Speaking of Psychology: Making love last and dating in the digital age, with Benjamin Karney, PhD

Love. We all want it but sustaining that spark can be difficult in our hectic world, especially with life stressors beyond our control. How do we find love and keep the passion alive throughout the years? Relationship expert Benjamin Karney, PhD, from the UCLA Marriage Lab shares valuable insights.

Benjamin Karney, PhD, is a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, co-director of the UCLA Marriage Lab and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. He is an expert on interpersonal relationships, especially marriage, and has done extensive research on how relationship processes and interactions are constrained or enhanced by the contexts in which they take place.

Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Benjamin Karney, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-director of the UCLA Marriage Lab. Dr. Karney is a leading scholar of social relationships and marriage, who studies change and stability in intimate relationships, with a particular emphasis on minority populations, including low-income couples and military families. Welcome, Dr. Karney.

Benjamin Karney: Oh, thanks for having me.

Kaitlin Luna: Happy to have you here today. So, you're a co-author of a study that was recently published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined what's known as “demand withdraw behavior” and so to summarize that, that means one partner in a relationship asks the other to change something and the partner who's asked to make that change basically shuts down and withdraws. And in this study, you looked at how that behavior is impacted based a bit impacts the couple's relationship satisfaction based on their income levels. So, can you explain what you found?

Benjamin Karney: Sure. What we were building off of is an existing literature on the negative implications of the demand withdrawal pattern. So, there's been a lot of research on marriage that shows that when one partner seeks change and the other partner is invested in the status quo, you get this negative cycle where the person who wants change has to turn up the volume and ask more and ask more and the person who loves the status quo, which is often the male partner, but not always, has to withdraw to maintain this status quo and then that means that the person who wants change has to get louder and louder. The person who withdraws has to get worse and worse and a lot of research that's been done shows that this pattern has negative implications for marriage.

But couples that fall into this sort of negative cycle of demanding and withdrawing experience -- lower marital satisfaction, experienced a client and marital satisfaction, experience higher rates of divorce. So, that's the conventional wisdom.

The limits, the problem with that conventional wisdom is that all of that research and I mean all of it, has been conducted on middle-class or more affluent, mostly white college-educated couples.

Kaitlin Luna: Okay.

Benjamin Karney: So, the advice that's available for all couples is based on research on a very narrow range of couples.

And the assumption is well, demand withdraw is going to be equally bad for everybody. So it doesn't matter that we actually have never studied it in anyone except for a bunch of college-educated white couples.

Our work questions that assumption and says well, what if we think about couples that are not affluent that might not have gone to college, that might not have the same options that affluent college-educated couples have.

What were the implications of that cycle in that other context and what we were thinking is that what makes demand withdraw so negative for affluent couples?

Is the presumption, the implicit assumption that people can change things if they want to in their lives. So, if I'm asking you for change, I'm saying you could change if you wanted to and so you're not wanting to, you're not changing means you don't want to which means baby don't love me, you don't care about me.

Kaitlin Luna: Right.

Benjamin Karney: In non-affluent couples – in, in couples that might be poor or disadvantaged, that assumption is true. You can't assume that people who don't change would, don't change because they don't want to change. Couples that don't have resources might not be able to change.

So, let's say I'm a spouse and I'm asking my partner hey, you know you should make more money. You should get a better job. You should work harder for this family. Well, if I'm an affluent couple, I'm like well your failure to do so means you don't care enough. But if I'm a poor couple your feeling to do so might mean that you can't. I might be asking for something that you cannot do.

So, for a poor couple withdrawing in the face of that kind of demand might actually be adaptive. That was the idea.

Kaitlin Luna: And adaptive meaning?

Benjamin Karney: It might actually help the relationship, that might be the best available way of dealing with your demand would be to withdraw because I can't address it any other way.

Kaitlin Luna: Okay.

Benjamin Karney: So, we tested it. We were one of them, I think, the first study ever that got a diverse set of couples and actually used observational data on poor and affluent couples. Most observational research on marriage took place only with the affluent couples.

But, we had a diverse, we went out of our way to sample couples in low-income neighborhoods and couples that were more affluent. So, we had a range of couples and we videotape talking about problems and we identified the demand withdrawal pattern and here's what we showed. We showed this in two different samples -- that the couples who were more affluent, the more they did this demand withdraw cycle, the worse off they were.

But the couples who were less affluent, the more that it demand-withdraw, the better off they were. Demand -withdraw, that every advice column says don't do this. You know, don't fall you don't allow yourself to fall into the cycle. That advice would have been bad advice for the low-income couples. The poorest couples in our sample actually benefited from engaging in a demand-withdraw pattern and so that's the news here, that and the broader lesson is the advice that we give to couples has to be tailored to their circumstances. The same advice that applies to couples that have a lot of resources might not apply -- it might even be counterproductive for couples that do, that don't have a lot of resources and that's what we found.

Kaitlin Luna: And a lot of your research as I mentioned when I was introducing you does include couple, you know, minority populations, I would say and not necessary, racial, ethnic minorities. But, income minorities, military families. So, why do you think it's important to include such a diverse sample in your research? Can you explain your commitment to that inclusivity?

Benjamin Karney: Absolutely. Um, there’s, there's two ways about it. I mean for me personally, it's, a sort of an ideology that says science has not done a good job of representing the broader population or diverse populations.

It's easy for a scientist and you know, I have empathy for social science, which is a hard thing to do. To try to make it a little easier by studying conveniently available samples – cause boy, science is hard, so at the least I can do is study an easy sample again. Problem is that the easiest sample to get is white people, is people hang out around universities who tend to go to college.

It's a lot of extra expense. An extra effort if I want to try to find people who are different than that who are somewhere else. It's only okay to look at convenient samples if the conclusions of that research apply broadly to everybody. Here's the problem. They don't. So, my thought is that to be a good scientist, you actually have to directly examine whether your findings generalize to diverse populations.

And now there's a political reason to do this, as well or a policy-based reason, especially for me, a family researcher. And this is about, about 15 years ago at the early 2000s, there were policies put into place by our federal government to try to promote low income families and promote the health of low-income families. And this was known as the Healthy Marriage Initiative and it was developed in the second Bush administration to -- with a very noble goal, let's help poor families that are struggling.

The question is what kind of help was offered and the answer is the help that was offered was help based on the research. Again, very admirable. Only promised that research had only been conduct on affluent, white middle-class couples.

So, millions of dollars -- what I mean is hundreds of millions of dollars. What I really mean is almost a billion dollars, was spent over the next ten years on programs to help low-income families based on research on high-income families.

You can imagine what might, what the risk is for that is that the advice and all that money got spent on programs that proved ineffective. So, the problem so there's real consequences, like a billion dollars worth of consequences of not knowing what's really going on in those low-income couples. That is what motivates my commitment to studying the couples that have a good study.

Kaitlin Luna: Mmm-hmm. And going back to the results of that other study, is in those low-income couples, is too much withdraw-demand behavior unhealthy? Did you exceed? I know you believe the study was over eighteen months, correct, the period of time it was?

Benjamin Karney: Again, there were two different samples there and we found the same general pattern in both. We did not see what, what you're suggesting is a curvilinear effect -- an effect that they're a little bit of demand withdrawal might be good for those couples but too much would be bad. We didn't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not there. It just means that one of the things is true in that in both of these samples we were studying younger couples and it's quite possible that the couples that we're seeing weren't the most distressed couples. It might be that, that if you're really studying maybe couples have been together longer or couples that were really struggling with distress, that at the end the extremes demand-withdraw might be bad or you know, too much withdrawal might be bad for a lot of couples.

But, we didn't see it. In the younger couples, the couples who were still together, who were moderately satisfied and committed to each other, we saw that a modest level of the demand withdraw pattern was okay.

By the way, to be clear, there's an effect where we looked at it there's an effect of withdrawal. Withdrawal generally isn't a great thing, but withdrawal in the face of demand turned out to be an adaptive thing for the low-income couples only.

Kaitlin Luna: Sort of giving that partner who's withdrawing a chance, like save face if you will, as you say maybe not face the reality the you know the very basic realities they're dealing with.

Benjamin Karney: It's beautifully said. That's beautifully said. Action in a condition where you cannot, your face of the demand that you cannot meet, withdrawal might be the best of a bad set of options. Think of what the other options are disappointing you directly or denying your demand or confronting you or getting mad or getting defensive?

If those are your options, withdrawal start to look better.

Kaitlin Luna: Right, that makes a lot of sense and you mentioned also to in the bottom of the study -- you know, the end of it usually concludes saying where future research could go and you did note that the future research could possibly be on the same-sex couples or could be on older couples to see how it would play out in different, you know, maybe not necessarily from the UCLA Marriage Lab, from other researchers.

Benjamin Karney: Exactly. Our habit and our expertise is on the earlier years of marriage. And in the same way that I very reluctant to generalize to diverse couples from the only, from the couple that have been studied, I would be reluctant to generalize from what I know about the early years of marriage to studying the later years of marriage.

You could easily imagine that demanding the demands, the meaning of demand and the meaning of withdraw might evolve over the course of relationship. Couples have been together 25-30 years, what does it mean to withdraw in the face of a demand then? If the demand is something like, oh yeah, I've heard this hundreds of times and it's not going to change, that my withdrawal might be interpreted differently, it might have different implications and that's a future direction that we pointed out at that paper.

Kaitlin Luna: So, what can couples do with this information? So, they have this study saying that you know, sometimes this behavior is helpful, sometimes it's not helpful. But, what can as the average person in a relationship reading this, what might they take away from it in their own lives?

Benjamin Karney: That there are implications of this work for couples, which is, but I think the strongest implications of this work are for policy makers. I think the real audience for this paper isn't couples themselves, but policy makers because for too long policy makers have said again, admirably, let's find the research and base our policy on the research.

Unfortunately, the question they haven't asked is, is there available research that applies to the population we want to target? So, policy makers, the audience for this paper is to say to policy makers you can't assume that a program that might work in an affluent couple, a good affluent population is going to work in a low-income population. That's really the lesson of this. So and the implication is if I as a policymaker want to improve or target a particular population, I need to research this explicit of the population because this paper shows that relationships might function quite differently in those two different contexts.

So, I think that's really the primary audience and the primary value of this paper for making the world, you know, a better place is that we might have hopefully be able to start developing policies that are more targeted and based on more specific research that acknowledges the real differences in the way these intimate relationships play out at different levels of socioeconomic status.

Kaitlin Luna: Okay great. And moving on to your general research with The Marriage Lab -- how do you advise couples to deal with the inevitable conflicts that come up throughout a relationship?

Benjamin Karney: So right, a big issue and that's just true in all the couples we studied – low-income, middle income and high income, is conflict. Now the way social psych, I’m a social psychologist -- the way social psychologists define conflict, it really, generally is anytime that my pursuit of my goals gets in the way of your pursuit of your goals.

So, whenever that happens we've got a conflict. And if you define conflict that way, it follows that conflict’s inevitable. That's always going to become. We're always getting in each other's way and the closer we are, the more we get in each other's way.

Think about, you know, dancing. If the closer we are, the more we're going to separate each other's toes.

Kaitlin Luna: That's a good analogy.

Benjamin Karney: So, the issue in relationships isn't why do we have conflict, because conflict is part of the game. We’re not going to want the same thing at the same time, all the time. We're going to have different desires for when to be on the couch and how often have sex and what do we have for dinner and whether what time we have kids and all of that.

The issue for couples is how, what do we do when we hit those conflicts? What do we do when we encounter those conflicts? And our research has talked a lot about what do the what a couples do that makes it makes those couples -- makes those conflicts easier to manage and what do couples do that makes them harder to manage?

So, and there's a lot on this you know we could go on and on, but there's one big issue that's come up is there are different structures of conflict and we distinguish between a vertical conflicts and horizontal conflicts.

Kaitlin Luna: Okay.

Benjamin Karney: What's the difference? A vertical conflict is a conflict where one side is objectively right, and the other side is objectively wrong. Let me give an example. If you and I start arguing about what the capital of Portugal is -- I actually don't know what the capital of Portugal is. But, let's assume that we disagreed about it -- one of us might be right. The other one would be just wrong. And we could discuss it until we convinced each other like this is the right answer, that's the wrong answer.

Now the problem with vertical conflicts is they were almost never in them. Our conflicts are not typically vertical conflicts. The comforts of relationship partners have are typically horizontal conflicts. And a horizontal conflict is a difference in values or preferences, where there isn't an objectively right or wrong answer -- where both sides are valid.

Here's an example of a horizontal conflict. Let's go to dinner. I want to go to Chinese, you want to go to Italian.

Okay, that's a conflict. We want different things, but you're not wrong, it's not wrong to want Italian, you know Chinese objectively better, it's just we want different things.

Almost all conflicts, our horizontal conflicts and relationships, but people approach them as if they’re vertical conflicts. So, if couples disagree and you know, what religion should we raise our kids? You know, one person's like well, my religion’s right and yours is wrong and maybe if I see I think that I'm right and you're wrong -- how often should we have sex -- you know, what's the most appropriate time?

Like well, we should have sex the amount that I want it and you're wrong to want it your amount. You're like weird is four too much or too little, like that's wrong.

When I think I'm in a vertical conflict, I'm going try to debate you. I'm going try to convince you that you're wrong. I'm going to try to instruct you but teach you none of that works.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it's not going to get you anywhere.

Benjamin Karney: It's not going to get you anywhere. Nobody wants to be convinced by their partner or debated by their partner or instructed by their partner.

And yet if I think that there's a right answer and I've got it, that's what it leads me to do.

So, the advice that we often give couples is remember that you're in a horizontal conflict. Remember that you can disagree, and both sides are still valid. You just want what you want your partner wants something different. If you start from there, now you're in a negotiation. If you start from there, you're not in a debate but you're now just going okay we want you what now we're going to be compromised. Can we take turns?

You still might not get what you both want, but it feels a lot better to start from a position that both of our positions are valid. And that's what thinking about horizontal conflicts does. So, that's like one thing that couples can do to address the inevitable conflicts.

Kaitlin Luna: That kind of sounds like politics to I guess even that could be it really. It's most likely a horizontal conflict and not a vertical kind, even though we try to paint it as a vertical conflict. I know we're going off in a different territory, but soon as you said that that's immediately what I thought I was like. Is it really one side, right or wrong it's more so different values and how do you compromise, so.

Benjamin Karney: Absolutely. Now, it's a little off the topic of couples it's not but there are social psychologists who've been studying the deep structure of political conflict.

And, of course, it is a values discussion that the two sides are having. One side says you know the most important value is, let's say equality and another side says quality. I'm not against equality but the most important value is security.

You're not wrong to like security. I'm not wrong to value equality. We're just valuing different, we’re prioritizing different things, but that's not how it -- that's not how it plays out in the political realm. Not that we want different things how are we going to negotiate this? Plays out as I'm right and you are evil Satan.

The same thing happens in couples -- bring it back.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah bring you back to the relationships but there's a lot of parallels. I mean, it's human interaction.

Benjamin Karney: An unhappy couple, they don't just say oh we want different things. The unhappy couples say why do you want -- how dare you want what you want?

You're wrong and mean and malevolent for wanting something different than what I want – which, that is not a road toward compromise. That's not a road toward connection. Thinking about it as differences of values allows you to say, oh I'm not going to debate you, I'm not trying to convince you. Let's just negotiate, which always feels better even though it's still hard.

Kaitlin Luna: Is this advice you give to couples to how to stay together for the long haul -- for a long period of time is - how to navigate these, these conflicts and to see them in a different light?

Benjamin Karney I mean, yes. Now generally, we're, you know, my lab is a research lab. I'm a social psychologist, not a clinical psychologist. I'm not really in the advice business.

That said, I do research that I think matters for people and I think has implications for how we live our lives. So, you know we always give the advice with a very light, a light touch because it's basically saying this is an implication of the observations we've made in our lab.

A second observation we've made in our lab around conflict all the time has to do with the psychological framing of the conflict. And it is, you can frame a discussion with your partner or even a disagreement with your partner as a specific problem or a global problem and a lot of times we have flexibility in how we do that. And so, you know if we're arguing about the toilet seat, it could be I want it raised and you want it lowered. Or it could be I think that I've asked for something and you don't care enough to give it to me. So, the fact that you aren't lowering the toilet seat is actually a sign that you don't love me. You don't care about me. You're not paying attention to me.

Yeah well, that second one is more global right and it's a lot harder a problem to solve.

Kaitlin Luna: Right, it's not a simple thing. It's applied to a much larger issue.

Benjamin Karney: Exactly. The happier couples, the couples that manage conflict more effectively are the couples that keep it specific -- a dishwasher problem is a dishwasher problem. I'm not going to link this to -- I'm not going to say that the problem is, you're a selfish bastard because how am I going to solve that one? Let's just focus on the dishwasher.

So, another piece of advice that sort of comes out of this work is the more that you can keep your specific disagreements specific, the better for your relationship.

So, containing the disagreements -- containing conflict is a good skill to practice.

Kaitlin Luna: And shifting gears a bit, but you also have studied the health in relationships. Not health of the relationship but being healthy together as a couple. And you and your co-director wrote a book “Love Me Slender,” which is very cute play on words, but he explained the importance of for couples being healthy and how that helps a relationship. I mean where is that correlation?

Benjamin Karney: Sure, that's so that's a book my co-director and collaborator is a guy named Tom Bradbury, who's a clinical psychologist at UCLA and Tom and I wrote this book several years ago called “Love Me Slender” and it came out of work that we had done on how couples support each other and we'd studied for years what makes couples more or less effective at supporting each other's goals.

And it wasn't until some years later that we asked hey, what are those goals? What are they supporting each other and doing? So, we went back to we had you know thousands of video tapes and we went back and said in those discussions where they're given an opportunity to support each other, what are they supporting each other with?

And what we found out is that over half of the couples we're asking each other for support about one issue and that was health and fitness, a diet and weight. In other words, their bodies.

Couples, when they look to each other for support, half the time are saying I want you to help me be healthier. Either to lose weight or to eat better or to go to the gym more. So, we looked at those tapes and we said are couples doing a good job and helping each other do this thing if they really want help with?

And what we noticed in the tapes was on one hand all these couples -- we tend to study younger couples who are pretty happy. They're committed to each other.

These couples wanted to help each other. Like they wanted to, you look at me. You're like, I want to be healthy and like, oh my god, I'm committed to you. We're going to be married for years. I want you to be healthier. I want to help you with your thing.

And yet it turned out to be a very hard thing to do -- providing effective support around health turned out to be fraught with difficulty.

Let me give an example. If I say to you, do you think I look fat? Do you think I need to go to the gym? What's the helpful response?

Kaitlin Luna: No, you look great. No, you’re fine. Yeah.

Benjamin Karney: No, I don't go to the gym. I don't get healthier. Here's another option. Yeah, you do – you are gaining some weight. You should go to the gym. Oh yeah, how does that feel? It’s tough.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it’s tough.

Benjamin Karney: So, that's why we wrote the book. We're like, oh man, it's not easy. Even the couples would love each other, it's not easy.

So, we started really looking into it and what came out of the where's a couple big insights and one is health is not individual. If you're in a relationship, there's no such thing as individual health. There's no such thing as so I'm just going to be healthier because so much of our lives are interdependent.

You know, if you have a spouse or a co, if you live with somebody, how many kitchens does the average house have? A house, there's lots of bathrooms, only one kitchen. So, you're going to be eating from the same fridge. So, there's no way that you could just say, oh I'm just going to have my fridge over here you have your fridge over here, that's just not how couples work.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah and cooking meals and you know, going to the grocery store and everything, yeah.

Benjamin Karney: Absolutely. These are social events. These are and so when somebody says I want to eat differently, it affects their partner. And yet that's not how diet books are written. That's not how, how books are written. Diet books are written as if you make a change. You can't make a change that doesn't affect your partner.

So, you know once you acknowledge that, you're like wait a minute, I'm not going to be successful unless my partner's part of it. And that's a big part of the book.

Another thing that we pointed out is that providing support is authority because people want help, but they don't want bad help. And there's lots of help that is the kind of help we all can do without as my childhood book said.

So, in the book we have all sorts of examples from our tapes of couples that are trying to be helpful and kind of failing and you know one way is it's exactly what you came up with, which is no honey, your beautiful. You don't need to change a thing. Aren't, aren't I being loving? And I am being loving, but I'm not being helpful.

Kaitlin Luna: Yes.

Benjamin Karney: So, you know we talked about how you can thread that needle and say, hey, I love you, but did you say you want to do something? Well if that's what you want to do, I'm going to help you. Not because I think you need to change, but because I hear you saying that you think you need to change and I'm validating your goal. And we've seen couples do that. The example that we talked about in the book is a wife who says to the husband -- and she says it with real sadness, I feel bad about my body and I don't feel attractive and he says, oh, that's a big problem. It's a huge problem that you don't see the beautiful woman that I see when I look at you. That's terrible. What can we do about that together? How can we work on this problem?

So, that's a real deft move that he did. He was able to say that's a serious problem. I'm totally on board with helping you solve that problem. At the same time, they were saying, I don't share the opinion, I don't. It's not a problem for me and that's skillful. And so, we wrote the book to sort of try to articulate that skill and share it with others. That's what that book was about.

Kaitlin Luna: Great and so switching gears to dating. You know, many people are looking for love on apps today, like Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, and you and I spoke a bit about this and you said that how we’re dating has changed. So, we're not maybe necessarily meeting someone at a bar or at work as often. Perhaps we're using apps, but you said Howard hangs changed but the actual dating and dating actions and dating itself has not changed. Can you explain that?

Benjamin Karney: Sure.

Kaitlin Luna: This seems like, I think it would people to say oh it's totally different now than it was 20 years ago.

Benjamin Karney: You know, it's different. You could focus on continuity and you could focus on change and there's a lot that's changing and there's a lot that staying the same. So, what's changing? So as to where as technology another what's changing about in the domain of how do people find intimate partners? This is of interest to us. We study intimacy, so we're interested in how do people find intimate partners?

And clearly, the technology available to do that is changing and it's changing a lot, whereas before to find it 20 years ago, 25 years ago before we had smartphones if you want to find into a partner you had to go somewhere where people were likely to be, talked to a lot of people and hope that you find the available people.

But, nobody is wearing a t-shirt saying I'm available.

Kaitlin Luna: Some people might.

Benjamin Karney: Tell you they might and good for those. Yes, but for the most part they worked. You'd have to sort of like to say hey, hi are you interested and like no, I'm gay -- no I'm married look at my ring or whatever.

But now with apps you have a way of identifying people who are definitely available and local and willing to talk all before you get in the room. That's amazingly convenient. Like that's, that's, for some people life-altering.

So, if you were out at a job or a circumstance where you meet a lot of people, maybe it doesn't make that much difference. But, if you're a modern person that works a lot of long hours, doesn't meet how many people at work, but you want to meet someone socially, how do you do it?

You know, the old advice is to join a club and that's still good advice. But now there's a new way which is I can actually go online, and multiple apps will give me a long list of people who are interested in dating me who are relatively my age and who are within a short drive of my house. That’s astonishing.

It’s as astonishing as the fact that I can order on Amazon something in the morning and it will be delivered to my house at night if I live in a major city. So, this is incredible -- Earth-shattering. The convenience of it, that's the good news. The bad news is that some things haven't changed and the establishing of romantic chemistry, well that's not anything. That hasn't changed at all.

And we haven't discovered any magic bullets for that. And now, you know, there was a period where the dating apps were promising a magic bullet that didn't really exist. You had dating apps like chemistry.com and harmony.com that were advertising very heavily with the promise that they had a magic algorithm that could select partners from the pool better than you could by yourself. That they would say, we’re going to ask you some questions, do a magic mathematical equation and spit out people that you are guaranteed or at least have a high likelihood of matching with. That turned out to be snake oil that has now been very well established to be bunk.

But it was a persuasive idea. It was an appealing idea. Lots of people paid a lot of money for it. And the reason they paid a lot of money for it is that there's something compelling about the idea that if I give you a list of what I want in a partner, I want someone who votes like me, who likes Chinese food, who enjoys watching HBO limited series and you know, likes modern jazz.

And if I find someone like that, great. I'm probably going to like that person. That assumption turns out to be false.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, you said that it doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit it off just because you have the same interests.

Benjamin Karney: At all. Yeah, it doesn't and the reason it doesn't is that we have thousands of interests and anyone you meet if it's not that if I share the right interests with you, I'm going to like you. It's the opposite. If I like you, we’ll gravitate towards the interests that we have in common. And we will gravitate away toward the interests that we don't have in common.

Within a broad circle, you know, I want someone who's nowadays someone who generally shares my politics. Nowadays, it's being of the opposite or being of the wrong political party is more stigmatized in dating than being of a different race or religion. That's a new development.

Kaitlin Luna: How long is that been happening do you think?

Benjamin Karney: You know, in my lifetime - in the last 20 years that kind of polarization, people have said I wouldn't mind if my child came home with a partner of a different race, but I would never want my child to come home with a partner of a different party.

Kaitlin Luna: Wow, so it's not super recent but that's the it is super reason it's decades but not necessarily in the past like two or three years.

Benjamin Karney It speaks to the divisions in the country. But, there's lots of people who share your political persuasion in the world. A lot of people who share your religion and within that it turns out that a list of things you like, a list of your hobbies, doesn't predict who you're going to like romantically because it turns out that romantic attraction is not about these sorts of stable characteristics or interests. Romantic attraction has a lot more to do with behavior, interaction in the moment. Romantic attraction arises from how the exchange of behavior makes me feel. And if it makes me feel, you know, understood in the moment and your capacity to behave in a way that makes me feel understood and excited and interested have to do with what you do, not you know what foods you like to order in from.

Once that feeling arises of romantic chemistry, then people look for it, well what are we having common? Well, we have this in common. Great. Let's go do that thing and people are complicated. We'll find something we have in common.

So, that's why no matter how much you work on your profile, no matter how many hours you study the other person's profile, you're not going to know what's going to happen when you meet until you meet.

So, dating apps can do something great and there's something they can't do. They can find people who are available…

Kaitlin Luna: Which is helpful obviously, but…

Benjamin Karney It’s very helpful, it’s amazing. But they can't tell you who you're going to like. Only interaction can tell you who you're going to like. So, the apps are great. Use them. Find people and then get in front of them.

Kaitlin Luna So, is that your advice to dating in 2018 and moving forward, just get away from your phone?

Benjamin Karney: Yes, or even skyping, the face to face or the facetime, as it were, but I wouldn't spend that much time working on profiles because profiles are not where it's happening.

Kaitlin Luna: Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? Any other research you wanted to talk about or other topics?

Benjamin Karney: Back to the policy issue -- the things that, that I'm interested in pursuing are one of the other hidden ways, invisible ways that public policy affects intimacy because it's not something that gets discussed a lot.

When we talk about -- public policies like health care, like tax increases or decreases, like the minimum wage, all of those big public policy discussions are discussed in terms of well, how will it affect income? How will it affect employment? How will it affect you know, debt?

The implication of some of the work we're doing lately is that all of those policies should affect intimacy, as well. Intimacy, the decisions people make, should I get married, should I have a kid, am I satisfied with you, are very much affected by the policy environment in which it takes place -- in which these decisions take place.

So, one thing that we're interested in pursuing is looking at the very private intimate implications of these very public global policy changes. And so that's something that we're pursuing now and we're specifically doing analyses on what happens to marriage and divorce in states that raise the minimum wage?

You'd think that for poor couples there might be an effect and it seems like there is but that's really, you know, I shouldn't talk about that too much because that still work we’re working on now.

It follows from the paper that we started talking about, which is if you want to help couples, you can help them by trying to teach them stuff. You can help poor couples by trying to teach them stuff. Or you can help them by making their lives easier. And it turns out there's some evidence that if you make people's lives easier, intimacy improves, even if you don't teach people anything.

Kaitlin Luna: Huh, that's very interesting, so it's not much you think of relationship is just a small thing here, but it can obviously expand out more and to include a lot of other factors.

Benjamin Karney You've heard the expression the personal is political. The political turns out to be personal, as well.

Kaitlin Luna: I actually just off the top my head read an article recently about how the divorce rate from millennials is going down. New information shared, but you know, basically was saying people are choosing to marry later you know changing their habits in that way so that but that's interesting as well do you mean thoughts on that?

Benjamin Karney: Yeah, absolutely I read that same article and the analysis showed very clearly that divorce rates are declining for millennials who went to college. It's not true of couples who didn't go to college and so and here's the point is that nowadays people who have access to education and have access to good careers are delaying marriage until their education and careers are in place. So, people who get married once their education and careers are in place have more stable marriages. Makes perfect sense. People who don't go to college are marrying less but marrying earlier and when they marry they don't have careers in place then their lives are going to be harder and they struggle, and their marriages struggle too. Makes perfect sense.

Kaitlin Luna: That's really fascinating. Interesting, interesting to see what comes of that and you know, more studies are done or what news comes of that as we move.

Benjamin Karney: Absolutely. I’m very interested, as well.

Kaitlin Luna: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Karney. It’s been a really fascinating talk.

Benjamin Karney: Kaitlin, thank you for having me. I'll have this chat with you anytime.

Kaitlin Luna: Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue, about the latest and most exciting psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher and wherever you find your podcasts. You can also visit SpeakingofPsychology.org to view other episodes and resources about the topics we discuss. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna for the American Psychological Association.