Dr Laurie Talks Romance, Parents and Stalking on 'Love Factually'

Love Factually https://www.lovefactuallypod.com/ is a new podcast looking at what "rom com" movies get right and wrong about relationships. Dr Laurie Santos joined the hosts Eli Finkel of Northwestern University and Paul Eastwick from UC Davis to talk about her favorite 80s teen movie, Say Anything. In this episode, they discuss what Cameron Crowe's 1989 film tells us about what constitutes stalking; and the transition when romantic partners supplant our parents as our closest relationships. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Laurie Santos?

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• 1:16Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:24Laurie Santos?

  Happy Valentine's Day. As promised, I have a lovely little treat for you on this most romantic of days. In the last episode of The Happiness Lab, I chatted with relationship experts Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick to explore what rom-coms get right and wrong about romance. But Eli and Paul have their own fabulous podcast. It's called Love Factually, and it just so happens that I recently joined them as a guest. So here's me and Eli and Paul talking about the science of one of my favorite ever rom-coms, the movie Say Anything. I hope you enjoy our conversation. And if you do, be sure to check out Love Factually wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:07Laurie Santos?

  Welcome to Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom-coms and romantic films

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Using the science of close relationships. We're your hosts, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, welcoming in guest host of the Happiness Lab podcast, Dr. Laurie Santos. Thank you for joining us today.

• 2:26Laurie Santos?

  Thank you so much for having me on the show.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  So Laurie, tell us, what are we talking about today?

• 2:32Laurie Santos?

  So today, we're talking about Say Anything, Cameron Crowe's 1989 rom-com starring Si, John Cusack, and Ione Sky, which Entertainment Weekly ranked in 2002 as the number one romance movie of the past 25 years. Some of the themes we'll explore are how attachment bonds transfer from a parent to a romantic partner, the benefits of optimism, and what exactly counts as stalking.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  And fair warning, we'll be spoiling this movie today. So if you don't know how many songs one woman can write about Joe, and they're all about pain, then go ahead and watch this movie and come back. Okay, Eli, tell us, who are the key characters and couples in this movie?

• 3:14Speaker 04

  The movie explores the love triangle involving Diane, her father Jim, and her boyfriend Lloyd. The story takes place during the summer after the young lovers graduate from high school. Diane, played by Ione Sky, is the unassuming valedictorian who will be leaving for a prestigious fellowship abroad at the end of the summer. Her peers view her as pretty and kind, but she's always been so busy that nobody really knows her. Jim, played by John Mulaney, is Diane's father. He and Diane's mother divorced five years earlier, after which Diane chose to live with him. His devotion to his daughter is boundless, but the methods underlying that devotion are sometimes dubious.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Lloyd, played by Si, John Cusack, is a principled slacker and a devoted brother and uncle. His best friends are Cory and DC, both girls, and his primary passions are kickboxing and Diane. So Paul, those are the chess pieces. Are you ready to give us one minute on how the film moves them across the board?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Ready. Count me down. Here we go.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  On your mark, get set, and go.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Super achiever Diane Court delivers a graduation speech as Lloyd Dobler plots how to ask her out on a bona fide date. He wins her over by asking her to go with him to a graduation party and promising to give her all his English tips because she's moving to England in the fall for school. At the party, they orbit each other as Diane meets all the people she never got to know in high school while Lloyd acts as key master. They become friends with potential and plan to hang out as much as they can over the next 16 weeks. Lloyd survives a family dinner at Diane's house. He visits the retirement home run by her father. He teaches her how to drive stick. They have sex in the backseat, listening to Peter Gabriel. Diane's father becomes more and more disapproving of her relationship with Lloyd, and Diane ultimately relents. She breaks it off with Lloyd, leading to eight unreturned phone messages and a boombox Peter Gabriel serenade outside her bedroom window.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  All this time, Diane's father's been lying to her about evading taxes, but the IRS closes in and she discovers her father's piles of cash. Diane confronts her father. She makes it with Lloyd. Her father goes to prison and Diane and Lloyd fly to England together as he promises her that everything will be okay once the smoking sign goes ding. Ah, you did it. Amazing.

• 5:27Laurie Santos?

  I was never gonna pull that off. I was gonna get so stuck on minute details of this film, but yes. Amazing job, Paul.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  This is very challenging. Okay. Well, Lori, why don't you kick it off by telling us, what is your relationship to this movie?

• 5:40Laurie Santos?

  So, I saw this movie back in the 1980s when I was a kid myself. And interestingly, I just rewatched this movie with a friend from grad school and his now two 13-year-old kids. And it was fascinating to kind of rewatch the film because probably, I probably watched it around the time I was 13, if it kind of came out around 1988. So it was like a very strange full circle. But I kind of both identified with Lloyd as being this sort of like, kind but clueless, don't really know where you're going type person. And also Diane, in the sense that she was like, smart, not the pretty part. So I was kind of the like, kind of unfortunate, not very cool, but also smart person. And so I like, really wanted this couple to get together.

• 6:22Laurie Santos?

  And then I think like, all women who watched this film back in the day, I just absolutely fell in love with Lloyd Dobler. Everyone wants their own Lloyd Dobler. Everyone wants the no, and this, you know, Peter Gabriel serenade, just the whole thing. So, for me, when I think of like 80s rom-coms that make me smile, and honestly- That still hold up today. This is really one of them.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  That's really cool. I do think that it felt like a permission structure to be a sensitive dude and that it, but that you could also kind of be admired for it at the same time. And I also really liked too how he seems to really be taken with Diane for many different reasons, but also in part that she's like a badass and killing it out there. Right? I mean, she's, you know, very smart and successful. And it's very clear that from the beginning, he's like, wow.

• 7:10Laurie Santos?

  Yeah. I mean, Lloyd Dobler was like the OG like husband that's going to support the woman's career. Right. Like in the eighties when that wasn't so much of a thing. So I mean, he's going to give up, you know, his permanent kickboxing kind of teaching ship to fly to England with her to kind of help her out in her studies. Right. And so, yeah. Aspirational.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's cool. Well, Eli, what about you?

• 7:30Speaker 04

  I, you know, I connected in a lot of different ways to this. One of them is, is when I, I've mentioned on this podcast a couple of times that I acted in high school and there's something in Evanston called the Piven, P I V E N. Known like Jerry Piven's parent, Jeremy Piven's parents, theater workshop. So I took that when I was 16 and even then, so this was 1991 and, you know, famous alumni, John and Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven himself, like a whole bunch of stuff like that. And when I took it, I took it with, you know, Martin Scorsese's daughter. And then sort of had my first, you know, serious sort of girlfriend situation there and, and just-

• 8:04Laurie Santos?

  Was it Martin Scorsese's daughter? You could say, no?

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no, I did not date her. That would have been quite the story. It was not, but, but what's interesting is just proving that I never did grow up. I currently live one block from where that, that theater workshop is held.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Oh, not kidding. Yeah. Well, let's transition to talking about what this movie gets right, about the nature of close relationships, but also, you know, about the nature of happiness and optimism more generally. So Lori, do you want to kick it off for us?

• 8:34Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, so one of the reasons I love this film is I think it really does a nice job of showing the power of optimism, right? So Lloyd is this like underachiever, like Diane Court has no idea who he is, but he tells his friends, like his two girlfriends, hey, I'm just gonna like ask her out. And so Cory and DC are just like, no, like, are you crazy? She's beautiful. What is it? She's the brain with the body of a game show host. And she doesn't know it, right? And so they're like, she's just gonna destroy you, Lloyd, like, don't do this. But Lloyd is just like, I'm gonna go for it. I'm just gonna ask her out. And as we see in the film, ultimately, this works. And so this raises this interesting question about like, is kind of believing you can succeed

• 9:19Laurie Santos?

  at something that seems incredibly unlikely, good for you, like, does it make it more likely that you're gonna succeed at the thing? And it turns out that there's some interesting psychology on this. There's this famous effect in psychology called the Roger Bannister effect, which for you runners out there, you might know that Roger Bannister is a famous British runner who originally was the first guy to run the four-minute mile back in the day. And the deal with the four-minute mile, I mean, I can't even barely run like a 10, 20-minute, 40-minute, 40-minute miles. 11:30 right here. Yeah, so, so like, nobody had run the four-minute mile before Roger Bannister. But importantly, no one thought anyone could. It was actually believed to be beyond like human capacity, right?

• 10:03Laurie Santos?

  And, and so Roger was like, I'm gonna run the four-minute mile. And everyone's like, that seems crazy. But then, at this one famous race in 1954, he ran it. But instantly what happened after that is people said like, oh, it is humanly possible, we can run it. And like, just like, over a month later, somebody else ran the four-minute mile. And now subsequently, a four-minute mile is like, not even anything for somebody who's a real runner to like, super brag about, because so many people have kind of done this at this point. And so what does this mean? This means that Roger, believing that it was possible to run the four-minute mile when everyone else thought it was impossible, the idea is that his mental model of this made it easier for him to actually physically achieve this. Like, it allowed him to engage in whatever behaviors he needed to do this, like, you know, practicing or sort of

• 10:44Laurie Santos?

  Pushing himself or whatever, believing he could do it meant it made it easier for him to do it. And I think this is true for Lloyd too, right? To believe he had to do it, he had to call her up. And you know, just be his normal, kind of jovial, kind, funny self, like a little self-effacing. But like, he just went for it and ultimately it worked.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  That's great. I mean, what I love about the Roger Bannister idea vis a vis this movie is that we also see the inspiration for other people. And so there's this point at the, uh, at the party where, uh, where Lloyd goes up to, uh, one of his friends, Mike Cameron. And, uh, and is talking to him and Mike Cameron says,

• 11:23Speaker 05

  I wanted to ask you, how'd you get Diane Court to go out with you?

• 11:27Speaker 03

  I called her up.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  But how come it worked? I mean, like, what are you?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  I'm Lloyd Dobler.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  This is great. This gives me hope. Thanks.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  All right. So yeah, that, right? That quote right there is how it works.

• 11:43Laurie Santos?

  And Mike is basically every other runner, like in the late 1950s who were like, oh, well, if your Roger Bannister can do it, you know, then the rest of us can do it too.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Um, Eli, what do you got?

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Oh my God, Lori, I'm so psyched you mentioned this movie. I had forgotten just how much is in here. And watching it from the perspective of relationship science was deeply enlightening. I, I'm going to start by talking about something that's a little obscure in the movie. Um, and, and it points to this idea that I, I, I put a lot of stock in that, that in a sense, social reality is reality, right? That, that basically things exist within our social consensus and, and the line, Diane says this to her dad, she says, "It always feels good to tell you the truth because if I can't share it with you, it's almost like it didn't happen."

• 12:32Speaker 04

  It's such a great line. And, and going back into the sixties, these sociologists, Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, had this, this paper where they talked about the microsociology of knowledge. And really what they're talking about is this idea that the reality of the world is sustained in conversations with significant others. Now this is one with her dad. But more recently, Maya Rossignot Malone and Tori Higgins have done research on this shared reality idea. And they talked about partners as making sense of the world together. And they have this line in one of their papers that I love, which is that humans are truth cartographers, searching for epistemic companions with whom to map out the bounds of reality.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  And the movie, again, it focuses on a lot of things, but I think one of the lesser noticed aspects of what they're doing is they're playing in this space that, that yes, you can have these experiences, but until you've shared them with someone, they are not fully real. And I love that about this film.

• 13:30Laurie Santos?

  Okay, Eli, but that raises an interesting question that's like shown in the title of the film. This idea of say anything, like, should we share all our realities with people? I have to say, again, rewatching this film with 13 year olds, the scene where Diane is telling her dad about having sex. Cause she's like, she comes home late after the whole like sex in the car thing. And then she's like, okay, I just feel so sad. I can't share this with you. So I'm just going to go through it, dad. And she's just like, I attacked him. It was so great. You know, it's sex in the elbow. And the dad's face, and even these 13 year olds were like, something major has been violated there. This is, this is a new, this is a new, very much more sharing generation, I think, than like the generation like Diane came from. And so what does the science say there? Is that right?

• 14:14Laurie Santos?

  Should we really be able to share anything? Is honesty and shared reality about every truth important for relationships?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Look, so I think there's two ways of engaging with that, Lori. I love this question. The first one is about the shared reality aspect. And yes, I do think there's something realer about her having sex with Lloyd because she shared it with her dad. So in that sense, I think this classic shared reality literature is correct. This, this question of discretion, are there circumstances under which we shouldn't be sharing everything with everybody? Even our, our close partners? I don't think the field has gotten into this enough, but I am persuaded that, that there are certain sorts of discretion, certain sorts of things that, that are probably best not shared in certain relationships. And it's true that, that Diane and her dad had a very close and special bond.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  But in general, like details about one's sex life, sharing those with one's parents might be a little dubious on average. That would be my guess.

• 15:09Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I mean, and even in the movie, right? I mean, there is this moment of like, oh, my gosh, she's telling her dad that she just had sex. But I think it was in the context of her just saying, look, I'm willing to share everything with you, even the tough things. And I feel like that is actually an interesting message that like with if we can't share our tough things with close others or controversial things or, you know, sensitive things, like, who can we share them with? So.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  So Paul, I'm gonna throw it to you in a sec, because I know you also must have identified a million things. But Lori, on this, this idea of say anything and share everything, I think part of the title of the movie is really about her dad's lie. We haven't talked too much about it, but the whole conceit of their relationship is say anything. But meanwhile, he's been involved in this embezzlement fraud. And, you know, his motives are probably good, maybe we'll, we'll touch on that. But she's deeply shaken by it. And on this idea of like, social relationship partners as truth cartographers, I find it interesting what happens to her when he, when she finds out. She's deeply shaken. And what she says, she goes

• 16:14Speaker 04

  to Lloyd at that point, and she says, my father's guilty. He lied to me. He lied to everybody. I just left home. I need you. And I think really what she needs is her reality, her sense of reality is kind of shaken. And she's looking to him to find some sort of stability about the world. And I do think part of why she went back to him is this epistemic, the world isn't making sense, please help motivation.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  I think that actually leads into one of the other things that I think this movie gets pretty correct. And it is the attachment transfer that takes place as people age, as people grow up. Typically, for most adolescents, they will tell you that the people that they have the strongest attachment bonds with are their parents. And that includes various behaviors, like, who do you want to be around? We call it proximity seeking, right? But it's like, who do you want to be around? Who do you go to for support when you're feeling down? We call that safe haven. And then who do you go to for advice or to celebrate? And that we call the

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Secure base and usually the transfer kind of goes in that order as people move from having parents be their closest confidants to having romantic partners be their closest confidants. So first you you want to spend all this time with a romantic party, but you might still go to the parent for advice or for support and then the support transfers and finally it's that advice component that moves over to the romantic partner and I kind of see we I think we witness her go through that process and Eli that scene you were just describing I think is is the moment the final moment where she has the transfer is complete.

• 17:56Laurie Santos?

  Although in her case, I worry that like the oh she she kind of does that transfer, but it really is like the only person that she ever talked to because she got into have friends in high school was the dead and now it seems like the only person that she's talking to now is Lloyd, which bracketed might be a great person to talk to because Lloyd is kind and considerate and the best significant other out there ever, but it's still not it's risky. It's still not really good. And I think even Lloyd Lloyd recognizes this. At one point in the film, he asked this question when she comes back to him, he says, do you need me or do you just need somebody else? Right? And I think there's kind of a he doesn't actually even let her answer. He's like, never mind. I don't care. And he just kisses her and reunion is perfect. But I think it raises this question of like,

• 18:37Laurie Santos?

  is this healthy that Diane is kind of transferring this attachment, but maybe not seeking out kind of help, support, save havens, all these other things from just like other humans in her life.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, having a thin rather than a more developed social network is not great for people. You want to feel like your little dyad is embedded in a set of other people who are all invested in helping your relationship to work. And so, you know, two people going off on their own, it's very romantic, but it's a it's a it's a little risky in the grand scheme of things.

• 19:16Laurie Santos?

  And it's an interesting contrast with like how Lloyd Dobler does it, right? He's got Cory and DJ, he's like close female friends to go to. He's got this close relationship with his sister, who's his actual sister in real life, Joan Cusack, right? And her son, he's just like has this, he even has this like bevy of dude friends at the sip and go that he goes to to talk to and get like relationship advice from. But I think there's there's a sense in which like Lloyd is healthier in part just because he has these other support systems to go to.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Cool. Laurie, what else do you have about this movie, other things this movie gets right?

• 19:52Laurie Santos?

  So, so another thing I think this movie gets right, or at least I really hope the relationship science bears out, and I hope it gets right, right, is this question of like, who do you find attractive, right? You know, Lloyd is this kind of like, you know, underachiever, he just likes his kickboxing, he's kind of unremarkable, so unremarkable that when he first calls Diane, she pulls out her yearbook and starts flipping through to try to look at him and just like, look at his photo. She just, he's just not known to her, right?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  That's really funny.

• 20:19Laurie Santos?

  But, he's, but he's kind, she sees that kindness later, even on that short phone call when he's asking her out, he kind of makes her laugh and she's into that. And it kind of raises this question, like, do we pick people based on, you know, just their looks, just their success criteria, what they're going to achieve in life, whether they're going to get some huge fellowship and be a valedictorian, or do we pick people based just on how they make us feel, right? They're kind to us, they make us laugh, they make us feel positive. And so, my sense is that this movie is winning out, according to the relationship science, but you two are the experts, what is the science saying?

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Paul, you might have a thought or two on this one.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I'm glad you brought that up, Laurie. In fact, your, your hopes for the way attraction works are indeed true. That is very close to, to how people actually experience initial attraction, which is what I think is happening in that scene that you're describing. So, there's this classic study by Elaine Walster, then Walster, now Elaine Hatfield, conducted in the 1960s, and it's affectionately called the Computer Dance Study. And the idea was that these researchers, they brought a number of college freshmen together, set them up with each other, looked to see who like whom. The lore of this study is that, ah, only attractiveness mattered, nothing else really mattered. The reality is, they didn't like, have great

• 21:38Speaker 03

  measures of the other stuff. And even the measures they did have, it like, kind of worked, it just, I think everybody was surprised that physical attractiveness was so potent. So, when you look at contemporary speed dating data sets, yes, the appeal of attractiveness is very much present.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  It's very powerful, but so is confidence. That's also a huge effect size, right? Then that's Lloyd in a nutshell. So is being funny. So is being nice and responsive. These are all positive, meaningful predictors. It is not the case that only attractiveness matters. All of those other features end up being important too. So I think you're spot on there.

• 22:19Laurie Santos?

  And I love how the movie just develops Lloyd's moral character over time. One of my favorite, you mentioned it in your quick summary. I was surprised they got in there. Paul's especially effective summary was one of the first things that Diane learns about Lloyd is at least at this party. He's the so-called key master, which for those of you who may not remember eighties parties, is the person that gets to hold everybody's car keys and so that they don't necessarily drive home drunk. So Lloyd is sort of the evaluator of whether or not somebody is ready to drive home. And we see in the movie that this kind of comes to a head with one of the friends who comes up to him and is screaming at him. And Lloyd is just like, you must chill, you must chill.

• 22:59Laurie Santos?

  You know, he doesn't give him the keys, right? But I think that's a moment for Diane to realize like, oh, this person is responsible. He can be responsible outside of your academic pursuits, but this person is also kind of compassionate and kind. Like she's seeing all these like great strengths that he has, not in the context of her relationship, but just kind of generally, right? And I think that that must be a huge, I mean, it's a huge factor in why every teenage girl who watched this movie in the eighties fell in love with Lloyd Doppler. So it must be good for Diane too.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. So on this, like, does the movie get the attraction right? It does so many different ways. So it also plays with some false myths that, you know, she might be out of his league. She's the brains with the body of, what did you say? The body of a game show hostess.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  So she's out of his league. Also brains stay with brains. So one is this idea of out of your league. The other is like, no, like likes attract like, like what would she want with you? You sort of burn out, you know, kickboxer. And The movie basically puts the lie to all those sorts of things. Of course, they're compatible because he's got these other qualities and they're attentive to each other and he makes her laugh. But one of the things that's interesting is, we talk a lot about attraction on this show, especially with regard to similarity, right? So there's this conventional view, widespread, that we're attracted to people who are similar to us. Turns out, if you study that, we're attracted to people whom we think are similar to us. And you see this here a little bit because, or you see one of the reasons why this might

• 24:28Speaker 04

  emerge, because there's this scene where she works at an old person's home, a retirement home, I'm not sure what they call it at that time. And she says to Lloyd, "Do you want to come by?" And he's like, "Eh." And she says, "Like, you seem to have something against old people." And then he sort of says, "Well, no, I don't, but I kind of do because, you know, I used to work at a smorgasbord and the old people would flock there and they loved to eat and they'd just jam their mouths, you know, they ate with their mouths open." And she says, "I think that's ageism and that's being prejudiced against people because they're old. Maybe their mouths don't work as well as yours." And he says, "Really? Um, I, well, you're really turning me around here. I was looking at it the wrong way, I think."

• 25:11Speaker 04

  And there is research on this concept called attitude alignment in close relationships. And this is work that my advisor Carol Rustbult was doing in collaboration with a student who was there with me named Jody Davis when I was in graduate school in the late 90s. But what they find in that space is that alignment is stronger to the extent that the issue is central to the other person. And clearly Lloyd's happy to recognize that Diane cares more about this than he does. And it's stronger to the degree that the relationship is important. And so what we see here is this will masquerade as, "Look how much they have in common. They both love old people." But only because he basically tuned to her over time. And so it feels like they have these things in common, but in reality, they develop them together over time.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that idea. It's also connected to one of the things that I really appreciated about this movie, which, again, sort of this nice guy manifesto idea for how it can work. And I think it highlights the importance of having female platonic friends if you are a heterosexual man. And this is everywhere in the literature. So if you look, for example, at correlations between like hostile sexism and if you're a man having female friends, that's a meaningful negative correlation there. The more female friends you have, the less likely you are to endorse hostile sexism. These ideas of like, oh, women are

• 26:34Speaker 03

  out to get men. Women are out to take advantage of men, right? Things like this. And it's a simple intergroup contact story. We spend more time with people, just getting to know them as people, and we have less of those really pernicious beliefs. Furthermore, having a bigger other gender network, and this is true for both men and women, heterosexual men and women, they're more likely to form relationships over a few year period. This is also done on high school students. So I think we're really seeing that here, that these are good ways to be in the world if you are a heterosexual man, so you're interested in women and you want to actually get to know women and ultimately date somebody that

• 27:18Speaker 03

  you're really into. This movie is pointing out the, one of the more effective ways to do that.

• 27:27Laurie Santos?

  Plus, the female friends are sometimes incredible songs for sex.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 27:31Laurie Santos?

  We'll get to that later on as well.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Those songs were stuck in my head all day.

• 27:35Laurie Santos?

  The Joe Lys.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  They're so catchy. Why? No idea.

• 27:43Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, she should have went on to write commercial jingles. I hope that's a chord did well in life. When you give that definition, it kind of sounds a little bit like the kinds of things that Lloyd's kind of male friends, who he seeks out right after Diane breaks up with him, some of the views they expressed about women. I think the most succinct one was the youngest member of the Sip and Go crew, which was just this little kid who was like, bitches, man.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. But another reason that I totally, I love that scene because, again, it's all bearing down on exposing the lie of the, of keeping the genders separate. And it's when Lloyd asked them,

• 28:22Speaker 06

  I got a question. You guys know so much about women, how come you hear it like a gas and sip on a Saturday night, completely alone, drinking beers, no women anywhere?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  And they really have no-

• 28:32Laurie Santos?

  By choice, man.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, uh huh, uh huh, so anyway, there, there you go.

• 28:40Laurie Santos?

  It points out, I mean, I wish Lloyd Dobler could like walk around and like go to every incel Reddit like thread and just walk in and ask the same Lloyd Dobler question to kind of break this up.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Seriously. Um, all right, so, um, tell us about some things that this movie gets wrong about the nature of close relationships, either of you, what do you, what do you have?

• 29:01Laurie Santos?

  I just said something that the movie gets wrong generally, which is that kickboxing does not seem to be the sport of the future.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 29:07Laurie Santos?

  You know, see, notwithstanding, it just seems, it was close, but a little bit off. Okay, but that's not really relationship size, that's not really relationship size. One of the things I wanted to look at was this question of stalking.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:21Laurie Santos?

  Um, because I think this movie portrays a kind of strange version of it. It was definitely a version that, you know, I think based on all the memes that still exists now, like, like 30 years later, like the holding up the boombox, which I was able to look up and is in fact a Sharp GF 76,000 boombox, just like old school.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  That's the romantic boombox.

• 29:46Laurie Santos?

  That is the purely romantic boombox. I think you, like, it's really hard to find them now, I mean, in part because it's like not the 80s anymore, but I think people have bought them for the specific act of sort of copying Lloyd Dobler.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:58Laurie Santos?

  That's a move that like is iconic, it's on t-shirts and memes, but it's also like borderline stalkery, and so, Paul, what is the movie kind of saying about stalker? And, yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  So, I felt that the movie, um, kind of gives a pass to certain stalking behaviors.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  It treats it kind of romantically, kind of, I don't want to say a how to manual, but there's, there's, there's a couple of things happening. One, and, and I'll start with this, even though this really seems benign, are the eight phone messages, right? Eight left messages. So there are studies that look at different forms of stalking and leaving messages or unwanted phone calls are some of the most common ones. Those show the biggest discrepancy between what the person who is being left feels, is likely to, to be unpleasant and what the person who is being stalked feels. People who are being stalked hate the phone messages.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  They, they really want them to stop. And the people leaving the phone messages are like, oh, whatever. I'm sure it didn't really bother them. They're really, really unpleasant. And so is showing up at somebody's house uninvited. Also, not the kind of thing that most people look upon very favorably if they've broken up with somebody. I think that, I think that whole meme, the whole idea, like rewatching it, I was like, oh, this is not what I remembered. I remembered something inspiring, not like triumphant, but like, like, let's go, like, let's defy your father. That is not what that scene is at all.

• 31:45Laurie Santos?

  Yeah. All the adults that I watched this film with remember the, the boombox scene as ending with Diane kind of rushing out and that's when they meet up and like, it kind of worked. And I was like, wait a minute, of course it didn't work. He's just like creepily showing up with spoon box in the middle of the night.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. It would have been, it would have been better if they'd had the scene where he like got back into his car and drove home. That, that scene never made it into the movie.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Right. So.

• 32:10Laurie Santos?

  Where he thought really carefully and was like, maybe that was a little too much. Like, I should really respect Diane's boundaries. Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  And so I, I want to, actually want to give the movie credit for that, that it actually didn't show that working, right? And that it, and that it, a number of other things have to transpire before she changes her mind. So it's more, I think that I'm critiquing the way the movie lodged itself in our collective memories. It contained some things that I think the movie didn't intend, but, but aren't a very good idea.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Laurie, you're gonna regret that you ever chose to be on our show, but I have a question for you about this. So what does it mean to seduce someone? Like, what does seduction mean if we stipulate that it isn't stuff like this, right? If it isn't stuff like, "Well, she wasn't sure, so I tried to be more charming. I did something innovative. I left a funny phone message or ate." And I agree that, like, I don't think we really want these behaviors. Again, the movie gets away with it in a way a lot of these old movies get away with it, because she actually did want it, right? That's the thing that he can't know. And certainly, she's not giving him reason to believe that she really

• 33:25Speaker 04

  wants it, but she did, and so it's sort of okay from our perspective, from the viewer's perspective. But Laurie, do you have an opinion? Like, what would it mean to be interested in somebody, be unsure whether that person is interested in you, and to try to persuade them that, you know, "Give me a try. Like, it'll be fun." And is it, if it isn't this, if it isn't what Lloyd Dobbler did in this movie, like, what does it look like?

• 33:51Laurie Santos?

  Yeah. Well, I think it is kind of what Lloyd Dobbler does, not with the boombox part, but with the other parts, right? It's really thinking from the other person's perspective about how to help them and what they need, right? One of the scenes in the beginning that Diane Courte actually comments on to her dad later, when she's like, "Well, here's why I fell in love with Lloyd," was that they're just kind of walking around, and Lloyd notices some broken glass on the ground. And, you know, it's post-party, so she's kind of walking around barefoot, and he's like, "No, no, no. Let me just move that out of the way for you." Like, he's thinking about it from her perspective. He's kind of perspective-taking, in that case, hopefully accurately, about what she really needs. And I think that's the spot where it kind of seduction works best, like, when we're kind of perspective-taking about what would help another person, but then looking for

• 34:36Laurie Santos?

  signs of consent, right? And that's the spot where I think the boombox is kind of on the borderline. But even Lloyd, again, I'm kind of defending him because he's

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Because he's Lloyd.

• 34:45Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, "Hi, sweetie Lloyd Dobbler, and, you know, how could I, like, you know, regret all the things I watched in the 80s and all these things?" Even then, he has this sign where people are trying to convince him to call her some more. I think it was his girlfriends are trying to convince him to call her some more. And he says, I draw the line at eight, you know, answering machine messages. And to be fair, bracketed, I do think that like, maybe it was okay to do a little more in the eighties. Just because like, sometimes the people are running for the phone, like you didn't know.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Right, that's a good point.

• 35:13Laurie Santos?

  When the cellphone goes to the message, they don't want to talk to you. But the answering machine, sometimes it's like, the cord's really far away. They don't have it in their pocket, you know, so. But Lloyd is saying, I'm setting a boundary, right? I'm giving her a chance, but I'm drawing the line at eight phone calls.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's persuaded to do that one last one. And then we see, right, that she almost picks it up. So he gets an out from our perspective, because we know what's going on a little bit behind the scenes.

• 35:39Laurie Santos?

  I hope you're enjoying my appearance on the new podcast, Love Factually. It's time for a quick break, but Paul, Eli and I will be back soon to explain what other things say anything gets wrong about relationship science.

• 35:55Laurie Santos?

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• 36:35Laurie Santos?

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• 37:20Laurie Santos?

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• 38:04Laurie Santos?

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• 38:15Laurie Santos?

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• 38:57Laurie Santos?

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• 39:09Speaker 03

  So, anything else about what this movie gets wrong about Close Relationships? Eli, what do you have?

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Look, it mostly gets stuff right, but you know, it makes some errors like every movie. And, and one of them is, you know, a very forgivable error, but generally it's risky to make forever promises in the first weeks and months of a new relationship. And so the letter that he writes to her, right? Lloyd writes this letter to Diane after they have sex and he's really into her. And the, the letter in its entirety is, "Dear Diane, I'll always be there for you. All the love in my heart, Lloyd." Now, I don't have a problem with "Dear Diane," or "All the love in my heart," or "Lloyd." But I think the part when he says, "I'll always be there for you..."

• 39:53Laurie Santos?

  It's the "always," really the "always," yeah.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  "...is probably a bold commitment that he's actually, he's, he's, he's making a vow that he really is probably not in a position to make. And we do this. We do this a lot and it's desirable and we like it and we want to feel this way. We stand up at our wedding vows and say, "I will love you forever." These seem like high-risk choices for somebody who takes seriously what the definition of a vow is. But I do think this is one of the cases where I just felt a little sheepish about suggesting that the really romantic thing to do is to tell somebody something that you really cannot, you probably cannot promise you're going to be able to deliver over time.

• 40:35Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, you forget when you see the movie because it seems like it's built over this whole, you know, two-hour period. It's a little Romeo and Juliet, right? You know, they've only really kind of hung out with each other for like a couple days, really, you know.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Right. And you, and even, you know, it's over 16 weeks and now they are going to a foreign country together to presumably to live together.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Um, and that is pretty fast to jump into that level of commitment. And the movie clearly wants us to feel that, that we are witnessing a success story. I mean, you know, the, the ending, I love it. And I love the contrast with the graduate, right? That it's, you know, here are these two people embarking on this adventure and this one... We're supposed to be rooting for them and feeling like they've got it. But the reality is 16 weeks, that is quite a leap of faith to think that they've got it figured out at this point.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  You know, Paul, it's interesting because I actually think this is the other thing that maybe the movie doesn't get right. And this depends on interpretation, but like, what is the point of the ding on the airport? Like, this is literally the last thing that happens in the entire movie. It's obvious that this is supposed to be really significant.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  It's so good, though. It's so good.

• 41:48Laurie Santos?

  It's so good, though.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  It's amazing.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  There is a reading where you're basically like, the early parts of a relationship are turbulent. So again, just a reminder for people who haven't seen the movie this early. Diane is scared of flying and Lloyd is with her on this flight. Literally the last scene of the movie, they're going to England for this fellowship that she has. And he says, like, if anything goes wrong, it's going to be within the first five minutes. So you just have to make it to the ding, the airport, the take off your seatbelt ding. I think it was the no smoking ding in the eighties.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  The no smoking ding.

• 42:22Laurie Santos?

  It was the no smoking ding. Because everybody else on the plane is like holding their pack of cigarettes, shaking to try to wait till they can light one up.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  I think, right, the ding is light up.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  It is basically light up. But either way, it could have been the seatbelt ding. And so one reading is that now they're through the turbulent time. And we're witnessing, like, the ding is like, and now it's smooth sailing. And if that is what Cameron Crowe intended, I think he's really guilty of the, and they all lived happily ever after sort of thing. So I think that is my other concern about the movie is that if he was implying something like that in the closing scene, that strikes me as wildly incorrect about what the next 60 years of that relationship might look like.

• 43:07Laurie Santos?

  Or the next, like, you know, four months.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  68 seconds.

• 43:09Laurie Santos?

  And she starts studying. There's no kickboxing in all of London and et cetera, et cetera.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Right. And what exactly is he going to do with himself? I think that's right. I think compared to some movies where they get together at the end and then we don't see anything about them encountering challenges. I think those versions are worse because we do see them overcoming some stuff here, but. I I hear you as much as I love the way that whole ending is done. I I get it that with, you know, there are trials to come.

• 43:38Laurie Santos?

  Can I just, can I just like, can I try out a like, a more empirically sane version? What if that whole plane flight where there's a lot of turbulence, like an unusual amount of turbulence for like a plane taking off before the seatbelt thing goes off? What if that is kind of a metaphor for like, we're gonna go on this, you know, trip together, the long version of our life together is gonna have a lot of turbulence. But by holding each other's hand, we'll get through it and, you know, we'll kind of wait for the day.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  You know what's, you know what's funny about that, Lori, is that that that reminds me of the point you made earlier about the social network? Because his friends, he's got these two really close women friends, girlfriends, I guess. And they have also packed some stuff for this flight for them, right? They've packed some things to make sure, like, I think they know that she's nervous about flying and they're having this adventure together as a couple for the first time. And so those friends who are really invested in the relationship have packed for them some nice things for the trip. And that that is, I think, hearkens back to, wow, they seem to have a pretty good foundation for a lot of what they might be going through next.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  That's cool. It's like, it's like a wedding thing, right? It's like, you know, you get everybody together to sort of give you, you know, well wishes on your way.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  I object.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  So are we okay with this? Anything in this movie raise moral quandaries or other concerns, other things age badly? What does everybody have here?

• 45:05Laurie Santos?

  Well, I can say what was interesting is that I, as I mentioned, I watched it with two 2024 13 year olds. And they genuinely really liked the film. They had two things that were kind of funny, and maybe this is that they were a little young. One was that, well, first of all, we were watching with their their dad, and so they really didn't like the sexy. Oh, God, they're kissing. Why are they under the blanket? Why is he shaking? Like, they literally couldn't handle that. But the second thing was that they were really confused when Diane broke up with Lloyd. Where they're like, but she doesn't think that. Why is she saying that? She doesn't think that. And they kind of just like couldn't get it like they kind of couldn't handle her kind of confusion based on what was going on with her dad of sort of stepping away. And they're like, but she doesn't think that, right? They're going to get back together, right?

• 45:49Laurie Santos?

  Like, they kind of were seeing, and so maybe this is the current generation having a hard time with like, you know, tough emotions or complicated conflict in the film, but they had a really tough time.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  That's really interesting.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things that was really eye opening about watching it again, and here Lori, thank you again for recommending this one. It was just a delight, is it's not just a movie for kids. That was, that was something that I think you're describing here, like the 13 year olds didn't get it, but also as somebody who is now a dad, I'm actually a dad of a teen girl, and I just thought a whole lot more about the dad, daughter dynamic. And the truth is, I, I at the top called this like a love triangle. I don't think that's the standard way people think about this movie, but I do think that's what's happening, is that these are two men who are deeply in love with, obviously there's nothing sexual with her dad, of course, but deeply in love with her, that she is going to be somewhat, or to a significant degree, the center of their lives.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  And she's trying to balance that, and she feels awkward about this time that she's spending with Lloyd, given that she's going away, and she feels like maybe she should be with her dad. And so I think there is like a sophistication, an adultness of this teen romance that you almost never get in a teen romance. And I think that's why, part of the reason why I think the 13 year olds didn't get it is she feels this strong sense of obligation to her dad and doesn't know how to fit Lloyd into that schema, and therefore ends up playing around for a while with breaking up with him in a way that doesn't make sense for her feelings for Lloyd, but isn't crazy from the perspective of the various emotional forces that are buffeting her.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  One of the things that I flagged as being a little bit, that sort of aged badly or aged strangely about this movie is in this same category. And I'll pose this in the form of a question. Did, did some Gen Xers think this was a parenting manual?

• 47:44Speaker 03

  That the way to parent is to really push your kid as much as possible, cut them off from socialization when they are, when they are in high school. Again, I think this is sometimes a stereotype of Gen X contemporary parenting rather than the reality. But I do think there is much more pressure today to achieve, achieve, achieve for people in high school that people like Diane Court are very common these days, right? You know, she was the one person in her high school and now like this is a thing. And, and so I wonder how many people saw this movie and thought like, that's how I'm gonna treat my daughter.

• 48:26Laurie Santos?

  Parenting 101 and tax fraud. No, but I mean, apart, apart for the tax fraud, no, I mean, Paul, I think you're really on to something, right? Like if we look at the current generation of teenagers, right? The 13 year olds I was watching this with, this is the loneliest generation in history since we've been measuring loneliness in teenagers. They're also the most academically busy, like the most academically strappy. If we just like look at just sheer amounts of homework, those things have gone up since the making of this film. And beyond that, we see like the seeds of the fact that they're kind of like Diane, like shifting away from these sort of dating relationships, right? Like the fact that like, modern teenagers are having less sex than teenagers have ever had back in the day. And so you might be kind of on to something where the sort of

• 49:09Laurie Santos?

  Diane Court School of Child Rearing was like, kind of coming up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that the kiddos picked up on is that, you know, Lloyd does this lovely thing where he's the key master and he's taking everyone's keys. But then when his job is over, he's like, hand me a beer. And he then proceeds to drive home to the beer. And even the 13 year olds were like, wait a minute. Like, I thought we weren't drinking and driving. And I was like, good, good point. Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  That's great. Relationship quotes. We've hit a few good ones already, but do either of you have any other quotes that we should clip in here and talk about?

• 49:48Laurie Santos?

  So mine is kind of a funny one. And it gets back to this idea that like, these are teenagers who are acting in the film that we're trying to identify with. But the film is actually written by adults. And in a few points, I think you hear the adult voice kicking. And so. This was a quote that happened just after Lloyd has sex with Diane. And he's meeting up with his friends and they're trying to suss out, oh, did you have sex? Or did you have sex? Look at his face. He did the deed. You're an inspiration, Lloyd. You should go on the 700 Club or something.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  All right, all right, all right. Calm down. All right, calm down. Nothing's different.

• 50:22Laurie Santos?

  Lloyd, listen to me. Everything has changed. You've had sex. No matter what you might think, nothing will ever be the same between you two. You might be 60. You might be walking down the street and you'll talk to her about something, whatever. But what you'll really be thinking is, we had sex. And that struck me as like, interestingly, like, it struck me as the kind of case that you couldn't know that unless you were like, you know, in your 40s or 50s. Like, I just didn't think any 19-year-old would be thinking back that that's that.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, sometimes, sometimes Cory in particular has a wisdom beyond her years.

• 51:00Laurie Santos?

  Beyond her years.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  It was somewhere between the 53rd and the 54th song she wrote for Joe that she just developed life's wisdom, I think.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  I wonder if that tape is like on the internet somewhere. If we can buy, like, if somebody has like cobbled together all of those clips and somehow created something.

• 51:19Laurie Santos?

  And then we can ultimately play it on a Sharp GF 76000 box.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  I love it. All right. Any other, any other quotes?

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's one other thing I love. He left those seven voicemails and then on the eighth and final voicemail, he says,

• 51:34Speaker 06

  Don't pick it up. You know it's past. I've been thinking, maybe I didn't know you. Maybe you're a mirage. Maybe the world is a blur of food and sex and spectacle and everyone was just hurtling towards an acropolis. In which case, it's not your fault, you know? Maybe it's a good side to all this. I don't know. I've been thinking about these things.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  The reason I love that is because it ties back a little bit to this like truth cartographers. He's like really thrown at the dissolution of the relationship and he doesn't really make, he's not really able to make sense of things. Maybe you were just a mirage. It's all sort of confusing. And this is a pretty common reaction in the wake of a breakup is we lose a little bit of our sense of order, our sense of structure, our sense of who we are. And I think this, this quote, this last eighth and final voicemail he leaves for her, I think really captures the essence of this idea that it can be bewildering. It can be confusing to end a meaningful relationship. And he's just struggling to make sense of it.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is one of the hardest things that people have to do to get over a breakup is to make sense of it and develop that narrative. So what do we wish we knew about close relationships or any other psychological phenomenon, you know, questions that this movie poses that we don't have great answers to yet?

• 52:44Speaker 04

  Um, how should we act when we are suspicious of a loved one? So at first Diana is convinced that there's no way her father did anything wrong. She goes to the IRS and says, stop it, you've got the wrong guy. And he's like, no, we don't. He's guilty as sin and then gives her enough reason to believe like, uh oh, maybe he did this. So what does she do? She snoops. She looks through his drawers. She eventually unlocks something private and then eventually discovers, uh oh, there's a bunch of like $100 bills here that shouldn't be here. And I just don't have a sense of how people generally behave when they become a little suspicious. I don't know. Is he getting text messages from that girl?

• 53:26Speaker 04

  I sort of think maybe, is that an excuse? Is that something that people use to say, okay, well, I'm gonna break into his email or his texts and try to find out what's going on? When do people do that? When do they start acting like private detectives? Under what circumstances? Is it ethical to do those things? I just don't think we know that much about that.

• 53:45Laurie Santos?

  Well, this is a spot where at least in 2024, I feel like people crowdsourced this a lot. I'm not sure if you all are fans of, am I overreacting on Reddit?

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's good stuff.

• 53:54Laurie Santos?

  But I think this would be like a classic, am I overreacting on Reddit? Where it's like, my dad, you know, the IRS is investigating my dad for, you know, nursing home tax fraud and, you know, I saw some money like in his private chamber. Like, am I reacting? But I think that is something we can do, right? I mean, I think not necessarily on Reddit, but we can go to our close others and ask the question, like, can you give me some advice here? Like, does this make sense? And again, this gets back to the kind of thing you were talking about earlier, Eli, right? Where we're looking for truth seeking, right? We're trying to figure out, is my, like, if you have that reality just privately, it's hard to kind of know, but we're getting some other folks' opinions on things, all of a sudden we can know, am I just being paranoid or is this kind of a real situation? That we need to pay attention to in more detail.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Um, I feel like one thing we talk about a lot on this show is the like motivated reasoning and close relationships. We have all these biases about our close others. We just want to believe what we want to believe. And it is also important to realize that sometimes those beliefs cannot be sustained in light of reality. Reality is still a thing. And at some point, you have to confront that. And so going to other relationships, I mean, that kind of social proof is is a good way to do that. For me, the thing that this movie pointed out that I loved, but also thought like, oh, I wish we studied attraction like this more. And it is the nature of their first date, right, that

• 55:20Speaker 03

  they go to this, I'm not talking about that whatever the thing was at the mall. Right, that doesn't count. When they, when they go to the party, and they're like, kind of interacting, but they're also watching each other interact with other people, right? That this is in many ways, what dating kind of used to be. It was about social networks. You're getting to know each other, but other people are floating in and out of the conversations at the same time. And this is how we see if there's a connection with somebody else. And I wonder if we've really lost something as we transition to the resume version of dating where you sit down across from somebody and I

• 56:02Speaker 03

  talk and you talk and I talk and you talk and we exchange statistics, and we hope that something clicks. And I think we really missed something by not having these kinds of dates. There was something really special about this idea that they are on a date and they're only interacting for a fraction of the time. Like, what a cool idea this is. And, you know, I wish this wasn't so much a bygone era.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 56:26Laurie Santos?

  Okay, here's one that I got interested in, but it might just be how the Lloyd Dobler relationship situation maps on to my own love life right now.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 56:35Laurie Santos?

  And so. There's this open question about whether or not Lloyd and Diane got together at the right time, right? Clearly, they went to high school for three years together. Yeah, they had this weird three-year high school where they had the...

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:48Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, so freaked that that was another thing that 13 years like, what? They went to school for three years? Like, yeah, it was a big mind blowing for them. But but clearly, Diane and Lloyd overlapped for three whole years. Clearly, there was lots of parties he could have invited her to. It's after graduation. She's only got like a couple weeks left before she skedaddles off to the UK for her fellowship. Was that the right time to kind of get together? You know, should he have done it sooner? Is there something special about a relationship that begins when it doesn't have much time? And the reason I like this question is that my husband and I got together right after I found out that I was getting a job at Yale and I was about to move there in a couple weeks' time. We had almost exactly the 16 weeks that Diane and Lloyd had when we found out.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  And he thought, I've always wanted to be in New Haven.

• 57:33Laurie Santos?

  I think he super didn't think that.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  Wait, maybe he had tips. He had tips for New Haven.

• 57:39Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, yeah, no, he didn't think that. He didn't think that. But, you know, I think that in in some ways, it was in some ways at the time, it felt like, oh, there's no pressure to this. We can just kind of get to know each other and enjoy it because it would be silly to think that the end of this has to result in, you know, him hopping on a plane to New Haven until, you know, the turbulence causes the ding, or I guess a car version of that or whatever. And I've wondered, like, is there data on that? Was that a good thing? It was a good thing for me. It seems like it was a good thing for Lloyd and Diane, although, as we've talked about, we don't know what happened afterwards. Is the preciousness of the little time and the fact that we can't think of this as a long-term thing because there's some other constraint, does that help things or hurt things?

• 58:19Speaker 03

  It's fascinating. You know, we don't study this all that well. You're right. There's this phenomenon of on-again, off-again relationships.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  And the general idea is that some relationships have more of this turbulence, this turnover than other relationships do, and they generally tend to have a number of other features that are less than optimal. But I don't think there's good work looking at the situational forces that might set people up well when they start a relationship, or set people up poorly. Other than some of the social network stuff, there really isn't that much out there. But it would be really interesting to look at something as simple as, how much time will we be in the same place, and to see what kind of effect that has.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, there's not much in terms of the situations that set you up well, but it occurs to me, there's another way of thinking about this question, which is, are there circumstances that will supercharge the pace of a romantic connection, regardless of the long-term future? And Paul, you and I talk sometimes about Art Aaron's fast friends procedure.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  You're asking increasingly intimate questions, or you look into each other's eyes for three consecutive minutes, right? There's these procedures. My guess, Laurie, is that, what I think of as like the summer camp romance thing, this idea that there's an end date, my guess is that that is in some ways a disinhibitor. And I wish the field knew more. My guess is that there is probably like a typology, or a category of disinhibitors, things that make us willing to get vulnerable and intimate quickly. And so, yes, my guess is that knowing that we've only got X number of weeks, or X numbers of months will do that. And then the interesting question is, okay, well, if you have supercharged the intimacy,

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  under what circumstances does that intimacy last for a long time, possibly even forever? And that is something that I'm pretty sure we know nothing about.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  That's really cool. So it's like, well, this relationship has a certain amount of intimacy potential, and if you give us, you know, four days, we're gonna get it all.

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're fast.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  We're gonna extract it all. Yeah, that's really cool.

• 1:00:31Laurie Santos?

  And you all have talked about cases like this, like before Sunrise and Before Sunset, these other movies where you have these kind of short periods of supercharging relationships.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Laurie Santos?

  I wonder if these factors play in.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Right, that the ticking clock could in fact be an accelerant in some cases. And I think we see it in those movies. And yeah, you're right. I think we see it here too, in some ways, in a more realistic way. 16 weeks would be a more common, uh, hypercharged romance than those movies where it's happening in a matter of hours.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  So we rate movies on this podcast from one to five stars. Uh, so let's all go through and talk about how many stars we give this movie. Lori, I will throw to you first. How many stars do you give Say Anything?

• 1:01:18Laurie Santos?

  100 million stars. No. Look, I chose this one because it's a favorite. Lloyd Dobler, uh, Swoon Swoon. Uh, wait, what's my top stars? Four?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Five. Five. You can go as high as five stars.

• 1:01:31Laurie Santos?

  Yes, sorry.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Laurie Santos?

  Yeah. So, I love this movie. Lloyd Dobler Swoon. It's got to be five stars for me.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Okay. And Eli, how many stars for Say Anything?

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  Five. And only because I can't take all the 500 million or whatever it was. I, I knew that I liked this movie. I didn't really remember just how great it was.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  We're gonna make this a hat trick. Five stars for me as well. What a man to have as a role model. John Cusack. Thank you. Right. I mean, we talk about the bad messages from 80's movies and this was the antidote. Came along in 1989 and cleaned the slate. We also rate movies on Rustbolts. Now, the Rustbolt is named after Eli's advisor, the late, great Carol Rustbolt, pioneer of close relationships research with five stars indicating a near-perfect depiction of the nature of close relationships. I'll go first on this one. This movie gets four Rustbolts from me. I think it got a lot of things right, a lot of the things that we covered here

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  today. Um, a few things that I thought were, uh, the reason it doesn't go all the way to five, uh, Rustbolts for me is really just that stalking component. I think it somehow lodged in our memories as, as endorsing or maybe excusing some, some things that we'd call stalking today. But overall, four Rustbolts for me. Um, Eli, what about you?

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  I have this at five Rustbolts too.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  I had a list of, I think, 11 different things that I thought the movie got right. We talked about some of the bigger ones, but I was floored by the level of insight that Cameron Crowe had when writing this and also by the delivery from these particular actors. I thought it was just great and illustrated exactly, I think, a lot of how relationships work.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Lori, what about you? What do you think?

• 1:03:22Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I gotta go with like four and a half Rustbolts. Like, while I share your intuition that the stalking stuff just had me a little bit more skeeved out when I rewatched it. That was probably because one of the 13-year-olds I watched with, a boy named Max, just at the end of the film, took his iPhone on speakerphone and played Peter Gabriel's in your eyes, like standing there looking for Lauren. And I was like, no, that wasn't the one message you take from the film.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  No, no, no. It was a desperate, desperate moment.

• 1:03:49Laurie Santos?

  So I'm gonna knock it down point five, but yeah, I mean, I share Eli's intuition too. That like, this movie did a lot of stuff right for the 80s.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  It really did. Well, this is all the time we have for today. This has been the Love Factually Podcast, and we have been delighted to have as our special guest Dr. Lori Santos, host of this Happiness Lab podcast. So Lori, thank you so much for joining us today.

• 1:04:14Laurie Santos?

  Anytime. I'm ready to come back whenever you need to.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  We are likely to take you.

• 1:04:19Laurie Santos?

  Whenever you need an expert on bad 80s movies, I am here.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Let's do it. Let's do it. Or good ones, for that matter. All right. Well, that is all we have for you today, and I look forward to doing this with both of you at some time in the future.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  The Love Factually Podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, featuring music from Andrew Fraker and Sons.

• 1:04:52Laurie Santos?

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• 1:06:45Speaker 00

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