Why We Get Married, and Should We Still? With Stephanie Coontz
America’s leading historian on marriage, Stephanie Coontz visits the show to talk about her latest look into how the value of marriage has changed over the years, why we’re so interested in the idea of tradwives right now, and what she thinks makes for a strong modern marriage. Plus, she expounds on her joy of mushroom foraging!
Before they get into it, Doree and Elise chat about the hot divorcee summer aesthetic, Doree’s birthday party, and Elise’s very LA weekend.
Photo Credit: Shauna Bittle
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated.
Doree Shafrir (00:10):
Hello and welcome to Forever 35 podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise Hu (00:17):
And I'm Elise Hu and we're just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.
Doree Shafrir (00:20):
And today we have a great guest on the show. Stephanie Coontz, who is I would say the- Leading. Leading expert. The
Elise Hu (00:33):
Leading historian
Doree Shafrir (00:34):
On the history of marriage.
Elise Hu (00:36):
Yeah.
Doree Shafrir (00:37):
And also contemporary marriage. And she has a new book out that we both really enjoyed.
Elise Hu (00:45):
I was preparing for this episode and around that same time I got a newsletter from the feminist writer, Liz Lenz, who famously wrote a memoir about her divorce. And I think it was part of the big wave of divorce memoirs that came out within the last couple of years. And she wrote about how yet again, Bustle or one of these groups, one of these publications is describing this summer as hot divorcee summer. And how being a divorce say doesn't necessarily mean you have had to have been divorced, but it's a certain energy of like, I don't have any cares left to give.
(01:28):
But then it's also kind of like an aesthetic and she gets into that also. Oh, interesting. Yeah. She's like, this is kind of a backlash to the trad wife aesthetic. But she wrote, "But I do worry that replacing an aesthetic for a revolution creates the sense of change without actually doing anything to create change. We still live in a country where it's harder for a 43-year-old woman to get a divorce than it is for a girl under 18 to get married. Women have fewer rights now than they did when I- That's crazy. ... I first wrote this essay. Yeah, because a few summers ago, it was another hot divorce day summer. And then now she's like, things are actually backsliding, which Stephanie Coontz has said too. She had this answer to one of our questions about like, are things better in some ways? Are they worse in some ways?
(02:15):
And she gets into that. So anyway, but we'll get to Stephanie Coontz later in the show.
Doree Shafrir (02:22):
I love having guests on the show who are like a little older, who have never listened to our show before. They're not like regular listeners for Pocket. In fact, she said in our Forever 35 questionnaire, we always ask like, "What's a podcast you listen to regularly?" She was like, "I don't listen to podcasts." But she was like, "Oh my gosh, this was such a great conversation. Thank you so much." So that was really fun. And I just love having these intergenerational guests on. As much as I enjoy talking to fellow middle-aged ladies, it's nice to talk to someone who is our elder with a lot of wisdom.
Elise Hu (03:00):
Yeah. She has such a contextual view of things too. Not only as a historian who studies hundreds of years ago, but also just having lived longer and through second wave feminism and then whatever postmodern feminism came after. So yeah, I thought it was really interesting and she was awesome. So anyway, we're going to get to that. This was like a long tease for Stephanie Coontz. But before we get to that, we should give an update on your birthday for our n-casual chat listeners because we just wrapped up Memorial Day weekend as we're taping this and Doree threw her tennis birthday party.
Doree Shafrir (03:38):
I did. I booked three courts at a local park, invited a bunch of my friends. I said, "You can play tennis or not play tennis. You can just come and hang out or you can also play tennis. We'll play some tennis games and we'll have pizza and cake." I was reflecting on it because one of my friends posted to her Instagram story like, "Tennis, pizza, cake, home by 7:00 PM. This is my kind of party." And I was like, "Oh, I basically just had a kid's birthday. I had a kid's birthday party in the park." Yeah, during
Elise Hu (04:17):
The day. Yeah.
Doree Shafrir (04:19):
With pizza and cake. Where was
Elise Hu (04:21):
The bouncy house?
Doree Shafrir (04:22):
And where was the face painter? Right. I actually contemplated, I was like, "Would it be funny to get a face painter?" But I thought of this the day before and then I was like, "Eh, whatever." But I did think it would be funny if we got a face painter and people got tennis balls on their faces, so maybe next year. But yeah, I was definitely inspired by the kids' birthday parties I have thrown and attended in parks because the big takeaway from those parties is you don't have to over complicate it.
(04:53):
We had some drinks and some snacks and people brought drinks and brought snacks and we got some pizza. Elise brought the cake and then on the tennis courts we played Queen of the Court and then there was also a court, this was also super fun. There were a bunch of kids there. I said, "Bring your kids." And kids brought their tennis rackets including Henry and the kids were playing. So that was really cute. It was really sweet to see the kids playing tennis. I don't know, it was just good vibes. Also, the weather was amazing. It really was. It was low 70s and it was late afternoon so the sun wasn't brutal and it was just the park was also empty. I don't know if it was Memorial Day weekend because usually there's a lot happening at that park. There was no one there. So that was all so great.
(05:45):
It just all worked out. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this was so fun." So yeah.
Elise Hu (05:53):
It was a really great weekend to have stayed in Los Angeles because it was icky in New York. The weather was icky in New York, from what I understand, because my co-director Rufus lives there and they went to the Rockaway Beach. Is that what it is? Yeah. And he was like, "It was kind of gray the whole time." And then on Memorial Day itself, my friends and I just did an impromptu bechange and everybody who could come came. And we just had this long sprawling squad hangout on Venice Beach, a quieter part of Venice Beach. And everybody's kids came and just hung out and Ava was so happy because the UV was nine and she's into tanning. She was like, "I just want to get good tan lines."
Doree Shafrir (06:38):
I
Elise Hu (06:38):
Just read
Doree Shafrir (06:39):
Something about how Gen Z is really into tanning.
Elise Hu (06:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And she still wears some SPF but lower SPF because they really want to get good tan lines. What the heck? Yeah. And it was pretty windy. So people were flying kites and it was a little windy to play volleyball, but we brought the volleyball and we brought Koush, which is another thing that it's like a paddle game with a couch ball. No,
Doree Shafrir (07:07):
It's not like ... Oh, okay. But it's with Acoush, like the Koush from when we were kids?
Elise Hu (07:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's like the little rubber bandball
Doree Shafrir (07:14):
Thing. Yeah. That's so funny.
Elise Hu (07:16):
It's really fun. And we always bring it. We bring that and we bring Bop It on road trips and when we go glamping, we'll get a cabin and don't have any devices so we have to play stuff together so we'll have that. So we have to do things as a family and talk to each other. Yeah. Weird. What's that like? It's rough. But it was really fun. I feel like this past weekend I was just feeling very grateful to live where we live and every once in a while I go on these little reveries about how rad it is to live in LA. And that was one except for the potential chemical leak incident or potential chemical tanker explosion that did not happen. So crisis averted for those who were following my Insta stories where I was getting increasingly panicked about that. Everything is fine.
Doree Shafrir (08:14):
Everything is fine. It all worked out. All right. Well, let's introduce our guest. Elise, do you want to take it away?
Elise Hu (08:23):
Yes. Stephanie Coontz is the director of search and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage: A History: A Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on Marriage Equality. Her new book is called For Better and Worse. It just came out last week. She is a sought after radio and podcast guest. She's published extensively in both academic and popular media from the New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal to the Chronicle of Higher Education. She's also cited by a previous Forever 35 guest, Megan Cain, who wrote a book on being single and she based a lot of her arguments for singlehood on a lot of what Stephanie Coontz has learned about marriage. She was just an awesome guest as we talked about at the top of the show and we can't wait for y'all to hear this conversation.
Doree Shafrir (09:19):
Before we do, just a reminder that you can call or text us at 781-591-0390 and email us at forever35podcast@gmail.com. Our website is forever35podcast.com. We have links there to everything we and our guests mention on the show. Our Instagram is @Forever35Podcast and you can join our Patreon at patreon.com/fore35 if you want to hear more of us. For $5 a month, you get access to our casual chat, which we now do on video if you also want to watch us. We have live casual chats once a quarter. You get access to our community chat on Patreon and more. And at $10 a month, you get ad free episodes and a shout out on the podcast each and every month. And if you want to just join the community but you don't want to commit financially yet, you can join us at the free level and get access to our semi-monthly newsletter where we discuss pod highlights, product reviews, exclusive discounts, giveaways, and additional bonus content.
(10:18):
So head over to patreon.com/forever35 and check it out. And we are going to take a short break and we will be right back with Stephanie.
Elise Hu (10:26):
We'll be right back
Doree Shafrir (10:34):
Welcome to Forever 35. We are really excited to get to talk to you today.
Stephanie Coontz (10:39):
Well, thank you.
Doree Shafrir (10:40):
We start conversations with the same question, which we will now ask you, which is what is something you do for yourself that you would consider self-care?
Stephanie Coontz (10:51):
Foraging for wild mushrooms.
Elise Hu (10:54):
Oh, you're a forager.
Stephanie Coontz (10:56):
Yes, I am a forager. It's the closest I can get to meditation because I can't think about anything else except what's hiding behind this bush and is it a poisonous one or is it not? So that is one of my major forms of self-care.
Doree Shafrir (11:10):
How long does it take to become familiar with the species of mushroom that are poisonous versus not? I'm always very intrigued by this.
Stephanie Coontz (11:19):
Well, I was lucky enough to have a colleague who's one of the best mycologists in the country so I could always and can always take him things that I can't identify, but I have to admit that it's not the science that drives me in this case. So basically I memorize the ones that I must never touch and I memorize the ones that I can gather and the rest are what we call LBMs, little brown mushrooms, and I don't bother with the scientific names.
Elise Hu (11:47):
I love that. Well, we are having you back on because you were out with your latest book on marriage and you set out to explore how the rewards and risks of modern marriage are changing. So the big question is how are they changing and what did you find?
Stephanie Coontz (12:04):
Well, they're changing in a lot of ways and some of them good because it turns out that egalitarianism is really a benefit to marriages, even for people who don't know that it's a benefit. It turns out that the studies show that a marriage in which women and men, heterosexual marriage, we can learn a lot from same-sex marriages in this regard who share housework and childcare. Their love tends to build over time and ones who don't, even if the love started out very strong, it tends to waver a little bit over time. Now these are all averages, right? But one of the lovely things that we are finding out for women like you and me and others who may be listening to this is the ones who really want to have egalitarian relationships. Men are getting much better at accepting it. They're doing much more housework and hands-on childcare.
(13:04):
It's not even yet, but it's come a long, long way. They're no longer threatened when a woman has more education right up and through the '70s. It raised your risk of divorce if you had more education or earned more money than your husband. Now it doesn't. And so there's a lot of things that are good happening between individuals and especially when men take paternity leave, it really increases their understanding of what goes on at home. Even after the paternity leave, they do more housework and childcare and have fewer arguments. They've actually documented that. I don't know what kind of research it took to do that, but they did. But on the other hand, there are all of these other pressures coming down on us, economic pressures, time pressures, work pressures, one of the worst social programs for supporting families in the entire modern world. So all of those are huge challenges and something that I spend a lot of time on in the book because I'm a historian, I guess, is we also have all of these things we've inherited, myths about the past, ideas that were drilled into our head as kids about what girls do and boys do.
(14:25):
And all of these kinds of things, I call them irreworms in the book and they kind of repeat themselves in their head and they get in the way of our being able to figure out how to do the kind of new marriages that we want. And it's important that we cut ourselves some slack, ourselves and our partners. We're trying to do something nobody's ever tried to do before in history. That is to get relationships and marriages that are free from coercion by who you have to marry, who you can't marry, what you have to do in a marriage, rigid gender roles. That's uncharted territory and we're just finding our way. So I think that we have to keep moving forward, but at the same time to recognize that we're going to occasionally take a wrong term in our marriages and we're going to have to backtrack a little bit and get it straight.
Doree Shafrir (15:19):
Stephanie, can I ask if we could just sort of back up a bit and hear about how you became interested in marriage in the first place?
Stephanie Coontz (15:29):
Well, when I was back in a long time ago in the '60s, I was a young historian and people, all the history was about men and wars and stuff like that. So I was really interested in family life and women and integrating blacks and working people and people who had been left out of history. And I was very active in the civil rights movement and in fact, left my PhD unfinished to work against the war in Vietnam. And so finally somebody I had been teaching informal classes on women's history and Black history and I finally got hired at Evergreen State College and then a publisher approached me and said, "Would you do a book on the history of women?" Well, that was in the mid '70s and there were a lot of books coming out with what's been done to women through the ages or what some women have done without it.
(16:32):
So I decided, well, I wanted to bring women and men into interaction and there weren't many places in the workforce or anything. Finally, I said, "Oh, like family." So that's how I started studying family and I really didn't pay a lot of attention to marriage itself. The way that I began to do that was reporters started asking me questions I couldn't answer. So I'd have to say, "Well, wait a minute." Well, it turned out wait's five years and I went back and wrote a whole history of marriage that came out in 2005, I think it was. And then ever since that's really been the thing that has propelled my writing and thinking.
Elise Hu (17:11):
One question about your first point about how things are getting better for women in marriages when it comes to division of labor and that heterosexual marriage is becoming more egalitarian in the aggregate. If things are getting better, what explains then the ambivalence about marriage among young women these days?
Stephanie Coontz (17:35):
It's interesting. I think the ambivalence is not because we don't think marriage is a decent thing. Most people do want to get married or have a marriage-like relationship eventually. It's not that we have lower standards for marriage or lower evaluation, but we both have higher standards for what a marriage involves, how much mutual commitment it involves. And the result is that we're a little hesitant to enter into it. I think one of the most interesting polls I've seen is that young people today are far less likely they were than they were in the past to tell pollsters that they're confident that they'll be an excellent marriage partner. And I think that shows us it's not that they don't want marriage, it's that they have very high standards for what makes a marriage. They worry whether they're up to it, they worry about whether their partner will be up to it.
Elise Hu (18:25):
And the bar is too high.
Stephanie Coontz (18:27):
I don't think it's too high. Listen, I spent a lot of my life spending studying marriages where the bar was really low and you don't want to do that. I mean, just the other day I ran across an interview note from a woman in the 1970s who married in the 60s and the interviewer asked her, "How are you doing?" Because she worked. She said, "Well, my husband doesn't help me. It gets to be pretty hard with five kids." But she says, "This is a lot more than my mom had. I got a man who doesn't drink too much and hardly ever gets violent and any woman with that doesn't have much to complain about. " And that's what she was saying in the 70s. So we've come a long way since then, you have to admit
Elise Hu (19:14):
There's another stat I'd love for you to share with our listeners from your book about how long people used to date before getting married and how long they're dating now before they get married.
Stephanie Coontz (19:28):
Frank Ferstenberg is a sociologist. We don't have exact numbers, but estimated that it was about six months that people went out with each other before they decided to marry. And the oral histories that I've done really go with that. It's like people just was, let's just do it. It's something that you have to do, you do it. If that's a woman and she looks like she'll be a good mom, go for it. And if it's a man and he's earning the kind of salary that at that point you couldn't earn at all, well, then I got a chance at a home of my own, so let's do it. And some of that worked out, but there was a lot of misery in that over the long run. So nowadays people spend a lot more time. They expect they want to know themselves better to make sure they're ready to be the kind of partner.
(20:21):
They want to know their partner better and a lot of marriage promoters think this is a bad thing. They also want to be more economically or an educationally set before they enter into it. And they may not know the reams of research that show what happens to a marriage when people are under economic stress or not sure whether they're going to get a job and what their future's like and if they're going to be able to pay for their kids. They know in practice what it means and what the research shows is that it's a much bigger predictor of bad communication and bad interactions in marriage than childhood of origins issues, like what your parents had a divorce or even how much you really do care about each other. So they're making a sensible decision to say, "I want to wait until we're absolutely sure that we're on the kind of footing that we can give the attention, care and mutual support that people didn't really expect from marriage in the past, but that we think is vital nowadays." And I think that's a good thing, but it is a hard thing, especially in our current economic and political situation.
Doree Shafrir (21:34):
Yeah. Yo brought up something that I wanted to ask you about, which you do talk about in the last couple chapters of the book, which is the differences in class when it comes to marriage. I was hoping you could kind of unpack that a little bit for our listeners. What have you learned in your research and how has that changed over the last few decades?
Stephanie Coontz (21:56):
Well, right up until the '70s, people basically married at about the same rates, whatever their educational levels and their income levels. And now there is just a chasm between the marriage rates and also the chance of divorce if you do marry in terms of low income. So one of the things that just drives me crazy with some of the debates about this is people say, "Well, it's just that people aren't patient anymore." And I point out to them, "No, what we were talking about, it's that they expect more and they have a right to expect for from marriage and as parents than in the past." And they know from tremendous watching other people or maybe their own experience that these kinds of stresses and pressures of jobs that are irregular or unsure and economic stress, it leads to all sorts of bad communication patterns. Sometimes it's so bad that it drives people into behaviors that are stress reducers for them individually like drinking or using drugs, but that are relationship killers so that people are not being dumb.
(23:08):
They're not being too picky to say, "Let's make sure that we've met a certain kind of security bar or economic bar before we start off on this new adventure that will take us places our forefathers and mothers never got to go, but that will take us places only with a lot more work than they had to put in.
Doree Shafrir (23:31):
So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back.
Elise Hu (23:43):
Stephanie, I'm curious what you make of the cultural discourse that's been going on, especially with books released in the last few years about marriage and the value of marriage as an institution. There have been a few books, buzzy books about making the conservative argument that romanticizes male breadwinner marriages, I guess, of the 1950s and that contemporary practices like cohabitating while you're just dating or even just casually dating are sinful or should be suppressed. And then at the other extreme, I've been paying attention to feminist movements that we've seen out of Korea, for example, women who are saying that heterosexual marriage is inherently unfair to women and that we should just give up on the institution completely and these women have. You write that history supports neither of those beliefs. Say more.
Stephanie Coontz (24:42):
Well, first of all, if you go back to why marriage was invented originally, it had less to do with the relationship between the man and the woman with something that I think we often forget. It was a way of expanding your connections to others. And I'd like to say that my son and daughter-in-law, when they got married, instead of her parents giving her away to him, they gave their in- laws, they gave their parents away to each other, trying to build upon that old idea that marriage is a way of expanding your social ties. We know that there have been marriages in the past and there were for thousands of years that were not as oppressive as they got when you got the development of very strong class societies and patriarchal societies. And yes, we have a very long history that we have to overcome on that, but I am cautiously optimistic that we can.
(25:45):
We know that so many of these patterns, for example, the heteropesism seems to me to really neglect how rich the history is about how many alternative ways there are to organize our lives, our relationships, our gender roles. For example, you just go back to the early American history for all of the issues with that and the problems, men were so much more open about their feelings to each other as well as to women. We have these letters that remind me of me as a teenager writing to my girlfriend.
Elise Hu (26:23):
You mean the affection between male friends? Exactly. Yes, yes. Men holding hands with each other. Yes. They weren't scared to quote unquote seem gay or whatever the masculine tropes are.
Stephanie Coontz (26:35):
And to write to each other saying, the way we now think girls write," I miss you. Why haven't you written me this sort of thing? "All of these letters from men. And in their courtships too in the 19th century, men were much more open about their feelings. O line that occurs to me from a letter was, " Where there are not, there is a sort of death, "said one man to his fiance. This is the sort of thing that men would just like, " Oh my gosh, how could they talk about that? "But it was only in the late 19th century that men were told it was unmanly and women wouldn't like you if you were weak that way. And occasionally women have bought into this too. There's that supposedly funny saying that some women say," Well, I like a man who's sensitive as long as he doesn't cry.
(27:30):
"So this is the way we were socialized in ways that really need overcoming and we need to work at overcoming them. But I'm cautiously optimistic that given the real efforts on our part and a little more social support for family life than we get from our current economic and political system, that it will work for us. And in fact, one of the things that I really appreciate about the legalization of same-sex marriage is that they teach us a lot about how to do these things because they also come to marriage with socialization, but because there's two men or two women, they can't say," Well, you do this because you're a woman and I'll do this because I'm a man. "The have to negotiate it and think it through in ways that I think heterosexuals have been very late in coming to.
Doree Shafrir (28:25):
Yeah. Could you also just talk a little bit about the whole recent obsession with trad wives in popular culture and on social media and why you think this is happening just curious about that.
Stephanie Coontz (28:46):
Well, it's interesting that you say that because my feelings about how to deal with it have evolved. My first most popular book was called The Way We Never Were: American Families in the Nostalgia Trap. And I came down pretty hard on idealization of 1950s families with very good reason. I mean, this was a period when it was totally legal to rape your wife, even violently rates of domestic violence were much bigger. I mean, these families are nothing to idealize, but on the other hand, I think that there has been ever since that people have started out looking for egalitarianism and find that it's very hard to attain, especially in today's economy and that some of the things that families face today are worse than the 50s. The problem is they're different than what people assume. It's not the male-female relations or the family forms that we should be missing.
(29:47):
It's the broader trends that we're helping people improve their lives. So I've come to the point where I've come to think of the nostalgia for Families, not so much as, oh, it's all on your heads. You're just imagining that it was better. But as what physicians talk about referred pain, that where you have our brain, my son is a doctor, so he explained that to me, that our brain isn't really good at figuring out exactly where pain originates if it starts in an internal organ. If it starts in your stomach somewhere, you may feel it in the back of your neck. It tells us it's somewhere on the surface of your body. And I think that's a great analogy to think about why people are looking back to the 50s. And looking back to a time where for men at least, wages were going up very, very steadily.
(30:49):
The inequality was going down. Two round economists recently estimated how much more money people would've had today, whatever your low income, you would've had 60 to 70% more income today if the trends in income from the 1945 to 1973 had continued.
Elise Hu (31:12):
Holy
Stephanie Coontz (31:13):
Cow. Yeah. But instead we've seen this incredible increase in wealth and the averages don't tell us how much it hurts us as individuals because what's happened with this huge concentration of wealth at the top, they've become the people who are ... They account for 50% of consumer spending. And so they account for a lot more than 90% of many companies' attention and that's often at our expense. That's why inflation with the things that families used to do, buying homes, going on vacation, going to Disneyland, all have risen at much greater rate than the average rate of inflation, college tuition, medical care, all those things. And so as we start thinking about how can we form a family or trying to, the stresses of it are immense. And then on top of that, there's all the kind of insults that you get from a society where the rich get top priority.
(32:21):
They get to board the airplanes first, they get to talk to a real person first. And we got all these stresses going on. And so I'm beginning to understand why people look around for something, think that something's lost. And unfortunately, there is a whole economic, political, and right-wing religious coalition that doesn't want to talk about the economics and keeps telling them, well, what's wrong is that people have sex before their marriage or they have no-fault divorce. Which by the way, one of the results of no-fault divorce in every state that developed it was domestic violence rates fell dramatically and so did wife's suicide rates. You don't want to go back to that.
Elise Hu (33:09):
So if quote unquote traditional marriage, and you kind of take a hatchet to the idea of traditional marriage again and again in all of your work, but if marriage, heterosexual marriage that was modeled in a very violent period for women in the 1950s is not the answer. And you just explained the attraction of it, at least for certain sectors of our culture. Why do people still seek marriage today? What's the value of it to you as somebody who has studied this?
Stephanie Coontz (33:43):
Well, I'm in a marriage myself, especially at my age, a little older than yours. It's nice to have somebody that I married who respected me and that I respected and that we have this long history of social activism together and of helping each other out. And that's very nice to have when you get to be not 35, but like in your 70s and approaching your 80s. So that's one reason that people want to have it. I mean, you can have a perfectly satisfactory life outside marriage, of course, but it looks like the majority of people do want something akin to marriage, some long-term relationship that, and most of them want it reasonably monogamous and at least consensually that they don't want people non-consensually having experiments. And so marriage for better or worse and worse as the book title said, is what we think of as the way to do that.
(34:55):
And why not? It's just that we need to make sure that people know there are alternatives, that a single people can be extremely happy. Well, one of the secrets, it seems to me that we are learning about what's good about a good marriage and a good single life is not putting all your eggs in the basket of one other person, of really reaching out and having friendship networks and having social networks that aren't particularly deep friendships. I was telling my husband about the research about what some people call consequential strangers, the interactions with people that you'll never be friendly with, you'll never spend time with, but that you see every couple days or you're standing in a line and you have it. And I was telling him about how important those seem to be to people's morale. And fortunately, he's willing to take advice from a female.
(35:51):
So he came back to me a couple of weeks later and he said, "I started talking to people in grocery lines and started talking to the checkout." And it's true. I felt better all day for having done so.
Elise Hu (36:03):
Yeah, that's so funny. There's a bunch of social science research that supports that too, because it's something that Doree and I have actually talked about on our recent episode because I just saw a TED Talk on it. But before we let you go, Stephanie, it's just been so fascinating getting to hear about your work and the decades and decades of research that you've done on this topic. Before we let you go, I'm just curious, what do you feel or what have you found are the greatest predictors of marital satisfaction today in Modern Heart?
Stephanie Coontz (36:35):
Well, I'm not a psychologist and I won't play one on a podcast, I don't know the research on that, but there's enough research and enough personal experience for me to say that mutual respect is absolutely critical and you can love someone without really respecting them. At the most extreme, I love my cat, but I don't particularly respect my cat. And there's a lot of that sort of confusion of getting something from another, being fond of another, and confusing that with really respecting the other. And from my own experience, and I don't have reams of research to back this up, that if you don't find that you just respect somebody's opinion, respect somebody's dedication to their life and respect what they're willing to tell you about yours, including being able to tell you, not like an AI companion, but being able to tell you when you're wrong.
(37:44):
I think that you're missing something really important.
Elise Hu (37:48):
That's a great way to end it. Tell everybody where to find you and where to find your book.
Stephanie Coontz (37:53):
Well, the book is available from all the usual outlets. It's published by Viking Penguin and I live in Olympia, Washington, little bit outside of town and I come from a pioneer family, so we've had a little bit of stability there, although I never came back here until I was an adult, but now we're happily ensconced here.
Elise Hu (38:17):
Very cool. Stephanie Coontz, thank you so much.
Stephanie Coontz (38:20):
Well, thank you.
Doree Shafrir (38:24):
All right. Well, Stephanie was great. She said she was going to listen to our show, so I wonder if she's listening right
Elise Hu (38:32):
Now. Hopefully she listens to this one.
Doree Shafrir (38:34):
Yeah. All right. Well, getting into the intention zone, I think I fulfilled my intention from last week, which was to enjoy myself at my tennis party.
Elise Hu (38:44):
You sure did. You sure did. You know what else
Doree Shafrir (38:46):
I did that I just want to note is I didn't overthink the planning too much.
Elise Hu (38:52):
Good. Do you have a tendency to when you host something?
Doree Shafrir (38:55):
Yeah.
Elise Hu (38:56):
Okay.
Doree Shafrir (38:57):
But I remember you were texting me like, "Do you have this? Do you have that? " And I was like, "No. Yeah. " I was just kind of like, "I don't know. It'll be fun." I'm happy to bring anything.
Elise Hu (39:06):
Yeah.
Doree Shafrir (39:06):
Yeah. I was just like, I got the cake. We're going to order pizza. I'm getting some drinks at Costco. The end, I was just kind of like, it's all good, which is unlike me. So I was proud of myself for that. And then this weekend I have sectionals, yet again, there's always some sectionals going on. Going to San Diego this weekend for sectionals. Again, I have very low expectations. We have eight people going and you need seven per match and we have three matches. So people are going to be playing a lot of tennis and like-
Elise Hu (39:42):
Oh my gosh.
Doree Shafrir (39:44):
I have not been feeling great, so I'm just like, how's this going to
Stephanie Coontz (39:49):
Go?
Doree Shafrir (39:49):
But I'm just going to go and have fun. The weather's supposed to be amazing and I'm just going to be like, "You know what? I'm in San Diego for the weekend to play some tennis." Life could be worse.
Elise Hu (39:59):
And you get to be on your own, right? You're leaving Matt and Henry at home? Yes.
Doree Shafrir (40:03):
Yes.
Elise Hu (40:03):
Oh, see,
Doree Shafrir (40:04):
That's
Elise Hu (40:04):
Like a vacay then.
Doree Shafrir (40:06):
A little toury vacation. Of my teammates booked an Airbnb house nearby near the tennis courts. Lovely. And so we will be staying there.
Elise Hu (40:18):
Love
Doree Shafrir (40:18):
It. Yeah. How about you?
Elise Hu (40:20):
My intention was to ask for more help driving, which I did. And I'm glad I did because both dads were out for half of the week and all of the weekend. And so it took a village and the village showed up in lots of different ways. And the kids showed up. The kids were able to entertain themselves and stay home alone and when I needed to go and get other kids and things like that. So it ended up working out really quite well.
Stephanie Coontz (40:46):
Great.
Elise Hu (40:46):
So praise to the kids. This week I'm going to, I know I've said this before and then I dropped off. I'm going to get back into some strength training. I'm going to take some classes. It's really fallen off because of May, Sember, this particular year, part of the year where there's like 8,000 commitments every day, but I'm going to do it because otherwise I start feeling like I've been in the house all day, like very early COVID periods where I just haven't left the house and I'm still in my soft pants. I didn't even leave the house to drop off a kid today. So maybe the intention is really like leave the house in the morning and not appear only after sundown like a vampire. Yes. Yes. But no, strength training will be the concrete tactic I will take.
Doree Shafrir (41:37):
Amazing. I love that. Well, this is also the episode where we thank our patriot supporters at the spa and sweet level. Elise, I'm going to ask you to read this because I have been coughing. So if you wouldn't mind taking it away.
Elise Hu (41:53):
Thank you to LM, Alvin, Ariel C, Laura Cicone, Sarah Liska, Felicia, Justice Bureau, Jasmine De Jesus, Christie, Caitlin H, Katie, Ashley Taylor, Teresa Anderson, Nicole Gass, Maya, Barbara C, Amy, Amy Schnitzer, Megan, Shelly Lee, Cookie Townsends, Sarah Buzi, Alison Cohen, Melissa McClain, Jackie Leventhal, Fran, Kelsey Wolf Denae, Laura Eddie, Jettel Apte, Valerie Brenu, Julie Daniel, E. Jackson, Alicia, Katherine Burke, Amy Maseko, Liz Raine, JDK, Hannah M, Julia P, Maddie, Marissa, Sarah Bell, Maria, Diana, S-T, Coco Bean, Laura Haddon, Josie H, Nikki Bosser, Juliana Duff, Chelsea Torres, Tiffany G. Olivia Fahey, Elizabeth A. Christine Bass is Jessica Gale, Zulima Lundy, Carolyn Rodriguez, Carrie Golds, Auntie, Katherine Ellingson, Kara Brugman, Sarah H, Sarah Egan, Jess Combin, Jennifer Olson, Jennifer H.S. Eliza Gibson, Jillian Bowman, Brianne Macy, Elizabeth Holland, Katie Jordan, Sarah, M, Blanca, Kate M, Josie Alquist, Tara Todd, Elizabeth Cleary and Monica. Thank you all so much.
Doree Shafrir (43:03):
And just a reminder, Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir, Elise Hu and produced and edited by Samee Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partners, ACAST. Thanks everyone.
Stephanie Coontz (43:15):
Bye.