Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kaya Rizdahl, thanks for joining us everybody.

Tuesday, today, February 13th, Valentine's Day Eve.

So we're going to talk money, this economy, and romance, and how they shape one another.

Yes, we want to know more about how the economy and the economic circumstances somebody

might be in can influence people's love lives and how couples are navigating all of that today.

So here to make us smart about this is Julia Carpenter.

She's a personal finance reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So before we get into the nuts and bolts of it,

how different are the economic circumstances

of singles versus coupled people in this economy right now.

I've written quite a bit about this because the gap we see between single people

and married people has been slowly widening over time.

And I think for a lot of people,

they just say, well, that's math.

You know, of course, two people make more than one person.

You know, that's just how it's always been.

And while that's true to a certain extent

there is this widening gap between what a single person can en masse in terms of

...