Next Big Idea Transcript: Eric Barker

Below is the the transcript of bestselling author Eric Barker's conversation with guest host Panio Gianopoulos, co-founder of the Next Big Idea Club. Listen to the episode below, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify .

Panio Gianopoulos: Eric, welcome to The Next Big Idea podcast. How are you doing today?

Eric Barker: I'm doing good. It's great to be here, man.

Panio: I loved your book, your new book, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. I'm a big fan of your work. I've been reading your newsletter for years. I read your first book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree. What I really love is your contrarian impulse. You seem to love to give people bad news, or at least you start with bad news. You're just like, wait, wait, this is going to be terrible. But you do, you're very funny about it, even apologetic. It doesn't feel malicious. It's the sort of myth busting quality you have to your work. But I think it's why so many people love it, because you try to find the actual truth behind a lot of these common sense beliefs that aren't necessarily actually accurate. I've got to say, before we get into all these fascinating things that you discovered, how did you get into this kind of writing? Because it's a very specific sort of niche.

Eric: It's weird. I actually started out after college as a screenwriter in Hollywood. So going from fiction to non-fiction is a very big shift because you lose that ability to just make stuff up. But it's funny because I know a lot of other authors in similar genre and they often have scientific or backgrounds or something, they're good with their research. They had to figure out how to tell stories. And for me the issue was exactly the reverse, was I had to get familiar with the research and telling the stories for me is the fun and easy part. So it was a transition, but I don't try and fool anybody that I have a PhD or anything. For me, it's about making it accessible. So I think it's a journey that I'm going on with the reader and I try to make it as fun and conversational as possible.

Panio: It seems like you start from a question or a hypothesis, like I'm going to find out can you judge a book by its cover? That's one of the questions you tackle in your book. And then do you know what you're going to do for research? I'm wondering how structured it is or do you just like, "I know a guy"?

Eric: Luckily, I've been doing my blog, looking at social science research for 13 years now. So especially with the first book, a lot of that was already uploaded into my brain. So when I had the maxims that I was stress testing it was pretty easy for me to go, "Oh, yeah.I remember this study, this was related." With Plays Well with Others, with the new one, it was a bigger challenge. I had some background, but yeah, I did have to blue sky it. And there were challenges as a result of that. Ironically, when I stress testing does love conquer all, well there, the amount of research on love and marriage is astronomical and trying to just whittle that down was a challenge. Meanwhile, testing friend in need is a friend indeed, friendship research is thin. There was not a lot there and I really had to... So one was like trying to strain all of the internet and then the other one was like mining for gold was like, does anybody talk about this? Does anybody care about friends? And so it was very different challenges for each section actually.

Panio: Well, let's jump into friendship because I found that section really interesting. And I agree there's not a lot out there. There's the book by Lydia Denworth, I think on friendship.

Eric: Yes. Yes.

Panio: Because we covered that at The Next Big Idea club a few years ago. And I was surprised by it. And you say right off the back that you share a stat, I love stats. Who doesn't, right? Which is more time with friends boosts smiling the same as an additional $97,000 a year. Now I love me some friends, but I don't know that I love them 100K. That seems like a huge amount. How did they even come to a figure like that?

Eric: Because the issue is that when we think about money, like so much of what we do with money doesn't necessarily directly impact happiness. We get fun things. But having the support, having the emotional connection of friends, that is direct, it's immediate. And the thing about friends, which most people don't know which I was surprised to find out as Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman found, friends make us happier than any other relationship, including spouses. And even within a marriage, the happiness inducing aspect, the most powerful happiness inducing aspect of the marriage is the friendship. So it's like that emotional connection, I hate to get cliche here, but there is an aspect of it really that money can't buy. And as I talk about the book, the irony is that friends really don't get the respect and really get the attention. Especially as we get older and get busier, we don't dedicate enough time to the thing that makes us happier than anything else.

Panio: I was shocked by how significant even essential friendship is because I agree, culturally, it doesn't really come up. And you say a great thing. It's very funny, a little bitter, but it's funny. You say the 30s are the decade where friendships go to die. You gather all your friends for your wedding and then promptly never see them again. And I know from personal experience, it's true. It's very often in your thirties, you start having families and you get pulled into taking care of children and marriages and all that. And then your friends very often get neglected for years. But if it's true, that friendships are absolutely essential to happiness, it seems like this is something as a culture we should maybe highlight and do something about.

Eric: This is the paradox of freedom. I also get into this when I talk about the loneliness community issues is we don't always do what's best for us. We procrastinate. We don't always go to the gym. We don't always eat right, and we don't always do what makes us happiest. Often, we do what's easy, not necessarily what's optimal. And yeah, it's like friends get put by the wayside. If you have a problem with a spouse, you get a marriage therapist, you have a problem with your kids, you get a child therapist. You have a problem with your friend, oh, well. That's not built in, but the irony is the fragility of friendship proves its purity.

The reason why friends make us happier than any other relationship is that it's always voluntary. There's no contract and there's no immediate concrete penalties for not following through, unlike these other relationships. But, on the flip side, that is the reason why friends make us happier than anything else is because it's always voluntary. If they didn't make you happy, you wouldn't be there. If you didn't like them, you wouldn't spend time with them. You can stop liking your kids. You can stop liking your spouse. You can definitely stop liking your boss. But if you stop liking your friends, you don't spend any time with them. So it's this tremendous irony where, because there is nothing there, but your desire and will, that guarantees that it's something that's going to make you happy. Like I said, its fragility proves its purity.

Panio: You talk about maintaining friendships, right? Because it's very easy to neglect a friendship. And I was surprised by the stats on this, because you said to make contact once every two weeks, at least.

Eric: That was a research study by Notre Dame University. They looked at two million phone calls over the span of years. And basically, what they could see was, okay, you're talking to this person six months later, are you talking to this person? And the pattern they found was the people who touched base every two weeks, those were the relationships that were likely to sustain because other research has shown that in seven years, half of close friendships are no longer close friendships. And one of the key things, patterns they found in the data was if you touch base every two weeks, those were the people who kept calling one another over the course of the study.

Panio: Well, that's the funny thing about friendship, is it's so intangible in a way, right? I have a friend that I used to work with 15 years ago. We have not talked in 10 years. Are we still friends? I think so. Maybe not. Maybe they hate me. I don't know. You just don't know until you see them again. And then very often there's that phenomenon of suddenly the friendship's back 100% and you think, why did I wait 10 years to hang out with this guy? He's great.

Eric: That's the most common pushback I hear from people. I have a friend who I don't see for three years and we get together and it's like no time has passed. And I'm like, yeah, that's also survivor bias. You're not talking about the nine friendships where you didn't touch base and now they're gone. And occasionally, you see them on your friend list on Facebook and go, "Whatever happened to Jim?" It's like you have to count those in as well. And so certainly, there are some that sustain the passage of time. There are some smokers who don't get cancer. We need to be a little bit more deliberate about that. But the problem is if we make it too deliberate, then it just becomes another task and it's likely to fall back on.

So what I talk about, because time is one of the critical factors when it comes to friendship, simply because it's a very scarce resource. And therefore it's a powerful signal that you care about someone that you're making time for them. We need to build people into our lives. When you get busy, if you can have something that is consistently on the calendar whether it's a consist lunch, a book club, you go to the gym together, building people into the structure of your life is a really helpful way organically, to maintain a friendship, rather than making it one more thing on your calendar and outlook.

Panio: Yeah. That's good advice. And I think it's also tricky now because with so many people working remotely, you used to have your work friends that you'd get lunch together every Wednesday or something. And now with that gone, you do have to put a little effort into it.

Eric: Well, it's really deceptive. I also talk about this in the love section, is where love just happens to us. It's like you, don't flip a switch and choose to fall in love. It's this immediate thing that happens to you. And that's deceptive in the sense that it feels passive. It feels like I don't. And as we all know, and as the research certainly shows, as time goes on, we need to be proactive. This is true in friendships as well. I've seen a rash of articles online about making friends as an adult, proving that people are struggling with this.

And again, I think it's that same approach where when you're a kid, you're in school, you're in college. It's like you're naturally in this environment with your peers and you're forced, in a way, to connect with them. And then when you get out into the working world, it can be very different. And the pandemic only accelerated that where all of a sudden, what was passive, what just happened to us, we need to put a little elbow grease and little effort into it. And that's a difficult transition. It sets us up that, oh, this is going to be simple, and then we're very surprised when we have to be a little bit more proactive about it.

Panio: When's the last time you made a new friend?

Eric: That's interesting. I don't know if I'm the modal case here because I definitely struggle. That's the attitude I take in the book is that I struggle with these things as much as anyone.

Panio: Yeah. Well, in your defense, it's hard to make friends as an adult. There's always a little bit of awkwardness.

Eric: It is something weird, there's no doubt about that. But one thing that was very reassuring to me was that issue of in the book, I go into Dale Carnegie, which is probably what everybody thinks of when they think of how to make friends. And Carnegie's book is much more about business networking. But most of what he talked about is validated by the research. The only thing he got wrong was he talked about putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing from their perspective. And Nicholas Epley's research shows that we're pretty terrible at that. But that said, Carnegie's stuff is great for the very beginning for making acquaintances and networking. But when you take it to the next level, when you want to make the deep friendships that you and I are talking about, it's like, yeah, it takes time.

And the other thing I talk about is vulnerability. And there is that issue. Like you said, it's awkward. You feel weird, we feel that passivity aspect where it's like you feel like I shouldn't have to put effort in, or then it's not real, or I'm going to look stupid. I'm going to be rejected. And the truth is that in psychology, there's this thing called the beautiful mess effect where it's the fact that we often forgive others a great deal of awkwardness. Yet we hold ourselves to a much higher standard. When someone else flubs something, we actually regard them usually in a warm fashion. Whereas, our fear is that if we do something silly or awkward, we're just immediately going to be exiled to a distant village or put on an ice flow, and we're done. And that's just not the case. We have to realize that generally, people are just as forgiving as we are with those flubs.

And they actually make people human. They make people normal. It's really not that difficult. And that aspect of vulnerability, not only is it nice, not only is it helpful, but it's really powerful because when you talk about the things that you are scared about, when you are a little bit awkward, when you reveal those things, it makes you human. It tells the other person that you feel safe with them, that you trust them. And the research shows the best way to get other people to trust you is to first put the trust in them. So that awkwardness, we really shouldn't fear it as much as we do.

Sure, things happen and we look stupid and those things stand out in our memory like neon signs. However, survivor bias, it's like we forget all the times that we did something silly and it bonded us to other people. And over time, the research shows that small talk creates a decline in friendship quality. When you just talk about the weather with people that you're supposed to be close to, it creates distance. We need to open up. We need to not be afraid to look stupid. We need to be able to do those things. I could go on forever about the power of vulnerability. It's really critical.

Panio: It's a huge thing. And it's funny, I love hearing that fact about how small talk almost degrades the quality of a friendship, because I know that personally, I'm very introverted, so I don't make a lot of friends. But when I do, they're very important to me, those friendships. And I hit a point at which I want the friendships to go deeper, or I sort of don't want to keep going with a friendship. I can feel that within me. And I found that when I make the effort, nine times out of 10, it gets better. Most people don't say like, "Well, hang on. I don't want to talk about my mom or like my childhood or whatever." People want to talk about themselves if they feel like they're not going to be judged. And if you're a good friend, you won't. So most of the time, it ends up turning out very well.

Eric: Absolutely. And that's the thing, is that a lot of people will complain about the quality of their relationships and that they don't feel supported. They do feel lonely and that sucks. But we do have to look and realize it's like, if you're not opening up, if you're not sharing what you're dealing with, what your challenges are, what scares you, how the heck do you expect other people to help you when they don't know what your problems are? So it's this natural thing where, my friends aren't really supporting me. It's like, well, did you tell them that you need help? We need to do that because it's really, really powerful. And what we don't often realize is how negative it can be for us as individuals where loneliness is correlated with pretty much every negative health result that you can possibly imagine.

Doing that research scared the hell out of me, while I'm sitting there in the middle of a pandemic, writing this book by myself. But the thing is, when you're hungry you need to eat. When you're exhausted, you know you need to sleep. But when we don't feel connected to others, that feeling is not as stark. It's not as clear. We can just feel a malaise. We can just feel sad. We can just feel down. It's not as clear what's going on there. And we need to open up to people so that they can assist us. And what you see, Robert Garfield did research at University of Pennsylvania, where this takes its toll on us, is that people who aren't vulnerable with what they're dealing with, their illnesses are prolonged, they're more likely to experience a first heart attack and that heart attack is more likely to be lethal.

It's a lot of stress. John Cacioppo's research on loneliness shows that the elevation in stress hormones is the equivalent of a physical assault. So basically, loneliness is like getting punched in the face. But the irony of it, and Cacioppo called this the paradox of loneliness is that loneliness is, it's basically claxons going off in your head saying, if you're in danger, you're alone, no help is coming. But often the result of feeling lonely is that we actually push people away, we distance ourselves further. And so sometimes we ignore the alarm and the fire alarm and it can actually make things worse. So we do need to deepen those connections, not just make those casual, soft, easy connections.

Panio: And you make the distinction between loneliness and solitude, right? Because loneliness is a feeling. You can feel lonely while surrounded by people.

Eric: Yeah. This was some of the research that blew me away. Again, this was John Cacioppo, where he found that on average, lonely people don't spend any less time with others than non lonely people do. Which at first, I tell people that and they don't believe me. They want to check me for head injuries. But when you think about it, like you said, you can be in the middle of Times Square, you're going to be surrounded by people, but you're not necessarily going to feel connected to them. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. Loneliness is an internal experience. Loneliness isn't merely being proximate to people. Loneliness is how you feel about your relationships. If you have a strong family and great friends and you go on a business trip, you don't feel horribly, despairingly lonely. You might miss them, but you don't feel like this horrible, deep loneliness when you travel, because you know they're there. And that's what it is, it's that knowledge of that connection.

Yet, if you don't feel connected to people, you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely. It's about that meaningful of those connections. And that's why solitude of, Vivek Murthy, surgeon general of the United States said solitude is protective. Solitude is a positive things in terms of our physical and mental health. And again, ostensibly, they're the same thing. Loneliness, you're by yourself, solitude, you're by yourself. But the distinction is that subjective experience is when you are away from people and you feel like nobody is thinking about you, nobody cares about you, that your brain, at its most fundamental level, sees threat. Versus, if you have strong relationships and you take some time to yourself to recharge, that is a total absolute positive. And it's really about our internal states and our perception of the depth and meaningfulness of our relationships.

Panio: There was a stat that I found really alarming early on, where you're talking about loneliness and about Japanese youth not wanting to date because it's essentially too much hassle. And I have to say, that's my fear when I look at technical innovation and robots and AI, where everything becomes customized, right to what we want. And the fundamental thing about people is they're their own people, right? They're not customized to what we want. And so I worry whether we're creating a world for the next generation or the next couple generations where people are unwilling to compromise. And so they elect for a loneliness, but like a tech assisted loneliness.

Eric: Again, it's that issue of, we don't always do what's best, we do what's easy. And that's the danger, is for the vast majority of human existence, we had no choice but to be in communities. And that's why Fay Alberti, a historian at University of York, she found that before the 19th century, loneliness pretty much didn't exist.

Panio: That blew my mind. Loneliness did not exist.

Eric: You can see the word lonely used, but it's merely meant, the word is used as this thing is isolated. But it doesn't have that negative spin on it where it's this terrible thing. It's only in the 19th century where industrial revolution, so many rapid changes going on in the world where all of a sudden, we were able to live apart. Before then, we were always embedded in religions, nations, tribes, communities, and there just wasn't another option. Now, we have the option to live apart. And that aspect of this is easier, that is really dangerous. Robert Putnam, at Harvard did research looking throughout the 20th century about the death of community. You look back to the 1950s and you think about bowling leagues and the elk lodge and all of these things that just seem archaic. And it's like, where did all that go?

And what Putnam found was that it was basically television. It was the advent of TV replaced that. And we replaced those deeper social connections with parasocial relationships. Television characters, that became sort of this replacement. It sort of cannibalized those real relationships. I talk about in 2008, there was a writer strike in Hollywood and a lot of TV shows stopped producing episodes. Researchers studied TV viewers and what they found was this was the emotional equivalent of a breakup. Those were real relationships to these people, and not having their quote, unquote, friends made them feel alone. And now in the 21st century, that's only been accelerated with social media where we're replacing face to face time and community activities with Instagram and Facebook. And I don't want to be one of these doomsayers, who's like, social media is awful and terrible. It's not necessarily, but we only have so much time in the day for socializing. And if we completely replace real friendship connections and real emotional connections with social media, that's like living on a diet of junk food. It's really not as emotionally nutritious to us.

Panio: I've caught myself doing the same thing and I probably shouldn't besmirch podcasts while I'm interviewing someone on a podcast. But I was listening to a podcast and it was one of those podcasts based on a TV show where you've got the actors or creators just talking. And I would tune in every week. And I realized one day I felt pathetic, because I thought, oh my God, these guys, they're friends and I'm just hanging around as if I were their friend.

Eric: I've done the same thing where I've been so busy with all this book stuff and I'm working on some grunt work and I'll put on a podcast, I'm putting on an episode I've already listened to in the background. And I have the same realization where I'm like, is this like some sort of pseudo friendship in some sort of like Philip K Dick novel? I don't think we're realizing that it's like so much of this is due to the fact that we're not... It's great. We have so much more freedom that we're not embedded in groups that inevitably will have social pressures upon us. on the flip side, without that pressure that we evolve to have, we can be lazy and that can have really strong emotional and mental health impacts that again are not immediately apparent to us or at least the causes aren't immediately apparent to us and we just wonder why we feel a little down or we feel this ever present hum of anxiety. And that's what that is.

Panio: Well, let's move on to love because this was a fun one. Love was great. As someone who's been married now for, I should know this number, but I don't, it's been a while. Almost 20 years.

Eric: We can edit this part out. You don't want to get in trouble at home.

Panio: You know what it is? It's been so blissful, I don't even try to quantify it.

Eric: Yeah. See, there you go.

Panio: But I was thrilled, first of all, that right off the bat... First, actually you start with a lot of warnings. Like heads up, I'm going to destroy your worldview of love. But then you talk about how active listening doesn't work. And I love that because I feel like that's a very common piece of advice given by therapists, couples therapists, whomever, "Oh, you need to active, listen, you need to repeat what the person says." And to me, I can't do it with a straight phase because it just sounds so patronizing. And apparently, it doesn't really work unless I guess you're negotiating with a hostage.

Eric: The issue there is that it does work in theory. It's like me saying, "Oh yeah, you can be a UFC heavyweight champion. Just walk into the ring and just knock the guy out. It's that simple." And you're like-

Panio: Don't complicate it.

Eric: You're like, "In theory, that works. But I don't know if I could do that. That other man is very scary." That's the issue is that it works if you can do it. Most people can't do it. Most people, when in those situations, emotions are running high, adrenaline is running high and they can't be that calm and deliberate and non-reactive. It is very successful in therapy situations. And as I talk about at the beginning of the book, hostage negotiations, because you're a third party. You are not the person that the finger is being pointed at. So in that situation, active listening, you don't feel like you're being attacked. Once it's a relationship argument, when it's you, who didn't take out the trash, now all of a sudden, it's very hard to not want to come back over the top and start making defensive accusations or to start criticizing. So it's a great idea, but it's not something most people can realistically accomplish in a relationship discussion.

Panio: One thing you say is traditionally or historically, perceptions or metaphors for love are love is a sickness, from ancient Greece. And it's this very popular metaphor. It's an affliction, almost like a fever, and eventually we burn it off. But you say that it can actually be taken quite literally, that if you look at our brain, when we're in love, in an MRI, it's hard to tell the difference between a loving brain and an OCD brain.

Eric: When you look at people in the heights of new love, it is effectively indistinguishable from mania. And I actually quote Frank Tallis, who is a psychiatrist, who said if you, if you went into a therapist and described your feelings and didn't mention love, you might walk out with a prescription for lithium. By the same token, when you look at people after a breakup, it looks like major depressive episode. And that's surprising. When you look at people under an MRI, it's like you definitely see OCD features. The thing that it most closely resembles is addiction. Love is so tied into the reward system. Looking at an MRI scan of someone who is newly in love and someone who is addicted to amphetamines or opiates, they look almost indistinguishable. Because basically Arthur Aron, who's done a lot of research in this area, basically says that love is a motivation system. In that same way where you and I were just talking about how, especially in the modern era where we're so comfortable and we don't have to have other people to survive and we get lazy and we don't do the things necessary.

Love is there to address that. Love is like, "Okay, you're going to procrastinate. I'm taking the wheel." And that's why love feels like that where it's just this overwhelming feeling and this drive to connect with the other person. But again, the difficulty there lies in over time, typically that mad, passionate love does die down. And we're usually not prepared for that in the context of a long term relationship. We usually have this feeling that whatever's going on is going continue. That's where again, being proactive and deliberate really does play part in all our relationships.

Panio: We're pretty terrible at emotional forecasting.

Eric: Oh, absolutely. We tend to feel like whatever we're feeling is going to continue. We have a cultural script of soulmates and magic and that all feels wonderful. Unfortunately, polls show those people actually struggle more in relationships because that aspect of magical thinking lets you have a passive perspective, and that's really dangerous for relationships over the long haul.

Panio: Well, you make a distinction, right? You say at one point I believe that love is a verb. The idea that falling in love is very easy, it's like contracting an illness, but a good one, a fun one. But staying in love, you can't just sit around the couch. There are things you need to do to maintain closeness, to keep things interesting, stay intimate with each other. I don't just mean physically, I also mean emotionally.

Eric: Yeah. One of the critical things was one study split couples into two cohorts. One went on pleasant dates, one went on exciting dates. And let me tell you, exciting won because there's this principle in psychology called emotional contagion, where whatever environment we're in, those feelings, those emotions that we're experiencing, we're going to associate those Pavlov style with the people around us. So if you're having yet another night of Netflix and pizza, that can get boring and you are probably going to associate that with your partner, as opposed to, if you are going out on fun dates, you're going to concerts, you're going skiing, you're going to roller coasters, you will associate those fun feelings with your partner. A lot of people, we had again, people get busy, dies down, we do less, we're not as proactive. And people feel like, well we did those fun things when we were first dating because we were falling in love. And that's true.

But the reverse is also true. You fell in love because you did those fun, exciting things together. And if you want to sustain it, that needs to be a part of it. Again, that magic soulmates thing can work against us by making us passive, as opposed to realizing we need to generate and sustain those positive feelings, especially as relationship goes on because we don't have that wonderful magic, utter insanity of love, of early love that is driving us crazy and motivating us to do these things. We need to have date nights, but they need to be date nights that are a little bit more exciting and a little more viscerally intoxicating.

Panio: Yeah. And maybe an element of novelty to it as well.

Eric: Absolutely. That is a huge, huge part in the psychology literature, they call it self-expansion. When we feel like we're growing as a person due to this other person, that's really huge, as opposed to the day after day turning into Groundhog Day where it's just the same old thing. That's boring, and as we all know, if I have a problem, of course it's not my fault, it's your fault, so you're doing this. And that's how marriages start to go south versus like saying like, okay, what can we learn together? What we can explore together? It's one of the reasons why travel is so wonderful, so great, why couples do enjoy it so much when they do it is you're learning, you're exploring, there's novelty. You're growing and you're doing it together.

Panio: There's also an element, and you discussed this in the book, where love is increasingly expected to satisfy every aspect of our lives, right? So it used to be that you'd get satisfaction from all these different things. You had a community, maybe you had family close to you, you had your friends. And now, more and more, it's all in the marital relationship it's supposed to bring you spiritual fulfillment, emotional fulfillment, all that stuff. And so this seems like maybe a good opportunity for us to offload some of the stuff onto friendships, right? Because those are helpful, and yet, they're not really doing as much as they could be doing for us.

Eric: Definitely, that's part of it. Our culture has been moving in the direction of marriage as the relationship, and this has basically been proven by happiness studies where over the past few decades, what you've seen is a strengthening of the correlation between marital satisfaction and happiness. Not that you have to be married, but that marital satisfaction has become a bigger and bigger determinant of personal happiness. And so we are all in on marriage because there was a tremendous shift. Historically, marriage was more about getting powerful in-laws. I refer to it as the help me not die marriage. Through most of human history, it was about building connections with powerful families because you don't need marriage to fall in love. You don't need marriage to have children.

You do need marriage to build associations so that you will live and you will thrive. But, marriage was also very restrictive and very dictated. And we didn't have much flexibility. Now, in the modern era, that is completely flipped. And that is produced a very strange shift in marriage over just the past century where what you see now is that fewer people are getting married. The average marriage is not as happy as it was. That's the bad news.

The good news is if you do the work, if you customize your marriage, if you treat it like a do-it-yourself kit, the happiest marriages in the modern era are happier than any marriages that have ever existed. We have that flexibility and freedom to make it whatever we want to be because we don't have the social, religious, cultural pressures to handle it in a specific way. But again, once again, that requires us being a little bit deliberate, proactive, communicating with our partner, figuring out what we want and really treating it systematically in a way, because we can't rely on social pressure, unless you're Amish. If you're Amish, this doesn't count. You don't have to listen to me.

Panio: That should be the subtitle of the book, if you're Amish-

Eric: Exactly. It's like, if you have those cultural pressures, then stability is all but expected. But if you don't have those pressures, you need to create a structure for yourself. The good news is if you're deliberate about that, you can create a custom tailored, perfect marriage that honors what both of you want and can make you happier than any couple has been throughout all of history.

Panio: Is it hard to do that though? It just sounds hard. But in an addition, love is supposed to be this rational thing and does demystifying it turn a partner off or a new partner off?

Eric: Possibly, but we're not really talking about the early stages of love and dating. We're talking about over the course of a marriage. And I think over the course of the marriage, the majority of people start to realize that there's just going to be a level of practicality. You know what I mean? There's going to be a level of things you need to do. The concept of date night is well established enough where I can say it, you know what I mean. Where, at a certain level, we do need to schedule things. Compromises are necessary. There's a level of practicality. You can still have magic. Magic's in the moment, but we do need, in such a busy world, with so many things competing for our attention over a marriage that will hopefully last decades, yeah, you're going to have to build those systems. That can happen organically, it can happen very deliberately. But we need to address these things because if you don't, you're going to end up in a very different structured system, which is therapy and then a different structured system, which is divorce court.

Panio: The end of the book is very ambitious. I have to applaud you for deciding that you are going to answer the question of what is the meaning of life.

Eric: That was definitely something I didn't initially intend. I was just that seemed like too big.

Panio: Five pages, let's knock it out.

Eric: Yeah. I needed a little bit of filler before I ended the book. When we asked the question, what creates a feeling of meaning in life, what makes us feel that there is meaning in our lives? It's very clearly the issue of belonging. This was research by Roy Baumeister, where the issue of belonging, feeling in a group where you're connected, you are supported, this is what produces the feeling of meaning in our minds. And that is the only meaning that is meaningful. That is the only meaning we will ever know. And so that issue of belonging, which sadly in many ways is lacking in the modern world, belonging is critical. That's what makes life meaningful. And we can have it. There are things we can do to get there, definitely.

Panio: What are some ways we can boost a sense of belonging? What comes to mind?

Eric: First and foremost is deepening those relationships, like we talked about with friendship, where time and vulnerability are the critical factors that deepen friendships, really getting to know someone. In the context of love John Gottman, the leading researcher on marriage, calls it love maps, where really getting to know your partner. Now that sounds cliche. I know people have heard that 1,000 times. But I'm not talking about what TV shows they like or how they like their coffee. I'm talking about big, hard questions. Asking your partner, what does marriage mean to you? What is a good husband to you? What does a good wife to you? What does love mean? Those are tough questions and the vast, vast majority of people don't ask them. But getting the answers to those questions, that's like getting answers to the test.

It's like cheating because those answers, if you go deep enough, are going to be very idiosyncratic. They're going to be very personal. And you're going to realize that they don't line up with yours. And that's not a negative thing, but it's probably going to explain a lot of the challenges you've faced to understand that this thing, which doesn't mean much to you, is a huge signal of love to them. And that thing, which means so much to you, they didn't realize how much it meant. You can work together to find something that honors both of your values. But if you don't communicate it, again, these are idiosyncratic elements. They're not written objectively on the wall for everyone. If you don't ask, you'll never know. So it's like that deepening, by getting to know, by asking really hard, idiosyncratic questions is key.

And then the other part is really looking at the issue of communities. There was a 2020 study that lept out to me because they looked at people and they found that basically if you have five friends and they don't know each other, and if you have five friends who do know each other, there's a huge difference there, huge in terms of happiness and support. Because if it's this hub and spoke relationship where you have five friends, but they're not connected, that's great on a one-on-one basis. But once you have friends who all know each other, it starts to become a community. There's a synergy there. And I don't mean that in a usual shallow sort of way. I mean in the sense that they can coordinate. You can work together to throw a party for your friend. If you're feeling down, one friend can say it to another friend and they can do something for you.

There is tremendous added value in communities and groups that even with the same number of people, on a one off basis, can't add. And we really need to think about how to build that back in and not to necessarily do it online in a very shallow, casual way. When you look at the research on online support groups, there are people, a lot of people in online support groups who feel depressed. If you look at the same kinds, whether it's for breast cancer or prostate cancer, whatever, those groups face to face, depression levels drop off huge. There's something to that really deep seated connection as opposed to posting on a forum or just sending a direct message.

So really going deep with time and vulnerability with friends, love maps, asking those tough questions with romantic partners and starting to go from individual friends to community. These are all things we can do to really deepen all of our relationships and get to that meaningful feeling of belonging.

Panio: Those are fantastic suggestions. And you include in the book, a link to a series of questions that you can ask. It doesn't have to be a loved one, but why not? And I tried that, actually last night at the dinner table. I'm talking to Eric tomorrow about it, let's try it out, see how it goes. And so I tried a bunch of the questions with my wife and my son was there. And I have to say, he's 12, almost 13. So he is not particularly forthcoming right now. And he opened up more in this one conversation after dinner than in a year. I couldn't believe it. In the beginning he was goofy and joking around, but then he got really sincere about it.

Eric: First and foremost, I cannot tell you how happy I am that you did that. That really warms my heart. This is worked by Arthur Aron, who, if you look at the majority of the research, I think Jeff Hall did most of the research showing how long it takes to make a friend. And it's like dozens of hours or for best friends, it's like hundreds of hours. And Arthur Aron did this research, that list of questions you're talking about, and he was able to make people feel like lifelong friends in 45 minutes. And it's staggering, for both friendships and also for romantic relationships. It was extremely powerful to just have people really talking about these things we don't talk about. And some of the questions aren't super, utterly personal or embarrassing. But just to really give your opinion and perspective and your feelings. Not only has it been powerful in terms of its academic research, yada yada, but when Arthur Aron was first putting these questions together, the two research assistants who were working on the project with him actually fell in love and got married.

Panio: That's so great. You can see how it happens because the questions, as you go along, some of them really seem like, who would you have for over for dinner? Just basic questions, but they go deep and then they also go a little more shallow. But they are a way of really expressing curiosity. And you usually only do that when you first meet someone. So it's a way to revitalize a relationship, I think, based on having done it once. But still, I was pretty impressed.

Eric: That's the thing, like you just said, is that very often we have this phase early on in any relationship of getting to know someone where we learn so much. And then we base the further years on utter assumption and people change. We all change to some degree. Our fundamental personalities may not change as much, but our preferences, our ideas, our perspectives, and certainly our feelings can change day to day, or for me, minute to minute, but we don't need to talk about that. And people might think, some of these questions or who would you have for dinner? But still, underneath it shows what does this person value? What are their priorities? What are their values? What are their beliefs? What do they want more than anything? You start to see, especially over the course of more and more questions, you start to see patterns. You start to see deeper understanding that you just don't get by typical interactions, like going to Starbucks.

Panio: Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about so many fascinating topics. I feel like I touched on maybe 2% of all the amazing things you share in your book. Thanks so much for being here.

Eric: It was great. Thank you.