Oh hey, it's that lady in the hotel lobby who just took an apple from the bowl of decorative fruit and feels only partly guilty about it.

Alley Ward, back with another episode of Ologies.

Oh, love! Oh, who doesn't love love?

Oh, this episode is coming out a few days before Valentine's Day. Love is in the air. It's on the shelves at Walgreens.

Soon it will be in the discount aisle at Walgreens, but it will still be in our hearts and on our minds until probably the day we're dead.

And return to the earth as scattered molecules. Ready to be a frog that loves another frog, but frogs don't get married and some people do.

So let's learn about it. But first, little business. So thank you, as always, to the Ologies patrons. I am your grateful humble servant to this podcast with none exists without the folks on patreon.com-alogies.

A dollar a month gets you in that club. Thanks to everyone for sporting Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com.

I've said it before. I hope you wear an Ologies shirt or pin or hat and you find your soulmate. And then I officiate your wedding and I eat free cake.

Okay, thanks to everyone who rates the show and hit subscribe. Bonus points for leaving a review for me to creepily lurk and read on the show. Such as this week's. Let's do it.

Ariel lean says this podcast is 100% worth writing my first ever review. I've gotten sucked into topics. I never thought I would be interested in. I'm looking at you postcards. They say the episodes on some knowledge inspired me to take a leap of faith and eliminate two of the three sleeping medications I had been taking for years. They say I feel better than ever.

So thanks, Ali, for putting your heart and soul and a few Brock crystals into bringing all of us so much joy. So thank you, Ariel. Everyone else consult a doctor before changing medications. Please don't sue me. Yay. Okay. So matrimonialogy. Is it a word? Come on, dad word. Don't go pull in legs here. Hot damn. Is it ever? Kind of. Okay. First off, the term matrimony comes from the Latin for mother as in to make a mother.

Out of someone gross, but now matrimony is used as catch all for marriage stuff and a now deceased psychologist from the Czech Republic coined the term matrimonyology wrote several books on marriage and relationship psychology. So it exists in literature. I say accounts. So I enlisted the help of new intern Harry Kim. They helped me track down one of the foremost American experts in the field who happens to teach not in Prague.

But in LA. So I just shimmy it over to UCLA on a sunny morning and I set up a few mics. I asked thisologist questions that had both adorable and also sometimes very uncomfortable answers just like a relationship adorable sometimes uncomfortable. So he is a professor of social psychology and a researcher at UCLA's marriage lab. There's a marriage lab and he's a co-author of the textbook intimate relationships and has written.

Inumerable papers on the topic many of which have really just juicy as health titles such as quote to know you is to love you the importance of global adoration and specific understanding for close relationships and how stress hinders adaptive processes in marriage.

This is a good stuff. Okay, so we sat down to discuss romantic intimacy how marriage differs from non-married relationships what to do if your partnership is going through.

What a rough batch why divorce is happen how movies could save your relays strategies for popping the question the darker historical side of marriage and then maybe per usual I have a life changing epiphany no spoilers. So sit back commit to this amazing and wild ride with someone who just technically speaking in some parts of the world would be considered a matrimonialogist Dr. Ben Karney.

You are sort of a matrimonialogist. I mean, technogime psychologist. If you want to get more specific I'm a social psychologist. So there's lots of different kinds of psychology at university.

So just a few studies and social psychology is a study of how human beings individual human beings are affected by the imagined or real presence of other human beings.

Oh, which is to say is the study of the human condition. That sounds so poetic. It's but it's true. We are the ones who study scientifically what it means to be human being on the planet earth within social psychology in all these different ways that human beings interact.

My own interest has always been in intimacy and how people develop and maintain intimate connections specifically romantic connections.

And I have studied that in the context of marriage, but my interest is broader than just marriage. Marriage is a very convenient place to study adult intimacy because it's where a lot of adults will end up practicing their adult intimacy for large portions of their lives.

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