This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
No matter how many weddings you've been to, it's hard to shake that contagious feeling of optimism.
Couples pledge to love one another in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer.
Family members dab tears from their eyes, agreeing that these two people are meant to be together forever.
But so many marriages become unhappy.
Some dissolve.
Some end in divorce.
And even the successful ones are not without challenges.
No one would deny that long-term relationships are hard.
And in fact, there's evidence they're getting harder.
Over the past few weeks, our Love 20 series has explored new ways to think about how we engage with romantic partners and spouses.
We've talked about how to build new bonds with our significant others, how to strengthen the bonds we already have.
We've looked at how we respond to our partner's most annoying habits and how we can let go of our desire to change them.
Today, we bring you a classic episode that many listeners have told us is one of their favorites.
It's about the changing nature of marriage in the United States and other parts of the world.
Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.
And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.
How our expectations of marriage have evolved, and a paradoxical way to achieve more happiness in our relationships.
This week on Hidden Brain.
To understand marriage today, we thought it best to go back to a time and place when marriage was very different.
Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years, but I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.
That's Stephanie Koontz.
She's an emeritus professor at the Evergreen State College and the author of the book Marriage a History How Love Conquered Marriage.
I interviewed her back in 2017.
Stephanie says the earliest marriages had nothing to do with the feelings of two people or their attraction to one another.
As you probably know, marriage was much more about economics and acquiring powerful in-laws.
Marriage originally arose in more egalitarian band level societies as a way of sharing resources and establishing peaceful relations with groups that you might otherwise only see occasionally and you might not know if they were going to be friends or enemies.
It was a way of circulating obligations and goods.
I marry my child off to you and that means you owe me things but I also owe you things.
Stephanie brought up a famous example from history the union between Cleopatra of Egypt and Mark Antony of Rome.
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Siren of the Nile.
This is from a 1963 film version.
Richard Burton as Mark Antony rash, impetuous leader of once invincible legion, dreaded adversary on the field of battle.
The Hollywood version of the story portrays Cleopatra and Antony as being very much in love, but Stephanie paints a slightly different picture.
There may have been passion, but it was more passion for power than sexual, although sexual probably entered into it too.
Cleopatra and Antony's marriage was primarily about strategy.
Rome and Egypt were the two most powerful empires in the world.
So getting anybody who got them together and got an alliance between them would be unstoppable.
The story goes that Cleopatra was married to her brother.
And without getting into all the details, let's just say she wasn't too happy with that.
So she started an affair with Julius Caesar, the ruler of Rome.
Cleopatra became pregnant.
When the baby was born, he was named Caesarian.
The child gave Cleopatra and Caesar a claim to each other's throne.
It was something they both desperately wanted.
Sounds like an episode of Game of Thrones, right?
Well, then Caesar died, and Mark Anthony came along.
And, of course, the story tells that she seduced him.
But you know, when you really look at what was happening practically, this was another political alliance.
First, as did Caesar.
Caesarian was too young to rule.
And Anthony could rule in his place.
So it was a great big political alliance, just like Game of Thrones.
This marriage strategy wasn't just for kings and queens.
There's a common misconception that people of lower classes in this time married for love.
Not true, Stephanie says.
You couldn't run a farm with one person.
You couldn't run a bakery with one person.
So people who were bakers married other bakers.
If you were a peasant, you wanted somebody who had a good reputation as a hard worker.
And that was much more important than this frivolous luxury is the way it was really thought of, as how attracted you were to the person.
A different idea started to become more common in the 17 and 1800s.
Jane Austen, the famous novelist, may well have been the trailblazer.
For those who don't remember the plot of her book Pride and Prejudice Mr Darcy, who has been promised in marriage to his wealthy cousin, falls instead for Elizabeth Bennet, a woman of modest means.
That throws his aunt into a rage.
Mr. Darcy is engaged to my daughter.
Now what have you to say?
Only this, if that is the case, you can have no reason to suppose he would make an offer to me.
You selfish girl!
This union has been planned since their infancy.
Do you think it can be prevented by a young woman of inferior birth?
Heaven and earth, are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?
Now tell me once and for all, are you engaged to him?
I am not.
So, Stephanie, talk about this.
This is the first glimmers, if you will, of the idea that, in some ways, love was coming to conquer marriage.
This clip you used is perfect because it illustrates the fact that men found it easier to embrace the love match than women did.
Men could marry down because they could go out and earn wages.
Women had to be very, very cautious.
You know you could say my heart inclines to Harry, but you know I'd better marry who my parents want me to and the person who is most likely to be able to support me.
And so there was a prolonged period of time where men actually were more romantic than women in the courtship arena.
By the second half of the 19th century the Jane Austen model of marriage had taken firm hold in the United States.
The idea of marrying for anything other than love came to be seen as old-fashioned.
And with the rise of this new idea came another.
If marriage was once seen as a partnership between people from similar backgrounds and similar social classes, the new model of marriage began to celebrate the coming together of people who were supposedly radically different from one another.
And you got this new theory that love was a union of opposites.
Now this idea came that men and women were totally different and you could only have access to the emotions resources, abilities of the other by getting married and staying married.
You were incomplete without it.
In practice, this dovetailed with a changing economic landscape in the country, where men increasingly became the breadwinners and women became homemakers.
The 1950s sitcom, Leave It to Beaver, makes clear this division between male and female roles.
You know, Dad, it's funny.
What's funny?
Well, whenever we cook inside, Mom always does the cooking.
But whenever we cook outside, you always do it.
How come?
Well, it's sort of traditional, I guess.
You know, they say a woman's place is in the home, and I suppose as long as she's in the home she might as well be in the kitchen.
Well, that explains about Mom.
But how come you always do the outside cooking?
Well, I'll tell you, son, women do all right when they have all the modern conveniences.
But us men are better at this rugged type of outdoor cooking.
Sort of a throwback to caveman days.
Talk to me about this idea, Stephanie.
So clearly, gender biases played a role in how we came to think about marriage.
Well, absolutely.
But what's interesting about this clip is that the concept of the male breadwinner was unknown before the 19th century.
Women worked in the home, but so did men.
And men didn't go out and bring home the bacon.
Women helped raise the pig.
Maybe the man butchered it, but the woman often cured the bacon and took the bacon to market.
So again, this was part of this new idea of love that I talked about earlier, the idea that men and women were so different that the man had to do all the outside stuff because the woman couldn't do it, and the woman had to do all the inside stuff because the man couldn't do it and wasn't supposed to do it.
The idea of the love match may have been controversial at first, but when concerns were raised about how people from different backgrounds would stay together when they didn't have the bond of shared work or the larger framework of a shared community.
Advocates for love marriage said men and women would stay together because they needed one another to feel psychologically complete.
This theory was later appropriated in romantic stories and movies.
Think of the saying, opposites attract.
But as the divorce rate in America surged in the 1970s and 80s, many started to think that what you should look for in a mate was not your opposite, but someone who shared your interests and values.
It wasn't quite the same as one baker looking to marry another baker, but more along the lines of people marrying others with similar educational backgrounds and similar cultural and political attitudes.
You know, it's important to understand that love itself, the definition has changed.
It's different today than it was at the beginning of the love match, when it was a union of opposites.
And today, it's really like a union of people who share so many values.
And that's one of the big challenges of love today, because we spent 100 years trying to get people to see love a difference as erotic and the source of love.
And now our big challenge is how do we make equality erotic?
How do you make equality erotic?
Where is the sizzle in consensus and compromise, in child care pickups and doctor's appointments, in a lifestyle symbolized by a Honda Civic rather than a flashy Ferrari?
When we come back, we'll answer that question.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
We've been talking with historian Stephanie Koons about how marriage changed from an institution that was primarily about economic partnerships and political expedience to one based on romantic love.
Once this shift took hold in the United States, over the course of the 19th century, love marriages became the norm.
Soon, everyone wanted to know the secrets of making love last.
You've seen those documentaries and news stories about elderly couples who've managed to stay together for most of their lives.
Meet Milt and Leona, sweethearts for life.
We've been married 60 years, 60 beautiful years.
When people ask me, how long have you been married?
I truthfully say, not long enough.
A heartwarming documentary about the life of a couple that has been together for three quarters of a century 75 years.
There's something that these stories don't tell you.
Social psychologist Eli Finkel at Northwestern University has studied the psychological effects of the historical changes that Stephanie has documented.
Eli is the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work.
He has a very dramatic term for the challenge that many couples face today.
Modern marriage, he says, runs the risk of suffocation.
To understand that term, Eli says you have to look at yet another shift that started in the 1960s and 70s.
We wanted to complement our emphasis on love, achieving love through marriage with a new emphasis on achieving a sense of personal fulfillment in the way of personal growth.
So in the terminology of psychology, we wanted to self-actualize through our marriage.
We wanted to grow into a more authentic version of ourselves.
One example of this comes from the bestselling book by Elizabeth Gilbert about walking out on her husband and trying to create a more meaningful life for herself.
We're going to play a few clips from the movies as we chat.
And this one comes from the movie Eat, Pray, Love featuring Julia Roberts.
We'd only bought this house a year ago.
Hadn't I wanted this?
I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life.
So why didn't I see myself in any of it?
The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.
It sounds like she was searching for her true self, Eli.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
For the first time, you start to see cases where people would say, as I think Liz Gilbert would say, that she was in a loving marriage and he was a good man and treated her well.
But she felt stagnant and she really wasn't willing to endure a stagnant life for the next 30 or 40 years.
And she walked out.
This would have been unthinkable, of course, 100 years ago, let alone 500 years ago.
Yes.
This would have been a very, very bizarre thing to say.
And marriage.
You know, it wasn't really until the 70s that you started seeing no-fault divorce laws.
It used to be that you had to prove some type of serious mistreatment like abuse or desertion.
Yes, it's a very modern idea that we are entitled to a sense of real fulfillment and personal growth through the marriage.
And if our marriage is falling short, many of us consider it to be a reasonable option to end the marriage.
You come up with what I think of as a riff on a very famous psychological concept.
Many years ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that human beings have a series of different needs that begin with physical security and end with a search for meaning and fulfillment.
And you say that a similar hierarchy has come to describe how many Americans think about marriage.
Tell me about what you call Mount Maslow.
Well, one of the most exciting things that happened to me in the process of writing the book is I learned a lot about the history and the sociology and the economics of marriage, particularly reading people like Stephanie Kuntz, because my primary expertise is as pretty much a laboratory psychologist.
I bring couples into the laboratory and I videotape them interacting and I follow them over time.
But these other disciplines, scholars in these other disciplines, adopt a different approach.
So I realized that marriage had in fact changed radically in terms of the way we expect it to fulfill our needs, in America that is.
And it used to be that marriage was about basic economic survival.
We've seen that from Stephanie Kuntz and others.
And you can think of that as being at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy toward the physiological and safety needs, really survival-based needs.
And then, as we track marriage and it becomes more about love.
Now we're more toward the And, then in the 1960s and then really up until today.
We're in this new era where yes, we're still looking for love.
But now we're toward the top of Maslow's hierarchy, where he's talking about things like esteem and self-actualization.
And so our expectations of marriage have basically ascended from the bottom to the top of Maslow's hierarchy over the course of American history.
And one of the ideas that emerged as I was writing this book is that we can conceptualize Maslow's hierarchy not just in terms of a triangle, but in terms of a mountain right.
And the advantage of thinking of Maslow's hierarchy as a mountain in this way is that it brings to mind a number of metaphors related to –.
And one thing that we know when we climb up a big mountain is the views get increasingly gorgeous as you get to the top, but the oxygen gets a little thinner.
And so having a successful experience way up there at the top requires that you are able to invest a lot of oxygen.
Either bring extra oxygen with you on the mountain or invest a lot of time and energy in the marriage to succeed up there.
So, to continue your analogy, if we want to get to the top of Mount Maslow but we have failed to bring our oxygen tanks with us, that's what leads presumably to what you call the suffocation model.
That's right.
That's right.
That is, it's lovely way up there at the top.
And if we're looking to try to achieve not only this sense of love and connection but also this sense of personal growth and authenticity through the marriage, but we're trying to do it on the cheap.
And that disconnect is what I'm talking about when I talk about the suffocation of marriage.
What I love about that analogy is it makes physical almost this psychological process, this effect of our expectations.
All of us can imagine what it would be like to suddenly wake up one morning and decide you know, I'm going to run a marathon or I'm going to climb a mountain, a very tall mountain, without really any preparation.
And we would recognize that it's not just difficult to do, but potentially foolhardy.
That is exactly right.
I think if we think about what we're really asking of our marriages these days in terms of the you know ambition of these expectations, then we realize that if we're too tired or lazy to invest in the quality of the relationship, that of course we're not going to be able to make the summit attempt.
Of course we're not going to be able to succeed in meeting those expectations toward the very high end of Maslow's hierarchy.
And so the book talks a lot about how we can in fact align what we're asking of the marriage with what the marriage is realistically able to offer us.
So there have been a few people Eli, over the years who've tried to explore the same ideas that you have.
Esther Perel, of course, comes to mind.
In her famous TED Talk, she summarizes some of these challenges.
And I want to play you a short clip.
So we come to one person and And we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide.
Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one.
Give me comfort, give me edge.
Give me novelty, give me familiarity.
Give me predictability, give me surprise.
And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.
So I love that passage, Eli, but you talk about the same idea in your book.
You give the analogy of a woman who once turned to five different friends for important things she needed.
But once she gets married she turns to her husband for those same five things and he's not able to provide all of them and she feels now unfulfilled.
That's right.
In the research literature on how we achieve our goals, there's a clunky word called multifinality.
And this is the idea that a given means can serve multiple goals.
So, for example, when I walk to work, that might simultaneously meet my need to get to work, but also my needs to get some fresh air and get some exercise.
And so this one activity can serve all sorts of functions.
What's interesting is that's really what we've done to marriage.
Right is that marriage for a long time served a set and relatively limited array of different functions for us.
And over time, we've piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions.
So, instead of turning to our close friends and other relatives for nights out on the town for deep, intimate disclosure, to a larger and larger extent our spouse has replaced a lot of what we used to look to our broader social network to help us do.
You know, as I read your book Eli, I realized that it's not just what we expect from our partners.
That's changing.
We also now expect that we can unlock special things in our partners.
And this is also reflected in the movies.
The 1997 movie As Good As It Gets has a scene where a woman who is fed up with put-downs by the man who's trying to woo her, demands that he give her a compliment.
Okay, here I go. clearly a mistake.
I've got this, what, ailment?
My doctor a shrink that I used to go to all the time.
He says that in 50 or 60 percent of the cases a pill really helps.
I hate pills.
My compliment is that night when you came over and told me that you would never All right.
Well, you were there.
You know what you said.
Well, my compliment to you is... the next morning, I started taking the pills.
I don't quite get how that's a compliment for me.
You make me want to be a better man.
That's maybe the best compliment of my life.
I found this so revealing in the context of your book, Eli.
Helen Hunt's character is telling Jack Nicholson's character that the thing that makes her feel really good is not what he does for her, but what she can do to unlock something special in him.
Yeah, he is smitten with her, and his desire for her, his being impressed with her and the desire to make her like him more, actually makes him want to grow into a better person.
And in some sense, that's the absolute archetype of what we see today. in contemporary marriage.
Today we're looking for a spouse to bring out the ideal version of us, the latent version that's inside of us, that we can hopefully grow into with enough time and effort.
You have a wonderful term in your book.
You call this the Michelangelo effect.
Yeah, this is a term I actually got from my doctoral advisor, Carol Rustbolt.
Many of your listeners will know that Michelangelo, when he talked about the sculpting process, talked not in terms of revealing a sculpture, but in terms of unleashing it from the rock in which it's been slumbering.
So the sculptor's job is not to create something new, but merely to refine and buff and polish and maybe scrape away the rough edges of what was already nesting within the rock.
That's a really good metaphor for how partners today try to relate to each other.
That is, all of us have an actual self, the person that we currently are, but we also have an ideal self, a version of ourselves that's aspirational.
Like, what could I maybe become if I could be the best version of myself?
And we look to our partners to be our sculptors, to help us until we actually grow toward the best ideal version of ourselves.
So Eli, do we actually have this power, this power to play sculptor and bring out the best in someone else?
The answer is yes.
We do have this power, but it's not easy to do and not everybody is compatible.
And sometimes the version of you that you want to grow into isn't the version of you that I want you to grow into.
And this is a very delicate dance that we play.
And you know the best relationships today, the sorts of relationships that I call the all relationships and the idea of the all or nothing marriage.
They're well aligned in this sense.
They're able to bring out the best in each other and connect in a way that facilitates each other's personal growth and therefore helps to produce a really profound amount of emotional connection and psychological fulfillment.
Yeah.
Many marriage experts say that high expectations are the enemy of happiness in marriage.
You come to a slightly different conclusion.
You say that it's true that, on average, many marriages might be unhappier today than they were half a century ago, but that isn't true of all marriages.
Who are the exceptions?
The exceptions are people who bring those expectations and are able to meet them.
And this is, I think, the crux of the entire issue.
Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.
And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.
I, when I set out to write this book, thought I was writing a book about the decline over time in marriage and how we're throwing more and more expectations on this one institution and this one relationship, but we're not investing enough time.
And therefore, we've really created a seriously problematic approach to marriage.
And it wasn't until I reviewed these other scientific literatures and learned more about how things have changed that I realized that's really half the story.
It is true that we are asking a lot more, especially when it comes to these more psychological and love-based needs, than we did in the past.
But some marriages are able to meet those needs.
And so what does it mean if you have a marriage that you're looking for to meet these very highest level needs say, for example, in Maslow's hierarchy, and the marriage succeeds in doing so?
You're able to achieve a level of fulfillment in the marriage that would have been out of reach in an era where we really weren't even trying to meet those types of needs.
So, at the same time that these high expectations are weighting us down and making it more difficult to achieve a healthy marriage, at the same time that a marriage that would have been acceptable to us in 1950 is a disappointment to us today because of these high expectations.
Those same expectations have placed within REACH a level of marital fulfillment that was out of REACH until pretty recently.
So this idea that some people invest heavily in their marriages at the expense of careers and friends maybe even you know their children's activities, you say this is perfectly captured in a scene from another movie.
In Sideways.
Paul Giamatti's wine connoisseur character explains to his love interest the difference between a Pinot and a Cabernet.
Why are you so into Pinot?
I mean, it's like a thing with you.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Um...
It's a hard grape to grow, as you know, right?
It's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early.
It's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected.
No, Pinot needs constant care and attention.
In fact, it can only grow in these really specific little tucked-away corners of the world.
And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really.
Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.
And then I mean oh, its flavors.
They're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.
So, of course Eli, when we hear this and we're thinking about this in the context of marriage why wouldn't we all want to grow Pinot?
Well, I think a lot of us should be pretty careful about Pinot.
I mean, I think that clip does an absolutely masterful job of providing an analogy to how marriage has changed in America in the last say, 50 years or more.
It's changed from an institution approximating Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected, to a much more delicate, fragile institution that requires a lot of tending and maintenance.
So you ask me who would ever want anything other than Pinot Noir, at least according to how Miles thinks about those grapes.
And I would say a whole lot of people might not want to deal with something that fragile and delicate.
But...
Like he says, those of us who get it right.
That is well, and he's talking about the grapes.
When there's the right grower and the right context, the flavors are just haunting and brilliant and subtle and ancient.
And what I think he's saying is this is a high-maintenance grape.
It takes a lot of work.
And if you aren't careful and attentive, you're going to be disappointed in it.
It's going to fail you.
But if you work hard enough, you can have something truly exquisite.
And that is where we are today with the All or Nothing Marriage.
One of the conclusions of your book is that we have, in some ways, two major alternatives when it comes to dealing with this challenge that many of us want to be at the top of Mount Maslow but are not investing the time and effort or the patience to actually get there.
In your own marriage, you describe a trip to Seattle where, in your own analogy, you found yourself starved of oxygen.
That's right.
We went through a hard time.
I, in particular, went through a hard time with the adjustment to parenthood.
And I frankly, I think that the reason I had a hard time is the sort of stuff that I'm talking about in the book.
I hadn't sufficiently calibrated or recalibrated my expectations to what life would be like with a newborn.
And the research on this is in fact tricky.
Obviously, having a bundle of joy is a wonderful thing, and you love the new baby like crazy, and kissing that little fuzzy head is one of the most satisfying things we ever get to do in our lives.
But the reality is a recent estimate suggests that it's about 33 and a half additional hours a week of extra time like of care that goes into that.
And I would ask the couples out there listening who don't have a kid, Where would those 335 hours a week come from?
And then you're complementing that with some sleep deprivation and frankly, much less time for emotional connection or sexual connection with your spouse.
And is it any surprise that the research evidence shows that the arrival of the first baby tends to be pretty hard on the quality of the relationship, on the marital satisfaction, for example?
Yeah.
And it was during that period where we took a trip to Seattle to see my closest and longest-term friend, one of these life experiences that has always been a source of bliss and joy for me throughout the 30-some-odd years of my life at the time.
And I was miserable.
It turns out that traveling across the country with an eight-month-old is not anything like traveling across the country without an eight-month-old.
And then you're together with your best friend and there's all the stuff that you used to do.
But now there's an eight-month-old there and you're not doing any of those things.
And I – really had a hard time.
I mean, I can't really exaggerate this.
I really struggled emotionally with the adjustment.
And I said to my wife and I regret saying this, it's hard for me to say out loud right now.
You know I can endure this.
Like I can get past this and I certainly love my daughter, but I need to stop trying to have fun, because if I'm trying to enjoy my life and I'm trying to enjoy you, I keep end up disappointed.
And she was very upset about that.
And, you know, I made her cry.
I'm not proud of this at all, but she cried and thought what is this?
The end of us trying to live a good life together?
Are we just going to hunker down and be unhappy together?
But the truth is this ended up being the lowest point, but also the starting of where I started to recover a little bit.
It took that moment before I started to get serious about making life better again.
And one of the major ways I did it was by recalibrating my expectations yes, but also reinvesting in a way that made sure that I was more connected to my wife than we had been.
And it took some work.
And it did require that we lower expectations in some ways and then try to meet those lowered expectations.
And we were, in fact, able to do it.
But it certainly wasn't easy.
Eli and other researchers have found that it's not especially easy to fulfill a partner's emotional and psychological needs when you're struggling to pay the bills or working three jobs.
This might be one reason that the institution of marriage appears to be especially fragile among low-income couples.
When we come back, we're going to look at tangible solutions.
If you can't afford to take your partner on that romantic trip to Paris, but you still want to get to the top of Mount Maslow, we'll show you how to get there.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
On today's show, knowledge.
Marriage is what brings us together today.
That's right, marriage.
Marriage, that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream.
The priest from that iconic scene in The Princess Bride describes it best.
Or does he?
We're taking a look at how marriage has evolved over time.
It went from a partnership of necessity to a union of two very different people who need one another's love to be complete.
Now it's gone to the all-or-nothing relationships identified by psychologist Eli Finkel.
Eli argues that our expectations for marriage, both gay and straight, among rich and poor, have dramatically increased.
Couples who are able to meet these higher expectations are happier than couples have ever been.
But couples who fall short are unhappier than their counterparts a century ago.
Use the subject line marriage.
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.
Eli says there are things we can do what he calls love hacks to reorient how we think about marriage and make ourselves more fulfilled in long-term relationships.
Some of your listeners might be fans of Marcel Proust, who argues that mystery is not about traveling to new places, but about looking with new eyes.
And the love hacks are exactly that.
There are ways that we can try to experience the same relationship but view it in a different way and therefore be a little bit happier in the relationship itself.
So psychologists have long talked about something called the fundamental attribution error, which is sometimes when we see someone behave in a way that we don't like.
There's two ways to interpret it.
You can either say this person is behaving badly because they're a bad person, or you can say this person is behaving badly because there's something in the context, there's something happening around him or her that's causing him or her to behave this way.
And one of the hacks that you suggest is to reinterpret negative behavior from your partner in a way that's more sympathetic rather than critical.
Right.
And I'm not saying it's magic.
I'm not saying it's the easiest thing to do.
But I'm saying that with some effort, we can get a little better at this.
So your spouse is late.
Your spouse is disrespectful.
I mean, ideally not in a huge way.
But your spouse does something inconsiderate, you have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you.
And, in particular, you have control over whether you want to explain that behavior in terms of something about your spouse that's maybe stable and a characterological assessment like my spouse is always such a jerk.
You can try instead to say look, my spouse was a jerk just now, but he's under a lot of stress at work.
Or you can think, look, he probably tried the best he could.
You know, there was probably some traffic or some crisis at work.
I'm just going to let it ride.
Now I'm not saying these are easy things to do, because we do have a default to explain other people's behaviors as elements of their character.
But the fact is and we should be better at understanding this there are all sorts of things that contribute to why somebody engaged in one behavior over another behavior.
And we have some control over the extent to which we interpret our partner's inconsiderate or rude behavior in a way that's more generous and kind.
And the kinder approach will make us happier in the relationship and our partner will probably be happier too.
You also think that having what you call a growth mindset is a useful thing.
What do you mean by that?
So the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford.
She's developed this idea that people differ in terms of how they think about various attributes.
So she studies intelligence, for example.
And people differ in the extent to which they think intelligence is something that's fixed and stable, and you have it or you don't.
Versus it's malleable and it's something that you can develop over time.
Well, it turns out there's a lot of good research now on the extent to which people feel like compatibility in a relationship is something that is fixed.
You could call this a destiny mindset.
People who think look, partners are either compatible or they're not, and that's the end of the story, versus more of a growth-oriented mindset who think –.
Look, there's a lot of room where you can develop compatibility.
And, in fact, going through difficulties in a relationship isn't a signal that, oh my goodness, we're incompatible people.
It's an opportunity to learn to understand each other better and strengthen the relationship through the resolution of the conflict.
And here again it's not like we have complete control over the thoughts that we have about these things, but we can try to make ourselves adopt a more constructive, growth-oriented approach to thinking about conflict in the relationship, rather than a more destiny-oriented approach that can often view conflict as a deep sign of incompatibility And that's pretty destructive for the relationship.
You also talk about more serious alternatives.
So if people find over time that they are just incompatible with one another and yet they have these high expectations of different things they want from their life, you suggest that one of the alternatives might be to develop systems where people are actually getting different things from different people.
That's right.
It's the same logic again, right?
So we have this all or nothing approach.
We expect these high level things.
And many of our marriages are, in fact, falling short of that.
So one possibility is that we try to invest more in the relationship.
And the second possibility, which we've called love hacks, is how to be more efficient.
But the third possibility, and I actually think we should be pretty serious about this.
There's nothing shameful about making these sorts of sacrifices.
We should ask less.
In what ways can we in our own marriage look to the relationship and see man like I have been looking to fulfill this sort of need in the relationship for a long time.
And I'm chronically a little disappointed about how we do as a couple and helping to fulfill this sort of need.
Is there some other way that I might be able to meet this need I have, either through some other friends or even on my own?
And there's some research by the psychologist Elaine Chung that looks at what she calls social diversification.
Can you diversify your social portfolio, if you will?
And she looks at the people we turn to when we're feeling emotions that can help us regulate those emotions.
So To whom do you turn when you're feeling sad?
To whom do you turn when you want to celebrate your happiness?
And she assesses how much people look to a relatively small number of people to do all of those things versus a larger number of people.
And she finds across a range of studies, now that people who've diversified their social portfolio, that is, turned to different sorts of people for different sorts of emotional experiences, tend to be a little bit happier.
And so, with regard to marriage in particular, we've really lumped a lot of our emotional fulfillment on this one relationship.
And for many of us we would benefit, and our marriage would actually benefit, if we asked a little bit less in some respects.
I love the idea of diversification and the analogy with financial diversification.
I mean.
So the idea, of course, is that you might have bonds in your portfolio and they don't do very well and they don't grow a lot, but they're very stable.
And then you might have some stocks in your portfolio that are high growth, but they also have the potential for losing a lot.
And what you're suggesting is that, by having different things accomplish different parts of what you need, your portfolio as a whole ends up being more stable than if you put all your eggs in one basket.
You know, that's right.
And that's a neat way of thinking about it that I hadn't fully processed previously.
In some sense, what we're doing with marriage these days is we've got a heavily stock-loaded portfolio.
And that means that when the market is up, we make huge gains.
But that's a lot of eggs to put in that one basket.
And when the market goes down... we're going to get hit pretty hard.
And to some degree that's also a reasonable metaphor for the self-expressive marriage where we look to one person to fulfill so many of our emotional and our psychological needs.
The payoff can be huge, but there's a lot of risk.
Now for people to actually consider diversifying their portfolio romantically and emotionally.
Presumably this also creates stresses on what we think of as marriage.
So if people are looking outside the marriage for emotional support or other needs, some people are going to say well, are you really married anymore?
I think this is a valid question and this is a complexity that comes up when you think about how an institution like marriage changes over time.
I suspect that if somebody transported from 1750 to today, they might look around and say whoa, that doesn't look like marriage.
I don't even really get what you guys are doing.
Or, better yet, if we transported back to 1750 and looked at what people were expecting and how little they were looking for personal fulfillment from the marriage, we would be bewildered.
So one of the more controversial ideas that I play with in the book is when I'm talking about ways that we can ask less of the marriage.
By the way, when I am doing that, I'm talking about how can we strengthen the marriage by asking less of it.
One of the places that I consider is in the romantic or sexual domain.
So is it reasonable for some people to consider some type of consensual non-monogamy?
Now, this is not cheating.
That's the whole idea of consensual non-monogamy.
This is an understanding that we don't need to have complete monogamy all the time.
And you can negotiate an alternative.
In fact, among millennials, this is becoming an increasingly common way of thinking about the ideal relationship.
So this is an ideal option, especially for people who generally are connecting pretty well and they love each other and they're good co-CEOs of the household together, but they're really struggling to sustain a mutually satisfying sex life together.
Those are particularly good opportunities to consider.
Could we reduce some of the disappointment and pressure by opening up the relationship in some ways that we can both agree to?
It's certainly a high-risk option, but it's an option that probably will benefit some relationships.
You say that you and your wife Alison have developed a shorthand of sorts for the times you want to communicate affection but are starved of time.
And it has to do with this song.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, but she doesn't have a lot to say.
Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, but she changes from day to day.
That's Paul McCartney at the end of the Abbey Road medley.
It's like a little 23-second bonus track.
And it's interesting.
I haven't heard it in a while and even as I listened to it as you just played it I sort of teared up a little bit, because it's been a very significant song for my wife and me in our marriage.
When we were first dating, you know...
People are falling in love and they often say, I love you or whatever.
But I was very partial to this idea of belly full of wine, right?
I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I got to get a belly full of wine.
And eventually saying belly full of wine was our little replacement for wine.
I love you.
And what was neat about the way we used the phrase belly full of wine is it was able to contain like a whole terabyte of information about love and respect and affection in this like one second phrase.
We could turn to each other and just say belly full of wine and just really communicate so much information in that very little space, just those few words.
And this is an example of a broader idea that we don't appreciate enough, which is that every marriage has its own culture, that has its own language and its own expectations, and we can leverage the features of how culture works to benefit the marriage, with a sort of emotional shorthand that can help express affection.
And it can be especially crucial If you're going through a difficult time and maybe things are getting a little hot and maybe you're on the verge of a fight and you can say hey baby, belly full of wine and you might be able to diffuse some of what could have been a pretty problematic episode.
Eli Finkel is a social psychologist at Northwestern University.
He's the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work.
Eli, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Do you have a personal story to share about a long-term relationship in your own life that has gone very well or gone very badly?
If you'd be willing to share the story with the Hidden Brain audience, or if you have follow-up questions, thoughts or comments about this episode.
Please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.
Two or three minutes is plenty.
Then email the file to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. use the subject line marriage.
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.
After the break, your questions answered.
Psychologist Jonathan Adler returns to the show.
He'll answer listeners' questions about the stories we tell about our lives and we'll hear remarkable tales from listeners about how they came to terms with dramatic and difficult moments in their lives.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
The first films in history were quite simple.
A series of moving pictures showed a horse running, a family playing in a garden and a boxer punching his opponent.
As the technology developed, so did the complexity of the stories portrayed on screen.
In the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, George Meleus depicted astronomers who fly to the moon, get captured by aliens and then escape back to Earth.
As Hollywood evolved into its studio era, the plots of films coalesced into a distinct style, with a beginning, middle and end.
In most blockbuster movies today, the characters inevitably reach a satisfying conclusion.
Filmmakers with an artistic bent have experimented with different storytelling devices.
The 1950 film Rashomon is about a samurai who gets murdered.
It tells the same story from four perspectives.
They end up being four completely different stories.
The film Memento tells its plot in reverse, while Inception evokes the feeling of a fragmented dream.
Jesus, mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?
It's my subconscious.
Remember, I can't control it.
When we watch these films, we're riveted by the characters, the action, and the dialogue.
But we often fail to notice that the way the story is told has a fundamental impact on how we feel.
If Forrest Gump didn't have flashbacks, it would simply be a guy sitting on a bench talking to a stranger.
If Star Wars had started with Luke blowing up the Death Star, it would be a completely different story.
What is true in fiction is true in real life as well.
How we tell stories, including the stories of our own lives, has profound consequences for our well-being.
Whom we include, whom we exclude, and what point of view we take.
All these choices alter how we feel about ourselves and the world.
We explored the science of stories and what's known as narrative psychology in a recent episode of Hidden Brain titled U20 Change Your Story, Change Your Life.
Our guest was Jonathan Adler, a psychologist at Olin College.
Today, Jonathan returns to answer listeners' questions about personal stories and how they shape our lives.
Jonathan Adler, welcome back to Hidden Brain.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Jonathan, we're constantly telling ourselves stories, and even small details are important in weaving the narrative of who we are.
I'm going to start by having you tell me the story of your day today.
What happened since you woke up?
Well, this morning I got up, I helped my kids get off to school.
They are in fifth and seventh grade, so they are navigating their own autonomy and what they're in charge of, but also attending to the clock.
And then I came here to campus and I had a little bit of time to get some work done.
I met with my new first year advisees over lunch to get them oriented.
And then I came here to the sound studio to get ready to talk with you.
I have to confess that one reason we ask people this question sometimes is to establish audio levels and to make sure they're sounding good.
But in the context of this conversation I'm having with you Jonathan, can you just articulate for a moment why the stories we tell about our own lives are so important?
Sure.
That story, I don't know, meets any kind of criterion for interesting or important story.
And in fact, when we look back over our lives, it's often the big moments that stick around.
But the story that I just told you is really all chronology.
There's not much more to it than that.
But stories actually play a huge number of roles in our lives, at the level of the individual, the level of the interpersonal relationship, but also at the broad cultural level.
So in my field, we're especially focused on the ways stories provide us with a sense of unity and meaning.
So stories integrate us.
They make us feel like we're the same person across time and across situations, and they help turn the messy flow of life into something meaningful.
But stories are also a vital tool for connection with other people and with communities.
And stories play a huge role in both maintaining and changing culture.
One of your main findings is that the way we tell stories can be just as important as the content of our stories.
For example, there's a lot of significance in where we start our stories and where we end our stories.
You call these the chapter breaks in our stories?
Yeah, yeah.
It's important to remember that we have two roles to play with respect to our life story.
We are both the main character, but we're also the narrator.
So while we only have so much control over the things that happen to us, we have somewhat more control over how we parse those experiences.
And shifting the chapter breaks of our lives means reframing the beginnings and endings of our experiences.
So while we're living our lives, it's hard to know whether we're towards the beginning of some experience versus towards the end of it.
But in retrospect we can sort of make some decisions about how to chunk our lives into episodes, and simply moving the beginning or ending of episodes can really recast its meaning.
You describe two kinds of stories that you call contamination stories and redemption stories.
And both these stories have to do with how we are arranging the chapter breaks of our lives.
Can you explain what these two are, perhaps with some examples, Jonathan?
Sure.
And these are two of many themes that show up in people's stories.
Contamination stories are simply good turns bad.
And redemption is bad turns good.
So, you know, all lives have good and bad in them.
But these themes are very much about where we draw connections and parse the chapter breaks.
For example, in the story that I shared with you the last time we talked.
It was a story about my experience in college in studying abroad and then going into graduate school.
And things had been challenging for quite a while and I really threw myself into my academic work looking towards graduate school.
And then, when I applied to graduate schools, I only got into one of the programs that I had applied to.
And at the time, that felt like a big letdown.
Now, when I look back from a vantage point 20 years later, it's one of the most important turning points in my life.
I really found my intellectual passion.
I worked with a graduate mentor who really nurtured my career.
I met the person who I went on to marry and have children with.
So at the time I might have cut that experience into a contamination experience where I was working really hard, and it didn't turn out.
But when I move the ending of that story later and incorporate what came afterwards when I started graduate school, the chapter the transition from college into graduate school actually turns out to be this redemptive story where my one option turned out to be a fantastic pathway for me.
The striking thing, of course, here is that the facts of your story are not necessarily changing.
It's just where you choose to start and where you choose to stop the story.
That's right.
And actually, even the emotional experience isn't changing, right?
Things were hard and later things were better.
But I could cut up the same exact sequence of not only sort of objective chronological facts but also the emotions associated with them.
And I could cut up that story into ways that would render it with different thematic arcs.
And there's real consequences for that.
We know from the research that contamination themes in people's stories tend to be associated with worse well-being, and redemption tends to be associated with positive well-being.
Jonathan, I want to walk you through a story from a listener named Cassandra.
Here's the first part of her story.
It was in 2005, Thanksgiving weekend, and I was with my family in our home in Texas, and most of us were asleep in bed around midnight when someone came into my garage, planted an explosive device and blew my house up.
We were sleeping, and but not my daughter, my teenage daughter.
She was upstairs sewing.
The lights went off and then she saw a flame shoot from our driveway across our U-shaped house to the opposite property.
And she ran down the stairs to wake me and my husband up.
And she said, fire, fire.
She screamed.
She woke us both up.
I tried to turn my light on, but the power was off and I couldn't understand why the light wouldn't turn on.
The house was covered in black smoke.
My husband and I wound up running across the end of the bed and we slammed into each other.
I knocked him out.
I ran out the bedroom door.
I met my daughters at the bottom of the stairs.
We ran toward the front door.
My younger daughter reached over my shoulder to touch the door.
And you know, you don't open a door and feed the fire.
And I was thinking stop, drop.
And I didn't even get the word roll out before the door exploded inwards.
It knocked me onto my back, my dog jumped over my prone body.
Both of my daughters were now out chasing the dog and my garage door had exploded and it was metal and shards of the door were whizzing towards their heads like saw blades and i thought they're going to be decapitated.
So jonathan, there's more to the story, but what are you hearing so far, whoa?
Thank you Cassandra, for being willing to share that story.
And I'm so sorry that happened to you.
This is a highly dramatic moment.
And it's certainly setting up the dramatic tension.
I'm dying to know what happens next.
So I think it's fair to say Jonathan, that at this point in the story, Cassandra's story is pretty horrific.
No one would actually want to be in Cassandra's shoes.
This is definitely almost a contamination story, because it started out with everyone sleeping peacefully at night and suddenly there's this terrible thing that happens to them.
So let me play you the rest of Cassandra's story.
It picks up from here.
Saw blades, and I thought, they're going to be decapitated.
And luckily those saw blades went around them, by them, over them, and they were untouched.
And I could barely see anything, because the next explosion just about blinded me and it blew up my eardrums.
But I could barely see anything.
Someone charging through the neighbor's fences, pulling on his pants.
It was my neighbor, Jeff.
He grabbed my dog, he grabbed my daughter, and he hustled them into his house.
Then I picked myself up and then I glanced down the street and I could see, through my near blindness, the Christmas lights of red and blue lights coming towards me.
Those were fire trucks.
Three hours later, 40 of my neighbors were standing with my whole family and my dog in the street outside my house watching my house burn to the ground.
And one of the neighbors got out his best scotch and they passed it around.
And somebody else got me some herbal tea.
Somebody else gave me a bathrobe.
Now I neglected to say that my husband was naked when he was sleeping.
And when he came to and I don't know when that was and came out of the house, he went and grabbed a bathrobe.
And I looked up to this two-story house and fire was coming out every window like giant orange eyelashes.
And there was my husband standing with his back to me, warming his cockles by the fire at the front door.
And he was putting on his bathrobe and tying the silk scotch around his waist.
It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
So anyway, as we watched the fire, we saw the explosions.
Somebody invited me into the house, our neighbors.
We've all recovered.
We all are okay.
And we're better for it.
Thank you.
Jonathan, this is an amazing story.
Talk about the turn that she makes here.
It sure is an amazing story and I'm glad that everyone turned out okay.
It's kind of remarkable to be able to find any humor amidst this, let alone the poetry of the Christmas lights being the first responders on their way.
Yeah, I mean...
Cassandra certainly ends this story with a redemptive turn, right?
It all turned out okay.
And she says at the end, we're even better as a result.
So that is quite something to be able to see that kind of turnaround in the wake of such a dramatic and terrible event.
Talk a little bit more about the effects of redemption stories on our well-being, Jonathan.
So the research demonstrates over and over that when we're able to take negative experiences and find something redemptive in them, that that tends to be good for our psychological well-being.
But we live in a rich narrative ecology of stories.
There are stories all around us.
And some of those stories exert more influence over our lives than others.
So scholars in my field call these potent stories master narratives.
Master narratives tend to be ubiquitous, but invisible.
We only see them when we bump into them, like when our life story doesn't fit in some way with the master narrative.
And there's excellent work by Dan McAdams suggesting that redemption is an especially potent American master narrative.
And I would say especially with cancer patients.
We have a strong master narrative of what it means to be a cancer patient in the United States.
Cancer is a battle, and it's supposed to show you how strong you are.
And that kind of redemptive spin on cancer has two kinds of impacts on patients.
First, if you get cast against your will in a war story, it's going to influence your behavior.
So there's research suggesting that the war metaphor might actually lead people to pay less attention to health, supporting behaviors like drinking and smoking less or eating healthier.
Right.
If you're going into battle, you might not care as much about those things, but those can actually make a difference to your overall health.
But second, I've talked with cancer patients who don't feel like cancer made them stronger.
And so if cancer isn't some complex gift in disguise, right?
If it just sucks, then not only are you sick, but you're not telling a story about being sick that anyone wants to hear.
And indeed there is research demonstrating that Americans love to hear redemption stories and don't love contamination stories.
So when you narrate your own life in ways that don't fit with cultural master narratives, it can be a double whammy.
When we come back?
Can the master narrative that tells us to tell redemption stories become a form of pressure on people who've been through tough times?
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Jonathan Adler has found that the way we tell stories changes the way we feel about our lives.
He says that when we start stories from a place of success and well-being and end the tale with disaster and tragedy, we are telling what he calls a contamination story.
Things started out great and then turned bad.
On the other hand, when we tell stories that start out with difficulty and challenge but end in a positive place, these redemption stories are often associated with better well-being.
Jonathan, we heard from a listener who said that the pressure to tell redemption stories can sometimes feel unfair.
Here's Kristen.
Since my children were young, I've lost both my parents to cancer, had to manage the business of death and of grieving on my own as being an only child.
And my children also had witnessed a violent attack that happened on the porch of our old home.
I also found out that I had two rare medical conditions.
One of them took a few years and a lot of stress to get diagnosed, and the other one just requires a lot of stressful surveillance.
So this is just a short part of the list, but I definitely felt the pressure for a redemptive spin on my life and basically I spent my last several years just dealing with the fallout of this.
I have no elevator pitch to give to people at parties about.
You know, I guess what's gotten me through is just that I realized that we were hit by an onslaught of events that most of which were out of our control.
And we bear the scars, but we're still putting one foot in front of the other.
And our story is still continuing.
Thank you.
So Jonathan, you were talking a moment ago about how, in some ways, we have this master narrative that we're supposed to come up with a redemption story.
And I feel I can very much hear that in the way Kristen is telling the story of the many challenges she has encountered in her life.
Yeah, wow.
Kristen, I am so sorry to hear about this.
I don't know how listeners are feeling, but my body feels different just hearing what Kristen has been through.
So I'm really grateful for sharing this hard story.
I think it's really important to remember that negative experiences are a part of everyone's life.
And if we just ignore them, we miss out on an invitation to grow from them.
But...
We've already talked about master narratives and looked at redemption as one example of an American master narrative.
And I think there's a real rush to redemption in our culture, where we want to get through the negative as quickly as possible.
Put a nice redemptive bow on it and move on.
But negative experiences can also force us out of the story that we've sort of gotten used to living.
And in doing so, they can offer an invitation to see things differently.
I want to be really clear that different ways of seeing things don't necessarily feel good.
Some things are just awful and we just need to acknowledge their role in our lives without needing to transform them into something positive.
But even when feeling good isn't an option, we can find meaning.
And that active search for meaning is what it sounds like Kristen has been working to do.
And that in and of itself is a worthwhile and valuable goal.
Redemption isn't the only option in the wake of negative experiences.
I'm so glad you mentioned that Jonathan, because I was struck when Kristen said I feel better, knowing some things are out of my control.
So she's not necessarily telling a story that says things have taken a dramatic upswing, but she is saying her own understanding about her life has changed as a result of these negative experiences.
Exactly.
So if we were sort of technically looking, examining her narrative, we might see evidence of what we call exploratory processing, that search for meaning which is different than redemption right.
Redemption turns negative positive.
Exploratory processing can lead us to a sense of meaningfulness, but it might not feel good.
But that search for meaning is still a really worthwhile pursuit.
One common story we heard from many listeners had to do with an injury or an illness.
Here's one from Alison.
I think I'm a pretty positive person.
And I think part of that is telling my big life stories in a redemptive way.
About a year and a half ago, my husband was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.
And I think we sort of thought it was very scary and crappy.
But we did what we had to do to get through it.
And now we just feel so lucky that he's healthy.
And as far as we know, he's cancer free.
So it was a really tough time in our lives, but we came out the other side and I think it just makes us more grateful for each other.
So Jonathan, Alison's story is clearly a redemption story, the way she's telling it.
But I'm wondering is it possible that sometimes we need to let some time pass before we can see the redemption arc of a story?
When Alison and her husband were in the midst of dealing with this cancer.
It's possible that it might have been harder to see the story through a redemptive lens.
Yeah, I imagine that's true, having talked with many cancer patients and their loved ones.
And indeed I wonder if Allison and her husband felt pushed into sort of a cancer master narrative which is really not about redemption at the beginning.
There's always the promise of redemption at the end.
But that kind of story really centers a different theme, which we call agency right, which is sort of the degree to which you are in the driver's seat of your life versus being batted around by external forces.
And again, these are themes and stories.
No one is completely in control of their life.
But the war story of cancer is a high agency story.
And sometimes, when people are in the face of real existential threat, being reminded of your agency can feel good.
So I agree with you.
It's often hard to do redemption in the middle of negative experiences, though I think people feel pressure to do that all the time.
And so I often encourage people to resist the rush to redemption and to acknowledge the real awful parts of negative experiences before thinking about whether there's a redemptive end or not.
Yeah.
You talked a moment ago Jonathan, about the importance of agency, and I want to just stay with this for a moment longer.
A lot of people feel bad.
Things happen to me, and whether that's an illness or an injury, or you lose a loved one or your home burns down, many of these things are external things that happen to us, and many of us then feel like we are effectively buffeted around by the winds of life.
Talk a moment about how the act of storytelling itself might be a way of regaining some sense of agency.
Yeah, this is actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently.
Certainly, one of the things that drew me to the field of studying narrative identity was the idea that you can't always control what happens to you, but you can control the story you tell about what happens to you.
And to a large extent, I think that is true.
You know, as I've said, we're both the main character and the narrator of our life story.
And we do have agency to tell stories that support our well-being.
So I don't want to diminish the importance of that at all.
But at the same time, our stories don't just exist in our heads, right?
Stories are meant to be told.
And if you're telling a story about your life that other people don't affirm, it's actually quite hard to keep living out that story.
Yeah. where people lose control over their life stories.
Can you talk about how the big events in our lives weddings, the birth of children, the death of loved ones how these might be particularly powerful occasions to tell both contamination and redemption stories?
Yeah, so big events like that, to a certain extent, play into a different kind of master narrative.
We call this in my field the cultural concept of biography, which means, in any given culture there's sort of an expected timeline of milestones.
And so, when your life coincides with those milestones, there's a socially acceptable pressure for you to narrate those.
So I... was doing a study years ago where we were reading transcripts of entire life stories.
And my students who were working with the narratives said I can't read another high point that is about a wedding or the birth of a first child.
And it's just like, right.
Those are such straightforward stories for people to point to as the high point of their life.
And indeed it is often the big moments of our lives that serve as chapter breaks, that serve as anchor points in our stories.
But I also want to remind everyone that it doesn't have to just be objective big moments.
I've read and interviewed people with absolutely gorgeous, very small moments that have very big subjective meaning associated with them.
And so that meaningful conversation you know over a bowl of Cheerios could turn out to be a high point or a turning point in your life.
It doesn't just have to be the big milestone events.
It's really about the subjective meaning that we associate with our experiences.
We've looked at the reliability of memory in many episodes of Hidden Brain Jonathan, and it's fair to say that the scientific consensus is that our memories are not very accurate, even when it comes to the big events in our lives.
How much does the accuracy of a narrative in our lives matter?
Yeah, this is such an important topic.
I guess it depends on mattering for what, right?
So fundamentally, stories are reconstructions, right?
As you said, there's excellent work on memory, demonstrating that we're not particularly accurate reporters of the things that happen to us.
And there's good reason for that, right?
Our memory systems evolved to help us interpret the present and anticipate the future.
The present and the future are never exact replicas of the past.
So if we could only hold on to the past precisely as it happened, we actually wouldn't have the cognitive flexibility to navigate our lives so adaptively.
I like to say that our life stories are based on a true story, right?
If you are telling a story about wildly improbable things that could have happened to you, no one's going to believe that story and that's going to make it hard for you to live that story.
But we just don't have access to the objective history of our lives.
We're always reconstructing the past, interpreting the present, imagining the future.
So I often refer to my field as a science of subjectivity, using the tools of science to understand the ways in which people turn their experiences into meaning.
When we come back, Jonathan answers more of your questions about the science of storytelling.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedant.
In 2006, the writer and journalist Joan Didion published a collection of nonfiction pieces titled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.
At Olin College.
Psychologist Jonathan Adler couldn't agree more with the premise of that title.
But he might edit the title to say We Tell Ourselves Stories to Shape How We Live.
He joins us today for our latest installment of Your Questions Answered.
Jonathan, we heard from lots of listeners who are in the process of rewriting their personal narratives.
Maybe they're in a transition point in their lives or just reflecting on events that happened to them in the past and they're trying to figure out how do I reframe my story in a useful way.
Here's listener Denise.
So I thought I would share my story, which is about my experience of living with tinnitus, which started in my 20s, was a visitor now and then through the years.
But as I got older, it was a little bit more in volume and was with me constantly.
I did go to a doctor who pretty much said there isn't much they can do and felt discouraged.
And yeah, there was some anxiety about it until I had a change of story.
And my story was that if this is going to be with me all the time, it might as well be my friend.
And it could be even more than that.
It could be a part of me, almost a helper, a guardian angel.
Once I changed the story.
I am what you might call habituated to this sound and I haven't really experienced any nervousness about it since.
The new story is that tinnitus can be my friend.
So, Jonathan, you said that a story like this might be an example of what you call integration.
What do you mean by that term?
Yeah.
First of all, let me just say wow, it is not everyone who can take those chronic challenges that get thrown at us and reframe them in quite that way.
And if Denise was able to do that in an authentic way, that's really spectacular.
So.
I really see this story as highlighting yeah, like you said, the importance of integration in storytelling.
Some of the work that I've done with Lauren Mitchell and others really tried to illustrate the ways in which integration is one of the central developmental tasks of midlife.
In adolescence and early adulthood, we're really laying down early drafts of our life story.
In midlife.
Our job is to nurture those stories, maintaining them when that's what's called for, helping them develop when that's what's needed, like in Denise's story.
Many events, like the onset of medical diagnoses, can disrupt life. our sense of integration.
And, of course, many negative things like getting a medical diagnosis or getting divorced or getting fired.
Those things can make us feel like we've lost our sense of continuity.
But positive things can also do that too.
Like becoming a parent can often be a huge shakeup to identity.
And so the work in midlife is really about striving for integration, figuring out what parts of the story from before the disruptive event ought to still be part of our identity and which parts need to change.
Can you talk a moment about what Denise is doing here?
She's basically transforming something that's a negative experience into something that is a positive experience.
I have to confess, I sometimes do this myself.
If I'm waiting for something and it feels excruciating to be waiting and waiting for an airplane to take off, for example I'll tell myself a story.
And the story is, these are the last 20 minutes of my life.
And suddenly, I want those 20 minutes to extend as far as they possibly can.
And I'm not anxious or worried or exasperated by the delay anymore.
Can you talk a bit about whether this is an act of storytelling and if this is an effective form of storytelling for our mental health?
It sure sounds like it in your case and in Denise's case, where you can take a negative experience that's not in your control and transform it by changing the story that you're telling yourself about that.
We have to learn how to live with them.
So she initially framed her tinnitus as a visitor.
And then it became a friend.
And I thought, wow, that's really quite a transformation there.
If we can see the negative things that happen to us, as teachers who are there to help us, as other characters who are there to help us, that's really amazing.
But then Denise goes one step further and she really does the hard work of integrating it into her own sense of self.
That really transforms the main character of the story, Denise herself, and really makes room in that character for both positive and negative experiences to coexist.
Jonathan, when we lose a loved one, we often reflect not just on the story of our life, but on the story of this other person's life.
A listener named Raquel called in with this experience.
In 2014, I had just finished graduate school and I was starting a new job.
The day before my 27th birthday, my sister called to tell me that my dad had been in a car accident.
Sadly, he passed away a few days later.
Fast forward to 2019.
I began helping with a grief support group at my church and I had to tell the story of my dad's passing.
With each new group, I started to notice things in the story that changed my perspective on it.
Since my dad had passed.
I had looked on that time with regret for not having prioritized time with him because of my new job.
I felt awful that I wasn't able to say a proper goodbye or make time to spend with him in what I realize now were his last days.
But as I told the story to the grief group, I remembered that I had had a sense of foreboding, actually around my 27th birthday.
I had heard stories of celebrities dying specifically at this age Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix and it made me wonder if something might happen to me.
And I realized something did happen. but it happened to my dad.
Now I look back and I tell a story of my dad taking my place.
Maybe I had been the target, that 27th birthday curse coming for me, but my dad protected me.
I know there's no evidence for this, but knowing my dad, it's not a stretch to believe that he would gladly give his life up to give us what we needed.
So now I see the ways my dad's love for teaching and learning live on in me and I try to honor these traits and the gift I feel he's given me.
Jonathan, I'm wondering what you make of Raquel's story.
Oh, who's publishing it?
It's gorgeous.
I mean, what a poignant but beautifully told story of this transformation.
I think grief is often one of those negative experiences that doesn't neatly lend itself to redemption.
And I don't know that what Raquel is doing there is redeeming the death of her father itself, right?
She still acknowledges how sad that is, how she still has regrets about the last few days of his life.
But what she's doing is looking towards her own agency and her act as the storyteller to think about the ways in which the storytelling itself offers her a different way to relate to that negative experience without transforming it itself right.
The storytelling doesn't undermine the sadness.
I'm sure it doesn't stop the waves of grief from crashing over her, but it does give her an opportunity to add to that experience.
And indeed, as I've been saying, our stories are not only living in our own heads.
We...
We tell the stories to other people and other people tell their stories to us.
They become important characters in our own life stories.
One thing I heard in Raquel's story is that she retold the story of her father's passing over and over again.
And something in that repetitive retelling actually changed the story in her own mind.
We heard from a listener named Michelle who went through something similar.
I've struggled with an unexplained illness, unexplained symptoms for the last 12 years.
I've gone through many doctors and many tests and no one can really tell me what's wrong.
And it can be really unsettling to have something unexplained go on for so long.
And I've turned to voice recorder.
I've myself talking about it and working through it for the last 12 years.
And it's been really helpful.
And you know, as humans, we want to find meaning in things and we want to find patterns and try to make sense of it.
And I feel like it's really helped me do that.
I'm kind of loving the questions at this point.
And I think it's.
This whole experience has opened my heart to other people who are going through uncertain times, and it has opened me up more to all the questions and uncertainties in my life.
Thanks for letting me share my story.
What's interesting about Michelle's story Jonathan, is that in working through the story over and over again for 12 years, she has found fresh insights in it.
Is this something that you find in the stories that you hear from people?
Telling the same story over and over again can change our stories themselves.
Yeah, yeah.
I think this is a great question because it invites us to think more, not just about the content of the stories we tell and the themes, but how sharing stories with others helps shape them right.
So when we tell a story, the version in our head gets shaped by the interpersonal context.
Who are we telling the story to?
What kind of audience are they?
And then the feedback that we get, both verbally and non-verbally, during the experience of storytelling will inevitably shape the way we consolidate that story in our mind and then the way we tell it the next time.
Our stories always serve a psychological function in the present.
So, in addition to the impact of prior tellings, the meaning of specific stories changes over time, leading us to tell stories differently.
That doesn't mean we're lying.
It just means we're always thinking about our past through the lens of the present.
And indeed I did some of my clinical work at a veterans hospital and one of the leading therapeutic approaches to treating post-traumatic stress disorder essentially asks people, once they're ready, once they're prepared with tools for navigating it, to tell the story of their traumatic experience over and over.
And we do find that that kind of exposure to the story of the traumatic event can help transform it for people, not just in the meaning that they make but in the physiology of their bodies while they're telling it.
Now, narrative psychology doesn't just have to apply to individuals.
As you've indicated Jonathan, it's also relevant to the collective stories we tell in our country, our workplaces, our families.
We heard from a listener in the United States named Debbie, who writes I'm at a fairly good place in my personal life now.
However, I find that my thinking about our country and the world is becoming increasingly pessimistic.
I'm wondering how do we create a better mindset or a better story, or a more positive story in the face of what's going on in these divided states today?
I think our national story is turning very negative and I'm wondering if there's a way that we can reframe that.
What do you think, Jonathan?
Can we rewrite our general cultural narrative?
Well, so all narratives, individual or cultural, are based on a true story, right?
So to a certain extent, if you want to see things change in a culture, you have to advocate to the levers of power in that culture to make things actually change.
And that will help change the story.
As I've talked about master narratives, we so often experience them as top down, right?
Like our feeling of being penned in by stories around us about things like cancer or gender or race or politics or many other master narratives in our culture.
But just as stories play out in the dynamic space between individual people, they also play out in the dialogue between individuals and broader cultural narratives.
So there's another scholar in my field, Phil Hammack, who says that when we narrate our own individual life story, we really only have two options to either reproduce or to push back on the master narratives in our cultural context.
It's kind of the ultimate, you know, the personalist political.
But that means that the power dynamic works in a bottom up way, too.
In fact, the only way cultural master narratives change is by individual people being willing to share their own stories that don't fit with the master narrative.
Doing so, as I said before, provides other people with narrative options that they may not have considered before, and it invites them to narrate their lives differently.
So individual life stories aren't just co-narrated, so are cultural narratives.
And so we can intervene in cultural narratives by narrating our own experience of our cultural context differently.
Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College.
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.
Totally my pleasure.
Thank you.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
Before we go today, we want to say thank you to Loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain 2025 Perceptions Tour.
While on tour, we asked members of the audience to tell us about some of the best advice they ever received.
Here's one piece of wisdom shared during our stop in Mesa, Arizona.
My name is Nick.
The advice I have begins with a statement that you probably may have heard.
We judge others by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions.
And I've heard that a lot of times throughout my life by many different people.
But something I didn't understand was what to do with that information.
Me and my friend talked about it for a long time.
And we came to the conclusion that you must flip those two to really understand, be able to understand others and have empathy for others.
You must judge yourself by your actions.
You can see yourself from their perspective and you must judge them from their intentions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks to Nick for sharing that advice and thanks again to Loom for sponsoring the 2025 Perceptions Tour.
Loom is AI-powered video communication that moves teams forward, whether you're sharing feedback, obtaining approvals or setting context.
It removes the friction by making it easy to share and collaborate on work without having to be in the same room or time zone.
Try Loom today at loom.com.
That's L-O-O-M dot com.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
See you soon.
