How to Fall in Love with Anyone | Mandy Len Catron
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with author Mandy Len Catron. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google.

You might know Mandy Len Katrin from her wildly popular modern love essay in the New York Times, "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This." She popularized the 36 questions that are said to make people fall in love. Mandy's essay then inspired her book of the same name.

In the book, Mandy deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories through a series of candid and vulnerable essays. She dives all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love.

And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about, where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of 36 questions, and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand new relationship. Originally published in July 2017, here's Mandy Lynn Catron, How to Fall in Love with Anyone.

Mandy, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So Mandy, your new book of essays, How to Fall in Love with Anyone, is about how love stories shape our ideas about love, sometimes in unproductive and misleading ways. Let's start there. What's the problem with love stories? Well, I mean, I think there are a lot of problems with love stories, actually. I first started thinking about this when I was 26. My parents sat my sister and I down and they were like,

We don't love each other anymore, we're getting a divorce. And I was really shocked. I didn't know that anything was less than perfect in their marriage. And I had a really hard time just like coming to terms with this. And I started thinking about why. And one of the things

that I came up with was that divorce felt like the wrong ending to their love story. And I started thinking about all the ways in which love stories had shaped maybe like most of my ideas about romantic love. And I began to feel like

you know, maybe I don't know very much about love at all. And so I just started doing lots of research and very quickly I was like this topic, which is basically just like the gap

between how we talk about love and how we actually practice it. And I mean everything from, like, romantic comedies to the stories we tell each other about our own relationships to the stories we inherit from our families, that, like, this gap was big enough to become the subject of a book, basically. And so that's what I did. So now we have your book. Yeah, yeah. But I guess, like, the short answer to your question is essentially...

Love stories suggest that there's like a right way to practice love and that if you practice it that way, then you'll be happy. And I think that often, really often, that's just not the case. That actually love is a lot more complicated than that.

So speaking of being complicated, in your book and essays, you say that the 36 questions are compelling because they create vulnerability and the chance for people to connect and feel known. Yet many people have understood them to be a guarantee to produce love. Ironically, despite your hesitations around love stories, your life has been viewed as the ultimate love story. How do you reconcile your intention in writing the 36 question piece with how people have interpreted it?

Yeah, it's really strange. It's been a strange experience. I think I started writing this book about five years before I published the article in the New York Times.

And so I had been thinking like really long and hard about the role of love stories in our culture. And one of the things that always bothered me is that I felt like people really were like they really wanted a simple story and they liked sort of a really clean, tidy narrative. And it was very strange then to feel like to basically watch because this article was published and I think within a month,

It had gotten like 8 million views, which is crazy. And so I was reading about my own relationship in the news. And people would say things like, they fell in love by the end of the evening. Or this is how she met her husband. And like none of those things were true. Like we did the questions. We started dating probably like three months later.

And we had only been dating for like four months when the article was published. No pressure. Yeah. Yeah. So it was like really strange. And the other thing that was interesting to me is that people...

People would say, and when I say people, I mean like journalists, but also I spoke to a couple of editors about the book. And everybody would ask the same question, which is, are you guys still together? And when I said yes, they were like, oh my God, like that's so great. And it was great, but...

I felt like there were much more interesting things to say about it, but people didn't, they didn't care. Like they didn't want to hear that. They just want to know like that it worked.

But people must come up to you and say, I tried it and we didn't fall in love. Yeah, they have said that. And I'm like, that's because there is no guarantee that doing this equals romantic love. But it does seem pretty good at creating closeness. So I think going into it with that in mind is maybe a better way to approach it. But I realize that

Really, it doesn't matter what I say about this. Like, the study has taken on a life of its own that is sort of separate from me. So in your book, you discuss unconventional relationships that we don't hear about in love stories like Cinderella or romantic comedies like Notting Hill.

You live in Vancouver. We're here in the Bay Area. And these are places where different types of relationships are more accepted. In fact, my boyfriend and I joke that in San Francisco, we have to come out to our friends as monogamous. What would be your advice for people who are unfamiliar with unconventional relationships such as open marriages? And what would you say for people watching this online who live somewhere where those partnerships are more stigmatized?

I mean, so one of the things that I found when I was researching this book is that

Many love stories have the effect of really just narrowing our sense of what love can look like and sort of channeling it into this dominant practice of love. And that practice is what I call the love-marriage-baby-carriage trajectory. And it's this idea, because ultimately love is a biological experience, but it's also very social. And the way what we do with those biological experiences

sort of impulses is very much channeled by the culture that we live in. And so most of the stories we consume I think really, like I was saying earlier, suggest that like this is the way to be happy and that if you're not practicing love this way then you're sort of failing. But actually if you look at like the history of romantic love and the history of marriage

Like one of the things you'll discover is that love and marriage have only been like very tightly interconnected for like the past 200 or so years. And so this idea that we think is like normal and maybe even universal, which is that you find one person and you want to spend the rest of your life with them and you have this intense, passionate love for them.

forever is like really a fairly new idea in the history of humanity. So I think it's interesting to think about it that way. And once you start thinking about it that way, you realize like there are actually lots of different ways to practice love. And so one of the things that I found is that what I wanted from a love story changed a lot over the course of writing the book.

And by the time I got to the end of the process, what I found is that I was much more interested in stories that sort of widened our sense of like what love could be. And those would be things like stories about non-monogamous relationships, queer relationships, even stories about marriage.

relationships that are short but meaningful, like something that doesn't last your whole life but still is important. And so anything where we sort of approach love with like a real complexity and look for what makes it meaningful in our lives instead of thinking about how it's supposed to be, like those kinds of stories I think

are the kinds of stories that we should all be seeking out more. And I think the advantage of looking for those kinds of stories is that ultimately you have more, like a broader sense of possibility of what love might look like. And then you have a better chance of creating the kinds of relationships in your life that work for you, which I think is great.

So what would your advice be for somebody who maybe hasn't had success with monogamous relationships or is like, oh, what else is out there? I don't see a lot of examples of that. Yeah. And non-monogamy, I sometimes feel like is like the final frontier of romantic relationships in our culture because it is so stigmatized.

But I do think that's changing. A good friend of mine wrote this great book called What Love Is and What It Could Be. And her name is Carrie Jenkins, and she's a philosopher at UBC. And she really thinks about...

the biological science of romantic love and how that sort of relates to our social impulses for what love looks like. And she essentially suggests that it is possible to change our ideas about romantic love, but that it takes time and practice and sort of opening ourselves up to new possibilities for how it might be practiced. So I would recommend that people read her book because I think it's great.

It's interesting. So you mentioned new ways for love to be practiced. I really enjoyed your newest modern love essay, which was about Mark and Mandy's relationship contract. And it includes commitments for the next 12 months of your relationship, such as how you'll do chores, save money, and even have sex. For some people, there's nothing less sexy than signing a contract. Yet you called the experience empowering. Yeah. Tell us more about why you created this contract and how it's changed your relationship.

So basically, one of the nice things about writing about romantic love is that people send you things all the time, like articles and books and whatever. Like people, once they know you're interested in it, they're always sharing ideas with you, which is great. So one of the things that a friend of mine sent me was this book called The New I Do. And it was just like ways of reconceptualizing marriage.

And in it, she had a chapter called the starter marriage. And basically it was like the idea was that you would have a two-year marriage and you would sign a contract. And then you could, at the end of that two years, you could decide if you really wanted to be with this person. And Mark and I were reading it fairly early in our relationship. And we both thought it was an interesting idea.

And so then like a year after that, we were trying to decide whether or not to move in together. And I think we both had a lot of anxieties about it. And for me, like, I feel like I can only really speak for myself here, but my anxieties were really to do with the fact that like I was in a long relationship from age 20 to 30. And then when I got out of that relationship, one of the things that I discovered was

that was so amazing about being single was just being like fully in charge of my own time. And I just had no idea how great that would be. And I was scared that once I started living with someone again, that I would give that up. Because I think I have this tendency to sort of like really deeply invest in my relationships, which, you know, is not a bad thing.

And so I wanted some way to feel like there would be space for me in my own relationship.

And so Mark actually suggested, "Hey, what about that contract thing that we read about?" And so we sat down one night, like a week before he moved in, and we just went over everything, everything that we could think of. And a lot of people think, "Oh my God." Like a lot of the comments in the New York Times in response to this article was like, "Are you guys robots?" So cold-hearted and calculating.

But it's really not at all. Like, it's really about the spirit of things. So like, the sex part people were very concerned about. It's really just like, this is an important part of our relationship. It's something we both value. And we agree that we're going to be monogamous for now. But like, we wanted to be open to changing that because we want to be open to changing everything, I guess. And acknowledging that people do change.

and that our needs change. And there's something I think so nice about that, because I just really felt heard. And I never felt heard in a relationship quite like that before, and that my needs mattered. And I think probably that was great for both of us, which is nice. What are some other things you included that maybe would have been awkward to bring up outside of writing a contract? Oh, well, so one of them is marriage. So I talked about that, because...

It sort of came out one night that he felt a lot of pressure to decide to get a ring and do a proposal. And I got really upset about this. And I think that was because I felt like we had been so intentional about so many things in our relationship. It just seemed to me weird that this would be a decision that he made alone.

And so that was like a month before we renewed our contract. So then when we sat down to renew it, we just said, okay, what do you think about marriage? And is this something we want to do? And it was really nice just to have a really open conversation about it. I mean, I should be honest, it helps to...

it helps that it's my job to think about these things. So it's like much easier to bring them up in conversation because I'm thinking about them all the time. And so it becomes like, because I'm always like, we're always trying to practice because he's like really a good sport. So I was like, oh, I read this about like the research of romantic love today. Like recently I read that, I think John Gottman said when you get home

And you greet your partner at the end of the day, you should kiss for six seconds. So I told him this. And so he's like, OK, cool, let's do it. That's so cute. Which is great.

Yeah, along similar lines, I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast recently and Esther Perel was on, the couples therapist and author. And she said, quote, every other system gets innovation, new ideas, curiosity, inventiveness. Coupledom doesn't benefit from the same innovative spirit that every other company and entrepreneurial space benefits from.

So I'd certainly say that your relationship contract is a more innovative approach to love. What are some of the other original ideas or love hacks that couples can use to improve their relationships? I love that she said this. I haven't heard this quote. It's so good.

Yeah, there are lots of things that you can do. So one of the things that we do that I really like is that we have a monthly date night. So it's like the first week of every month. And the rule is that we take turns planning it. This goes back to the emotional labor thing. Yep. Whoever plans it also pays for it. And the other person doesn't know anything about what we're doing except the day it is and then like...

They just sort of go along. So everything's a surprise. So it's really fun, first of all, but it is backed up by research. So there's this thing called the Misattribution of Arousal, which is also by Arthur Aaron, who did the 36 questions. So he did this study where basically...

And it just so happens to be done in Vancouver. And I think this was also back in the 90s or maybe early 2000s. But there's this huge suspension bridge. And so what he did is he had this like attractive woman who was his research assistant stand at the end of the suspension bridge. And when men crossed the bridge, and it's just like, I don't know how far it is down, just like hundreds of feet long.

She would ask them a few questions to say, oh, I'm doing a study. And then she would write her phone number on the corner of the paper and tear it off and say, if you have any questions, call me. So she did that there. And then she also did it at the end of just like a regular walkway. And what they found was that people who had crossed the bridge were like statistically significantly like way more likely to call her.

And so what they think is that like this physiological arousal, so like increased heart rate and like sweaty palms, which is also what happens when you fall in love, happens when you're like when you do something new or scary or interesting. And so we tend to attribute those feelings to the people that we're with.

instead of to what we're doing. So there's like real value basically in novelty. So our role for Day9 is that we have to do something we wouldn't normally do. And it's fun because it's just fun. But there is a suggestion that like

Doing new things together increases, like, your dopamine levels and, like, activates your reward system and helps keep you feeling attracted to your partner, which is interesting. Yeah. I actually remember hearing about that psych study in, like, intro psych class. Oh, yeah. It's, like, a popular one. And then I think the professor made a joke, like, that's why you should take your date to see a scary movie. Really?

This is so funny. Your adrenaline will spike and then you'll be like, I must really like the person I'm with. So this is funny because a friend of mine is a psychology professor and he used this to...

- No way. - Like he took her to a scary movie. - It works. - And now they're married and he always tells his students about this. - Yeah, okay, we'll have to chat about this. What are some of the novel dates that you do? I think all of this is great fodder for people. - Oh man, we've done all kinds of things. Like we went on a long bike ride to a part of town we've never been to before. We went to like a burlesque show. We've been to like, we went wine tasting.

Gosh, now I'm like blanking. But we've done all kinds of fun stuff in the city. We went to the opera. Yeah, and just like things that I wouldn't make time to do during my regular life. So it sounds like it's carving out that time, taking turns planning, and then really emphasizing that it's novel. Yeah, exactly. Great. Yeah.

So I know from your book, and you mention it now, that one of the reasons you started researching the topic of love stories is because your parents got divorced after decades of marriage. On the topic of divorce, Louis C.K. has said, Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it's true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. Now that you've spent the last 10 years debunking love stories, how do you feel when you hear a couple is getting divorced? I feel...

like a deep empathy because I know it's hard. But sometimes, I mean, sometimes I do feel like excited for the people. This sounds so horrible. Yeah, like a friend of mine, so it wasn't a divorce, but a friend of mine had had a sort of on-again, off-again relationship with this woman for a long time. And he called me one day and he's like, we finally ended things. And I was like, congratulations. And he was like,

I'm feeling really sad. I felt so bad. I was like, I'm so sorry. Was that because you didn't like the person? No, it was because I just felt like it was the right thing for him to do and it had been hard. And I just felt like it was going to open him up to...

better relationship. And I think because I really went through a similar experience where I was in a long-term relationship with someone that I like really, really loved, but we argued constantly and it was a real struggle to decide whether or not to stay in that relationship, which I think also motivated me to do all this research. Because there aren't a lot of stories about people like

deciding to end like a pretty good but not great relationship and well now there is but I think because I knew how much that was a great experience for me ultimately in the end but I know like yeah divorces are hard and I think the thing about divorce as opposed to just a breakup is

is it comes with a lot more shame because it still has a lot of social stigma. I mean, I think we're getting more accustomed to it. But nobody, I shouldn't say nobody, very few people enter into this kind of commitment expecting it to end. So you not only have to deal with the loss of that relationship and your partner, and there is research that shows going through a breakup is like going through cocaine withdrawal, like neurochemically, like your brain looks the same to an fMRI machine. So like, it sucks.

So I get that. Yeah. So do you actually have a lot of people reaching out to you saying, I'm in a good but not great relationship. What should I do? I got an email about this yesterday. What are you going to reply? I don't know. Let's work through it here. It's really tough. So often, and they're like strangers. They're not like people I know. And so often I want to be like, you should end the relationship.

because people in the audience are gasping. Because I do think that there are, you know, like seven and a half billion people in the world. And I think there are any number of people that you could have a great relationship with. And personally, I think like

So there's this term by this philosopher named Elizabeth Brake called amatonormativity. And the idea is that in our culture, we tend to presume that it is better to be in a relationship and ideally like a long-term committed relationship than to not be in a relationship. And I love this word because I feel like this idea is so true, but we never talk about it. And now that we have a word for it, it's like it's easier to talk about it.

But I think the truth is, like, it's not better to be in a mediocre relationship than it is to be single. I think we should put that on a banner somewhere. Yeah. Put it on the Google homepage. There we go. Someone here may be able to help with that. Yeah, but it's not better. Like, being single can be so great, and I don't think we acknowledge that enough.

So I don't know. I always kind of want to be like, you should leave that relationship. But I know that if I had gotten that advice myself, I would not have taken it. But it also feels like they're coming to you for it. So it's sort of like they want you to bless them.

leaving the relationship. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what? I did that. Like, I got this email from this girl once. She was really young and she was like with her high school boyfriend and they had graduated college and she like wanted to live a different life than him. And I said, like, do you want me to give you permission to break his heart? Because I will. Like, you'll both be better off for it. And

And she emailed me back like six months later and she was like, that was the right thing to do, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I think for the rest of your life, people will come to you with these issues. I think so too. And so I just want to be clear. Sometimes I do not know the answer to these questions, but this is why I started the advice column because I felt like,

That was a better way to sort of deal with this than like responding to personal emails. Because you really, yeah, I don't know. It feels like a lot of responsibility. You should all check out. It's on therumpus.net. And I think you've done two so far. Yeah. And they're great. They're very research-backed. So it's not just somebody saying, here's what happened to me. It's saying, well...

researchers who are in the space of philosophy and psychology and romantic relationships have found this. And this is what I like about it because I feel like so much advice is just like someone's intuition. And I just like don't trust my intuition that much. So instead I'm like, let me do some research for you. And that's fun because I learn a lot in the process. That's great. So you're very passionate about the idea that love stories perpetuate a mystical and unrealistic quality to love.

If you could design a class, either in high school or online, that every person would be required to take before entering into adult relationships, what would you include in the course? Oh, my gosh. This is so interesting. So I sort of teach a course like this. Really? And it's not actually meant to be, like, practical. But I do... Because I teach, like, first-year composition, which is just, like, here's how to write a research paper. And that can be about anything. So I just teach them...

I just use all the research that I came across in my book. And so we research, we read a lot of articles about romantic love and then I have them write a research paper about love, which is really fun. But often I feel like I'm just like puncturing things

the romantic illusions of 18 and 19 year olds and I feel conflicted about that. Mostly I feel good about it. Yeah, you know, I think what I would like everyone to do or what everyone should do is just like think long and hard about the stories that have influenced your ideas about romantic love.

And think about the scripts that they contain. Like there are these sociologists who have this theory that basically like all human knowledge is contained in stories. And so they talk about these scripts and there can be like a macro script, which is like the role of love over the course of your life, which is like this love, marriage, baby carriage thing. But there are also these micro scripts, which is just like what to say on a first date.

And these scripts basically are very useful because they help us figure out how to interact with other people. But I think so often we take these scripts to heart. And it's nice to look at the scripts that really have probably influenced you over the years and step back from them and say, which ones of these do I actually want to practice? And which one of these am I not so sure about and do I want to reject?

And that's been like a useful exercise for me. What are some of the ones that you've rejected? So one of the biggest ones is this idea that love is equated to deservingness, which really bothers me. So this is like the idea in pretty much any Cinderella story.

So I write a lot about Cinderella stories and in particular the movie Pretty Woman, which was this, like I started watching, we had this on VHS at home when I was growing up. And my sister and I would watch it when we were like really little, like I think I was 10 and she was six. And we'd watch 101 Dalmatians and we'd watch Aladdin and we'd watch Pretty Woman. And you know, I think of the ideas that I absorbed, but really it's like there's a powerful man

And then there's a woman of like really low social status. And basically all Cinderella stories have this narrative. And it's like she waits for someone important to notice her and choose her. And...

In Cinderella stories, the woman is always chosen. The genders can be reversed, but typically it's a woman. Chosen because she's, like, fundamentally good somehow. And, like, in Pretty Woman, the great example of this is where she's in the bathroom of their penthouse suite. And Richard Gere thinks she's, like, doing drugs. And he, like, grabs her arm and tries to kick her out. And he opens her hand and it's, like, dental floss. Yeah.

So it's like, you know, this is like 1990, which is like the DARE era where it's like drugs are like the worst thing a person can do. But like oral hygiene is like so great. So it's like, oh, yeah, she's actually like a really good person who just like stumbled into this bad job.

But I think, yeah, so this idea, which is like some people deserve love. And if you are good, then someone will notice you and you don't have to do anything, but just like be good and they'll choose you. And then you'll have like the life you've always dreamed of. And like this story is so common and like it's in Dirty Dancing and it's in

Pretty Woman and it's in all the different versions of Cinderella. It's in like Titanic even with the genders reversed. But I think it's a real problem. And it really implies, especially for women, that like the most important moment of your life, the most validating experience is being chosen by someone important or interesting. And I hate that idea.

It seems like there's two problematic issues. One is it implies that if you're good, you'll be chosen. So if you're not chosen, then you weren't good. Yeah. And it also seems like it's a very passive approach to finding your partner. Yeah. And I think it's important to point out that like the inverse, that if you're not chosen, then you're not good, which I think is really related to the stigma of being single in our society. Like,

Single people have great lives. And yet the implication is like, oh, you must be miserable or, oh, you must be doing something wrong. And sometimes like that's just not true. Like you're just living your life. Well, that's like the spinster bachelor. Absolutely. I think we need a new word for single women. Yeah. Yeah, I do too. I don't know what it should be, but I'm going to think about this.

I'm going to get it in the lexicon. Good. Okay. I'll look out for it. So one of the reasons that the 36 questions I think is so powerful is because it creates space and social permission for vulnerability. What are some other ways that people can foster vulnerability in romantic and other interpersonal relationships?

Yeah, that's such a great question. I like that you're asking this. I mean, you don't have to sit down and do the 36 questions on a date to generate a sense of intimacy. But it is a good way to do it. And you should try it if you haven't.

But I do think that like we have this idea, especially when dating, that it's like our job to present our best selves to the other person. And in actuality, like people tend to respond to like seeing a little bit of vulnerability, like a little bit of like,

weakness or not weakness is maybe not the right word, but like imperfection. I think that matters. And like, if you look at OkCupid's advice for posting profile pictures, one of the things that they suggest is that like you post a picture that you yourself think is not that flattering. But like, if you have a unique feature, like say you have like

a prominent nose. I think this is the example that they use. They're like, you should have a picture that really shows that off because actually some people are going to really like that. And like, you want to cater to those people. And I think the same is true of like everything. And if you go on a date and you just sort of acknowledge like, oh, I'm not a morning person or like whatever, just like revealing any sort of small details about yourself, you're

encourages other people to do the same. And that slow exchange of like intimacy or vulnerability can happen in like a less structured way. Do you do that? Like when you engage with people, you know, besides Mark, do you ever find yourself saying like, oh, I'm going to say this thing that feels authentic and vulnerable and see if they reciprocate?

I don't know that I do it with that level of trying to get people to reciprocate, but I do do it. One of the things that I found, so when I started doing all this research, I started a blog. And what I found was that the more vulnerable the writing was on my blog, the more people responded to it, which had the effect of making me feel more comfortable being vulnerable publicly.

But also in general, I've just realized like people kind of respond well to this

authenticity, when you're like, you just own who you are, I think it goes a long way. So I've become more comfortable doing it over time. Yeah, I think it's great advice for everyone. Sometimes first dates can feel like a job interview. Yeah. And they're so much more fun when they're not. When they're not. So one of my friends hosted a no small talk party. Oh, this is cool. Yeah. Maybe we should have a no small talk party.

first date rule so anyone here who wants to sign up for that it's a great rule yeah just like be really honest about something that's important if the person can find it on linkedin you don't need to mention it yeah exactly i think that's a good rule

So I'm going to ask you one more question and then we'll have time to open up for questions from the audience. We talked about this a little bit, but this is a question I like to ask everyone that I bring into Google to interview. We have the google.com homepage, the white screen with the logo where people search billions of times of the day. We came up with one idea, but really, if you could come up with one thing to put on the google.com homepage related to dating and relationships, what would it be? I think what

I think what it would be is, I think I would say that love isn't something that happens to you. Like love is offering yourself with generosity to another person. I think that's, that would be my message. So nice.

Great. Okay. So we have a volunteer who's going to go around with a mic. So if you have a question, just raise your hand and he'll get to you. One of my questions for you is I feel, especially as a woman, I'm much more emotional and vulnerable and open to talking about my emotions. And I definitely want to talk about or go through this list of questions with my boyfriend, but I'm afraid he's going to look at me like I have six heads to be like, why do you want to talk about all this emotional stuff? What's wrong? Okay.

And everything is on. I just don't think he'll dig into it. How maybe Mark is really that kind of person that's open to talking about it. But like, how do you talk to a 28 year old guy about these deep questions? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think it's worth noting that like the 36 questions...

start out really casually and they get more intimate as you go along so the first one is like if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead who would it be which I think is like just interesting and I think maybe if you just position it as a way like a fun game and a way to get to know each other like like a friend of mine texted me yesterday and she said I'm

My partner and I finally did the 36 questions, and they have been together for like 15 years or something. And she's like, I learned new things about him, and I was so surprised. So I think the value of it sometimes is just like you learn things that you wouldn't necessarily know. And it's not like the things are these necessarily like deeply revealing things. Like sometimes they're just like interesting facts.

And I think if you kind of position it that way, it's not like, hey, let's sit down and talk about our feelings, which sometimes Mark and I say to each other ironically as a way to actually talk about our feelings because that feels like a ridiculous thing to say. But I think it's like, oh, hey, like, I think this would be fun. Let's try it because it is fun. Yeah. Yeah.

And you can blame us. You can be like, I went to this thing at Google. Yeah, totally. You talk about good relationships, great relationships, complicated relationships. And my question is, if like you're in a relationship that might be complicated and it might not be great, do you think that there is a chance for people to kind of like fall in love again? Or do you think once things are broken, they're broken?

You know, I'm not very absolute about anything. Like, I'm sort of wary of, like, really fixed rules. So I guess I would say, of course there's a chance. But I do think we tend to create these, like, patterns of interactions with other people. And a lot of research suggests this as well. And it's really difficult to break those patterns.

But I do think it is possible to change things. This is like another tip related to your question earlier. Yeah, right. So John Gottman, like famous relationship psychologist, talks about...

basically having like a relationship bank account and you want to always like keep it in the black. And he suggests that you need like five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. And he has lots of ways to like incorporate these into a relationship. But really, it's like you can practice this.

positive interactions and you can like train yourself to do more of them and getting that ratio up I think goes a long way towards relationship satisfaction and so it's just little things like touching your partner on the shoulder and being like hey how was your day or saying thank you like thank you goes a long way and just like thanks for taking out the trash or doing the laundry or whatever just like little small positive interactions so I think

Yeah, everything's changeable. I have two, if that's all right. One's just a quick one. You mentioned a word, I think a motto normativity. Uh-huh. Spell check or spelling on that would be good so I can Google it. Okay, yeah. Yeah, it's A-M-A-T-O-N.

N-O-R-M-A-T-I-V-I-T-Y. She's an English professor. I always get nervous spelling things aloud because I'm like, the stakes are high when you're an English professor. Google has good, it would help you. Amato Normativity. It's spelled exactly like it sounds. Got it. That was my guess, so I'm going to feel good.

And so the main question is that there's a concept or this idea that everyone is our mirror. And there's a saying, if you can spot it, you got it. And relationships fail when we see in others qualities that we dislike about ourselves. And similarly, if you admire someone, it's because you see something in them that you have yet to own. So my question is,

Is that BS? Do you ascribe to that? Or what are your thoughts on that? It's kind of like a how do you fall in love with yourself type question. That's interesting.

I'm not sure what I think about that, to be honest. I mean, I do think being in a relationship with someone who likes you makes you like yourself more. And I do think liking your partner goes a long way. I mean, I don't think we talk about liking enough. Like, we talk about loving a lot, but we don't talk that much about liking.

And there's this thing that psychologists have written about called the Michelangelo effect, which is really like if you see the best in your partner, that they will...

aspire to become the person you see in them. And that goes both ways, right? So like if your partner sees the best in you, then they will aspire, then you will aspire to be the person that they imagine. So I suspect that there's huge benefit in like noticing the great things about your partner and paying attention to them and complimenting them. And this is something that I try to do in my relationship a lot.

And it's also just nice to be complimented. So, you know, I would say be in a relationship with someone who notices the good in you and notice the good in other people.

Is that advice, though, that you've given other people where you say, like, you have to love yourself before you can be in a relationship? Yeah, I don't know if that's true. I kind of feel like that's crappy advice because there are plenty of people who don't love themselves, who probably have a lot of self-loathing, who are in relationships. Obviously, it's great to love yourself, but I think it is much easier to love yourself when you're with someone who likes you. Yeah.

And I've been in relationships with people I loved who loved me. I'm not sure we liked each other that much.

Just to follow up on your previous answer, so you said there are a lot of people who loathe themselves who are in relationships, but do you think they're in healthy, good relationships? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I'm ready to answer this question because I think it's really interesting, but my instinct is that the answer to this should be no, but I don't really know if that's true. So I'd have to do a little research to figure that out. To what extent does liking yourself...

make you happy in your own relationship, it probably goes fairly far. I'm sure it makes a difference. Yeah, that's an unsatisfying answer. I just want to get it right. So, like, I don't know. Maybe we'll submit it. Yeah, submit it to my advice column. I'll do some research and I'll write about this because I would actually like to know this answer. If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

You know what's so funny is I was looking over the 36 questions recently and it's been like three years since we did them and I realized I don't remember any of my answers or Mark's answers. Or I remember a few. But that one I couldn't remember the answer. So I decided that I needed to come up with an answer. And actually I decided it would be my dad's mother, my grandmother, who died when I was 13.

Um, because I was able to interview my mom's mom, my grandmother about her love story for this book and write about it. And she has a fantastic love story. She, um,

She met my grandfather. So they lived in this tiny little coal mining camp in rural Appalachia, like in the hollers of Virginia. And she met my grandfather when he was on leave from World War II. And she was 13 and he was 29. I know. Wow.

And they spent like two weeks together just like chatting. And then he went back to France and like fought in Normandy. And then he came home and was like, well, let's get married. And that was two years later. So she was 15 and he was 31 when they got married. And then they had eight children. And he died when I was four and she never remarried. Anyway, it's like such an interesting story to me. And I loved it.

talking to her about it. So I would love to be able to interview my other grandmother and find out her love story. Kind of going back to the question about like, if you don't like yourself, but you're in like a relationship, I'm more interested in how would you go about like, what's your process for making a study like that? Like, how would you like, do you just find couples and relationships and ask them like,

Do you hate yourself but love this person? I'm curious actually about how would you run any of your studies that you do for research? Well, I don't do these studies. So what I would do is I would turn to one of my friends who's a psychologist and say, can you do this study? And I'll write about it. But I think there are ways for measuring self-esteem, right?

and there are ways for measuring relationship satisfaction. Like psychologists have created tools for this and I guess you would just compare those two. But I'm not a psychologist so I don't know. I just read a lot of psychology. Just to give you an example if you're curious around the background. So they could likely do a longitudinal study where they could track

a series of people over something like four years and then they would say like how much do you like yourself and how happy is your relationship and they could track it and they could see like this person consistently didn't like themselves and they consistently had these relationships. This person when they started to like themselves we saw these changes and then if there was a statistically significant difference they might be able to say something like when people like themselves they start to be in healthier relationships. See we have a psych major here. That's very handy.

My question will be, what makes a great relationship great? And what is the difference between a good relationship? Is it all the emotional connection? What makes a great relationship great? Yeah, so I've thought about this a lot. And I think the short answer is kindness. Like, so much of the psychological research on romantic love can be summarized as like,

being kind to someone and having them be kind to you. So I think like a good rule for gauging a relationship is, am I able to be kind to my partner? And are they kind to me? And I think if the answer to either of those questions is no, then you should really think about why you're in that relationship.

After your talk, I recognize you mainly discuss about like the relationship between two people. But often in the actual real world is like, I come from a family and my girlfriend may also come from a family. And I guess at a certain point she would ask me, hey, maybe it's time for us to get married. Maybe it's not her fault, maybe just some pressure from her family, something like that. I'm not sure in that situation, how should I react?

talk with her about that point because maybe I myself I feel like maybe we should slowly get in that stage and then maybe get married but what if her family hey it's time for us to get a baby or for some biological reason maybe you should get a baby as soon as possible something like that yeah I'm not sure how would you deal with that case if your girlfriend is coming up with that issue yeah I mean I don't know but I

But I think that you're asking a really important question, and it's important to acknowledge what's at the heart of this question, which is that love is very much...

not just a feeling but a practice and that practice is very much controlled by our environment our social environments and that can be everything from like our immediate family to like a religious belief to like a cultural background and all of these things indicate how people think about romantic love like my dad grew up in like the rural south and um

You know, he has like really traditional ideas about love. Traditional as in the past hundred years, I guess, how it's been practiced in America. And so he is like waiting for my partner to decide that he wants to marry me. And I'm like, that's not how a relationship works. But it's really difficult to cross that cultural gap.

I don't think I have a good answer for how to deal with this, but my advice would be to seek out

stories and experiences from other people who've been in this situation. Because really, if we think like love stories give us scripts and scripts tell us how we can possibly behave in a given number of situations, then like gathering as many of those scripts as possible will give you more options for how you might handle it. So it seems like in relationships today, like the key metric to success is like longevity. And I was wondering if you'd like subscribe to that metric and...

Also, it seems like you were talking about how marriages today, there's a modern phenomenon of just relatively modern phenomenon of marriages being very passionate and romantic. And so if longevity is a good metric, do we have to redefine kind of our idea of what marriage should be like? Yeah. Okay. So first I will say I don't know that longevity is a good metric. Okay.

I don't think of it as a good metric. I think it's... I guess I feel complicated about it because, like you were saying, this is your anniversary. And I was like, congratulations. Only of having lunch at Big Table. And so I was thinking about, I have this impulse to congratulate people. And yet...

Like longevity doesn't really tell you anything about the quality of a relationship at all. I know people who've been married for a very long time who don't seem particularly happy to be together. And so I do think we would benefit from like coming up with better metrics.

You know, like kindness being one. And I think, what was the second part of your question? Based on the premise of longevity being a good metric. Right. We have to like redefine how we see marriage in terms of passion. Yeah. And I will say, I do think we need to redefine it regardless because the fact is like we live in a culture, like it or not, that values long-term commitment. And really most people aspire to long-term commitment. Right.

And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So I do think we would benefit from...

changing our expectations of marriage for sure, or long-term relationships in general. Like there is this research that shows, it's by this psychologist named Eli Finkel, and he's found that essentially marriage has climbed over the past, like, I don't know, 60, 70 years, or maybe even longer than that, climbed Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but it's like, it's basically like food, shelter, and then it's like belonging and love. And then it's like self-actualization up at the top. And what we increasingly want and expect from our marriages is self-actualization. So like we're looking to this one person to like give us like the best sex we've ever had and be like a perfect parent.

and to have like stimulating conversations about like the latest Malcolm Gladwell novel and to, or novel book. And, you know, so it was like, we want all these things from this one person. And essentially what he suggests is that's really unrealistic. And we would benefit from diversifying the ways in which we meet those needs for self-actualization. So we're getting them from other people. The other like really interesting and not so good, uh,

A side effect of that is that, so the best marriages are probably more happy and satisfied than ever before, but fewer and fewer people are achieving that sort of pinnacle of self-actualization within a marriage.

And one of the things that he's pointed out is that increasingly satisfaction in marriage is only accessible to people of, like, upper middle class and upper class because it requires, like, this date night, which I was just saying is so great, but it requires, like, financial flexibility to be able to do something like that, especially if you have children. You know, like, you need to be able to hire a babysitter. You need to, like, not be working 65 hours a week or whatever, right? So, like...

Having the time to invest, like the more you invest in your relationship, the more you get out of it. But like having the time and resources to do that is like not that many people have that. So on the whole, I think we need to really rethink marriage. But that'll be another book. Hello, my name is Ricardo. And I believe you mentioned earlier that you've seen relationships where...

"You're in love with the other person, but maybe you don't like them right now or ever or something." And I was wondering, what do you think keeps the love alive in such kinds of relationships when you just don't like your partner?

I don't know. That's a great question. Like, why do we stay in relationships with people we don't like that much? I don't know. I mean, I think maybe I can only speak for myself on this particular point. And I definitely stayed in a relationship with somebody...

who I've really deeply loved. Like I felt this strong sense of intimacy and I felt really there was a lot of physical attraction and there was a lot of like shared history and the problem was we were really critical of each other all the time and criticism has been shown to like really erode relationships. So I think it was really a matter of time.

But I think part of what kept me in that relationship, or maybe even both of us, was the sense that we had already invested a lot.

I don't know if you're familiar with the economic theory of sunk cost. It's like you've already paid for these tickets to the baseball game, and even though you have a cold, you're like, "I'm going to go to this baseball game anyway, even though I'd rather stay at home and watch a movie." So I think it's like, "I'm going to stick out this relationship because I've been in it for so long, and the work of finding a new partner is really intimidating, and the other side feels very unknown."

And this is like, if not perfect, it's like it's familiar. And I think that that sort of inertia is powerful. It's scary to end a relationship. Well, Mandy, thank you so much for being vulnerable with us and coming. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having me. This was so much fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash toxic Google. Talk soon.