolutely not, absolutely not. Oh, wait a second. And then something clicks later.

So all trajectories are possible. But the general gist of what people tend to go through is that there’s a period of like, I don’t know, maybe I like this. I’m not sure about this. We’re getting to know each other better. Whoa, that was a lot of fun. Can we repeat that? And now we’re clicking, and now things are going somewhere.

And let me also say that now, let’s assume you’re in a relationship, it’s going strong, how you felt at the beginning, right? Was it somebody like yourself feeling great from day two? Was it somebody who took a year to get to that point? And none of it matters. Okay. None of it matters. Once things are off and running, you know, it’s all about sort of what you’re building from here. Are you building strong patterns? Are you building ways of connecting with each other?

So, and the story you tell, right? Your origin story is like a meaningful narrative that people have about their lives and their relationships. All that stuff matters. But literally, you can take the high path like you did, or the “be friends for a long time” path. And then we click. You know, all of these things are plausible routes to romantic success in the end.

Eli, if early chemistry isn’t particularly predictive of long-term compatibility, right? If initial glow doesn’t predict a long, stable relationship, what do we think is most predictive? I understand that maybe the confidence intervals here, you know, might be a little bit wide. But when you look at variables like sexual satisfaction, similarity of personality, perceived commitment of the partner, the ability to, I don’t know what the academic term for this would be, but get through fights. What actually seems to sustain good relationships?

I think there’s two ways of thinking about this question. So the first is like, what are the attributes or interpersonal styles? And actually, Paul, would you comment briefly on that? Your memory for the Sam Joel 2020 paper is better than mine.

Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of personal qualities that help people feel better themselves in their relationships. So if you are more secure rather than avoidant or anxious in your attachment style, that’s really good for you. If you are an emotionally stable person, that’s really good for you. These qualities are worth developing and cultivating, but mainly for your own sake.

Yeah. So yeah, thank you, Paul. So the other answer I have is that it’s not about attributes. It’s not about something that you have or I have, or even in a basic sense, something that we have. It’s something that we’re building. And the way we like to talk about this is in terms of a microculture.

• To what degree have you developed certain specific words that you use only with your spouse?
• To what degree are there rituals that are not just like, well, every Friday night we do Sabbath dinner or something like that, but rituals that are, sure, those matter too, by the way, but rituals that are literally unique to the two of us, pet names, certain styles of engaging when we’re feeling like we might be getting in the mood?

To what degree do we hold those things sacred? That is, we continue to use them. We realize that they’re special between the two of us. An objective third-party observer might not be able to understand it. It might even sound like we’re insulting each other. There’s a special culture for two, and we have built it and we respect it. And you can tell that a relationship is in trouble when I start doing the inside joke thing that we’ve had for a long time, and you sort of can’t be bothered to respond in the standard way that we had developed together.

That’s really interesting. And it reminds me of this line that I don’t know where I heard it first, which is that every relationship is a foreign country. And it speaks to this idea that not only should one be slow to judge other people’s relationships, the same way that we should be slow to say that the French are wrong to do X just because it’s different than the way that Americans do X.

What you’re also saying is that what sustains high-quality relationships is not the degree to which you were similar before you met each other, but your ability to sort of co-create something that didn’t previously exist. And that might even be something as concrete as like a language.

So like, you know, I host a podcast. Like I’m a fairly, I guess, like linguistic person, a fairly communicative person. It’s important for me that my partner be able to banter, that she can like play along with my little bits. I was, Eli, you’re a professor at Northwestern. University where I was a student between 2004 and 2008. I was a journalism major, but I was a de facto theater kid. I did like eight plays and musicals and theater.

In relationships, I do like bits constantly. I miss being an actor, and being married to me is just having to deal with just a bunch of bits. That might be extremely annoying to somebody else, but we have a dialogue of bits that we’ve developed together, and those are unique to the relationship.

This idea of co-creation I find really, really interesting. What I love about this idea is that it brings together the similarities we were talking about earlier. Derek likes bits, but the word theatrical doesn’t really capture that. It’s not that you’re theatrical; we need to pair you up with somebody else who is theatrical. That isn’t what you needed. You needed somebody that was going to play off with you and work with you to build a culture that you enjoyed.

I remain deeply skeptical of whether a series of self-reports or even an algorithm based on those self-reports is going to be able to set two people up in a way that’s going to be effective. So it’s a real challenge for prediction. But when it comes to explanation—like why are some relationships thriving and others are not—I think it’s great that we can engage in this kind of motivated reasoning.

“Hey, let’s find the things that we share and build a relationship around that because I’m into you and you’re into me. There’s a lot here that we can work with.” And that’s what people end up doing.

From this motivated reasoning perspective, yes, we are these silly creatures that invent reasons all the time and constantly lie to ourselves. But that also is part of the building blocks for what makes relationships work. It’s really interesting, a double-edged sword in that way that we can find things to like about other people if we’re motivated to do so.

One theme of that, Paul, which I find really interesting, is that we think of most online markets as being frictionless and therefore efficient. It is much more efficient to buy toilet paper from Amazon than it used to be to buy toilet paper, period, because I can remain at my computer, click, click. Now I have a monthly subscription to toilet paper.

But just because you’re removing friction in human relationships doesn’t mean you’re making things more efficient. In many ways, if we’re honed to understand each other and to fall in love by being with people and understanding their nature and then co-creating a culture that exists exclusively between us, flicking through faces is actually a very inefficient way to spend our time doing that.

So it is interesting to think that online dating markets, which look personally have been hugely beneficial—I met my wife on a dating site—might for other people be highly inefficient because they’re spending their time filtering for something that isn’t deterministic of a high-quality relationship.

That’s a very interesting point. Eli, I want to ask about marriage. You wrote a book called The All or Nothing Marriage. One theme of that book is that marriage is not what it used to be; it is so much more than it used to be. That is meant in several ways. I would love for you to just take the floor here and provide us with a brief history of marriage.

What’s the story of how marriage has evolved in the industrial age over the last century into what it’s become today? Yeah, I mean, it is so much more, but it is also so much less. If you go back—not so much the last century, but not that much further than that—marriage was literally about things like food, clothing, and shelter.

When we talk about how we’re asking more of marriage—and I absolutely think we are—we’re talking about the social and psychological aspects of marriage, not the more basic things like now we’re going to have enough food to eat. But remember that you didn’t used to get food at the supermarket or through your delivery app; you grew it yourself.

Who was going to be a good match for you? Did it matter that much if you got tingles when you kissed? It was nice. People liked when they loved their partner. If the sex was good, that was certainly a perquisite of a good marriage, but that’s not why people married.

So you go back far enough. We talk about this as the pragmatic era of marriage, which is, you know, think about agriculture. But then fast forward; we’re now looking at like the industrialization. Let’s talk in the U.S. for example, circa 1850 or so. What’s wild about what happens then is… Urbanization. Factories start to emerge in these urban centers and they act like a magnet, drawing people from rural areas and other countries. What happens as a result is that for the first time ever, anywhere, young people are geographically and economically independent of their parents.

As a result, increasingly, we see people marrying for personal fulfillment. This really was not the purpose of marriage up until around the 1850s. People preferred to love, no doubt, but that wasn’t the essence of marriage. This trend picks up and reaches its peak around the 1950s, a brief period we have memorialized as traditional marriage. It existed for about 15 years, coinciding with the arrival of television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. This idea that you could have a love-based breadwinner, homemaker approach to marriage is what we call the love-based model.

This second major era of marriage lasts until the 1960s, around 1965. What you find is wholesale disillusionment with the idea that men and women have fundamental essences that we’re supposed to connect across. This leads to the countercultural revolution, where people focus not just on love and cherishing—big in the 1950s—but also on authenticity. By the 1970s, love alone is insufficient; there’s a need for individuals to become more authentic and true versions of themselves through marriage. The self-expressive era is still ongoing today.

The shifts from pragmatic, to love-based, to self-expressive eras of marriage have significant implications for how well we do in our marriages. Social critics might argue that modernity has given us a rising set of expectations making us miserable. It makes it harder to find a partner and to have realistic expectations of one. While this might be true to an extent, your work reveals that these lofty expectations have coincided with many marriages being better than ever.

How do we think about the effect that the all-or-nothing marriage has had on marriage quality and happiness? Has it, in a way, extended marriage happiness inequality? Consider this: with low expectations, individuals might accept that they’re not in love with their partner but still feel satisfied because “there’s a roof over my head.” In contrast, in a world with high expectations, some might feel miserable about their lackluster relationships, especially when comparing them to friends’ Instagram highlights, while others may experience a marriage that’s better than anything most had before the 1960s.

So how do we evaluate the effect that higher expectations have on the perceived quality of relationships? I love this topic. Social critics are not wrong; as we expect more from deep psychological fulfillment—like needing a partner to help us grow into our most authentic selves—many of us become disappointed in marriages that would have sufficed for our grandparents.

However, it’s important to recognize that some benefits come from seeking that deeper connection. The historical trajectory from pragmatic to love-based to self-expressive can be viewed as mapping onto Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It used to be that we looked to marriage for physiological and safety needs, then for love and belonging needs. Now we still seek love and belonging but also esteem and self-actualization needs.

What does Maslow say about these needs? First, he notes that striving for self-actualization is not easy; most of us fall short most of the time. Yes, we are placing additional expectations on marriage. However, he also points out that these aspirations can lead to peak experiences. It’s not just basic needs like eating when hungry or finding shelter that make life fulfilling. To talk about serenity and richness of inner life is to pursue fulfilling the needs at the top of his hierarchy. Get as we look to the top of his hierarchy for our marriage and our marital well-being, more of us are falling short. But those of us who are connecting, even with those high psychological expectations, are connecting in a way that is deeper than what was available during periods when people weren’t even trying.

All right, guys, I want to end on interventions. My wife is a clinical psychologist, so I love reading psychology to learn about our minds, but I also feel like the point of psychology is to help us live better, more flourishing lives. So I want us to do a little bit of applied romance psychology to close out the show.

Paul, let’s think about a girl in New York, 24 or 25 years old. She’s frustrated by online dating and wants to find a partner. What is something from your body of research that you could offer this person that is true and just counterintuitive enough to actually teach her something rather than repeat what she already knows?

Yeah. So, I mean, it’s tough, and people in a lot of places feel like the dating scene is genuinely awful and they don’t know what to do. I actually kind of like to come at this problem as if we were addressing a loneliness challenge.

Now, that may not be the case for this girl, but let’s just imagine that it is for a second. What I’d be telling her is to try to spend a little less time interacting with people via apps. Go out and just hang out with people. Try new hobbies that get you to interact with other people, maybe other groups that you haven’t met before.

Do the whole sort of “see where the night takes you.” To the extent that it’s not about dating per se, but about maintaining and also growing social connections in different directions, we get back a little bit to the sort of more organic style of social networks shifting and changing and getting a chance to meet other people that way.

I’m not saying to ditch the apps; you can use the apps too, but often there’s an additional strategy: get the side dish, which involves growing your networks for the sake of growing your networks just because it’s fun to be around people. Sometimes it’s fun to meet new people.

Often what people discover is that they’ll meet somebody who then introduces them to somebody else. Then it’s like, “Oh, here were the potential dating partners. They were over here in this little nook, but I had to traverse these social pathways to get there.” I think that’s something that apps encourage us to unfortunately forget, but it’s still something that we can do out there, especially if you’re living in a reasonably populated city.

Well, obviously with the stuff that I did on the anti-social century, I’m incredibly inclined to agree with this piece. I think that relationships mean being with people, and a really, really good rehearsal for being with people is being with people.

So there’s something that, if you go out and you’re around people and you don’t find your next husband or wife, well, the downside is you didn’t find your next husband or wife. The good news, though, is you were around people. If you spend your twenties looking for people on your phone, alone on a couch, watching Netflix, you can spend many decades hence being on your couch, alone, watching Netflix.

It’s nice to, I would say, encourage people to spend their twenties when they can be hung over for just six hours rather than like me, hung over for two days.

That’s a benefit.

Drink when you’re young, yeah. Drink when you’re young is my advice to the world. And, of course, drink responsibly—responsibly enough.

Eli, let’s say someone is listening and they’re in their thirties or forties. Let’s make it a guy this time. This guy’s in a relationship that is good, but lately the downsides have been higher than the upsides. He wants some advice from someone who has spent decades studying what quality relationships look like and what habits lead to long-term high-quality relationships.

How would you advise our 30 or 40-something listener in an okay, but struggling long-term relationship that again is helpful without being entirely common wisdom?

I mean, one of the reasons I wrote The All or Nothing Marriage is to talk to people who are like, “the marriage is good, but it’s not great.” I’d love to take a moment with him. We talked earlier about how our expectations of marriage have shifted and have gone to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.

We’re asking so much more when it comes to psychological needs; that’s fine. But as we’ve discussed, it’s risky. Most of us do these things where it’s like, “Well, we’ve got these deal breakers and these are the things I’m asking for in the relationship.” But how often do we say, here’s some things that I don’t need from this one person that is, look, we’re pretty good at connecting in ways one, two, and three, but we seem to fight a lot about issues four or five and six.

To what extent are issues four or five and six things that are really fixable for us or things that I can just let go of? I find it useful in terms of just a broad framework to think in terms of supply and demand.

So supply is like our compatibility, our time together, all the things that we can use to invest in making the relationship better. And demand are the things that we’re asking of the relationship.

Thinking about, well, what is it that we’re asking of the relationship and where are the strengths of the relationship should allow us to lean into the strengths and minimize the weaknesses.

Because we can say, gosh, we are totally amazing at planning vacations together, at being good parents together in the bedroom, whatever it is that we tend to do really well, lean into those things and thank your lucky stars for them.

But we kind of suck at these other things. We get on each other’s nerves when we socialize as couples with other couples because we find each other’s stories kind of grating.

You know what’s possible? Socialize differently, right? Figuring out where are the strengths, where we can lean in, and where are the weaknesses, where we can ask less should be helpful for almost everybody trying to strengthen their relationship.

One follow-up there, Eli, is that it seems like with the all-or-nothing marriage, there’s this assumption that our partners should fulfill all 10 of our 10 expectations. But there might be a much happier relationship possible if people sort of lay out their 10 expectations or like 10 things that they want from a partner and say,

• You do these seven things spectacularly.

Of course, I spend all my time thinking about the final three because our attention is drawn to negativity. That’s true in both modern media and in interpersonal relationships.

But how do we spend more of our time doing the good seven rather than thinking and fighting about the bad three?

Is there a way in which people can sort of strategically down emphasize certain expectations they have of each other in order to have less of an all-or-nothing marriage and more of a just like a lot of something marriage?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I don’t think this exact study has been done. It is doable, right? You could randomly assign people to try to think of things where they’re going to meet their needs through other friends.

Nonetheless, we’ve seen that, these days, people stand on the wedding altar and say, you’re my best friend, right? That isn’t what a marriage used to be.

Should your spouse also be your best friend? Should it be like the person that you run your household with? Should it also be the person that you have, you know, the only sex of your life with and the person that you go to when you’re feeling vulnerable?

I think it is a very high-risk choice to put all of these psychological and social demands on this one person.

So I think it is a great idea to remember that we have broader social networks. These things have narrowed over time. We’ve increasingly looked to our spouse.

There are upsides to that. But there is no shame in a marriage that says, look, we’re great at these things. But when I’m really feeling insecure about what’s going on at work, I want to talk to Alice, not my husband, about those sorts of things.

That is a great thing for the marriage. There’s nothing problematic or insulting or degrading about the quality of the marriage.

Figuring out where is it that I can help my partner? Where is it that my partner can help me that we can connect together? If we’ve got these weaknesses, luckily, we don’t live in a world where we have only one significant person in our lives.

Eli Finkel, Paul Eastwick, thank you guys so much. Thank you for having us. Yes, thanks so much. I’ll see you next time.