Love 2.0: Reimagining Our Relationships

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. No matter how many weddings you've been to, it's hard to shake that contagious feeling of optimism. Couples pledge to love one another in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer. Family members dab tears from their eyes, agreeing that these two people are meant to be together forever. But so many marriages become unhappy, some dissolve.

Some end in divorce. And even the successful ones are not without challenges. No one would deny that long-term relationships are hard, and in fact, there's evidence they're getting harder. Over the past few weeks, our Love 2.0 series has explored new ways to think about how we engage with romantic partners and spouses. We've talked about how to build new bonds with our significant others, how to strengthen the bonds we already have.

We've looked at how we respond to our partners' most annoying habits and how we can let go of our desire to change them. Today we bring you a classic episode. that many listeners have told us is one of their favorites. It's about the changing nature of marriage in the United States and other parts of the world. Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (96 minutes, 15,661 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.