Coming Clean

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Growing up, I attended a Jesuit high school. I noticed that every weekend, my Catholic classmates and their families would line up and confess their sins to a priest. Some of those priests were also our teachers. They taught us history and geography and economics. I found myself wondering why in the world my classmates would fess up about the bad things they had done to the very teachers who held us to such strict account in the classroom. Nearly every religious and spiritual tradition has some version of the Catholic confessional. Everyone keeps secrets, but nearly everyone wants to share their secrets too. Turns out, we don't just want to be admired and loved, we also want to be seen. In our episode last week, we explored the costs of self-concealment. People who keep secrets have poorer physical and mental health. They are less likely to elicit help from others. If you missed that episode, you can find it in this podcast feed. It's titled, Keeping Secrets. Today, we look at the psychological power of self-disclosure. Sharing more about what is happening in our lives with others turns out to be one of the best ways of winning friends and influencing people. Coming clean this week on Hidden Brain. We all keep secrets, and most of us know what it feels like to share a secret. It feels scary. It feels risky. It can also feel liberating, honest, courageous. At Harvard University, psychologist Leslie John studies the psychology of secret keeping and the consequences of self-disclosure. Leslie John, welcome to Hidden Brain.

LESLIE JOHN: Thanks so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Leslie, when you were a doctoral student, you once found yourself at an academic conference party that went late into the night. Now psychologists and behavioral economists are like everyone else. So at one point in the evening, the topic of the conversation turned to embarrassments that people had experienced themselves. What kind of stories did people share?

LESLIE JOHN: Yes, so we were at this conference, nerd jamboree, and we're sitting in a circle. It's late at night, and someone has the great idea to do, hey, let's play a game. Let's all go around the circle and share our most embarrassing story. And so, yeah, it was a mix of doctoral students like me, lowly doctoral students, and super fancy, a couple of very fancy professors. And so we're, of course, I wanted them to know of my existence and have a positive view of me. And so we start going around the circle, and my fellow doctoral students, they're playing it safe, which is very smart in some sense, and they're giving kind of humble, braggy answers. So like, oh, the most embarrassing moment was when I discovered there was a typo in my abstract of my fancy journal article. Oh, no, the horror. So yeah, kind of eye-rolly. I mean, I was like rolling my eyes on the inside. And then my turn came, and kind of impulsively, I decided in the moment to share my actually most embarrassing story ever, which entailed in college, I was in a play, and there was this one scene that was just me, and it was a really funny scene. And the audience was howling with laughter, which then made me howl with laughter, which I was laughing so hard that I peed myself and making matters worse. I was wearing pantyhose, not pants, dress and pantyhose. So it was like, I mean, I don't know, I've never seen a film of it, but in my mind, it's like a waterfall between my legs is what I envisioned the scene to be. My family was there, too, and we've actually never spoken of it, so I just have blocked it from... But what I did in that moment, for some strange reason, I decided, hmm, let me share this actually embarrassing story. So I was the showstopper. What was the reaction in the group when you shared the story that evening? Laughter, laughter. Everybody was like, this is amazing, this is hilarious. I was, in the moment, I was also in it because everybody was enjoying it. We were having fun. But then the next morning when I woke up, I thought, oh God, what have I done? These people who I want them to think I'm competent, I felt that pang of a disclosure hangover. Like I just felt, oh, why did I do this? I just told them this story that's very undermining. So I thought I had, like, ruined my shots of ever getting a great job or being in high esteem from them. Bye, them. I'm wondering whether your decision to tell that story, how has it aged over time? Is there still a choice that you regret? Not at all, not at all. In fact, now I view it as like one of my finest moments, which is also so crazy sounding. But what I mean by that is, those two fancy behavioral economists, they actually, one of them is a wonderful mentor of mine, and is a very dear friend. And the other I know very well as well. And so they both ended up being pretty instrumental mentors in my career, and I benefited so much. And I don't know that, I don't know whether we would be this tight if they hadn't seen me share something vulnerable. And also funny, it was funny. And I think that was, it was also maybe surprising to them, because they're so used to having students kind of understandably be on their guard. And so it maybe made me stand out in a way that ended up being a good thing. But it was, I'm not saying that I did this strategically. It was like a weird moment that I had that I think ended up paying off big time.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, the choice that we often have in these moments is, do we show vulnerability or do we aim for respectability? And I think many of us choose the latter. And what you're saying is that, in the long run at least, the former might be better.

LESLIE JOHN: Precisely. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that that is a way to gain respect, is by being vulnerable at the right time and the right place. And that happened to be, I think, the right time, the right place for me. But I think a key to becoming respectable can be actually vulnerability. And in fact, we've seen this when we've done lots of research with leaders of organizations where we encourage them to be a little bit vulnerable, share a little bit about what they're like as a weakness, if they say to their employees, I'm working a little bit on my public speaking. That actually makes the employees trust them more, be more willing to work for them. And it does not erode the leaders' perceived competence.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah, you ran a study once, I believe, with executives at Google, where you basically said that the executive either shares a vulnerability or hides it, and you asked people how they would respond to that executive.

LESLIE JOHN: Exactly. Because one of the key challenges here is, you're a leader, you don't want people to, you don't want to lessen their faith in you. You want them to be comfortable with you and trust you and respect you and take your leadership. And so you do want people to view you as competent, and that's really important. And the primary concern about being a little bit open about your weaknesses is that that's going to erode competence. So we put this to the test. And what we did was with this Google executive, we had him record a few different versions of a video where he introduced himself to people. And yeah, in one of the versions, he added this point that he had applied to like something like 20 different jobs before he landed this one. So that's revealing a failure. And what we found is when the executive did that, people trusted him more, they wanted to work for him more, and it did not erode his perceived competence.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: A couple of years ago, we had the Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lemke on Hidden Brain. She's an addiction researcher and she talked very openly about an addiction of sorts that she developed in her 40s, when she was already a well-established and well-respected professor and researcher. I want to play you a clip from that show, Leslie.

CLIP: I got to a point where whenever I wasn't doing something that I absolutely had to do, like for my work or my family, I was reading romance novels. And then it got to where, like, that's all I wanted to do. And I didn't enjoy anything else. I didn't even really want to, like, be with my kids or my husband, right? I just wanted those times to rush through them so that I could go back to reading romance novels. The other thing that I only realized in retrospect was that these sort of tamer versions of romance where, you know, the sex scenes aren't super graphic, well, those stopped working for me. And now I needed ever more graphic types of romance novels in order to get that zing that I was looking for.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, it may seem like Anna Lemke was embarrassing herself by revealing her fascination with romance novels and eventually with erotic fiction. But those episodes of Hidden Brain that we devoted to her work remain among the most popular episodes in our history, Leslie. For listeners who are interested, they were titled The Paradox of Pleasure and The Path to Enough. But more important than that, I don't think anyone listened to that episode and thought less of Anna Lemke. All she heard in the feedback that she received and all that we heard was admiration for her courage and for herself insight.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, totally. This is such a great example. And I think it's one thing to say that you're confident in yourself, it's another thing to model it. It's so much more powerful when you show it. And I think saying these things publicly, owning it like that, saying like it's relatable, it's human, we shouldn't be so ashamed, we should be more upfront about these things we struggle with, really took guts. And therefore, we admire her for that because she's showing that she's a very competent, confident person because she has the guts to do this. It's also really relatable, right? We all have, we may not struggle with the same things, but we all have things we struggle with. And so when you have someone, a prestigious, a really admired academic, we think of the typical academic as like really buttoned up, and then they show their human side, we think, oh, you know, they're just like us, and you really admire that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We've all been told to think before we speak, but what if revealing more than we intend, our awkward stories, our embarrassing mistakes, can actually draw people closer to us? When we come back, the unexpected benefits of oversharing. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all roll our eyes at people who share too much. The colleague who tells you in graphic detail about his upset stomach. The friend who gives you a blow-by-blow account of a recent colonoscopy. But have you noticed that over time you come to see these people as more authentic than the people who keep their embarrassments to themselves? At Harvard Business School, psychologist Leslie John studies how and why we often get self-disclosure wrong. Leslie, in our conversation last week, you talked about how we are all worried about sharing too much information, TMI, but not enough about the risks of sharing TLI, too little information, you talked about how we persistently underestimate the value and the power of self-disclosure. One of those benefits is that sharing information simply feels good. What have neurobiologists learned about the rewards of self-disclosure?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, this is so cool, this research. Led by Diana Tamir, she and her co-author found that opening up, revealing things about ourselves, self-disclosure is pleasurable. And she showed that you can see this at the neuron level in the brain. So what they did was they put people into brain scanners, they asked them questions about themselves. And what they found was that when the people got personal questions, the pleasure areas of their brain lit up, so to speak, were activated much more than those who did not get to talk about themselves.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And in some ways, this correlates with our behavioral experience of wanting to be seen, of having the pleasure of feeling like we are seen by someone.

LESLIE JOHN: Completely. I mean, that's one of the great joys of intimate relationships, is that if you really share and keep sharing, you are really, really known and seen by someone for exactly who you are. And that gives us so much relief but also joy. There's also some interesting work showing that people like when their spouses see them as they are, rather than exaggeratedly positive. So suppose you have low self-esteem, you actually will feel more secure and heard and comfortable in your relationship if your spouse recognizes that you have low self-esteem, rather than if your spouse says, Oh, you've got great self-esteem. So even when they're kind of unflattering things about ourselves, we would much rather our partner know us for who we are. And that's really the beauty of close relationships, is the joy that that brings. Having someone who knows everything about you is just wonderful.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you recently told your colleagues about a small but embarrassing fact about something that you did in the shower. It's a decision that might be hard to explain other than you just felt like sharing it. What did you tell them, Leslie?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, I don't even remember the actual context, but what I told them was that the smell of the Body Shop Satsuma soap, you know, the bar soap, it's this really juicy orange smell, it smelled so real to me that I took a giant bite out of it. And I was well above the age of six when I did that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What was the reaction of your colleagues when you told them this?

LESLIE JOHN: Oh, they laughed. It was colleagues that I was already friends with, so I knew it would be. It wasn't like the super stiff upper lip kind of colleagues, although I did have a very stiff upper lip boss once, and I cried in front of him, and that was interesting. But not undermining, as I thought it would be. He ended up really helping me in promotion, so maybe that benefited me too.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You once conducted a study in which you analyzed data from a professional social networking platform. What did you find about the power of disclosures, Leslie?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, so we got data from a large social networking site, a professional one, and we were able to get people's posts and then how many responses, positive responses, likes they got and so on. And what we found was that the posts that got more likes were the ones that shared something a little bit edgy or vulnerable or real. And, you know, it kind of goes in contrast to this idea that we should present a curated portrait of ourselves all the time, like how we present ourselves on LinkedIn. This was a different platform. And so that was interesting. And it spurred many follow up experiments where we had leaders reveal something a little bit more than what they think they should reveal, like saying something that they're working on, they're working on their organizational skills or something. And then we measured employees trust in them, motivation and so on. And we found positive results there.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And do you think this is about people who reveal themselves being seen as more authentic?

LESLIE JOHN: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that was the key driver of the effects. And I think it makes sense if you think of like people that are high status leaders in organizations, the queen. You can think of all kinds of people, not just in our work lives, but in the world that are really high status. Movie stars, maybe even. When we know something really relatable about them, they seem more real to us. They're more authentic and we really like that. They're not just kind of these aloof people that are out of touch. We like people when we can relate to them. So it makes us like them and trust them. It's maybe even why things like one of my guilty pleasures is gossip magazines. So Us Weekly has a section called Stars, They're Just Like Us and it'll be like, Gwyneth Paltrow will be sitting and drinking a coffee. I love that section and I think part of it is because you see these people in the movies and you have them on a pedestal and then it's really refreshing to see them just be normal.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering if this might also be part of the appeal of someone like Donald Trump. He has lots of edges. He can be sometimes crass. But even the people who dislike him or disagree with his policies often feel like what you see is what you get.

LESLIE JOHN: Yes. Yes. I mean, he's a very complex character. I do think that part of the appeal is that he has this reputation for being kind of a straight shooter. And he does say unpopular things and he's not shy about it. A lot of us may disagree with them, but at the end of the day, the fact that he's saying unpopular things is kind of refreshing because we're so used to politicians just being politicians. And it's like nauseating because we're like, just tell me, tell me the real thing. And so I think that might be part of his appeal. But he is a very complex character and there's a lot going on there.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So many prominent people go to great lengths to conceal things about themselves, but they don't always see the consequences of the secrecy. Tell me what happened, Leslie, when Princess Diana died in 1997 and the Queen of England was called upon to respond.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, this is another one of these flashbulb memories. As a good Canadian, I love the monarchy. And I remember waking up that morning when Diana died, my mother woke me up and she just said she's dead and everyone was devastated. So, Queen Elizabeth, the monarchy, is very stoic in their personality, right? And they're very private. So it's very unusual for them to open up about anything personal. And when Princess Diana died in 1997, the Queen, she was criticized in the first week because she seemed really cold. In fact, for the first week, she hadn't been seen in public. She was staying cloistered in the family's bio-moral estate, which was far from the crowds, but the crowds were saying, show us you care, speak to us. And so then finally, about a week later, she did something very uncharacteristic, but I think really brave and really wonderful. She addressed the nation in an alive and heartfelt address, she was in Buckingham Palace, she stood in front of a window where you could see right outside the window, the flowers and the morning crowds. It was really visceral. And she started by saying, she said, since last Sunday's dreadful news we have seen throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana's death. We've all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings, disbelief, incomprehension, anger. And now this is extremely uncharacteristic of the Queen, right? To open up, period, you let alone talk about all these emotions, that was extremely uncharacteristic. She went on then to say, this week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered. And so she was saying, I'm being a proper grandmother. I am being with my grandchildren. And that is more important than being a Queen right now. And people loved her for it. Like when she revealed, you know, in a reserved way. But for her, like in that context, that was a big reveal. People celebrated it and they felt like it helps them mourn, too, knowing that.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, it's a paradox because we often think that being vulnerable exposes us and makes us appear weak when it's often the opposite.

LESLIE JOHN: Exactly. And now, of course, the message isn't we should always share everything to everyone. Like it is a risky, but I think it's precisely because it's risky that makes the rewards so great. Because when you think about it, the best way to earn trust is to earn it, right? And how do you earn trust? You signal it by being vulnerable, making yourself vulnerable to someone. By doing that, you're saying to someone implicitly, hey, I trust you to not take advantage of me, right? It's like, it's very common in the animal kingdom. It's when puppies reveal their bellies, it's like a sensitive part and they're garnering trust that way. Even octopuses, which are characteristically kind of loners, they have a way of like wrapping their tentacles to signal that they're open and to show that they're trust to make themselves vulnerable. Even the handshake. The handshake among humans originated by showing that you have exposing your hand to show that you're not armed. So all of these things, the way you get trust and respect is often by showing it instead of saying, you can trust me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You yourself demonstrated a moment of authenticity when you were interviewing for a job at Harvard. Now, the Harvard Business School is a notoriously tough place, lots of big egos, competitive people. Set the scene for me and tell me what happened, Leslie.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. So I went into the room, the interview room, and I was very nervous because I never in the world imagined I'd be in a position where I actually had a shot at a Harvard job, but here I was. And I knew I had a shot at it because one of my mentors who was at the peeing incident, the embarrassing story, he, I knew that he had like, he had stuck his neck out for me and he had really spent social capital on saying that I'm legit. And so I get there, I'm really nervous. And when I'm nervous, sometimes I blurt out stupid things. And so I sat there and it's all men, which makes it even more intimidating for me. And one of the faculty members looked at my CV and he said, oh, you used to be a ballet dancer. Because I was trained as a ballet dancer. He says, you used to be a ballet dancer. You know, I was a dancer too. And he was clearly trying to make a joke and trying to have a moment of levity because he saw that I was nervous. Like it was incredibly kind what he was trying to do. But that didn't register on me in the moment. In the moment, for some strange reason, I decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and look him up and down and then cock my head and say, clearly, really sarcastic tone. And as soon as I said that, yeah, I was like, oh my God, what did I just do? It's like, I just poured gasoline all over myself and lit a match. Please, can I take that back? My face turned bright red and my mentor then, he tried to break it up by, he's like, let's get you a glass of water and kind of reset that way. But I just thought, I'm never going to get this job. Well, turned out that I did end up getting the job. And then the guy I insulted, he's so sweet. He ended up being a close mentor and friend. And he said he loved to tell the story, regale job candidates and say, you know, when Leslie insulted me like that, we thought, hey, she's sassy, she'll fit right in here. She's a jerk like us, just like us. So I got lucky. I got lucky. That was definitely not strategic. But the bigger point, I think, is that job interviews are super high stakes, right? And the norm there is to only present our best foot forward. And we should be very careful about any kind of vulnerability in these high stakes context. But still, there is space for a little bit of levity, a little bit of sass, a little bit of authenticity, whatever your blend of that is. And the reason is that, provided you're qualified for the job, if you show a bit of yourself like that, one, you stand out more, you're more memorable. And two, it helps you, you can see how they respond to you, and it helps you get a sense of their culture and whether your personality fits. Are you gonna thrive there? That's a good little test.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One other advantage of self-disclosure, Leslie, is that it can prompt other people to disclose things in response. Talk about this reciprocal nature of self-disclosure. Yes. So, when someone opens up to you, says something slightly vulnerable, I'm almost comfortable with saying it's an instinct. That's a heavy word. But it's a very natural thing we humans do is to reciprocate, to respond in kind. And what that means is that we tend to feel the urge to also reveal something of similar sensitivity back. So strong is this urge that a colleague of mine, Young Mi Moon, has done a fascinating study. She did it a while back, but it's one of these kind of evergreen findings where she basically showed that the urge to reciprocate is so strong that we even do it with inanimate objects, with computers. So she had a computer, she had a participant sitting at a computer, and the computer output the text that said, it didn't even say I, it wasn't even trying to personify itself. It just said, this computer rarely reaches its full potential. It rarely gets to use its full hard drive or something like that, which is kind of like the computer's disclosing to you, right? And so then they measured and people then revealed back to the computer about, something that they were struggling with or something, a way that they feel they hadn't reached their full potential. It's really amazing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I understand that you conduct a classroom exercise, Leslie, where you ask students to pose questions to one another. There's a twist in the way that you set up the exercise. Tell me what you do and what you find.

LESLIE JOHN: Yes. So I divide the room into two, and I say to everyone, in a moment, you're going to have a question that you're going to talk about for a few minutes with the person next to you. But I only reveal one question to each group. So one group gets the question, what do you like about your job? Like, wah-wah, super boring question. The other group, unbeknownst to the first group, gets the question, when is the last time you cried? And usually when I give that question out, someone's gonna make an audible groan. Like, people do not want to talk about the last time they cried. In fact, my bestie, Alison Brooks, has done, she does lots of work on conversation and topics, and she's gotten people to rank or order, like, what topics do you want to talk about versus not? And talking about the last time you cried consistently ranks dead last. And yet, when I force people by the powers bestowed on me as a prof, when I force the class to talk about it, they're the ones that are bubbling. They're the ones that are actually joyful and excited and interested and moved. You can feel it in the classroom. The energy on one side is amazing and the other side is pretty flat. And in some ways, it speaks to the paradox, right, Leslie, which is that in some ways, we, you know, we hesitate so much to share, but the moment we start to do it, there's so many aspects of it that feel good. Exactly, and that's why I think a key thing is, you can't just talk about sharing, you gotta do it, because seeing is believing, like doing it is believing. You gotta feel the benefits in order to kind of get hooked on the possibilities.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You mentioned your colleague, Allison Wood Brooks, a second ago. We had Allison on Hidden Brain some time ago. You and Allison, of course, are friends, but the two of you recently made a significant disclosure to one another. What was this disclosure?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, so, I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this. So we had invited a scholar to come to talk to our lab about his research, and it happened to be about rivalry and envy, and he was going through the things that cause people to feel rivalry with each other, and it was like similarity, competitiveness, achievement-oriented talent, and Allison and I are just making eyes throughout the whole thing, like, is this us? Is this us? And so, as we walk back to our offices, she broaches the topic, because she's, as I said, world-class conversationalist. She says, why aren't we rivals? Which was an amazing entryway in, right? Because the way she said, she could have said, are we rivals? It feels like we're rivals. But she framed it as, why aren't we rivals? And then we just had this wonderful conversation about how, you know, I said, yeah, I admit that sometimes I do feel a bit envious of you. It's mostly admiration, but sometimes it's envy. And she said, yeah, I hear you. Sometimes I feel that way, too. In this kind of cool as a cucumber, warm as a sweater way, which is her way. And kind of nonchalant, too. Yeah, I feel that way, too, sometimes. But it just brought us so much closer. The again, like admitting this thing that's that's kind of a faux pas to feel envy about like she's one of my very best friends. And that really brought us even closer.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And it's really an indicator of how even when you're close with someone, a moment of authenticity, a moment of vulnerability can actually bring you even closer.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, completely.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Revealing what's really on our minds means taking a chance. We might be laughed at, we might be scorned, or we might find ourselves drawn closer to the people we care about. When we come back, advice on how to engage in skillful self-disclosure. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Can you think of a time in your life when you came clean about a secret to someone else? How did they respond? And how did you feel afterwards? If you are willing to share your personal story with a Hidden Brain audience, or have a question or comment about self-concealment and self-disclosure, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, secrets. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Psychologist Leslie John is the author of Revealing, The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, a social scientist you know at Cornell University, once posted a very unusual resume. It wasn't a list of important jobs and fancy publications. He called it a CV of failures. Tell me his story.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, this is cool. So what he did was he posted a CV that included not just all the fancy journals he had published in and all of his accomplishments, but also the failures. So for the journal articles that ended up being published, he also indicated the places that had rejected that article, that writing first. And this is highly anomalous, right? We never put failures in a CV, but he did. And it was really wonderful because I think it really had a wonderful effect on more junior scholars to not feel so alone. Because when you're a junior scholar, you don't see all the failed experiments, and you don't see all the failed journal submissions. And so to see that someone who is super successful also has failed is really motivating. Actually, if you're in a rut, you think, oh, well, he failed too. In a similar way, there's a woman by the name of Melanie Stefan. I think she's a neuroscientist, and she found out one day that her grant was rejected. But on that same day, the super famous football player, soccer player, Ronaldinho, it was announced that he didn't make the World Cup team. And so for her, what she thought was, oh, I'm just like Ronaldinho. Even Ronaldinho failed sometimes, and it perked her up.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, in some ways, this brings us to what an economist might call a positive externality of disclosure. You know, when someone posts a CV of failures, it almost becomes easier for everyone else to talk about their challenges.

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, exactly. However, I think it's really important, again, to read the room and understand where you are and understand what context you're in. So the CV example, this is someone who has already made it in academia, right? He's already got a great job. He's already a professor. I would not advise a doctoral candidate going on the rookie job market. I would not advise them to do this because your competence is kind of still in question there. It's particularly effective and less risky for someone who is already high status to do this.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I want to ask you about a couple of disclosure dilemmas that you've experienced in your own life, Leslie. You recently worked through one that involved who received credit for a joint project. Tell me the story of what happened.

LESLIE JOHN: Yes. I was working with a team of co-authors, which is one of the great joys of my job, is I get to choose who I work with, and we had to fill out some paperwork for the article we were publishing. One of the things was you had to write down which author gets the lion's share of credit for different aspects, one of them being idea generation. I had gotten a draft of the filled out form from a co-author and my heart sank when I got it, because she had written for the idea part, she said, equal contribution, all authors. And that stung for me, because I knew where the idea had come from. I knew that it had come from me, because I knew the specific motivating, real world thing that we built this paper on, which was something I had experienced. And so I knew that I had the kernel and that really bothered me. But my natural thing to do here would be to not say anything, would be to not rock the boat, because I really love my co-authors and I value our relationship and I don't want them to feel bad, I don't want them to think I'm petty. Nobody's going to read this, the stupid credit lines, like it doesn't matter, just go with it. But I have been writing a book on disclosure dilemmas and how to think through them, so I thought this is a good exercise for me. And one of the ways we go wrong when we consider whether to reveal something, one of the things that we tend to overlook is the risks of concealing. I realized that what's really salient in these decisions is the risks of revealing, right? What I just said, reasons why I would not reveal is I don't want them to think I'm petty, I don't want them to feel bad. Those are all risks of revealing, sins of commission, risks of revealing. But what we don't think about are what are the risks of holding back? We don't actually think about those. And so if I forced myself to think about them, I thought, well, I might ruminate, and then just have resentment potentially bubble up over the years. And then I thought, okay, and what about something I also don't usually consider is the benefits of speaking my mind. If I do it in a figurative nice way to say it. Well, if I say the benefits, if I say why, if I tell them this, one of the benefits might be they will know me better. They will know that I really care about ideas and that's important to me. And then that will make me happy with them knowing that they know me, right? Cause feeling known for who you are is just so deeply rewarding. So then I started to see kind of the other side of it, so much so that I actually ended up having a conversation about it and it went just fine.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So did they not feel like you were being petty? I mean, were your concerns completely unfounded?

LESLIE JOHN: So they didn't show it, they may have thought it. But I didn't read that at all. In fact, one of them teared up, as I was saying. I could tell she felt really badly. And then I, of course, said, I love you, and it's fine. And it's like, you were doing a great thing. This is why I love collaborating with you, because we're not excessively credit-seeking or petty. That's what makes it wonderful. So it brought us closer. You can see the way I'm even getting kind of worked up in a good way by talking about it. It also, interestingly, when you share these things, it also tells you more about the people you're working with. So this was so affirming of our collaborations together. I've had this conversation, a similar one, with another group, where one of the co-authors was just, just, it went really badly, and she was kind of aggressive and angry, and it wasn't just a natural defensiveness in the moment, but it kind of persisted, and that was also informative, right? Because people's true colors really show when they're in, when they get disappointing information.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I want you to tell me another story, Leslie. This one was more consequential. It had to do with a young man you met some years ago when you were single. His name was Colin. How did you meet and how did that relationship unfold?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah. So, we met in the most romantic of ways, i.e. Tinder. It's funny because I was in my 30s professing and it's very ironic that I met him on the most hook-uppy app. I was looking for a long-term partner, but the reason I chose Tinder was because it had amazing privacy settings, because at the time it was the only app where I could set it up so a guy would only see me if I had swiped right on him, because I just lived in fear of an MBA student seeing me on this. I lived in Harvard Square, so I'm like, I can't have my students seeing me. So that's why I was on Tinder. I always feel the need to justify it a bit, but anyways, so we found each other on Tinder and we started dating and it was wonderful. And we went on this romantic weekend to Palm Springs, and I was really feeling love vibes. But I was too shy, scared, all of these things to say it. And so we were in our room and I said, I think it was like the, trying to bring up the relationship definition conversation. I said, oh, so what are we? I think is what I said. And he's like, oh, I'm having a lot of fun, or something like that. That just, it felt like I was shut down. And so that was a very disappointing response slash non-response that I got from him. And so I started to feel like, question whether he was emotionally available. But then, a little while later, he actually was the first to announce, albeit guardedly, his love for me. He said, I think I love you. And I said, me you too.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Me you too?

LESLIE JOHN: Yeah, me you too. Because I think I couldn't say the L word, even though I was feeling that, I just had a hard time expressing it. And it was one of these moments, I just kind of blurted out, me you too? And you can never go back from that. You can't just then be like, oh yeah, I meant to say I love you. And so then more time passed. And I always felt like, oh, he's emotionally reserved. But in hindsight, I was just as, if not more reserved than he was. Like I felt these strong feelings. From day one, our first date, there was something really special and different about him in a good way.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But in the days that followed, Leslie and Colin started to feel awkward around each other. Leslie was sure that Colin regretted telling her that he loved her. At the back of her mind, she reminded herself that he had said, I think I love you. He only thought he loved her. That wasn't love, was it? Slowly, the conversations between them got more and more stilted. Leslie felt she was in relationship limbo. One day, Leslie asked to have a chat and told Colin she thought they should break up. He didn't argue with her or plead with her to change her mind. He said he would get his stuff and leave. Leslie was hurt Colin hadn't fought for the relationship, but she told herself, see, it shows he doesn't love me.

LESLIE JOHN: And I was really sad about it and I really, I felt like I'd lost out and then I had a tremendous stroke of luck because one day, there was a card that showed up on my doorstep, a handwritten note. It didn't even have a stamp on it like, and it was in his handwriting, which I knew. So I got home and it's just mega swoon. There's this handwritten card. He was there. He had dropped it off. So I opened it up and it's this amazing love letter. And it was so honest. I actually have it here. I wanted to read a part of it. Okay, he said, If I'm being honest with myself, I know that I do love you. I know I was scared of admitting that I was in love with you, scared to embrace how I was feeling about you, and scared to let myself be in love with you. And all that meant. Oh, and so then I texted him. And of course, I couldn't pick up the phone call and call him like a grown up. I texted him and I said, you know, Hi, I got your lovely letter. And I'm literally staring at my screen. And I see the bubbles pop up. He's communicating. He's texting and. So then we met up again, and we started seeing each other again. And a whirlwind romance ensued. And then a year later, we were married. And then two wonderful little children followed. I'm so grateful that he had the courage to do that, because I would have never had the life that I have now. I wouldn't have the children. I wouldn't have, yeah, my Prince Charming.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Over the last two weeks, we've looked at the many reasons to reveal ourselves to others. But that doesn't mean we should always blurt out everything on our minds. There are, in fact, times when it might be best to withhold information. That's in our Hidden Brain Plus episode titled When to Hide the Truth. If you're a subscriber, that episode should be available in your podcast feed right now. If you're not yet a subscriber, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Psychologist Leslie John is the author of Revealing, The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

LESLIE JOHN: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Can you think of a time when you came clean to someone else? Do you remember what happened and how it felt? If you're willing to share your personal story with the Hidden Brain audience, or have a question or comment about self-concealment and self-disclosure, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, secrets. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. One of the most significant contexts in which we often think about topics like secrets and self-disclosure is in our romantic relationships. We want our partners to be the person with whom we share everything, but we also want to keep a bit of excitement and mystery in our relationships. We've talked about this on the show with psychologist Eli Finkel, who has studied what he calls the all-or-nothing marriage. After the break, Eli returns to the show to answer your questions about the pressures we put on our romantic relationships and how we might want to take some of the pressure off ourselves and our partners. You won't want to miss it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to the last time you realized you were falling in love. How would you describe that feeling? Was it thrilling? Maybe a little scary? Perhaps you remember it as a phase when you and your love would talk for hours, chatting about nothing and everything. This honeymoon phase of a romantic relationship can be euphoric. As the relationship deepens, new things are added to the heady buzz of love. You come to rely on your partner. If you stay together, your lover becomes your confidant, your cheerleader, your support system. Over time, the demands we have for our soulmates only increase. We want the passionate lover, and we want the stable partner. We want the amazing parent, and the adventurer, the impulsive travel companion, and the rock who stands by us in tough times. We want funny, we want brave, we want kind, and of course, we still want the gorgeous person we fell in love with to stay gorgeous. At Northwestern University, psychologist Eli Finkel examines what happens when we ask one person to play so many roles for us. He is the author of the All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work. We first talked with Eli back in 2018, and our conversation has remained enduringly popular. You can find a link to it in the show notes. Today, Eli returns to Hidden Brain for Your Questions Answered, our segment where guests come back to the show to answer questions from listeners. Eli Finkel, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

ELI FINKEL: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Eli, in our first conversation, we discussed what you call the All or Nothing Marriage. What do you mean by that term? It's a way of capturing the current era of marriage. What I did when I was exploring these ideas is I tracked the historical trajectory of what is it that we expect from our marriage. And once I delved into the sociology and the history, I realized that our expectations today are different in some pretty radical ways from how they used to be in the past. I mean, we can go back a couple hundred years and think about what would we be looking for from our marriage if we were not in 2025, but like 1825. And what we looked for in a spouse was the fulfillment of really basic needs. I literally mean things like food, clothing, shelter. It's true that people preferred to love their spouse, and if the sex were good, that would be terrific, but that wasn't the point of marriage. People didn't get up on the marriage altar and say, I'm marrying you because you complete me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So today we expect our partners to be everything for us, a lover, a best friend, a therapist. We want them to represent a safe place, but also an exciting one. How did our expectations of marriage change so radically, Eli?

ELI FINKEL: Yeah, you're exactly right. So from this basic shared farmhouse way of thinking up until today, when we witness our loved ones stand on the marriage altar and say things like you complete me, you're my best friend, the two major things that shifted over the last couple hundred years, the first were changes to the economy. And in contrast to the agricultural era, we saw this urbanization. And it really picked up after the 1850s. And what you get with urbanization is a surfeit of jobs in urban centers. And so for the first time ever anywhere, young people move to cities and they are geographically and economically independent of their parents. And what is it that they want? They want to feel personally fulfilled. And so yes, it used to be nice for a marriage to be fulfilling, but since that time, the personal fulfillment of the spouses becomes essential. And that change to the economy dovetails with changes in our culture. We've seen a lot of changes to our culture, but perhaps the most relevant one here is the rise in the 20th century of humanistic psychology. These are people like Abraham Maslow, who talks about things like self-actualization. And so on the one hand, we've got the changes to the economy such that people are now independent, making decisions for themselves and their personal fulfillment, and they are emphasizing not only love, but also the idea that our spouse should help us live an authentic, self-actualizing life.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You mentioned the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Remind us about his famous hierarchy of needs and the corollary that you saw between this model and our approach to marriage today.

ELI FINKEL: Yeah, this is one of the most famous ideas in the history of psychology. The idea is that our needs are not just a random smattering of things that we would like, but that they exist in a hierarchy. And some of the more fundamental needs are things like physiological and safety needs. Literally things like the need to stay warm, the need to have enough food. And then you go up his hierarchy, if those needs are at least somewhat met, and you look to other sorts of needs. And to the middle of his hierarchy, you see things like love and belonging. And then, as you look toward the top of his hierarchy, you get more psychologically oriented needs like esteem and self-actualization needs.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And your argument is that in some ways, the story of marriage in some ways has marched up this hierarchy of needs. It used to be that we looked to marriage to fulfill more of our basic needs, but now we increasingly look to marriage to fulfill our very highest needs.

ELI FINKEL: Yes, that is exactly what we've seen over time. And it is interesting because I'm certainly among the people who have observed that we're asking more and more of our spouse over time, how can we achieve those things in our marriage, the level of understanding, the level of communication that we need to have for each other. If we're going to help each other, I don't know, conquer our unconscious blocks and our fear of success in order to break through to the other side to achieve the most authentic ideal version of ourselves. It's really hard, but there's a second thing that happens, and I think we really need to appreciate this one. It's at the top of Maslow's hierarchy that we get deep, profound feelings of fulfillment. At the bottom, sure, of course, we need to have enough food. Of course, it's terrible to be freezing. But as Maslow himself said, it's the higher need gratifications that produce more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life. So we've shifted in a way that makes connecting more difficult. And many of us are disappointed with a level of marital connection that would have been totally okay for our grandparents. But those of us who are looking to the top and succeeding are achieving a level of marital connection that was out of reach in earlier eras.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in some ways, Eli, what you're saying is that the much higher expectations that we have of marriage produce something of a paradox. For the couples who manage to meet those expectations, they end up incredibly happy and potentially much happier than couples were 200 years ago. But for many people who are not able to ascend to the very peaks of Mount Maslow, as you call it, people find that their relationships are falling short.

ELI FINKEL: That is exactly right. And that's the idea behind the all or nothing marriage. We've created an era that affords the possibility of a level of connection that was difficult to achieve when people weren't looking to the top of Maslow's hierarchy, while at the same time placed a lot of people at risk for disappointment because those expectations are oriented toward the top. And I should just say, one of the things that I think this theory can explain that no other theory can really account for is the extent to which having a happy marriage is linked to being overall happy in our lives is twice as strong today as it was a few decades ago. And I think the reason why is because there's so much more variability in terms of how fulfilled we feel in our marriage. The top end is exceptional. The average is maybe getting worse. And so sticking the landing on having a happy, fulfilling marriage is more important today than it was in the past.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So some listeners wrote in about the role of expectations in marriage and the challenge that high expectations can pose. Diana wrote, like Dr. Finkel, I agree that unmet expectations cause negative feelings. However, I strongly disagree with his opinion of the need to lower expectations. Lowering implies a decrease in quality or a lesser experience. I would suggest that you need to change or adapt your expectations to support the reality of what's happening in your lives and the relationship. Discussing expectations openly with your partner and mutually agreeing on what can be expected will go a long way in creating a loving, happy relationship. What do you think, Eli? Are you recommending that people lower their expectations? Or like Diana, are you saying that people in some way should discuss their expectations and come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion?

ELI FINKEL: Yeah, I see eye to eye with Diana on this. I think there are two things I'd like to say in response to her. The first one is that she's right about the importance of communicating about what we will and won't expect. And let me say, I think people do a whole lot more of articulating what they expect the marriage to deliver than what they're willing to say, the marriage doesn't have to deliver these things. And I think through communication with our partner and through honest assessment with ourselves, we can decide which are the things we have to meet through this one relationship versus which are the things that are totally acceptable to meet either through other relationships or on our own. The second thing I'd like to say is that expectations do two different things. One is they set a standard according to which we're going to evaluate the experiences we're having. And here, high expectations are in fact disadvantageous because given any set of experiences you might have, you'll be more pleased with them if you expected less than if you expected more. But Diana is absolutely right. There is a second thing that expectations do, which is that they serve as a motivational force. And so because I expect a lot from the marriage, I invest a lot. I push toward those things. I try to connect in exactly those ways that are oriented toward the top of Maslow's hierarchy. And it's those motivations, those high expectations, that afford the possibility of such a deep marital connection.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I think it's safe to say that the end of a marriage is rarely fun, but when a large part of your identity is built around that relationship, it can be especially painful when it doesn't work out. I'd like to play for you the experience of a listener named Sol.

SOL: >My wife and I were together for a total of 24 years, married for 22 of them, and I could not have been happier for most of the time. I have a tattoo of her on my arm, I wrote a book about her honeymoon, I just like made my whole identity be how much I was devoted to her. Through no fault of her own, she realized that she's gay, and that obviously came as a bombshell, I think, to both of us, and it obviously meant a lot of changes. We have four children, and we told them this, and I did not see us breaking up as possible, and I couldn't be more disappointed, because our story was everything to me, it was so beautiful, it was so wonderful, I thought we were just destined to be.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Eli, a feel for Soul, he says his whole identity was wrapped up in this relationship with his ex-wife, and it appears he was someone who thought he had reached the heights of Mount Maslow only to find himself losing the relationship. I'm wondering what you would say to Soul as he begins charting a new identity for himself.

ELI FINKEL: I sympathize with him enormously. I'm sort of tearing up a little as I'm listening to his story. It is a beautiful, poignant, sad, touching story, and it is very much a story of the current era. He understands and his wife understands that if she's gay, she shouldn't be expected to remain in a marriage to a man. That would be inconsistent with who she is, and I think he's capturing one of the great risks of the all or nothing era. He, so far as we can tell, really did build one of these top of Maslow's hierarchy, deep, profound level of connection and all the psychological sorts of ways. And when that ends, we really are left unmoored, sometimes even bereft. He didn't comment specifically about this, but one of the risky things about the current era of marriage is we don't attend as much as we used to, to what I've called the other significant others, our family members, our close friends, our cousins, right? We don't attend as much as we used to and continue to invest in those relationships. And that means that if this all marriage that we've been pursuing, the one atop Maslow's hierarchy, if it falters, we're left without the same level of social backdrop that we might have had otherwise.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering also, Eli, if it's possible that in some ways, our high expectations of marriage have meant that fewer people are now able to fit the bill. In other words, if I expect my partner to be my soulmate, my friend, my financial comrade, my everything, perhaps there are fewer and fewer suitors whom I might consider appropriate.

ELI FINKEL: I think that's a fair observation that insofar as our list of required attributes, especially for these sorts of social and psychological sorts of needs that we have, insofar as that list gets longer and deeper, the proportion of people, the number of people who might be able to fulfill that for us gets smaller. And it feels like we would be settling in a way that would be a violation to an authentic life to be with somebody who couldn't fulfill those needs.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: >When we come back, a closer look at some of the stressors that impact relationships and what we can do about them. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Northwestern University, psychologist Eli Finkel studies the science of relationships. He looks at why couples might be more likely to stay together and also why they might fall apart. Eli, let's talk about some of the stressors that can affect marriages. One of the most common stressors is money. Partners often differ on how to get money and whether to save, spend or invest it. You published a study that looked at the psychology of how financial struggles in relationships can affect the outcome of those relationships. Tell me what you found.

ELI FINKEL: There are two major findings linking things like income to relationship well-being. The first one construes low income as a source of stress. And what we see in that literature is that you just fight more. There's more things to fight about if you don't have enough resources rather than if you do. So for me, in my relationship, we have enough money to make it to the end of the month and pay the rent. We have enough money that if we want to eat out, we can eat out. What happens at the end of the month for people who are really struggling financially, they end up fighting about whose priorities get met, what sacrifices we're willing to make. And even as they're dealing with those additional stressors, there's a second problem, which is they don't have the resources, and here I'm talking financial and also emotional, to handle those difficult stressors as effectively. I can go out with my wife to a date and talk about these sorts of issues. We can hire a babysitter to look after the children, to give us time to invest in the relationship and work through those things. And so people who don't have the same level of resources are dealing with this double whammy where on the one hand, they're handling much more difficult circumstances than the rest of us. And on the other hand, the resources they have available to handle those circumstances are also more limited.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Yeah. So I'm wondering if this picture that you're painting is part of the reason why researchers found that lower income couples are less likely to marry in the first place. And once they do, they're more likely to divorce.

ELI FINKEL: Yes, they are less likely to marry. They're more likely to divorce. And the sort of low-hanging explanation for those differences turned out to be wrong. So the initial idea that many scholars had, also cultural commentators often have, is that people who don't have a college degree, maybe don't have a high school degree, don't make that much money, don't really value the institution of marriage enough. But look, we can ask, right? And now there is a bunch of really good research. People who don't have as much money, value marriage just as much as people who have more money or more education. One of the things is this stress thing that we've talked about already. But there is a second issue, which is what is it like to be an individual in a more precarious social situation more generally? And the issue here is that there is a more porous safety net, which makes people more dependent on others, but also at greater risk of being exploited or hurt, not because poorer people are more exploitative or more hurtful, but because on average they are needier. And so many people who have not gotten a college or a high school degree have learned that when push comes to shove, they need to look out for themselves more so than people who are in more comfortable social and economic circumstances have learned to do.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You also published a study that looked at whether couples who merged their finances or kept them separate, how this decision shaped their relationship. Tell me what you found.

ELI FINKEL: This was a cool study. This is a study led by Jenny Olson. We recruited hundreds of couples who were about to get married. All of them were engaged. They were on average about six weeks before their wedding day. And we randomly assigned them to one of three conditions in terms of their bank account structure. So if we imagine these are all heterosexual couples, he has his finances, she has hers, but they haven't yet merged any of their finances. So at the beginning of the study, all of them had entirely separate bank accounts. And in one of the conditions, we randomly assigned them to keep that structure throughout the course of the study, which was a two year study. In a second condition, we randomly assigned them to merge their bank accounts entirely. And then we also have a no intervention control condition. And what we see, if you look at the separate accounts condition or the control condition, you see the standard effect, which is that relationship quality goes down over time. People end up a little bit less satisfied over time over the first two years of their marriage than they were at the beginning. This, I regret to tell you and your listeners, is a standard effect in the research literature that on average relationship quality goes down over time. But in this study, what we found is that those couples who were randomly assigned to merge their finances were buffered against this downward trajectory in relationship quality. They remained approximately as happy over time over the first two years of their marriage, which is all that we studied thus far. They remained about as happy as they were when they were slated to get married.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And why do you think this is happening?

ELI FINKEL: We have several possibilities. We ran a follow-up study. One of the most promising options is the idea that people perceive their relationship as more communal when they've merged their finances than when they've kept their finances separate, for example. And what does it mean to have a communal relationship? It means that it's not your resources and my resources or your time and my time. It's our resources. It's our time. When I'm spending money, I'm spending our money. And I think that headspace tends to merge people a little bit more closely than they would be otherwise.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In addition to financial stressors, the people who surround a couple can also put a lot of pressure on a marriage. A listener named Sonia wrote to say, if extended families are not in approval from the beginning, no matter how compatible you are with your partner, this will impact the future of the relationship. Is Sonia correct, Eli?

ELI FINKEL: Yes, she is, and I find this one fun because, you know, not many people even know there is a field called relationship science, right? That's sort of my home discipline, where we actually collect data to try to answer questions about relationships. And this is one of these times where you just really get a sense of the scientific process unfolding. The reason why is that the earliest research in this space showed the opposite of Sonia's prediction. It was called the Romeo and Juliet Effect. And the idea was that if your parents disapprove or your loved ones disapprove of your relationship, you're going to like your partner even more as a way to sort of give the middle finger to the people trying to control you. And this is the field thought this was the right answer for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. But eventually you end up with just an avalanche of studies that show the opposite effect. All else equal, it is much harder to have a good relationship if the important people in your life disapprove than if they approve.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I also want to talk a moment about the role of culture in shaping our relationships. Can coming from different cultures impede our path to the peaks of Mount Maslow, Eli?

ELI FINKEL: The brief answer is yes. There are some additional complexities that come with intercultural relationships, partly because our patterns and traditions are a little different, and partly because with culture comes unconscious understandings of how the world works and how relationships work, but I don't see any reason whatsoever to be cynical about these sorts of relationships. For one thing, there's a lot of great stuff that comes with intercultural relationships, which is the ability to grow and to learn, and those are also wonderful things for relationships. And is it going to be a stronger negative effect that there's some complication over having to align our rituals, or is it a stronger positive effect that we get to learn and grow from each other? On average, that might be something of a wash. I think the more important thing is not which culture did you bring to the relationship and which culture did I bring to the relationship, but which culture are we building together in our relationship? What is the culture of you and me? And, Shankar, you may remember we talked about this the last time we spoke. I gave the example from my book where I used the phrase, belly full of wine. Early on, my wife and I weren't really saying, I love you yet. And this was the sort of shorthand that we developed for conveying a sense of love and safety and gratitude for each other. And, belly full of wine means nothing outside of the context of our relationship, but it means everything in the context of our relationship. So all of us can build this stuff together, and there's every reason to think that people coming from different cultures can do that just as well as anybody else.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, could the secret to a successful marriage be not two people, but three? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In many cultures, marriage is expected to last for life. It's part of the deal we sign up for. It's why we say, till death do us part. That commitment is reassuring for many. For others though, it can feel suffocating. Some people in that second category, those who feel constrained, might look to alternative forms of relationships. They might lean more heavily on friends or decide to pursue non-monogamy. At Northwestern University, Eli Finkel says, alternate kinds of relationships can prove useful for many, but they may also be very tricky to navigate. Eli, we heard several examples of listeners who have sought emotional support outside of their romantic relationships. Here's one from Amanda.

AMANDA: During COVID, the height of COVID, I started hiking every weekend with my children who really did not enjoy the hike. And then in 2021, I decided to let the kids off the hook and not take them hiking. And still decided to hike every weekend for my mental health. My best friend heard of my idea and asked if she could join. And of course, I was excited to have her join. So, that was January of 2021. We are now in October of 2025. And we are still hiking every single weekend throughout the year, rain or shine. And I think part of what keeps us hiking together every weekend is we process our week, our emotional toils, our troubles with our relationship, with our family or more. And what we get out of it is this ability to process and support one another and have those emotional needs met outside of our marriage. It takes a lot of burden off our spouses not to have to talk through all the minutiae and details of things that are weighing heavy on us. This way we found a way to be supported and feel fulfilled and not have this expectation that maybe they can't meet for us. And so I hope we continue this tradition for as long as we're physically able to hike on the weekends because it's been so beneficial.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Eli, it sounds like Amanda and her best friend didn't set out to go on these hikes as a way to take pressure off their marriages. But that certainly seems to be one of the benefits that they have experienced. We recently talked with a psychologist, James Cordova, who describes people who need more emotional support and engagement as ferns and those who need less as cacti. And in some ways, understanding whether there's a mismatch between you and your partner might be helpful as a first step in thinking about alternative ways to get the right level of support that you need. What do you think about what Amanda and her friend have done?

ELI FINKEL: I mean, I love it so much, and I love it whether they're hiking near ferns or hiking near cacti or anywhere else, that they're hiking. It's such a wonderful thing, and it's wild how few of us are building activity like that into our everyday lives. I love the idea that you might have what, again, we can call other significant others. Rhaina Cohen, your colleague, has written a terrific book called The Other Significant Others that talks about, well, what if we put friendship in a more primary role in modern life? Yes, having a spouse that you can share things with is one of the great blessings that we have, but having somebody else that you can share stuff with is also a great blessing, and it might be the case for many and probably most of us, that our spouse is better at nurturing us in some ways than in other ways, and there's no reason why we have to settle for just this one partner, and if she's good at it, then great, and if not, well, that's unfortunate for me. There are other people that we can have in our lives that can complement these sorts of experiences, and if you have a second person, it's also somebody that you can use to process things in your marriage in a way that might be difficult to do with your spouse, and furthermore, it's worth considering that sometimes when you are your most bandwidth starved, when you're most exhausted, when the kids are screaming and somebody's out of a job, and now you've heard that there's a cancer diagnosis, you know who else is really bandwidth starved? Your spouse, and so finding somebody else who isn't going through most of the things that you're going with alongside you, who can be there for you for those sorts of conversations, immensely, immensely valuable.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: The types of romantic relationships we have can change over the course of our lives. Teenage relationships are not the same as couples who've been together for decades. We received a message about later in life love from a listener named Ben.

BEN: My lady friend and I are both in our older years after lifelong very satisfying marriages. Now we're both widowed, and we have found each other at this time of our lives. All of the lower level needs of the Maslow hierarchy are already met in terms of your marriage conversation. But we're finding great joy in pursuing the self-actualization, the things that are fun and good for each other. We work hard to please each other as well as to meet our own needs. We do not live together, and we get together every week or two for a day or two or three, in order to enjoy each other's company. It seems to me that this is a good relationship, and it speaks very favorably of the way in which you have described what a good marriage is.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering what the research says about relationships at different life stages, Eli?

ELI FINKEL: The literature on how happy people are in their relationship maps on pretty well to the literature on how happy they are with their lives in general. And it looks like people reach a low point in midlife. I think this is driven in part by what used to be called the sandwich experience, where you've got kids at home and maybe aging parents, those sorts of things. But I have found it fascinating and surprising to discover that people tend to be happier in late life than they are in midlife. And in some ways, that's really surprising. You're dealing with the loss of your friends, often through death. You're dealing with more physical difficulties, including some indignities. And yet, if you look at people's overall satisfaction, it tends to be higher, and that also applies to their relationships. Now, there is a lot of interesting research in the psychology of aging, including by Laura Carstensen at Stanford, that looks at what people tend to prioritize in younger life versus older life. And she observes that, as people get older, they focus more on the pleasurable experiences for now. They're more attentive to things that feel good, and they're less focused on building things for the future, perhaps for self-evident reasons. And so it sounds like what Ben has built with his new partner is just a wonderful relationship, where they're grateful that they have found each other. They both had beautiful lifelong loves before this. They're grateful that they found each other. They're savoring each other for the now, they're focusing on the positive stuff rather than the indignities or unpleasantnesses of aging. And in that sense, I think they're pretty typical.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One thing I noticed in Ben's story is that he and his lady friend, as he calls her, spend time together and enjoy each other's company, but they also spend time apart. As the saying goes, distance makes the heart grow fonder. I'm wondering what having space for ourselves away from our partners might do for our relationships, Eli.

ELI FINKEL: One of the things that's fun about bringing data to bear is, yes, we've got the distance makes the heart grow fonder idea, but we also have the out of sight, out of mind idea. So which one is right and when are they right? Those are things that you sort of need evidence to unpack. One of the things I unpacked in the book, The All or Nothing Marriage, is what are the ways in which we can ask a little less of our partner in ways that both satisfy ourselves independent of our partner, but also serve as something of a release valve for the relationship, is people are choosing to live apart together, right? Sometimes people talk about the idea of being a partners, and this is what Ben is doing with his new partner. And it looks like people are able to do that and achieve a level of fulfillment that is just as high as the people who are living together. Now look, nobody's ever done a study that randomly assigns people to live either together or apart, so I would do the study if we were allowed to do it. So we can't know if there's a causal effect one way or the other, but based on the evidence that we have so far, there's no reason to think people should be frightened of this idea or wary of this idea. And in fact, some of us are more comfortable with intimacy, some of us are a little less comfortable with intimacy, and at least early evidence suggests that the people who benefit the most, the relationships that benefit the most from living apart are those in which at least one of the partners feels a little bit wary of excessive intimacy.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the more controversial topics you mentioned in our first chat was ethical non-monogamy. We heard from many listeners about this. One listener asked that we use his middle name, Christopher. He says that he and his wife found that consensual non-monogamy has benefited their marriage.

CHRISTOPHER: So, we are a couple married 42 years, and we had designed our marriage so that my wife would be able to have consensual relationships with others. When we got married, she was involved with someone, and that continued for a while, and it worked. The reason why we designed it that way was that I didn't really meet her needs. Right from the very beginning, we click on a lot of levels, but sexually, romantically, we were not a good match. So, and it worked.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What do you make of Christopher's story, Eli?

ELI FINKEL: It's not that rare a story. Increasingly, people are receptive to this idea that love might be capacious enough to involve more than two people. I feel compelled to say at the outset here that sometimes you can get like an activist orientation toward non-monogamy that sort of encourages people to do it as the right way or the more evolved way for us to relate. That is not at all my view. My guess is that more than half of people will probably be happier in a monogamous relationship than in a consensually non-monogamous relationship. But the real question I think we're confronting here is what sort of norms or expectations should we have about monogamy or non-monogamy? And I think our society hasn't quite gotten that right. In particular, by the extent to which that is the self-evident default, right? It's like, well, I'm gonna ask a whole bunch of stuff of my spouse, but of course, it's just gonna be the two of us for romantic and sexual contact for the next 60 years. We don't think, wow, that is a huge ask. Am I really gonna ask that of my partner? Is she really gonna ask that of me? And if so, what's it gonna take to make sure that 30, 40, 50 years from now, we're still excited about each other? What does it mean in terms of how playful we are in the bedroom, in terms of how well we take care of ourselves physically? I think because there's such a strong assumption, including a very moralized assumption, that of course lifelong love is only two, we don't engage seriously with the magnitude of the ask. And so what I would encourage everybody to do is to treat it as one of the many things that they should be discussing probably before they get married and perhaps revisiting now and again within their marriage. I do think that anybody listening to this would be justified in asking themselves, okay, fine, but aren't we going to ruin the marriage if we do this? Like isn't this something that people do for individual fulfillment, but surely it can't be good for the relationship, right? Well, there is evidence on this. People have now studied this in a compelling way. Terry Connolly, for example, at the University of Michigan, has some terrific research on consensual nonmonogamy. What she does is she recruits a whole bunch of people, I think like 1,500 people who are in monogamous relationships. These are all man-woman couples. And then amazingly, she recruited 600 additional people who were in consensually nonmonogamous relationships, all of which were involved with somebody of the other gender. And what you can do is you can ask these two groups, how happy are you in the relationship? How committed are you to the relationship? In fact, those measures show no difference at all. That is, nonmonogamous people, if you just look at their relationship with their primary partner, are no less and no more happy than monogamous people. But it gets interesting when you look at things like trust and jealousy. People in nonmonogamous relationships are a little bit more trusting and a little bit less jealous on average than people in monogamous relationships. So I think the best way to conclude this is the difference in overall relationship quality among people who have opted in to monogamy versus opted in to nonmonogamy, the difference is very small. And so I think there's plenty of room to think we have a choice here and this is a conversation we should have to get on the same page.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Now, we also heard from listeners who did not feel the same way as Christopher about ethical nonmonogamy. I want to play a quick note from listener Kendra.

KENDRA: We've watched our friend's marriage disastrously fall apart after they tried this. One partner found his new sexual partner was also better at meeting his emotional and psychological needs too. This has been permanently damaging for the spouse left behind and the kids.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I'm wondering, Eli, given the risks that might be involved in trying something like this, are there questions that a couple should ask, guardrails to put in place if they want to explore nonmonogamous relationships?

ELI FINKEL: Yes, it's a communication is at the top. But even with full communication, the risk is there. So yes, it's true that Christopher's situation is not that rare, but this new situation also is not that rare. There are risks for sure involved in pursuing consensual non-monogamy. One question is, are you setting things up in advance when there isn't a specific situation that's leading to the conversation? Or is it, hey, I'm now really attracted to this other person, can we open up the marriage? The first of those conversations is much easier than the second of those conversations. But also, I think it's important to keep in mind, the question isn't, is non-monogamy good or is non-monogamy bad? It's, is non-monogamy good or bad relative to the alternative? It isn't the case that monogamous relationships are always fine, but sometimes you see problems with non-monogamous relationships. The fact is, there's difficulties and challenges associated with both.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering, since we first talked in 2018, Eli, has your thinking about marriage and the all-or-nothing marriage evolved since we talked?

ELI FINKEL: As I think back to that conversation and to the all-or-nothing marriage, I mostly think we got it right back then. I was writing that book when we had very young kids at home, and we had emerged, I spoke openly about this in the book, we had emerged from a difficult period. I myself had a difficult adjustment to parenthood. We had emerged out of it by the time I was writing the book, but we have continued to emerge out of it in this beautiful way. I think what I would like to tell myself from that era when I was first writing that book is things can continue to get better. That even when you've gone through a difficult time, even if somebody's battling a depression, there's no reason to think that this is forever or that if you're going through a spell right now, where you think, uh-oh, like things are really tough, you don't have to think because they're tough now, they'll be tough always. And I think I'm one example of just, you can really come out the other side of those difficult stretches and just flourish.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In our first conversation, Eli, you told me how you try to keep your connection to your wife, Allison, even in hectic or stressful times. It's been seven years since we had that conversation, so update us. Are there new things that you have come up with to improve the quality of your relationship?

ELI FINKEL: Yes. I mean, the thing that we talked about back then is, you know, I told a story about traveling to Seattle from Chicago to see my childhood best friend and how that had always been something really fun, but now I was doing it with an eight-month-old, and the flight was no fun, and the activities that we did were nothing like the activities we used to do before we had those responsibilities. And I just thought, I need to stop trying to be happy. I mean, again, in retrospect, it was a little bit of postpartum depression on my part. And slowly but surely, we emerged from that. And to revisit the Mount Maslow metaphor, what I realized that day in Seattle was, I needed to descend back down to base camp. This wasn't the time in my life and in my marriage to have the sorts of connection, to be shooting to the top of Maslow's hierarchy in the way that I had been with this amazing woman that I chose to marry. This was a stretch where those efforts I was making, those expectations I was bringing were causing more damage than good. And I thought, I need to stop trying to achieve all that stuff for now. And we descended back down to base camp and we geared back up and we took some time and then slowly but surely, we started ascending together again. And you know what happens? Kids get older, you end up with more time with your spouse. Now, people aren't as exhausted as they were. The kids are more fun, at least from my point of view, than they were when they were in the newborn stage. And yes, we've managed to invest in these sorts of ways that has just been enormously satisfying and would have been, I think, out of reach during that really difficult time and really intense time when the kids were so young.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, I love this mountaineering analogy, Eli, because really what you're saying is that sometimes when there's a storm, the smart thing to do might be, in fact, to hunker down, come back to base camp, retreat, come back 500 feet or even 5,000 feet, and wait for a time to start ascending once again.

ELI FINKEL: That's right. And that metaphor, as you described it, is just perfect because you're not descending forever. That's the thing that I think is hard for us. It was hard for me, right? How do you say, Uh-oh, this isn't fulfilling me. I'm not fulfilling my spouse. We're having this hard time. We need to stop shooting for the top of the summit anymore. While simultaneously keeping in mind this isn't forever. This is something we have to do for now, given the resources we have available, the other expectations on us for now, to send back down to base camp, hunker down against the storm, and then the weather lifts a little bit, maybe sort of peek your head out of the tent and say, huh, maybe it's worth climbing a little bit. Let's see how this goes.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Eli Finkel is a psychologist at Northwestern University. He's the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work. With Paul Eastwick, he's the co-host of Love Factually, a podcast that uses rom-coms and other movies to explore the science of love and relationships. Eli, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.

ELI FINKEL: Thanks so much for having me back.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please think of a few people who would benefit from it. Share it with them, and tell them where they can find Hidden Brain. Many of our listeners find their way to the show based on recommendations from others. I would love it if you would be an ambassador for the show. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you soon.