This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
It's hard to shake the contagious optimism of weddings.
Couples vow 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.
Many people found long term relationships got harder during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the normal rhythm of days and patterns of interactions became disrupted.
But even before the pandemic, there was growing evidence that marriage was getting harder.
Why is that?
This week on hidden brain, as part of our annual U 2.0 series, we bring you one of our most popular episodes of all time.
It starts with a conversation about the history of marriage.
Most of what we think of as traditional marriage was not traditional at all, but a rather recent invention.
Well, also explore the radically higher expectations we have for marriage today.
Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.
And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.
And we'll discuss ways to improve our love lives by sometimes asking more of our partners and sometimes less.
To understand marriage today, we thought it best to go back to a time and place when marriage was very different.
Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years, but I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.
That's Stephanie Coons.