Kelly hosts a special Valentine’s Day Bonus Pod with professors Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick who host the “Love Factually” podcast. Eli and Paul are relationship scientists at Northwestern and University of California, Davis respectfully. Their podcast looks at a modern romantic comedy each week through the lens of the science of relationships.  

Explain what the Love Factually Podcast is. 

“The general conceit is that we want to review these movies, many of which are beloved classics, classics of the ROM-com genre, the romantic drama genre, even a few of the teen comedies we’ve got in there – and we want to revisit them, but with a relationship science lens. That’s Eli and my expertise. That’s the branch of social psychology that we know best. And we want to figure out, well, what are these movies getting right? At least vis-a-vis what the science reflects. And are they promoting some misconceptions about relationships that actually we can use the science to question or debunk or unpack in some way.” 

Relationship science is a relatively new field, right? 

“The study of marriage is something that’s been around for a little while, but a lot of it was done either by sociologists or in a sociological tradition, really through the middle part of the last century. And I’d argue that the social psychology of relationships and attraction really gets going in like the sixties and seventies, and then into the eighties. So that when I think of many of the founders of contemporary relationship science, it’s mostly people who were sort of coming of age at around that time. So, it is newer than a lot of the other social psychology. And it’s certainly newer than a lot of the other behavioral sciences and other branches of psychology that go back a little further.” 

One of my favoring episodes was when you talk about “When Harry Met Sally” and how that film is a perfect illustration of motivated reasoning. 

“Yes, a great example of motivated reasoning. You see it gradually takes place over the course of the movie. So, in the middle part of the movie, when Harry and Sally are friends, Harry is clearly irritated by certain things about her, probably most prominently her high maintenance behaviors – her being very fussy about certain things, and he sort of lives with it and makes fun of it. But he clearly doesn’t love that aspect of her. But when we get to the turn in the last 3rd of the movie, we now see he is in love with her. He tells us very clearly: ‘I love that it takes you 90 min to order a sandwich.’ So this thing that was once irritating is now a thing he loves about her right, not because she has changed in some way. In fact, he loves her because she has this quality. And, in fact, in the very last scene of the movie, we even see him starting to take it on himself when he acknowledges the importance of putting the chocolate sauce on the side. So, I think this is a wonderful arc of motivated reasoning. When you love somebody, you will turn their quote unquote faults into positives, and you may even take some of them on yourself.”