Curiosity Daily

How The Best Marriages Work

Episode Summary

The institution of marriage in America appears to be struggling. Or is it? Dr. Eli Finkel's most recent research reveals that the best marriages today may in fact be the best marriages the world has ever known. A renowned relationship expert, Dr. Finkel joins the Curiosity Podcast to reveal the structure of successful marriages and explain the context needed to understand how to flourish in any serious long-term relationship. Dr. Eli Finkel, author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. He has published more than 130 scientific articles and is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. More from Dr. Eli Finkel: Dr. Eli Finkel's website "The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work" The Marriage Hack: Eli Finkel at TEDxUChicago "Self and Relationships: Connecting Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Processes" Additional resources discussed: Money Survey: 78% Still Think Men Should Pay for the First Date Who Pays? NerdWallet Study Finds Gender Roles Remain Strong Among Couples Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

Episode Notes

Dr. Eli Finkel, author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. He has published more than 130 scientific articles and is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

Episode Transcription

CODY GOUGH: I'm curious, why is it so important to understand the historical context of relationships and marriage? If we're going to live in this world, getting a sense of how marriage has changed and how we can make ours as strong as possible is likely to have more bang for the buck in terms of your overall happiness with your life than pretty much anything else you can do.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hi. I'm Cody Gough from Curiosity.com. Today we're going to learn about marriage in the modern era. Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter. This is the Curiosity Podcast.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Conventional wisdom says that the institution of marriage in America has seen better days. But has it really? According to my guests this week, the best marriages today may be the best marriages ever. Dr. Eli Finkel returns to the Curiosity Podcast to explain his recent research, and talk about how to find success in marriage or in any serious long-term relationship.

Dr. Finkel is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. And he's been writing about relationships for more than a decade, from attraction to dating to marriage and everything in between.

And last time we discussed today's dating scene. So this time we'll delve into more serious relationships and how they've evolved into what they are today. And how to have a good one. I'm here with Dr. Eli Finkel. And you've got a book that just came out called The All Or Nothing Marriage, which we'll talk about in a bit. Why did you choose this particular path of study?

ELI FINKEL: Of the entire spectrum of things that one could do with one's life, it's hard to imagine choosing anything else other than this. And it is funny because I think most of us grow up thinking that-- well not thinking about it at all. But if you think about it, you think, well, that's not possible. You can't sort of study relationships for a living.

But I remember my 10-year high school reunion when I told people what I was doing I was back at Northwestern by that time. And everybody, thought, yeah that seems like just the right fit for you. So I'm delighted. It's a really fun thing to do. My job is quite literally to try to ask questions that people haven't answered about how relationships work. And then develop clever ways to try to study those questions, and then teach about it.

CODY GOUGH: And you don't just mean dating and marriage relationships. You mean all kinds, friends, neighbors?

ELI FINKEL: Yes, I'm interested broadly in relationships. For my money, there are extra elements of what we might call romantic relationships that are especially interesting. So I do think it's fun to think about how people navigate high levels of intimacy when there's challenges in terms of sexuality. And those are the sorts of interesting additional issues that tend to come up in romantic relationships that come up less frequently with your neighbor.

CODY GOUGH: If Tinder was around in 1950. And I went on a date with a girl, I'd pay. I'd pay for the check. I'd pick her up, probably with my really hot car. And I'd drop her off after her--

ELI FINKEL: Back seat.

CODY GOUGH: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All that stuff bring her out to lookout point or whatever. But now even when I was in 2011/2012, I would have hot debates in the lunchroom at work with who pays on the date, who asks what. And it's a lot more confusing.

ELI FINKEL: That's totally right.

ASHLEY HAMER: Hey. Ashley here. Despite the fact that times are changing and we're all independent working women who don't need no man, the data shows that when it comes to who pays on a date, gender roles are still alive and well.

A 2017 survey from the Time Publication Money showed that 72% of women and 85% of men still think that the man should cover the check on the first date. But it's not just first dates. A 2014 NerdWallet survey found that out of 1,000 people living with their partner, only a third split household expenses equally. More than 35% of the men said that they pay 100% of the bills.

CODY GOUGH: So is this good or bad or neither?

ELI FINKEL: Yes. I mean, it's funny because, I mean, we haven't delved into to marriage per se yet. But the name of the book is The All Or Nothing Marriage. And the question that you're getting gets to another all or nothing way of thinking about these things is, we have fewer rules.

I mean, psychologists sometimes use the phrase script looseness. We don't actually know-- like it was clear that he showed up in the car, and then she got in-- he walked around and opened the door. And then they got to the restaurant. And they looked at the menus. And then at the end, he paid. And then maybe as he walked her in, he got a peck on the cheek for the first date or something.

There were rules and norms that really help people understand how you were supposed to interact in a given situation. And those things are immensely valuable. But they're also immensely constrictive. So you know what you're supposed to do on a date, and that is deeply comforting.

You play your role. She plays her role. Everybody knows what to do. And that's fine. On the other hand, you might want a little bit of autonomy. You might want a little bit of banter, a little bit of playfulness, a little bit of, hey, why not have sex on the first date, or why not peck on the cheek after the first date.

There's a broad range of decisions that we can make. These days, we have a great deal of freedom. And with freedom comes responsibility, comes an increased likelihood of doing the wrong thing for this particular person. And sometimes those wrong things, even though they're benign, get interpreted in morally freighted language.

So the conclusion of all of this is yes, it's hard to live in an era where the social rules, the social norms are more ambiguous, that they're more ad hoc or each person chooses his or her own. But they do offer you the freedom to connect in a different sort of way, and that affords the ability to have a deeper sort of connection perhaps earlier than would have existed when people were following the social roles.

CODY GOUGH: Has any of your research tried to quantify the cost benefit of these freedoms?

ELI FINKEL: No. I mean, the brief answer is no. But the general conclusion is similar to what I was saying moments ago, which is that the people who figure it out, the people who are able to take this freedom and create their own idiosyncratic relationship orientation, a way of connecting to each other, have marriages that are profoundly fulfilling.

And profoundly fulfilling in a way that would have been difficult if all the rules and structures were laid out for us. And we were following a set of procedures. But that more of us are struggling to figure out, what is the right way to behave? And what is the right way to behave with this person on date 6?

And because of that, it's harder to get into a pretty good relationship. But it affords the possibility of something special, something distinctive, and unique that really works for us, just the two of us in a way that was harder to do when there were stricter rules.

CODY GOUGH: And are you focused on heterosexual or 2017, there's all kinds of lifestyles now, has it made your research a lot harder?

ELI FINKEL: Yes. I mean, so an answer to your first question. I'm not focused on heterosexual relationships. So when the opportunity presents itself, I think it's interesting to compare to, say lesbian or gay relationships, straight relationships, other types of relationships.

In reality as a practical matter, it turns out you have to be really, really interested in studying for, example, gay or lesbian relationships. If you want to be able to draw conclusions about how those relationships differ or are similar to heterosexual relationships.

And the reason why is sample recruitment. So if you want to recruit 100 couples, it's quite easy to do. You want to recruit 100 gay couples, 100 lesbian couples, and 100 heterosexual couples, you now have an enormously ambitious expensive study.

And that certainly worth doing if one of your major interests is to figure out how different types of relationships of those sorts are similar versus different. But if your major questions are not really about that, you usually will find yourself being on the lazy side and recruiting the sample that's easier to get.

CODY GOUGH: I would imagine you could find 100 couples of any disposition in a major city like New York or LA or Chicago, is the problem the lack of geographical diversity then?

ELI FINKEL: The problem-- you're right. It's not hard to find 100 lesbian couples. That's true. But the process of recruiting couples, maybe getting them into the lab. And then ideally most of my-- at least most of my more ambitious research is longitudinal.

And by that, I mean, multiple assessments over time. So you might do, for example, every four months for two years. And it turns out to be fairly expensive and challenging to be able to recruit that many couples, heterosexual or otherwise.

And because you start with a smaller pool of non-heterosexual people, it turns out that it actually isn't easy to recruit 100, say lesbian couples to do a longitudinal study of relationships that lasts several years. And it also can be expensive to be able to do it.

CODY GOUGH: Interesting. I just think about how we haven't figured out the silver bullet for heterosexual relationships. And we have millennia of data. The amount of data has got to be really limited when it comes to any non-heterosexual couple.

ELI FINKEL: Agreed. There are-- I should be clear that although I haven't done that much research on non-heterosexual relationships, I've done a little. There are scholars for whom those are their major research questions, assessing the similarities and differences among these various sorts of relationships.

And the take home lesson on that research thus far is that relationships among gay men or relationships among lesbians are by and large, very similar to relationships among heterosexuals. It's not that they're the same, because, for example, especially in the past, but to some degree still, there are major stigmas associated with non-heterosexual relationships.

So they confront different sorts of issues, different sorts of stressors. But then if you were to say, OK, well those are different sorts of stressors or they might have a higher level of stressors than the average heterosexual relationship.

But how does stress affect the relationship? That's similar. Do you follow me? So the major processes at least as far as we know thus far, you're right that the data and the evidence isn't that extensive thus far. But as far as we can tell to date, the way relationship dynamics work tend to be relatively similar across the various, you might say types of relationships.

With one major exception, which is that gay men tend to be looser about sexuality all else equal than heterosexual men or lesbian, women primarily, because both of those types of relationships have a woman in them.

CODY GOUGH: So there's a lot of changes in the types of couples getting together. There's also a lot of social changes when we talk about roles and relationships, the traditional provider/homemaker role is getting totally upended. Is that changing the psychology of relationships and marriages?

ELI FINKEL: Yeah, hugely. I mean, this is one of the issues that I tackled most directly in the book. I think this is one of the more interesting issues facing relationships researchers today is, how is it that changing gender dynamics influence relationships? Are relationships getting better? Are relationships getting worse? Are relationships getting more complicated?

And it turns out that the answers to every one of those questions that I listed and a whole range of other questions are really interesting and not totally straightforward. One thing I want to say right from the start is we think of the 1950s as being traditional relationship as if you could take 1950s and extend it back for millennia, and they would all look like Leave it to Beaver.

But that is not remotely true. And in fact, the historian Stephanie Coontz does a great job of really shaking us out of that bizarre assumption that the 1950s model is the traditional marriage, and that everything should be evaluated as a deviation from that. The name of her book is The Way We Never Were.

And she has to remind us, I mean, she has to remind us that Leave it to Beaver was not a documentary. It just so happens that there was a very, very idiosyncratic, highly historically unusual way of approaching relationships in the 1950s when television came on.

And because that's when television came on, it got imprinted in the cultural psyche as if this were traditional. But the idea that there would be a man who like kissed his wife and then went off to the office. And a woman who said love you honey. See you when you're back. And took share of the home. That was like an eye blink in history.

First of all, before the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1800s, people didn't go off to work. The individual farmhouse was the unit of economic production. This is how people made ends meet. Both men and women contributed hugely to economic production. And it wasn't until you got industrialization and this specialization that you got these weird-- I'm sorry. These highly gendered social roles, like his sphere is work and her sphere is home. So that was unusual right from the start.

ASHLEY HAMER: Stephanie Coontz points out that the nuclear family of the 1950s was actually a backlash against the dismal living situation and housing shortages of the Great Depression and post-war America. She writes that by 1947 6 million American families were sharing housing, and family counselors were worried about what those arrangements would do to marriages.

As soon as the country hit a period of prosperity in the 1950s, couples moved en masse into single family homes and started putting new importance on marriage and the nuclear family. As Coontz writes about that decade, quote, "For the first time in more than 100 years, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, divorce rates declined, and women's degree of educational parity with men dropped sharply." End quote.

CODY GOUGH: How about gender roles over time, otherwise?

ELI FINKEL: You mean since the 1970s?

CODY GOUGH: Since the 1970s.

ELI FINKEL: Yeah. That is what I think is especially interesting. So the convergence of the roles of men and women is probably the single biggest social change that we've seen over the last 50, years, maybe even the last 100 years. The Harvard economist Claudia Goldin refers to this as the grand gender convergence.

And most of us focus on gender differences. So it's very easy for us to think about the ways that men and women's roles and men and women's tendencies today differ. And there certainly are some gender differences. It's not that women are treated identically to men. It's not that men behave in the same way as women all the time.

But if you talk about the roles that different people play in society. So for example, do you go off to work? Do you earn a paycheck? Do you change diapers? The dominant thread, the dominant social trend that has happened in the last 50 years, maybe even more than that, is that the roles of men and women are more similar than they were in the past.

So he in a marriage, lets say a heterosexual marriage, much more than in the past. I mean, we can go back two generations. And our grandparents never changed a diaper, our grandfathers never changed a diaper. And our grandmothers never had a career.

But now most of the people we know, she's got a career. He does diapering. It's not that he does the same number of diapers as she does. But people increasingly have a better sense of this person who sits across the dinner table from me, I have a better sense of what that person goes through in terms of her everyday life, in terms of his everyday life relative to what people would have had say in the 1950s.

CODY GOUGH: So since maybe the wife is going off to work, even part time, let's say, she's able to empathize and put herself in the same shoes as her husband who's maybe working full time, or vise versa. Either way.

ELI FINKEL: Yeah. He has some sense of the anguish that comes when you're 70 nights into sleeplessness when you have a newborn. And you got the kid down 10 minutes ago. And then you hear the scream. Like there were experiences that were really difficult for husbands and wives to understand about each other's daily lives when we had this really weird 1950s social structure, where he had his sphere of existence.

And he was assertive, but certainly wasn't nurturing. And she was nurturing, but certainly wasn't assertive. And they connected across that divide. And they did love each other. I mean, loving and cherishing, these were part of it. But deep understanding, like deep real sense of what the other person's day-to-day life was like, that was hard to come by.

CODY GOUGH: How are apps like Tinder and Bumble and whatever else is out there, how are these affecting-- haven't they created a new problem in the overabundance of availability of dates?

ELI FINKEL: Yeah. This is something that I find especially fascinating. So I believe the logic of your question is, knowing that I can literally reach into my pocket, and within a matter of seconds, be browsing potential dates. How does that affect how we go about dating?

And the reality is nobody has the definitive answer. There's no world where people were randomly assigned to like Tinder exist versus Tinder doesn't exist. My intuition-- and I'll back this up with what I consider to be reasonable evidence, is it does affect how willing we are to go on a second date with somebody we were like, hey, like maybe. I don't know. I think we're more likely to say, nah, can't be bothered and start swiping right again.

ASHLEY HAMER: This relates to a phenomenon known as the paradox of choice, which you can read about on Curiosity.com. It says that as the number of available options increases, your satisfaction decreases. That's according to a study from the year 2000, which found that grocery shoppers who sampled jams from a display of six were more likely to buy one than those who saw a display of 24.

There's been some controversy over that particular study. And more research since then has found that people are only happier with fewer choices in certain circumstances. Were happier with two options than one, for example. And if you put a bunch of options into categories, you can ease people's so-called choice paralysis. So is the flood of options on dating sites making us more or less satisfied? That's an open question.

ELI FINKEL: But there's a second question, which is once you've actually formed a relationship, how perilous is it that you have the world's biggest singles club whatever in your pocket? How threatening is that to an ongoing relationship? And here's where I think I'm much more optimistic than anybody I've heard talking about this stuff.

What people don't appreciate is the extent to which falling in love and being committed to a partner makes you turn off the plausibility of other people being partners for you. Now I'm not saying there is no infidelity. I'm not saying that we're never tempted by other people.

But here's an example of the research that I find reassuring. So they take people-- there's a bunch of studies like this now. They take people who vary and how committed they are to their current relationship, and they show them one or two dating profiles-- online dating profiles.

One is rigged to be extremely appealing. So the photo is hot, the interests are cool. And one is rigged to be not especially interesting. So it turns out that among people who aren't especially committed to their current partner, when you ask them, like how much do you think you would enjoy being with this other person? Those people who aren't especially committed to their current partner say that one person would be amazing. But the other one doesn't seem that great.

But that difference, that ability to be sensitive to who's actually like a really appealing partner, that seems to disappear among people who are highly committed. And in fact, the tendency to say no, I probably wouldn't really be interested in that person, tends to be higher to the degree that the person is more appealing.

That is we tend to be pretty good. You recognize, of course, some objective quality that this person is attractive or whatever. But your assessment of I could be happy in a relationship with that person when we're really committed, it's those times when we're threatened, when we know like this is a person who could actually threaten us, that we say, nah, I really shouldn't do that coffee date, even though it's just a friendly thing.

We guard our relationship against these sorts of threats. And if you're guarding your relationship against these sorts of threats, does it make a difference if the threat is one person versus 1 million people? Probably not.

CODY GOUGH: So it's really more of an issue if there's already a crack in the windshield?

ELI FINKEL: Yes.

CODY GOUGH: This bring it back around to The All Or Nothing Marriage. I know that you start out with saying, well, my whole perception of my idea of what's good or bad or what's historically accurate about marriage has been totally shattered. So what happened?

ELI FINKEL: I set out to test or examine the hypothesis that I was calling the freighted marriage hypothesis. The idea being we're just asking more and more and more all the time. And the argument was, and that's bad.

CODY GOUGH: E And one of our partners.

ELI FINKEL: Yes. Sorry. More and more and more of our spouses of our romantic partners that is the number of roles that this one person has to play has gone stratospheric. And it would have been silly in 1950 to hear or unexpected to hear somebody say, well, I'm marrying you because you're my best friend.

That wasn't the role that people played. They had separate roles. And to a large extent, they had separate social lives. And over the last 50 years or 60 years, we've piled on more and more expectations and responsibilities on this one relationship.

And meanwhile, the size of our intimate social networks, the number of people that we confide in regularly, the number of hours that we spend engaging with other family members or friends, all of these things have gone down.

So my thesis when I started this whole book project was that I was going to conclude that we are harming marriage by asking all this stuff. And I the logic was sound. But when I actually started reading the history-- I'm not a historian. And I read the history and I really understood, started to understand what daily life was like for the pilgrims or in 1800.

And in 1950, I started to realize that there are massive ways that we're asking much less. And I don't think I'd heard anybody talking about that. So for example, in 1800, people look to their spouse for survival. I'm not exaggerating when I say life was precarious in a way that it isn't today.

I know that it's not nice to be poor today. I do understand that. But I assure you that the likelihood of dying early through disease or death or injury was massively, massively higher.

CODY GOUGH: Just play Oregon Trail.

ELI FINKEL: Exactly. Just play Oregon Trail and you'll start to get a sense of how bad it really was. So in that era, what did people look for from a spouse? Well, they certainly weren't looking for some profound sense of personal fulfillment. They weren't even really looking for love.

I mean, by that time, by the '17 and 1800s, the idea of marrying for love had been around for a while; in the Enlightenment era, and then the Romantic era. The idea like wouldn't it be awesome if we could marry for love? Like that idea was around, but it was impractical.

I mean, as I said, the individual farmhouse was the unit of economic production. Most people married somebody who was like a few streets down at most from where they grew up. Sometimes on the same street. And the idea that you'd have a bunch of choice and you'd make this-- you try to marry to have this sense of personal fulfillment, that wasn't what people did.

And if you said that's what you were going to do, you may well have been laughed out of your colonial Hamlet. So fast forward, and there's the Industrial Revolution. And let's call it the 1850s and beyond. Suddenly there's a surfeit of jobs in major urban centers. And people come from rural areas, they come from overseas.

And for the first time ever anywhere, young people are geographically and economically independent of their parents. And for the first time ever, they start to say, huh, I have some say over whom I marry. And what do they say? They want to marry for personal fulfillment. And in particular, they decide they want to marry for love.

And so they set out to build what we now know as like the breadwinner homemaker love-based marriage, this thing that over the next 100 years reached its peak in the 1950s with Leave it to Beaver and father knows best.

And yes, the idea here is, we don't really need to marry for basic survival any longer. Single people can make it. It's not literally life-threatening to be single. So we want to marry for a sense of fulfillment and love. But then in the 1960s, that became stifling. That it wasn't sufficient anymore that people adhered to these strict social roles, and that they wanted-- and what they decided is they wanted a sense of fulfillment through their marriage beyond just love.

And so for the first time anywhere you start hearing things, especially more recently, like he is a wonderful man. And I admire him, and I respect him, and he's a good dad. But I feel stagnant and stifled in the relationship. And I'm not going to live for the next 40 years of my life like that.

And these days, that's not an uncommon thing to say. And I guess each of your listeners can decide for him or herself, is that a good thing or a bad thing? For my money, it just is. Like it is both a good thing and a bad thing because it makes marriage much more fragile. It makes it much harder to be able to achieve this level of psychological fulfillment.

Not only that we continue to love each other and that the sex remained strong for a long time, but that you help me grow toward the best version of myself. More and more marriages are falling short. But at the same time, and this was the real revolution in how I was thinking about this stuff.

Because we're seeking this deeper sort of psychological connection, this self-expressive I'm looking for you to help you grow into the best version of yourself, into the most self-actualized version of yourself, and you're helping me with those things, things that would have been down the list in 1800 or in 1950.

And because we're looking for those things, some marriages are succeeding. And those marriages are better than the best marriages we've seen in earlier eras, because you not only have this sense of love and connection, but you also have this sense of each person growing toward the ideal self, becoming a better, more refined, more polished version, more authentic version of the self.

And doing that through their marriage, which means those marriages that's the minority, but those marriages that are able to succeed as we look what you might call the top of Maslow's hierarchy towards self-actualization and so forth, those marriages are able to achieve a level of fulfillment that was largely unavailable in earlier eras.

ASHLEY HAMER: I thought I'd pop in and explain what Eli means by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was proposed in 1943 by Abraham Maslow. And it's basically the food pyramid of human happiness. At the bottom of the original hierarchy, you've got physiological needs like nutrition and sleep.

Above that is basic safety, followed by the need to feel love and belonging, followed by the need for a sense of self-esteem and accomplishment. At the very top, and what Eli is talking about in those superstar marriages, is self-actualization, where you achieve your full potential as a person.

CODY GOUGH: So part of the reason more marriages are failing is because the bar is so much higher?

ELI FINKEL: Yes. The bar is so much higher, but hitting that bar is so much more satisfying.

CODY GOUGH: Well, that's cool. Well, we have a link in the show notes to pick up the all or nothing marriage, which is now out. And congratulations on getting that published. I want to wrap up really quick with a fast curiosity challenge, which is our final segment, where I'm actually going to give you a quick trivia question first to see if I can teach you something since you have taught me so many things about relationships.

For your question, I want to ask, there is something that you can wear that actually makes you perceive yourself hotter and others perceive you as sexier as well. Can you tell me what type of clothing or what item that would be?

ELI FINKEL: Spanx.

[LAUGHTER]

CODY GOUGH: Close.

ELI FINKEL: I don't know. A tight shirt?

CODY GOUGH: No, actually. It is the color red. The color red. You can read about that on Curiosity.com. But researchers at the University of Zurich put people basically in front of a mirror and ask participants in one section to wear a red shirt or one, wear a blue shirt.

Ask them how attractive they perceive themselves. And what do you know? Red shirt and increases. That hasn't come up in any of your research on what kind of Tinder profile pictures do the best or online dating pictures.

ELI FINKEL: I actually do know-- I had forgotten. I do know about that line of research. And one of the major players in that space is a researcher at Rochester named Andy Elliot. But yeah, there's a bunch of context in which wearing a red shirt makes us feel more appealing, makes other people look at us more appealing. As often happens in science, there's like debate about the robustness of these sorts of effects. But yes, I am actually tuned into that stuff. But I still think Spanx is the correct answer.

CODY GOUGH: Well, [LOUGHS] we'll go with that too. All right and I believe you brought a question for me.

ELI FINKEL: I have one. I don't know if you're a sports fan. Then you're going to struggle with this. So it turns out that in baseball, there is a statistic called total bases. And what it is over the course of a game or a season or something, you can get a base for a single, two bases for a double, three bases for a triple, four bases for a home run.

And so it turns out that every once in a while somebody has a spectacular game, multiple homers, and so forth. And it turns out that a couple people have gotten 18 total bases in a game, but only one person has gotten 19 total bases in a single game. One person in the history of baseball. Who is that person?

CODY GOUGH: I mean, the only names I'm even going to be able to come up with are Babe Ruth and Pete Rose. So let's go with Pete Rose.

ELI FINKEL: No. He had a lot of singles. So the reason why this is fun for me, it was because it is my cousin. So Shonn Greene, I think in 2002.

CODY GOUGH: Really.

ELI FINKEL: Yeah, he set a record for the most overall total bases in a game. 19 total bases. Well, for what team? That was 2002. So that would have been for the Dodgers. And he hit four home runs a double and a single in six at bats.

CODY GOUGH: No way.

ELI FINKEL: It's a big day.

CODY GOUGH: Well, congratulations to him. I mean, 15 years later.

ELI FINKEL: Yeah. No, I'm happy to be congratulated on that as if I did it.

[LAUGHTER]

CODY GOUGH: any time. I'll congratulate you for wearing Spanx today, too.

ELI FINKEL: Oh, Yeah. Really. Well, I mean, I should have probably worn something in addition to the Spanx.

CODY GOUGH: Well, it's radio or podcast or whatever you want to call it. Well, The Or Nothing Marriage is out. This is again, I was talking to Dr. Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University professor. Thank you so much for spending. And Kellogg School of-- School of management professor. Thanks so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hey I've got an extra credit question for you, courtesy of the Curiosity app. Everyone wants to be productive and successful, right? Well, when asked how to become more productive, billionaire Richard Branson has some advice. Here's your question. What two words sum up Richard Branson's secret to success? Here's a hint. It might help you in your relationship too. The answer after this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever been listening to the Curiosity Podcast, and wanted to share a clip on Facebook or Twitter? Well, here's some super exciting news. Now you can, thanks to gretta.com. That's G-R-E-T-T-A. You can stream our podcast on gretta.com/curiosity, and their podcast player will follow along with a written transcript of each episode while you listen.

When you hear a clip you want to share, just find it and click Share. Gretta will build a video for you to share with your friends so you can help spread the word about our podcast. Again, that's gretta.com/curiosity. And drop us a line to let us know what you think of this super cool new service.

CODY GOUGH: You've heard me mention that you can email us at podcast@curiosity.com with any feedback about our episodes. And one listener did just that after Dr. Finkel's last appearance on our podcast from all the way down under in Australia. Carly writes, quote, "I have never used online dating apps, but I met my boyfriend while playing virtual reality.

I'm in Australia, and he's in Utah. We met in February online, and then met in-person in May. It was an amazing experience. And we are crazy about one another. I'm coming to the US in two weeks just to see him again." End quote.

That is so cool, Carly. Congratulations on finding love online. It just goes to show that you never know where you'll find love. If you'd like to share your story, or if you have any questions or comments for us, again that email is podcast@curiosity.com.

If you still don't have enough curiosity in your life, then why not check out our newsletter at curiosity.com/email. We'll send you three bonus stories every week, plus exclusive features you won't find anywhere else. Just sign up at curiosity.com/email, and never stop learning.

If you have an Apple ID and you get a chance, then please search for the Curiosity Podcast on iTunes, and leave us a quick rating or review. You can still listen to the show on your favorite app, whether it's the Curiosity app or Stitcher or Google Play or SoundCloud or Podcast Addict or wherever else you listen.

But those iTunes reviews are acutely helpful in allowing us to keep bringing you fresh episodes every week. So please take a second, do that if you can. Thank you if you've hit us up already. We really appreciate it. And I shall show my appreciation with today's extra credit answer.

So what's Richard Branson's advice for becoming more productive? Two words, work out. In Tim Ferriss' book, The Four Hour Body, he writes about an occasion where Branson claimed he can accomplish twice as much in a day by keeping fit.

Science seems to agree that exercise is a good idea. One 2011 study found a correlation between going to the gym and a higher salary. Money. You can learn more about this and many other tips for success on the curiosity app for your Android or iOS device.

I'd like to take a moment to recognize Ashley Hamer for being an awesome editor, and bringing some really intelligent commentary to every podcast. So thank you for that, Ashley. And you listener, I want to thank you for listening, because without you, I would just be talking to myself, which, I mean, I might do anyway. But it would be harder to admit. Anyway, I'll talk to you, and hopefully not just myself, next week for the Curiosity Podcast. I'm Cody Gough.

[MUSIC PLAYING]