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Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Nicole Torres. Today I'm

talking to Mora Weigel, a PhD candidate in comparative

literature at Yale who just published a fascinating book

called Labor of Love. It's a thoroughly researched history of dating,

tracing how society and the ways that we meet people have changed because of who works and how we work.

Wara, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So one of the first things I noticed when I got your book was the jacket, which says that after years

of first-person research on dating, you are now off the market so how did you meet

your spouse did you to meet at work we actually have a funny story we met at

Harvard in undergrad very briefly we took a very early morning freshman German class together and then

we met by chance in what felt like a very improbable way at an engagement party for two friends who then didn't get married.

So we met, I was dating someone else at a fellowship to go to China for four months the week

after I met him, so something was very lucky because a lot of odds were stacked against or reconnecting, I think.

That sounds like quite a saga.

So in your research you found that meeting people at school and at work and you know dating colleagues and dating classmates that's all pretty common right is that more so than it used to be it's certainly true that from the very beginning of when people start to date or to go out, lots of people

meet to do work, the math entry of women into higher education happens a bit later.

And so I think meeting people who you marry through school takes a little longer to become

very mainstream. But through much of the 20th century, those are both sort of tried and true

ways to meet a long-term partner that many people happen to experience.

Right. It seems natural that one of the most likely places where you're going to meet someone

...