Shankar Vedantam

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After the break, what do couples who've been happily married for 40, 50, or 60 years know that the rest of us don't?

Listeners share how they make their relationships work, and psychologist James Cordova returns to the show in our latest installment of Your Questions Answered.

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I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Every generation has its power couples.

The novelist Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were arguably one such couple.

In the early part of the 20th century, their Paris apartment was the center of a thriving literary and artistic scene, attracting the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso.

But that doesn't mean everything was perfect between them.

Their relationship hit a rough patch when Alice learned that Gertrude had had a love affair before she met Alice.

The writer Francesca Wade describes this revelation in her book, Gertrude Stein and Afterlife.

She writes, In response, Alice later told an interviewer she tormented Gertrude for a year and a half.

She destroyed all of the letters Gertrude's former lover had sent to her.

And on a trip to the U.S., she tried to keep Gertrude's American friends from seeing her.

Eventually, Gertrude Stein had to tell her partner that if she didn't stop, their relationship was over.