Dr Paul Eastwick

And that's an incredible example of this, because I think like the main guy that the two women are fighting over in that movie, he's not quite over.

the Julia Roberts character.

And he keeps trying to like bring aspects of that relationship into his new one.

That's a disaster.

Like people don't wanna feel like you are retreading your old relationship with them now that you've started a new relationship.

They wanna feel like this relationship is new and special and we're carving something out together.

You can't just like borrow the pieces from the old relationship.

That is a disastrous idea.

So, you know-

Yep.

I mean, these microcultures, they're beautiful things to behold.

We've only recently started studying how these cultures work, how they're formed, why they matter.

One thing is clear is that people who experience their little unique microculture with their partners on a more regular basis tend to be happier in their relationships.

Um, whether that's like sharing and we ask people like, what are these things?

And they give us like pet names that make no sense.

They give us the, you know, names of rituals and stories that are absolutely bizarre, like secret, a secret squirrel root.

What does that mean?

I don't know, but it's really meaningful to these two people.

So these are in many ways the things that make relationships have life for people.

And yeah, when they're gone, it feels absolutely devastating to have lost that.