Thumbnail: Pexels, Photos: Rebecca Lee
Since February is the month of love, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts on love and relationships lately. Although I’m not in a relationship, some of the episodes I’ve stumbled upon surrounding love offered good advice and information that has stuck with me.
“Today, it’s really like a union of people who share so many values,” Stephanie Coontz said. “That’s one of the big challenges of love today because we spent a hundred years trying to get people to see difference as erotic and the source of love. And now, our big challenge is how do we make equality erotic?”
Stephanie Coontz, who guest starred on NPR’s Hidden Brain episode “When Did Marriage Become So Hard?” with the host, Shankar Vedantam. Coontz is historian and author of “Marriage, a History”.
In this podcast episode, they hit on a lot of topics regarding love and marriage, beginning by looking back at the way people viewed marriage prior to the 1970s. They even used classic movie clips to support their statements since film is where a lot of us learn about what love is “supposed” to look like.
There’s one analogy made by the author of “The All Or Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work” and social psychologist at Northwestern University, Eli Finkel, that really stuck with me: think of love and marriage as climbing a mountain.
“One thing that we know when we climb up a big mountain is the views get increasingly gorgeous as you get to the top, but the oxygen gets a little thinner,” Finkel said. “And so, having a successful experience way up there at the top requires that you are able to invest a lot of oxygen—either bring extra oxygen with you on the mountain or invest a lot of time and energy in the marriage to succeed up there.”
He continued using that analogy throughout the podcast and for someone who has never been married, it made a lot of the advice he was giving. His discussion made a lot more sense and really stuck with me.
All in all, with the guests of the show explaining different issues surrounding love and marriage and the different point of view that come with it, not only did I learn a lot about the history and development of love and marriage, I learned what to look out for in future relationships and recommend that anyone, in a relationship or not, give this podcast episode a listen. You’ll learn a lot and won’t be disappointed.