Kirstin Cills
Hello, friends, and welcome to So Curious!, presented by the Franklin Institute.
The Bul Bey
We are your hosts- I am the Bul Bey.
Kirstin Cills
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.
The Bul Bey
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.
Kirstin Cills
And later, Dr. Jayatri Das will be back to talk to us about what the science world is saying about marriage.
The Bul Bey
Okay, so do you want to get married now?
Kirstin Cills
This is so sudden. We work together, be professional.
The Bul Bey
I’m sorry.
Kirstin Cills
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.
The Bul Bey
No. I’m going to be Kirsten’s translator- nah- it’s a no for me.
The Bul Bey
Not for me dog.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah.
The Bul Bey
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.
Kirstin Cills
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?
The Bul Bey
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.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
Yeah.
Kirstin Cills
And our first guest is a true actual expert on marriage. So let’s introduce our first guest, marriage historian Dr. Rebecca Davis.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
The Bul Bey
One of the books that you have here in the studio is “More Perfect Unions: the American Search for Marital Bliss”. Tell us about the findings in the book, your research, and reflect on that book a little bit.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
The Bul Bey
This was like understood science of that.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
Kirstin Cills
You are blowing my mind right now.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
Kirstin Cills
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?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
That’s correct, yeah.
Kirstin Cills
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.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
The Bul Bey
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?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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 twenties 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.
The Bul Bey
I like “affectionately bound to.”
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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 were 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.
Kirstin Cills
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?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
Kirstin Cills
Wonderful.
The Bul Bey
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?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
One of my very favorite classes to teach is an introductory survey course called American Sexualities, and I’m happy to say it’s 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 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.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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?
The Bul Bey
What’s the answer to some of those questions? Am I new? Where’s my history? Where’s my story?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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.
The Bul Bey
Right. So, like, we’re getting historical tea right now.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
Yes. So this person who goes by the name Thomas or Thomasine is brought before the court and basically asked, “are you a 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 the 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.
Kirstin Cills
What an icon. Wow.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
I tell my students, that 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 nonbinary 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.
The Bul Bey
I would ask you, as a historian, how important is it to have these stories documented, saved, shared, and disseminated?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
What’s amazing is that in 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.
Kirstin Cills
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?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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 long-term happiness.
Kirstin Cills
Wow.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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’d 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.
The Bul Bey
Is this science? Would you consider that science?
Dr. Rebecca Davis
They considered it science.
The Bul Bey
Yeah. Nice answer.
Kirstin Cills
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?
The Bul Bey
Great question. Thank you.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
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, co-parenting or cohabiting relationship is all in one person. Is that 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.
The Bul Bey
Incredible. Dr. Rebecca Davis, thank you for coming in.
Kirstin Cills
Thank you so much.
Dr. Rebecca Davis
It was a real pleasure.
The Bul Bey
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 the Chief Bioscientist at the Franklin Institute, Dr. Jayatri Das. Or a segment we all know and love called Body of Knowledge.
Kirstin Cills
Hey, Jayatri.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Hi, Kirsten. Hi, Bey.
The Bul Bey
Hey, how are you?
Dr. Jayatri Das
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’ perceptions 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 to 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.
Dr. Jayatri Das
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.
Kirstin Cills
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.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Right?
Kirstin Cills
Bunch of other fish.
The Bul Bey
Yeah.
Dr. Jayatri Das
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.
The Bul Bey
Wow.
Kirstin Cills
Damn. People aren’t ready for that conversation, are they?
The Bul Bey
Well, hopefully, they’re having that conversation. It’s important to add. It’s really important.
Dr. Jayatri Das
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 Japanese cockroach that is 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.
Kirstin Cills
Literally tied down.
Dr. Jayatri Das
They are literally tied down because they can’t leave.
Kirstin Cills
Oh, my gosh.
The Bul Bey
Sounds like a toxic relationship to me. I don’t know.
Dr. Jayatri Das
They eat each other’s wings. There are lots of examples where like, the female might eat the male or things like that. But no, this is mutual.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah, because I was thinking about… is it grasshoppers that the female rips the head off of the male?
Dr. Jayatri Das
I like praying mantises.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah, but this is a mutual understanding that they’re both going to.
The Bul Bey
That doesn’t sound pleasant. And it’s like, you know who goes first?
Kirstin Cills
We don’t shame what anybody’s into here.
Dr. Jayatri Das
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.
The Bul Bey
That resonates. Right? Because once you’re in a relationship, delete that tinder app. Delete all those other things, man; this is permanent.
Dr. Jayatri Das
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.
The Bul Bey
Yeah, because I’m not biting anyone. Just not going to do that.
Kirstin Cills
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 we went into the old Google and typed in “Is Marriage..?” And let Google fill the rest for us. So the first thing that came up was, “is marriage for me?” Question mark- maybe in like 30 to 40 years, right?
The Bul Bey
Pairing and bonding and being with someone. We’re still social animals. We’re asking really good questions about monogamy, really good questions about polyamory, but we’re social, so hopefully, you’ll be around someone or a group of people into your golden years.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Maybe we learned a little bit about the history of marriage and how those social pressures influence that kind of decision.
The Bul Bey
You know, there are some social pressures. There’s always a grand mom around like, I want some kids.
Kirstin Cills
So the Googler Engine then told me, I just wanted to know, “is there a marriage for me? quiz- a lot of people wanted to know this, is there a marriage for Me quiz?
The Bul Bey
There probably is. I don’t know.
Dr. Jayatri Das
That’s kind of interesting. I bet there are some correlations to personality traits and psychology that predict whether someone is more likely to get married than somebody else.
The Bul Bey
Yeah.
Kirstin Cills
And there’s like Love Language Quizzes and everything where you can find better the way you want to be loved and all of that. But the way that this is phrased makes me think someone’s looking for a BuzzFeed quiz. It’s like, tell me your coffee order, and I’ll tell you if you’re going to get married.
The Bul Bey
Ice grande. Yeah.
Dr. Jayatri Das
What is it?
The Bul Bey
Two pumps. This is not I’m just making this up. You’re not getting married. Just give me a straight black coffee. That’s all I want. Okay.
Kirstin Cills
You’re getting married.
The Bul Bey
Okay. So moving on. We put into the Google Engine, is marriage religious? Is marriage religious?
Kirstin Cills
Used to be, right?
Dr. Jayatri Das
Probably. Yeah. And yet we have adopted it as a non religious custom. There’s some definite interplay between how religious norms get integrated into broader culture and how that may have evolved from some sort of social benefit of long term monogamy.
The Bul Bey
The church.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah, right. Because it was at one point a religious thing, and now you don’t have to be religious. You can get married by anybody. Not necessarily a clergy person. Right.
The Bul Bey
Yeah. Marriage is a mystery to me.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Certainly, that pressure for marriage goes cross-cultural. Not necessarily one religion here.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah. Right.
Dr. Jayatri Das
Somebody who’s not coming from the Christian church.
The Bul Bey
Big thanks to Dr. Davis, Dr. Das, for joining us on this episode of So Curious.
Kirstin Cills
And next week will be our final episode of the season. And in true dramatic, theatrical fashion, our final episode will be all about Ghosting. Because when this season ends, isn’t that really just Bey and I ghosting?
Kirstin Cills
This and more on next week’s episode. So please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to rate us. Talk about how fun we are. Talk about how great my voice is. Talk about Bey. Ask him to rap for you, all those things.
The Bul Bey
Okay.
Kirstin Cills
Yeah. Leave us some messages. We want to know how much you love this podcast.
The Bul Bey
Yeah. And I am the Bul Bey.
Kirstin Cills
And I am Kirsten Michelle Cills, and we will see you next week. Bye bye.
The Bul Bey
So Curious is presented by the Franklin Institute. Special thanks to Franklin Institute producers Joy Montefusco and Dr. Jayatri Das. This podcast is produced by Radio Kismet. Radio Kismet is Philadelphia’s premier podcast production studio. Head of operations is Christopher Plant. The managing producer is Emily Charash the producer is Lilianna Green. The lead audio engineer and editor is Christian Cederlund. The editors are Lauren DeLuca and Justin Berger. The science writer is Kira Villette, and the graphic designer is Emma Sager.
