It's with great pleasure and such admiration that I introduced my next guest, Stephanie Kuntz,

who, you know, your book, Marriage of History, found me in this really precarious time when I was trying to understand

marriage. And I was 27 when I was engaged. And when I ended my engagement, I actually sort of

went through this period where I was sort of angry at what I'd been taught about relationships.

And I grew up as a Catholic. And I often refer to myself as a recovering Catholic

in that sense, in that I really wanted to understand marriage and relationships. And the story

I'd been told growing up was you find someone, you know, in college or in your early 20s, and

you marry them by 27, and you have kids by 30. And if you don't do that, you're sort of

not part of the narrative that we've all sort of subscribed to. And when I found your book,

it was like a million little pieces went together of, I knew there was more to this than what

I've been seeing because I saw people getting divorced all

around me. You know, people weren't staying in love forever. And it just finally made some things

make sense where I didn't think I was crazy anymore. So you didn't know that like 13 years ago,

you had this guy who was going through a spiral who needed your book. So I appreciate that so much.

I appreciate your writing and your work. Well, that's so gratifying to hear because that's the passion

that drives my research is that people get told these things about the family that are not only

historically inaccurate, which offends me as a historian, but are really, really painful

and destructive to the people who hear them, which offends me as a citizen.

So tell me, like, what is it that really fed the, because, you know, so much of your, that

book that, when I read it, that struck me was just, I mean, you go into depth in so many

examples of how marriage is different everywhere.

Well, I started researching the families a long time ago before it was a respectable academic

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