The Surprising Science Behind Building Deep Relationships | Eric Barker

Eric Barker (0:00)

The bad news is, like I said, if we're walking into the marriage casino, the odds are against you.

But the difference here is that now we do have far more freedom. Marriage is self-defined in a lot of ways. So if you do the work, if you really try, put the effort in or are proactive, then you can have a happy marriage. And actually, better than that, Eli Finkel's research at Northwestern, the happiest marriages today are the happiest marriages that ever existed.

Michael Gervais (0:40)

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I'm really excited to welcome Eric Barker. And Eric is a former Hollywood screenwriter and then turned author, where he shares his, what I would say, often counterintuitive insights and research on how to live a great life. So Eric is the bestselling author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree. And earlier this year, he published his newest book called Play Well With Others, The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is Mostly Wrong.

Eric, thanks for being here. I'm really excited to have you on.

Eric Barker (1:25)

Thank you.

Michael Gervais (1:27)

Cool. So maybe we can start with a quote. And when I read this, two things happened. One is I was like, oh, that's a great bit of writing. And it's also telling about you. So here's the quote.

Getting me to write a relationship book is like asking Godzilla to improve the infrastructure in your city.

Where'd that come from?

Eric Barker (1:52)

Relationships were never my strong suit. And it was, I just found it very ironic for me to be writing a book about them. I mean, granted, like all my writing is focused on the science. So it's not like I'm giving my personal anecdotal advice, but still with me as the filter and the conduit, it was very interesting because I don't, I never try and take that attitude of, you know, oh, I'm the expert and guru and you should do as I do.

I kind of am along with the reader in the sense of, hey, I don't know what I'm doing. So maybe you and I can get some insight from people who are a lot smarter than both of us.

Michael Gervais (2:30)

I love that. Okay.

So let's start with big rocks. What are some of the big rocks that people are getting wrong with relationships?

Eric Barker (2:39)

I mean, there's a lot of things that surprised me. One thing that we didn't hear a lot about of late is loneliness. Even before the pandemic, loneliness was just exploding.

Looking at the research, I found two insights that really blew me away. First of all, before the 19th century, loneliness basically didn't exist. That's an exaggeration, but not by much.

Fael Bertie is a researcher at University of York, and she found that you look for the word lonely, and it meant things that were by themselves, but it didn't have the negative stigma. The reason loneliness didn't exist was basically we were all enmeshed in nations, religions, tribes, groups, families. There wasn't that perception of isolation. Historically, human beings couldn't make it on their own, so we didn't.

The second thing that really blew me away was John Cacioppo, who is the leading researcher on loneliness, found that lonely people don't spend any less time with others than non-lonely people do, which sounds ridiculous.

But the truth is, we've all felt lonely in a crowd. You can be in Times Square, New Year's Eve, surrounded by people and feel lonely. And what Cacioppo realized was that loneliness isn't about proximity to others. It's about how you feel about your relationships. We can experience solitude, which is a good thing. That's when you feel like you have strong connections to other people, but right now you're by yourself. That's fine, but you can also be surrounded by people, not feel connected to them and feel terribly lonely. So we're trying to solve the loneliness conundrum. And a big part of it is we don't really understand, we haven't really understood where loneliness comes from. And we've kind of misdiagnosed it.

Michael Gervais (4:28)

Okay, you're going to share insights like that, that are going to trigger a bunch of stuff for me in the world of psychology, which I love, which is like in some respects, you're knocking on the door of depression, which is I can be in a crowded space, feel lonely. I can be in a relationship with other people that know me really well, but feel lonely. And that's part of the depressed experience from a clinical perspective. And so you found that information about the loneliness, and then you found this enmeshed fabric of relationships, I think you said before the 19th century, is that where your data was from? So when you pull those two things together and you say, okay, we're more lonely than we were then, and we're more depressed, I think, than we were then, but I don't know that data to be absolute, but I do know that we're more depressed now than we were three years ago. So I would imagine that holds up, but I don't know.