Shankar Vedantam

That's right, marriage.

The priest from that iconic scene in The Princess Bride describes it best.

Or does he?

We're taking a look at how marriage has evolved over time.

It went from a partnership of necessity to a union of two very different people who need one another's love to be complete.

Now it's gone to the all-or-nothing relationships identified by psychologist Eli Finkel.

Eli argues that our expectations for marriage, both gay and straight, among rich and poor, have dramatically increased.

Couples who are able to meet these higher expectations are happier than couples have ever been.

But couples who fall short are unhappier than their counterparts a century ago.

If you have follow-up questions or thoughts about these ideas and you'd be willing to share them with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone.

Then email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line marriage.

That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Eli says there are things we can do, what he calls love hacks, to reorient how we think about marriage and make ourselves more fulfilled in long-term relationships.

So psychologists have long talked about something called the fundamental attribution error, which is sometimes when we see someone behave in a way that we don't like, there's two ways to interpret it.

You can either say this person is behaving badly because they're a bad person, or you can say this person is behaving badly because there's something in the context, there's something happening around him or her that's causing him or her to behave this way.

And one of the hacks that you suggest is to reinterpret negative behavior from your partner in a way that's more sympathetic rather than critical.

You also talk about more serious alternatives.

So if people find over time that they are just incompatible with one another, and yet they have these high expectations of different things they want from their life, you suggest that one of the alternatives might be to develop systems where people are actually getting different things from different people.

I love the idea of diversification and the analogy with financial diversification.