In this episode, Kirstin and Bey are talking all about the marriage. Historian Dr. Rebecca Davis shares about her research in how the institution of marriage has changed over the years. Later on the episode, Dr. Das shares her research on how mammals create relationships with one another.

Links for this episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Rebecca Davis
• Learn more about Dr. Jayatri Das
• Read a transcript of this episode

Hello, friends, and welcome to So Curious, presented by the Franklin Institute.

We are your hosts- I am the Bul Bey.

And I am Kirstin Michelle Cills.

Bey and I are so stoked to bring you this

season all about the science behind love, sex, and relationships.

So far, we've talked about everything from

your brain on love, to why we obsess over our favorite television characters to how

science and tech are changing our relationships with each other.

Okay, so all season we've been talking

about science and all different aspects of relationships.

I think it's time to tackle the elephant in the room... Marriage.

The ring on the finger.

In this episode, we are talking to historian Dr.

Rebecca Davis about how the institution of

marriage, as we know it actually came to be.

And later, Dr.

Jayatri Das will be back to talk to us

about what the science world is saying about marriage.

Okay, so do you want to get married now?

This is so sudden.

We work together, be professional.

I'm sorry.

I don't really know what I think about marriage.

Both my parents have been married three times.

I definitely think that marriage is great if you find the right person.

I also think that there's a lot of room in the world for marriage to not necessarily

be to one person for the rest of your life.

It often isn't that way, whether that was by design or by things not working out.

I sound like a downer.

No.

I'm going to be Kirsten's translator- nah- it's a no for me.

Not for me dog. Yeah.

No.

But it was definitely interesting to understand and know that all the things

that we don't talk about, what we know, people get married for status, resource,

all these different things have always been at play.

So it's nice to know that we weren't crazy and we haven't been crazy.

But it's also nice to know we're all considering different things.

I don't think I'm getting married for money or titles or anything like that.

And it's nice to rethink and assess these things personally, individually.

Yeah, there are definitely benefits to

marriage in many ways, but also there's a lot of societal pressure.

Also, a lot of people get married because they're like, well, all my friends are,

and I don't do it now, when am I going to do it right?

And it's nice to have historical context to even project into the future.

It's like, what is marriage going to look like 50 years from now?

Because these behaviors are going to change and that's going to change how we

interact with our environment in so many different ways.

All these different things were really

interesting to kind of, like, delve into and navigate.

Yeah.

And our first guest is a true actual expert on marriage.

So let's introduce our first guest, marriage historian Dr.

Rebecca Davis.

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

One of the books that you have here in the

the American Search for Marital Bliss".

Tell us about the findings in the book,

your research, and reflect on that book a little bit.

This is a book about how self styled experts of various kinds taught Americans

how to be husbands and wives in the 20th century.

And they did that very often through what we know as marriage counseling.

And marriage counseling could be something that's called marital counseling or

couples counseling, but it was very often less formal than that.

It was ministers and rabbis meeting with couples in the weeks leading up to their

marriages or meeting with them in crisis counseling afterward.

It was social workers at family service agencies, and it was professional

psychologists and psychiatrists in other formats.

And it really takes off in the United

States in the 1930s, and of course, it's still around today.

So what I found in the book was a surprising concern with heterosexuality.

I wanted to know what ministers and rabbis who were starting to

get more and more open to psychology ministers and rabbis said, we need to get

a little bit more savvy about how to give counseling.

And so they started to read up on social science and psychology.

They formed journals and societies, and they started to introduce psychology

classes into their seminaries to train rabbis and ministers.

And so I was really interested, well, what did they think about homosexuality?

Because in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s,

professional psychology was starting to define homosexuality as a mental illness.

And that was all sort of happening then.

The shift from seeing same sex desire as either just an aberration or more

negatively, as a sin was becoming more defined as a psychological problem.

What happens by the period that I was

starting to look at in the was a fear that there was latent homosexuality present and

that that was explaining people's levels of dissatisfaction with their lives.

So what I found I was looking through the indexes of these journals.

This is the nuts and bolts of historical research.

It's not a Google search.

It's hours and hours in dusty libraries,

pulling journals off the shelf, looking at the index, all of the articles in these

journals where clergy are trying to learn how to be psychologically more astute

homosexuality is mentioned in articles about marriage, why on earth were they

talking about homosexuality in the context of marriage?

This is obviously decades and decades

before any sort of national debate over same sex marriage.

And that was not what they were talking about.

They were worried about a sort of psychoanalytic idea of the latent

homosexual, that children have a sort of innate

bisexuality, but you're supposed to mature into heterosexuality.

And so adult maturity and heterosexuality go together.

This was like understood science of that.

This was understood mental health sort of baseline of the time.

And so that homosexuality then means that

a person hasn't fully psychologically matured.

Their psychosexual development has been,

quote unquote, arrested in an adolescent or stage.

You are blowing my mind right now.

So then if you say, okay, why is this woman hesitant about marriage?

Or why is she really dissatisfied with her marriage?

Maybe she has latent lesbian tendencies as they would talk about it.

So one of the things that has changed

that's in the background of all of this is that it's become easier to get divorced.

I remember seeing something online, I don't know the exact date that they were

saying, but it was like when people say people who are maybe like elderly now

well, in my day people didn't get divorced like this.

It's like, well, women weren't allowed to

have their own bank accounts until 1970 something.

Is that correct? That's correct, yeah.

And so it's like it really has nothing to

do with people being less happy with each other.

It's just a matter of logistics.

So one of the other things though, that's happened is that this idea that "you're

supposed to be happy in your marriage" had to come along first.

So that is also changing.

And so the idea that marriage is about romance, that marriage is a choice that

two people make and that they should expect a certain level of happiness and

companionship has been around for about 300 years in any sort of broad way.

That doesn't mean that there weren't

couples thousands of years ago who loved one another.

But the broader purposes of marriage were not mutual compatibility and emotional

satisfaction, let alone sexual satisfaction.

That's far more recent.

That's also when you have easier divorce options.

You have women's increasing economic

independence, and then you have all these experts saying, "oh wow, we've got to find

a way to keep these people together" and there you have marriage counseling.

Good point.

If making the decision about marriage is not financial anymore, what would you say

are some of the main factors that you see people are getting married?

Why are people getting married in 2022?

I think marriage still is an economic strategy for a lot of people.

I was just listening to a radio story, I

think yesterday about what the student loan repayment reprieve has meant for

people in their twenty's and their thirties over the last 18 months or two

years or however long it's been and I think that we can't underestimate the

degree to which pooling resources remains a strategy for a lot of people.

The acceptance around cohabitation though,

is completely different now than it was in years past.

This idea that you and a person you're

affectionately bound to, someone you love, to put it simply, could live together.

I like "affectionately bound to".

Yeah because sometimes these relationships are sexual, sometimes they're not.

But this idea of setting up house with someone because you want to live with them

and make a home with them, I think that's still very appealing to a lot of people.

I think it's still an economic strategy.

There was always jokes when I was living in New York City in my early twenties, and

there was always this joke that people moved in together so quickly because rent

was so high, and it was like you couldn't afford an apartment on your own.

I think this idea of

building a lasting relationship with a particular individual that will bring you

all kinds of community and satisfaction, I think that remains very appealing but

we have a legal structure that still privileges marriage.

Makes it so much easier in so many ways.

If you want to have certain parental rights and if you want to

have certain understandings when you pay your taxes with Social Security- there are

all kinds of ways in which marriage remains economically beneficial

and just sort of legally simplifies a lot of stuff.

If you want to be recognized as somebody's

person, it's much easier to do that if you're legally married to them.

Yeah.

And so I know you serve as a producer and a story editor for a podcast.

Could you tell us a little bit about that? Sure.

The Sexing History podcast started in 2017, and it was an effort by a group of

historians of sexuality to take some of the audio archives of this history and

bring them to a wider audience and to tell stories that we don't otherwise hear and

to show in many ways how this history is still relevant.

Wonderful.

Yeah, I definitely got to take a listen to that.

What do you hope your students take away

from your teachings and your findings and research?

One of my very favorite classes to teach is an introductory survey course called

American Sexualities, and I'm happy to say its a very popular course.

I had 165 plus students take it online the last time I taught it.

And what I teach in that course is that, all of these things have a history.

That the things we might think about, but when people talk about what's natural or

traditional, that doesn't really mean anything to a historian.

Historians don't talk about, you know, whether we've lost a tradition.

We see all these things as ever changing.

So what I hope my students take away from it is

I hope that the next time they hear someone talking about, well, that's not

natural or that's not traditional, they have the tools to stop and say, in fact, I

think I understand that's an a historical way to think about that question.

I hope my students, particularly a lot of my students, are

themselves in the process of coming out, or they're transitioning, or they have

loved ones and family members who are LGBTQ plus, or

my students who have had abortions, my students who've had various experiences

with using different kinds of contraception.

The students are in the room because

something very close to them relates to the topic of the course, and

they're there to try to figure out, am I new?

Is there a history to me or to my loved one or my friend?

How do I fit in? Where is my story?

Where is my history?

What's the answer to some of those questions?

Am I new? Where's my history?

Where's my story? Yeah, I love those questions.

And what I tell my students is this, that, for instance, with trans history, which is

really exciting, there's tons of new work being done in it right now.

With trans history, I can talk to them about a person

who arrived in colonial Virginia around 1620, I believe it was 1627 or 1628.

And this person

changed their name and their gender during the process of immigration,

but also had previously had multiple gender identities prior to emigrating and

fought as a soldier, but also worked as a seamstress and would wear the attire

appropriate and the hairstyle appropriate and the gender pronouns appropriate to

those roles and was a domestic servant in a female social role in Virginia and

got caught in bed with a maid, another indentured servant.

And the question was, could fornication have occurred?

Fornication in colonial Virginia meant sex outside of marriage?

And that's especially for indentured

servants the landowners wanted to control their working population, and pregnancy

really affects the management of your household.

Right.

So, like, we're getting historical tea right now.

Yes.

So this person who goes by the name Thomas or Thomasine is brought before the court

and basically asked, "are you man or woman?" And Thomas Thomasine says, I am

both, and I have parts of both and refuses the question.

And there are these invasive bodily

inspections of them by local women, which was a practice dating back to

Middle Ages in Europe, that midwives and the local women would be called upon to

provide evidence and allegations of impotence and other things like that.

There are other people who decide it's up

to them to sort of pull up the pull off the bed sheets and inspect Thomas

Thomasine's body- and ultimately, the court rules that

this person must wear elements of both genders clothing.

At the time there's no androgynous clothing in the 17th century.

There's very much females and dresses and

people understood as men in different breaches and other clothes.

And then they kind of go about their life, and there's no other record of them.

They're not jailed.

They're not expelled from the colony.

What an icon.

Wow.

I tell my students, so if you feel that your gender is nonbinary, if you feel that

you are trans, there are people in the past who also felt that.

That said, they didn't have the word transgender.

There was no sense of trans rights.

There was no sense of a broader queerness that would have given someone

a man who desired sex with a man, would not have had any social framework, any

idea that he had anything in common with this non binary person.

So I tell my students, I'm a little

hesitant to say there are transgender people throughout history.

I'm absolutely comfortable saying there are people who lived outside the bounds of

their time's gender norms throughout history.

I would ask you, as a historian, how important is it to have these stories

documented, saved, shared, and disseminated?

What's amazing is that the courts in

colonial Virginia, a lot of those records survived.

Even in the case of Thomas Thomasine, there are places where the

document is so frayed or parts of it have ripped off that you lose part of it.

There's a place where Thomas Thomasin describes their body, and we only have

part of what they said about how they understood their body.

So that's a loss.

But there's so much more now that you can get from these sources from 500 years ago

that have been digitized, and you can find them online.

I'm curious. So you expressed to us off mic when you

first got here something that I found really interesting, which is that people

tend to ask you, how do I make a marriage work?

Which is not your field at all. Right?

You're on the historical side of marriage.

Is there any research in what you've been doing about how people have answered that

question in the past and how it's changed over the course you've been looking over?

One of the big theories around the mid 20th century was that the more alike you

are in every way except gender, the more likely you are to have a good marriage.

So you want men to be manly and women to

be feminine, but otherwise, same religion, same race and ethnicity better.

That both.

Either come from rural or both from suburban, you know, on and on and on.

And so a whole host of people start to

create tests and questionnaires that they give to engaged couples to see.

Well, before you go to the altar, let's

double check that you have a chance of sort of longterm happiness.

Wow.

And psychologists had been working on personality tests by that point.

The 1920s is sort of when the first intelligence tests are rolled out.

And by the 1930s, they've taken some of

those questions and others and created personality tests.

And they also thought that they could

administer modified versions of these personality tests to engage people to

figure out if their personalities were compatible.

Is this science?

Would you consider that science?

They considered it science.

Yeah. Nice answer.

This is a great segue into our last question, which is, what can you tell us

about the very sought after narrative of finding a soulmate?

Has there been research on that data history?

Great question.

Thank you.

It was something that I tried to think about when I was writing More Perfect

Unions- this idea that marriage will bring you this ultimate happiness.

And

it is both a motivating drive for a lot of people to go out and date and find

a partner, but it also becomes a source of a lot of disappointment and frustration.

So I don't know what it's like today to be

going through that, but it becomes a source of dissatisfaction for a lot of

people when they find out that people with the sort of cliche, the

honeymoon is over and they have to deal with life as it is.

So this idea that there is someone who is a soulmate is probably I don't actually

know precisely, but I'm guessing it's an idea about 100 to 150 years old.

In the 19th century and early 20th, we

have lots of examples of men writing passionately romantic letters to other men

and then getting married to women and vice versa.

And we sort of have to guess about when

those passionate relationships were also erotic or in fact, realized as sexual.

But what's totally obvious is that people found passionate intimacy from a variety

of people, not just their spouses, and that it was important to them that these

friendships were central to how they got through the day.

So there are letters from two young men

from Michigan who served in the Civil War together.

They went all the way with Sherman's Army down to Atlanta, and they wrote letters to

one another where they referred to one as husband and wife.

They talked about their

keeping warm together in the tent on the march, and they showed these letters to

their sisters, who would add postscripts because the families knew each other, so

there was no secrecy around this and then each young man got married.

They continued to write letters, but they

said, well, maybe don't show your wife this one in some of them but

marriage was the way you went about for these men going to the Dakota Territory,

getting some land, starting an adult life but their passionate relationship, their

greatest emotional intimacy, was with another man.

So this much more 20th century idea and now 21st, that you have one person

with whom you're supposed to have your most intense sexual, emotional,

coparenting or cohabiting relationship is all in one person.

Is that's a lot?

That's a lot.

So I don't know if people are finding their soulmates more than they used to or

not, but this very notion is part of the way in which we've moved

our culture has been very negative toward kinship based models.

The whole negative connotation around African American family

strategies that comes out from the 19th century into the debates over social

welfare programs in the 20th, that denigration of alternate family forms

happens at the same time that people are saying, no, it's just marriage.

It's a man and a woman in one household raising their children.

That's what a healthy household looks like.

That's what happiness looks like.

And that's where you find your soulmate is

through that rather than through broader networks of kin or a wider number of

people with whom you have different kinds of intimacy.

Incredible. Dr.

Rebecca Davis, thank you for coming in.

Thank you so much.

It was a real pleasure.

Thanks so much to Dr.

Rebecca Davis.

Now that we have an understanding of where

marriage came from, let's talk about cockroaches.

I say we jump right into our next segment to debrief about the science side of

marriage with chief bioscientist at the Franklin Institute, Dr.

Jayatri Das.

Or a segment we all know and love called Body of Knowledge.

Hey, Jayatri. Hi, Kirsten.

Hi, Bey. Hey, how are you?

Good Good.

This is a topic that I am fascinated by

because it's a place where the advancement of scientific technology has really

changed scientists perception of relationships in the animal world.

So let me tell you a little bit what I mean.

So before the advent of DNA fingerprinting, scientists thought that

there were lots of species that were monogamous for life.

So if we think about what we perceive as marriage, as having lifelong relationships

with the same mate, people thought that there are lots of

species that had that same kind of behavior.

But then in the 1990s, we developed the

technology to do DNA fingerprinting- imagine a simple way is just think about

how paternity tests work in the courts, right?

So imagine that we now have the technology

to do paternity tests not just for humans, but for any species.

And suddenly we realize that all of these animals that we thought were getting

married, so to speak, or being monogamous throughout their life, we're not.

We were fingerprinting their offspring and

realizing that females were mating with different males.

So even if there's what we call pair

bonding between a male and a female that raise offspring together and spend time

together, they still occasionally mate with other animals outside of their bond.

And so that really changed the perception

of what we think of as monogamy and marriage in the scientific world.

And some scientists now are thinking that,

well, maybe we had those assumptions beforehand because of our own bias of

thinking about marriage from our human experience.

I was going to say every cartoon loves to portray this happy husband and wife fish

in the sea looking for their son Nemo or whatever.

And it's like, no, they probably have plenty of other people on the side.

Right?

Bunch of other fish. Yeah.

So to put that into perspective, let's look at mammals first.

If you look at any two individuals of a

monogamous species, they may have made it for life.

But if you look at the entire species, not a single mammal species has been

definitively shown to be actually monogamous.

So even if you look more broadly at thinking about social monogamy, where you

do kind of maybe hook up with other animals here and there.

It's still only like three to 5% of all

the mammal species on Earth practice any form of monogamy.

Wow. Damn.

People aren't ready for that conversation, are they?

Well, hopefully they're having that conversation.

It's important to add.

It's really important.

Can you give me a few minutes to talk about cockroaches?

As I was reading about this, this one species of cockroach just hooked me

because I'm so fascinated by how their mating systems work.

And it's a species of a Japanese cockroach

that are one of the only species that have been found to be truly monogamous.

And we know this because after they mate,

they eat each other's wings so that they are literally locked into where they live.

Literally tied down.

They are literally tied down because they can't leave.

Oh, my gosh.

Sounds like a toxic relationship to me. I don't don't know.

They eat each other's wings.

There's lots of examples where like, the

female might eat the male or things like that.

But no, this is mutual.

Yeah, because I was thinking about is it

grasshoppers that the female rips the head off of the map?

I like praying mantises.

Yeah, but this is a mutual understanding that they're both going to.

That doesn't sound pleasant. And it's like, you know who goes first?

We don't shame what anybody's into here.

This Japanese researcher named Haruka Osaki discovered this and she videotaped

pairs of cockroaches and found out that they literally eat each other's wings.

And it's probably beneficial for them

because they live in these really tight spaces.

So once you've found your mate, you don't need to look anymore.

So why not just get rid of your wings by eating them?

And then you are a better fit for your

house and you don't need to go anywhere anymore.

That resonates. Right?

Because once you're in a relationship, delete that tinder app.

Delete all those other things, man, this is permanent.

Yeah, but there are other examples of animals that practice some sort of

monogamy, like prairie or another example of a rodent that does this.

So I wouldn't classify them too

specifically, but this particular behavior is really unique.

Yeah, because I'm not biting anyone.

Just not going to do that.

Well, now that we've heard from the science world, we are going to take this

time to see what average people are thinking about as it relates to marriage.

For this segment, we are going to take to the Internet to see what the most popular

Google searches are surrounding our episode topic.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

Google Autofill.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

So we went into the old Google and typed

So this is Body of Knowledge:

in "Is Marriage..?" And let Google fill the rest for us.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

So the first thing that came up was "is

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marriage for me?" Question mark- maybe in like 30 to 40 years, right?

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Pairing and bonding and being with someone.

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We're still social animals.

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We're asking really good questions about

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monogamy, really good questions about polyamory, but we're social, so

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hopefully you'll be around someone or group of people into your golden years.

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Maybe we learned a little bit about the history of marriage and how those social

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pressures influence that kind of a decision.

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You know, there's some social pressures.

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There's always a grand mom around like, I want some kids.

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So the Googler Engine then told me, I just

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wanted to know, "is there a marriage for me?

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quiz- a lot of people wanted to know this, is there a marriage for Me quiz?

So this is Body of Knowledge:

There probably is. I don't know.

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That's kind of interesting.

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I bet there are some correlations to personality traits and psychology that

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predict whether someone is more likely to get married than somebody else.

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Yeah. And there's like Love Language Quizzes and

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everything where you can find better the way you want to be loved and all of that.

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But the way that this is phrased makes me

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think someone's looking for a BuzzFeed quiz.

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It's like, tell me your coffee order and

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I'll tell you if you're going to get married.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

Ice grande. Yeah.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

What is it? Two pump.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

This is not I'm just making this up.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

You're not getting married.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

Just give me a straight black coffee. That's all I want.

So this is Body of Knowledge:

Okay. You're getting married.

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Okay. So moving on.

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We put into the Google Engine, is marriage religious?

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Is marriage religious? Used to be, right?

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Probably. Yeah.

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And yet we have adopted it as a non religious custom.

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There's some definite interplay between how religious norms get integrated into

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broader culture and how that may have evolved from some

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sort of social benefit of long term monogamy.

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The church. Yeah, right.

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Because it was at one point a religious

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thing, and now you don't have to be religious.

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You can get married by anybody.

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Not necessarily a clergy person. Right.

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Yeah. Marriage is a mystery to me.

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Certainly that pressure for marriage goes cross cultural.

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Not necessarily one religion here.

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Yeah. Right.

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Somebody who's not coming from the Christian church.

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Big thanks to Dr.

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Davis, Dr.

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Das, for joining us on this episode of So Curious.

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And next week will be our final episode of the season.

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And in true dramatic, theatrical fashion,

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our final episode will be all about Ghosting.

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Because when this season ends, isn't that really just Bey and I ghosting?

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This and more on next week's episode.

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So please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to rate us.

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Talk about how fun we are.

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Talk about how great my voice is.

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Talk about Bey.

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Ask him to rap for you, all those things. Okay.

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Yeah. Leave us some messages.

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We want to know how much you love this podcast.

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Yeah. And I am the Bul Bey.

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And I am Kirsten michelle Cills and we will see you next week.

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Bye bye.

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So Curious is presented by the Franklin Institute.

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Special thanks to Franklin Institute producers Joy Montefusco and Dr.

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Jayatri Das.

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This podcast is produced by Radio Kismet.

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Radio Kismet is Philadelphia's premier podcast production studio.

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Head of operations is Christopher Plant.

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