Before Sunrise (1995)

[Music] Welcome to Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships. Where your host Paul Eastwick and Eli thinkl, Eli, what are we talking about today? Today we are talking about before sunrise. Richard Linklator's 1995 indie masterpiece starring Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpey. The rapturous reviews for this philosophical conversation soaked deeply romantic film produced a 100% freshness score on Rotten Tomatoes. Sounds about right. Yeah. Some of the themes we'll explore are how quickly attachment bonds can start to form. The relationship implications of believing that men and women are fundamentally different and how self-disclosure can cultivate feelings of intimacy. And fair warning, we will be spoiling this movie today. So if you don't know why it's a really bad sign when you meet your girlfriend and Madrid and you were expecting to have dinner just the two of you, but then she invites six of her friends out to you should go ahead and watch this movie and come back. Oh, it's a gut blow. I know. Like Pedro's coming. That's not a good sign. Not a good sign. Now there are two other movies that follow this one. We will not be spoiling those films. We are only going to be talking about before sunrise today, but you should probably just go watch those after listening to this conversation anyway. Yeah. So we like who are the key characters and couples in this movie? Before sunrise has only two major characters, both in their early 20s. Shortly after they meet on a train, they decide to spend the night together exploring Vienna as if there's no tomorrow. Jesse is an American aimlessly tooling around Europe for a few weeks on a Ural pass. He is spontaneous, charming, and cynical. Saylene is returning to France from a visit to her grandmother in Budapest. She is sensitive, idealistic, and tough. The film also has two major non-human characters. The first Vienna is so much more than a setting in the beauty of its architecture, the diversity of its entertainments, and the range of its social encounters. It represents the world in microcosm. And the second non-human character is time, which is both a gift from the universe and the closest thing the film has to a villain. Yeah. Jesse's flight home has a set departure time, the following morning, and the ticking clock brings a sense of urgency. So Paul, those are the chess pieces. Are you ready to give us one minute on how the film moves them across the board? Speaking of ticking clock, let's do it. It's ticking. On your mark, get set, go. Jesse and Celine meet on a train leaving Budapest. Celine moves her seat away from an arguing couple and sits near Jesse and they start chatting. As Jesse reaches his stop in Vienna, he charmingly persuades Celine to pause her journey to Paris and spend the day in evening with him in Vienna before he boards a flight in the morning back to the states. She agrees and they roam the streets talking for several hours, eventually kissing for the first time on a Ferris wheel. It takes some time before they finally discuss their relationship history with each other, but while playing pinball, Celine describes her breakup six months earlier, and Jesse describes how he took this trip to visit his girlfriend in Madrid, but discovered she didn't really want him there. Jesse and Celine start feeling more attached to each other, but they nevertheless decide that they don't want to pretend that they will keep in touch or see each other again after tonight, because long distance arrangements always fizzle out. They have sex and sleep in a park. They take mental pictures of each other, but then at the train station, as they go their separate ways, they reconsider their decision not to see each other again, but instead plan a meet at the same spot in six months. Oh, plenty of time. You had two and a half seconds to spare. Well done. Yeah, two easy, ten easy. So Eli, what is your relationship to this movie? It is profound. I had this experience. I had my own getting personal before son. No kidding. Cast that memory back to 1991. I was 16, and my parents had a conference. My dad and my stepmom were attending a professional conference in Rome, and they took their kid, the 16 year old guy, me, on the strip, and I met this girl. I will call her Samantha. She was this in my memory, spectacularly beautiful, charismatic, charming Israeli girl. And yes, we walked around all night talking, kind of hooking up, and we did exchange information. We did write some letters, but we never did see each other again. So I've had something pretty close to the before some magic experience. You're also fulfilled the prophecy of, yeah, you'll, you'll write a few times, and then it'll kind of disappear. True, that's true. That was the road that they did not travel. Yeah, that's really interesting. So I've really noticed that every time I return to this movie and the other two movies in the sequence, they all feel different each time in the same way that if you look into a mirror several years apart, you look different. It's like I feel different. You got to be watching. A trigger warning for that. Yeah, right. Seriously. Right. And so this time with this movie, you know, I, I, I winced recognizing, you know, the lofty ideals and the big ideas and the cynicism that they express, like, that's all a younger version of myself. Yeah. And it feels further and further away. It feels much further away than the last time I saw this movie. And so I'm actually more nostalgic for it as well. So these movies, I don't know what it is about them, but they, they teach you something about yourself. You're right. It's like every time we can watch ourselves aging in these characters. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. So Eli, do you want to start us off with a little bit of the thing about what this movie gets right about the nature of close relationships? I could be here all day. So more than anything, what I loved about the movie is that it calls the lie to this schism in the relationships literature and the scholarly literature where you and I spend our days between initial attraction and established relationships. Yeah. This idea. Look, in fairness, it's, you can't really search participants through different mechanisms. Right? If you're trying to study initial attraction, you recruit people who have never met. If you're trying to study relationships, you recruit people who are in relationships long enough that they're willing to sign up for a relationship study. And so then you end up with this sort of weird schism between what happens when we are first meeting people and what happens when like meaningful relationships happen. And this movie puts you in a way that you know, one of the studies that comes first to me is one that you convinced me to run. We ran this together published this in 2008 on the attachment system. Right? Because the research literature on attachment is very clear that you know, the attachment bond, this feeling of deep emotional attachment to a, let's say a romantic partner, takes a couple years to form. And I remember you saying like, yeah, okay, it takes a full year, you know, full two years to fully solidify, but that starts, that process starts fast and maybe even in the opening minutes. And you witness in the opening minutes and hours deep profound feelings of not only sexual desire, they certainly have that. And we all know that sexual desire happens in attraction context, but also deep feelings of emotional bondiveness. They happen in the opening minutes and hours together. Where you really see it is that they have the first kiss at the top of the Ferris wheel. And after that, their body language, they really look like an established couple. It's like a couple four after. It really, it is. And I think that is likely to be a very accurate depiction of how quickly the attachment kinds of behaviors, right? Like lots of touching and holding hands, but also like, you know, the walk and cuddle, I don't know how else to describe. It's just it's called a whittle. Yeah, the whittle. That they're there. It's all happening pretty quickly. Now you mentioned earlier that it that we used to think it takes a couple of years, but I think even that research is outdated now. And so what we typically find now is that basically as soon as researchers can catch couples, the majority are saying my romantic partner is the person I am most attached to wild. Even if they've known their mom for 25 years and they've known their best friend for 14 years and they've known their romantic partner for eight weeks, that's the person they turn to first. Right. I think there's a tendency for maybe younger people to do it less, maybe because they still have attachments to their parents, but for slightly old and slightly older, I'm talking about like people in like their mid 20s as opposed to like their late teenage years. Right. It's basically once you can catch them, once they are officially in a relationship, the attachment is primarily to the romantic partner. And I think that's a pretty important idea for solidifying just how important attachment is to how people people form relationships. - You know, I didn't notice that there seemed to be a moment in the movie that they, I don't know, to oversimplify they went from like an attraction context to a relationship context, but I think you're right that it was like, there was this build up to the first kiss, and then once they had the first kiss, the body language, the nature of the sort of connection felt different. What do you think it is about that? Is it some sort of like once they've had a mutual, once they've had a first kiss, there's been a moment of mutual acknowledgement that we really like each other, that were attracted to each other this way, and that that reduces some of the insecurity that can come before that moment. I think that's a good bet, and that now like a certain amount of physical intimacy has been like allowed and permitted, and so now it's like, you know, it sort of amps that up a little bit. - Yeah, that's nice. - That's nice. A big one that I had, and you mentioned it at the top, has to do with the way, what we call reciprocal self-disclosure works to build intimacy and closeness. And there is a very famous study in close relationships research, sometimes it's called the 36 questions study conducted by Art Aaron and colleagues where they concocted a set of questions that work in escalating intensity that you're supposed to sit down with somebody and over the course of, in some versions of his study, it's 45 minutes and some versions, it's 90 minutes, but basically over a relatively compressed period of time by answering questions about death, right? All right, they have their questions about death in Art Aaron's study, lots of discussions about death in this movie. There that you see increasing attachment, closeness, feelings of affection for another person. And, so this happens many times in the movie, right? It starts happening, like on the bus, right? They're really starting to ask these questions of each other, right? They've skipped the resume exchange. They're going in right for the good stuff, but where it really hit me is later in the movie when they're sitting in the restaurant and they're doing the mock phone calls. And so here, Celine is pretending to be Jesse's friend from home asking Jesse how he met Celine. How did you meet? I'm a train. Yeah, she was sitting next to this very weird couple that started fighting, so she had to move. She sat right across the aisle for me. So, now we started the talk and she didn't like me much at first. She's super smart, very passionate, beautiful. And I was so unsure of myself. I thought everything I said sounded so stupid. Oh, man, I wouldn't worry about that. No, I'm sure she wasn't judging you. No, and by the way, she sat next to you, no? I'm sure she did it in purpose. Yeah. And so, when people can reflect back on what it is they like about somebody, sort of clarify those earlier moments, like from that very early moment, I'd already noticed you. That's art, Erin, self-disclosure, one, one. You're right. And in this domain of reciprocal self-disclosure, our buddy Sue Sprecher and Stan Trigger, they've got this cool study that experiments it could manipulate how the reciprocity works. So, in one condition, like you talk about yourself for a few minutes and then I talk about myself for a few minutes, in the other condition, it's interspersed. I talk briefly, you talk briefly, I talk briefly, you talk briefly, and then they look at how much people like each other afterward, and it was that second condition where you say a thing, and then I say a thing, and each of us is taking turns in terms of self-disclosing, sharing private information, personal information about ourselves. That's where you really get, on average, that's where you really get the deepest sense of attraction and connection to each other, and the movie does just a magnificent job of almost like a tennis match of sort of passing back and forth who's sharing private, interesting information about themselves. Yeah, and it's another thing. I do love about this movie is it gives them both a chance to sort of divulge their inner life in about equal measure throughout, I think that's really interesting too. What else did you have about what the movie gets right? A couple of things I could mention. What it has to do with personality, something that you and I talk about less than some other relationships researchers surely would. And look, both of these people, maybe they're 23 or so, they're young and idealistic in their own ways, especially Selene. And they have lots of complaints. I think that she is higher than he is on a personality dimension that's correlated with relationship difficulties. And that dimension is one of the big five personality traits called neuroticism. So it's a tendency to experience high levels of negative emotion, experience high emotional reactivity. And she's not shy about it. She says things like everything pisses me off. I'm afraid of death 24 hours a day. Like I think she is high in neuroticism. What's interesting is if you look at the research literature on neuroticism and relationships, it's not a great sign. That is people who are higher in neuroticism tend to have relationship difficulties. You may be familiar, I don't know if you remember Paul, this 1987 Kelly and Conley paper, where they basically followed people over 30 or 40 years. They, I think, got people in the 1940s and they measured their personality. And really the major predictor, these were heterosexual couples, man, woman couples who married in circa 1940. And then they followed them about 40 years later. And the major predictor of increased likelihood of breakup and increased likelihood of dissatisfaction in the marriage was each person's level of neuroticism tested at baseline and reported by third parties. That's interesting. I sort of half agree with you. I mean, I'm maybe the part that I don't quite agree with is, are we seeing her neuroticism or are we seeing this just sort of like youthful punk rock angry energy? And which he has too. Which I mean, in about equal measure. But anyway, but for the sake of argument, yes, neuroticism is one of the attributes that tends to be associated with relationship difficulties. I think sometimes these effects are a little overstated and personally when I look at the literature, there was a meta analysis recently. It shows that the correlation between one's own neuroticism and relationship satisfaction, sort of bordering on medium. So that one is there. The correlation between my neuroticism and my partner's satisfaction is notably smaller. It's not zero. And if you were going to point to one attribute that was a bad sign, in a partner, it would be neuroticism. But I think Selene also says at one point, she's like, all the only person I could really hurt is myself. She's talking about it literally. But in a way, that also applies to neuroticism too. It's mainly bad for you to have neurotic, right? Your emotional instability is associated with your dissatisfaction. It's worth working on that emotional stability for your own sake, mostly. Yeah, and you're right. It bleeds over less powerfully to the other person. But I think when it does bleed over, you can think of it as something like grievance pronness. It's like the likelihood that you're going to feel distressed about something that your partner did is a little higher. And yeah, that affects you more than it affects than it affects your partner. But there is some residual effect on your partner as well. Yeah, they send you your voicing and making a big deal. Yeah, you're right. You could just do a miserable silence that has been possible. It doesn't seem like a stew and miserable silence sort of gal. That's funny. What else do you have? One of the one that I thought was interesting is, we talk a lot about responsiveness. And one that's not as much part of the relationship science space, but is pretty famous in the clinical, couples treatment spaces, this idea of bids, this idea, the idea that there's all sorts of things that we do that are like kind of reaching out to our partner. They're subtle. The partner can miss them. And they're like, oh, what a day, right? And that's like not like, oh, interesting. My partner made an observation about the day. It's like, no, I was trying to start a conversation. And I think that the film does a nice job of this. So there's one part I like when Jesse says to Celine, would you be in Paris by now if I hadn't gotten off the train with me? No, that's it. What should you be doing? I'd probably be hanging around the airport reading old magazines crying in my coffee because you didn't come with me. Oh. Oh. Actually, I think I'd probably get out of the train in Salzburg with someone else. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I see. So I'm just done American momentarily decorating your blank canvas. I'm having a great time. Really? Yeah. Me too. So what's fascinating for me about that clip is she's playful and she's teasing him when she says, oh, I'd probably gotten off of some other guy in Salzburg. Yeah. And he knows she's teasing. And yet there's a little bit of vulnerability when he says, oh, see, I'm just that dumb American. And that's his bid. He's basically saying, I'm with you and we're playing, but I'm also a little insecure and can you reassure me? And she says, I'm having a great time. And the-- That's really ideal. Like you should be able, like the two of them need to be able to tease each other and play and sort of almost say like negative sort of stuff to each other, but then they need to be able to say also like wait, I'm okay here, right? Like you really actually like me here, right? And the other person needs to be like, yes, I really deeply like you. Yeah, that's a cool example. Another sort of small one that I have and this also fits within the broader attachment frame is that when we think about attachment and sexual desire, they often go together, but attachment often takes place in the absence of sexual desire as well. And another way of putting it is that sexual desire often isn't really the point, right? What people are really craving in these moments is connection reciprocity, validation, and you feel as strongly about me as I do about you. And so they do have sex in the park. And we are strongly led to believe that they have a sex in the park. But even as that is happening, you really get the sense that this is meaningful because it is a more verification of how strongly they feel about each other, that the sex isn't really the point. And actually, I think there are several moments leading up to it where you think, actually, maybe they're not going to and it's going to be okay, right? Because again, the sex was not the central thing that they are craving at that time. And I think that is also spot on. Yeah, and I mean, look, sex is many things, including like a deeply pleasurable experience. But one of them, many things, and maybe in many contexts, the most important thing that it is, is the single way to be closest to each other. Like it's hard to be physically and emotionally closer to somebody than you are during sex. Yeah. And you can imagine clunky versions of this movie that at this point would have been totally lost. Yeah, it's a little hard to make this like an American pie. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. So Eli, are there any misconceptions about relationships that you flagged in this movie? You know, there's one that I'd like to mention. Do you want to get a start up on this one? Yeah, I feel like, so I have a small, this is a nitpick. This is a small thing. And then we'll get into one that's like a little more like medium size. Okay. The nitpick is this, is that so I am taking a face value, the idea behind this movie, right? Their enemy is time. They have stepped outside of their real lives into this compressed period of time or watching a compressed relationship. In fact, I love that for all the points that it makes about attachment. I still feel like legally obligated to point out that the period of time from when they meet to when they first kiss is very short. That's several standard deviations below the mean. Even for, you know, to people who are into each other, it usually takes months longer. That's a nitpick. I'm glad the movie is what it is. Okay. Moving on. So, I mean, 'cause other movies, I'll hammer them for that, but I'm not gonna hammer this movie for that. Okay. Now, so let's talk about, their various discussions of gender in this movie, right? So, they talk a lot about men and women and how men and women are different. Now, in some ways that just comes across as their sort of youthful exuberance, but also cynicism, you know, a little bit of anger, a little bit of idealism. It's all kind of mixed up in there. Okay. And so, talking about what men are like and what women are like, might seem to be like the harmless kind of banter that you have when you're young or you're getting to know somebody and you're just chatting about how you see the world. Okay. But in actual relationships, really essentialized beliefs about gender tend to bode poorly ultimately for how the relationship is going to go. Yeah, it's fascinating. This was mine as well. And look, I don't actually know where the film stands on this issue. So, that is a little confusing. Yeah, I don't know if it's like a misconception, but certainly I think the characters are playing with fire. And that's a great way of putting it. Yeah. So, for example, you know, one of the more classic ideas in relationship sciences that there are, there is a collection of ideas that people sometimes call dysfunctional relationship beliefs. And it includes items like one of the major causes of marital problems is that men and women have different emotional needs. So, to the degree that you think that men and women just have fundamentally different emotional needs, how satisfied do you tend to be in your marriage? And the answer is less. To the degree that you hold this belief that men and women are really just basically and deeply different, you tend to be less happy in the marriage. Now, these were all marriages between a man and a woman and the effects were there for both the man and the woman. And so, what you noticed in the movie, I definitely noticed. They had big, big talk about gender. It's interesting, it's important, but I do worry about the relationship future if both of these people form a deeper relationship and continue to hold these beliefs. That is correlated on average with relationship challenges. Yeah, and another one is like belief in sexual double standards, right? Even just believing that, oh, it is more okay for men to engage in these kinds of sexual overtures than it is for women. Those things also tend to both poorly on relationships for the same reason. Now, again, what exactly is the movie saying or what exactly do we learn about what Celine actually thinks is not totally clear because she does have considerable amount of sexual agency we see in the later part of the movie. And that's all fantastic. So maybe it's not actually a problem, but I think the way you put it playing with fire, I think that's exactly the right way to think about it. So are we okay with this movie? Anything in here, raise any moral concerns? I mean, there's one interesting issue that I'd love to chat about with you. I don't know if I would put it in the category of a moral concern. I think the movie's aged quite well. I didn't find myself morally challenged, even though I think the ideas are moral and interesting. I didn't love the homeless person, joke. That one, I thought, hate to admit it. He's kind of badly. That didn't feel great, but again, that's in the sort of the smaller category of a joke. Yeah, stuff that didn't go great. Yeah, so for me, the big interesting question is it's very clear that Celine is a card carrying a second wave feminist. So if the first wave of feminism is the one that got women the right to vote, and secondly, feminism is what we think of as 60s and 70s, feminism that's taking on de facto inequalities and is very serious about not just broad political things like the right to vote and representation in government, but also that people's personal lives intersect with the political. That is, you can't just go into your home and into your marriage and into your parental life and act as if the decisions that you make there are totally unrelated to gender differences and supporting the patriarchy and so forth. And my sense is that she's strongly of the belief that the personal is the political. So in terms of the moral implications, I find that fascinating and don't really have a strong moral point of view about it, but I think it is an interesting thing for relationship scientists to consider. Yeah. So I think that in our field, many people would say that sustaining a good, close relationship over time is difficult. And it seems plausible that if our fights are about the dishes, fair enough, but if our fights are about the dishes and that carries the weight of patriarchal hegemony and therefore the fight isn't really just about the dishes but is really about something much bigger and broader. My guess is that it makes it a little bit more difficult to resolve conflict in the relationship. It's interesting. When I think about this issue, I think about the tension between, as I understand, second wave feminism, a lot of it was about the tension between feminism and marriage and marital roles and those structures. And that completely makes sense to me. But you can also imagine how some people might interpret that as tension between feminism and attachment. And Selene seems to be wrestling with this. And I would just kind of call this heteropesamism. Right. It's just sort of a lingering malaise about the idea that men and women can never really get along. And she talks about, she says, I feel this pressure to be strong and independent, without having my life revolve around some guy, but loving someone feels really important. So how do I resolve those things? And I think that's a version of what you're talking about and that's the one that would make me nervous about if it's getting in the way of people attaching. Right? Does the political shape roles? Of course it does. But the political doesn't have to shape our attachments to each other. And she seems to be going down that, and that's the kind of thing that would make me nervous. - That's interesting. Yeah, that sort of is a reference back, I think, to this idea that fundamental views that women and men are fundamentally different. It's hard to connect across such a divide. - Yeah, yeah. So tell me about some quotes you got. I cheated. My favorite, look, there's no shortage of great lines. - Yeah, right. - I hope you didn't cheat. But my favorite line comes from the "Cath Bloom" song. That Selenin Jesse listened to. Do you remember there in that tiny listening booth in the record store, and "Cath Bloom" has this just fascinating, gorgeous voice, very non-traditionally gorgeous voice, and the song is called "Come Here." And the line is just, "Have I ever laid down by your side, baby, let's forget about this pride, come here, come here." And this is just before they've kissed. And in fact, it certainly looks in that little room in that little listening booth, where the camera must be about four inches from the actor's face. - That's shut, incredibly. - It looks like they're about to kiss, and they're almost kissing. And that's a little bit what this is. There's this insecurity, there's this pride, are we gonna cut through and take a risk? And it isn't until shortly thereafter, when they get to the top of the Ferris wheel, that they actually have their first kiss. - Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. I've got two. So one is, you know, I just got to talk about the ending speech. So they're at the train, they've decided not to exchange any kind of contact information. And so this is supposed to be goodbye. - Listen, listen, you know what all this bullshit we're talking about, about not seeing each other again. I don't wanna do that. - I don't wanna do that either. - You don't need that. - I was wearing for you to do this. - What did you say, something? - Who was a friend, maybe you do what to see? - All right, listen, what do you wanna do? - Maybe we should meet here in five years or something. - All right, all right, five years, that's a long time. - It's also like a sociological experiment. How about one year? - One year, all right, how about six months? - Six months? - It's gonna be freezing. - Yeah? - Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go somewhere else. - Okay, okay. - I think what's so glorious about that quote and that whole scene is like, as they are approaching the train, they look panic. They understand why? - Yeah, they look like they just have this look like, what are we doing, what are we doing, what are we doing? And we have like seconds to decide what we are going to do about this. And I just love that he cracks. And he's like, I don't wanna do this. And then and everything sort of comes down and like the walls come down. And then it feels like the dam bursts. And it's just a lovely moment of them getting a chance to reconsider what it seems like. - Such a sensible decision a few hours earlier. - Yeah, and again, just a quick thing on that, it is so vivid how different the world is now. It is just no way that they wouldn't have a way of contacting each other again, that the stakes will feel this high. - Yeah, it is, it's like from another age. - Yeah. - Any other quotes from you before I launch into my second one. - No, but I'm dying to hear the second one. - Okay, okay. - All right, my second one is, and this is toward the end, but I just thought this was a gorgeous way of imagining what love would look like in the future with somebody. - When you talked earlier about after a few years, how a couple would begin to hate each other by anticipating their reactions or getting tired of their mannerisms. I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone. - The way he's gonna pour this here, which shirt he's gonna wear that day, knowing the exact story, tell, and a given situation. - Sure, that's when I know I'm really in love. - I love that she's focusing on the specifics in that quote, and I think there's a cynical part of many people that would say, "No, those would be the things that would drive me up the wall because I'm so sick of it." But I think she is speaking at least what is the truth for many couples is that it is those small things that people build together. We talked about microcultures on this podcast, a number of times, and I think that's kind of what she's getting at here. And I love that she's talking about sort of the way that a couple would build together this thing where they really know each other in these deep, very precise, very specific ways. - You know, it's interesting. I hadn't noticed until I was listening to you talk about that, that that actually harkens back a little bit to their early conversation on the train when they just met each other. And he's talking about how he wants to start a cable show, and it would have just like 24 hours of people, and she's like all his boring mundanity, and he says, "No, it's the poetry of everyday life." - There it is. - But then you're right, like later on, she's talking about those mundanities, and it's right, she thinks of them as poetry. - Yeah. - So what do we wish we knew about Close Relation? One question is, is this movie raise about Close Relation? She said, "We don't really know." - I mean, the movie's chalk a block filled with ideas. One thing that I think is interesting, that I don't think we know enough about, is when we have a conflict with our partner, under what circumstances is it important that we resolve with the conflict, versus sort of shrugging and letting it go. And we talked a lot about gender earlier in our discussion today, but one thing that I found interesting is the scene where they're really starting to get on each other's nerves a little bit about gender stuff. And Jesse says, "You see what I'm saying? I mean, women say they hate it if you're all territorial protective, but if it suits them, then they'll tell you you're being on manly or wimpier." - You know what? I don't think women really wants to destroy men. And even if they want to, they don't succeed. I'm sure even men are destroying women, or are they all capable of destroying women much more than women? Well, anyway, it's depressing. I mean, you know what? - Wait, want to start talking about this? - Yeah, I'm really hate it. You know, men, women, you know, it's so antedous. Like, yeah. - So I don't know that everybody was able to catch exactly what happened at the end of the clip. So, Celine, they're getting into this discussion about gender, they're getting on each other's nerves, and it's gone a little too far. And so she interrupts herself in the middle and says, "Well, you know what?" And he gets it. He knows what she's about to say. - Yeah. - And he's like, "You want to stop talking about this." And then they talk over each other a little bit, but Celine says, "Yeah, I hate it." You know, "Man, women, there's no end to this." And he says, "It's hard to catch it." He says, "Okay, over it is." And I don't think we know very much about this idea of when and why is it a good idea just to say, "You know what? Let's just let this one go, rather than really trying to work on and resolve the conflict." It isn't clear to me what percentage of the time the things are truly resolvable anyway. And if there's a conflict like this that's gonna make us fight repeatedly and is not gonna be easy for us really to understand each other, when is it okay to be like, "You know what? You have your views and I have mine and we're just gonna move past it." - That's a good one. - Well, one thing I wish we knew is that, I think it's interesting to think about what happened between the moment that they were taking the attitude, like, "Hey, this is fun, like we're really enjoying this, but we're not gonna keep this up afterwards." And then, as we discussed, panic headed toward the train and absolutely panicking. So, right, so between the scene on the boat and the final scene of the train, then there is something that took place in between, which is they had sex in between. Now, I wonder sometimes if evolutionary psychology perspectives on sex and mating have kind of broken our brains about what short term sex is and what it means, right? That the idea would be, "Oh, this is a short term mating "situation, you would have sex with them one time "and then you would move on and look for other people "to have sex with." There's another way of thinking about sex, that I think is far more useful. And it's the idea that sex is about seeing if you have good chemistry, because if you do, you would want to keep having sex more in the future. - Yeah. - Okay? And this actually comes from the biologist, Richard Prum talks about this, how unique humans are in that not only are women unlike many other primate species, women are able to have sex at all points in their ovulatory cycle. Women enjoy having sex far more than most other primates do, but it's also pretty hard, relatively speaking, for humans to conceive. And so part of the logic there is that having sex repeatedly is part of building the bond. So if you have sex and it's good, you want to keep doing it. - Yeah. - So that's what happened. - Yeah, right. So I think that's a useful way of thinking about what happened in that moment is that it was good, it was a bonding experience. And now they're like, wait a minute, we don't want to let this thing go. And so I just find that a much more useful way of thinking about what it means to meet somebody that you don't know that well, meet a stranger, like you have sex, but that doesn't make it short term. What makes it short term is we have sex and the sex wasn't great. - Right, it's funny. Now that you say it, it's kind of a wild idea that like to the degree that I had like really hot one night stand sex, I sort of don't want to do it again. Like it's a real thing. weird idea. Yeah. Yeah. Another question I had. So, early in a relationship when people are really sort of just getting to know each other, feeling each other out emotionally and have some reservations about the level of intimacy, how vulnerable they're willing to be, how did they decide when to escalate the conversation? And one thing that this movie did that was interesting, you already referenced the weird phone call scene, like not an actual phone call, but sitting across from a table at each other and just saying the words, "Drink, drink, drink, drink," and then pretending to talk to our friends. But that was a device that she came up with and the two of them used, I think, to express ideas that were at the outer realm of what they were comfortable talking about. Yeah. And by the way, there was a period earlier when they're on the bus, and I think one of the earliest scenes after they've gotten off the train, and they're like playing this game where they're going to answer questions and they have to answer truthfully, and he escalates pretty quickly. And I think the question is, you know, describe for me your first sexual feelings towards a person, and I was like, "Whoa, that's a big one." But he sort of put on his like, "Dr. Ruth Voitz." He was like, "Oh, yeah." "You're a first." I can't really do it, I'm praying. Neither can he. But it's interesting. In both cases, there was like an escalation of the intimacy of the vulnerability, and in both cases, they seemed to feel like they couldn't just come out and talk. They had to have some sort of device. Yeah. Playful device to be like, "This is happening, but we're sort of removed a little bit from it, so it's safe." And I don't think we know much about how people decide to escalate intimacy, and when they're at the outer limits of what they're confident in doing, or feeling secure to do, are there devices that they use in order to break through their boundaries? Well, it is kind of relevant to the Art Air in 36 questions, right? That it's like, "Oh, we're providing this framework for people to engage in this escalating intimacy. I mean, not to put you on blast or anything, but one point 20 years ago, Eli and I went speed dating. He brought the Art Air in cards with him, right? So that is a little bit like you using your Dr. Ruth Voitz to chat with your speed dates about the more intimate topics. I don't think you win as far as Ethan Hawke did, but yeah. But, ZZ, you did it. I don't know that our listeners have quite enough context here. So the first year that I was a professor at Northwestern, '03, '04, Paul, you were a first-year grad student here at Northwestern, and our class, our PhD class, the one I was teaching on relationships, had this discussion about how you'd want to study attraction, because it wasn't something that people were doing very much these days. And the class collectively, without my knowledge, identified that there was like a speed dating event coming to town. And so we decided to go. It was like an optional field trip for the class. And so, yes, as a relationship scientist, I had an index card that had the high intimacy questions from Art Air and Research Procedure on one side of the card and the low intimacy questions on the other side of the card. And I busted out that card on my speed dates. It's true. It was funny. Other things you wish we knew. One last thing that I thought was interesting is what is the optimal amount of honesty that we should have with our romantic partner? I mean, you can make the case that like 100% honesty all the time is the right rule. My guess is many people will decide something other than that. Yeah. And I don't think we have a sense of like when and why. And is it only about small things? Is it about big things? And the reason why I bring this up is, you know, Celine at some point says, you know, I've been wondering lately, do you know anyone who's in a happy relationship? And Jesse says, oh, yeah, sure. I know happy couples, but I think they lie to each other. And he's kind of joking, but really kind of not. I think he feels like the way to be happy or at least just an idea that he's playing with is that a way to be happy in the relationship is to be something less than fully truthful. I suspect that he's right to some degree. And I don't think we as a scientific field know much about when or why lies are benefit are morally acceptable and potentially beneficial for the relationship. We don't know much about that. I see. So you interpreted him to be saying they lie to each other about some things and that then enables them to be happy. I thought he was doing the more cynical at their own line. They actually hate each other. I thought that was just like another like hard citizen. I don't think so. Yeah, I think I mean, you may be right. I think what he's saying is the only couples who are happy are those that lie. I think it's a cynical in its own way for. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So it's at least worth entertaining whether there's truth at least a kernel of truth in that idea. Yeah. Well, we rate the movies on one to five stars on this podcast. So Eli, why don't you go first before sunrise? How many stars? One to five. I struggled here. I gave this four stars and I'll admit that I found the ideas the characters are playing with more profound when I was 20 than I do today. But still there's something that feels deep and true and singular about these attractive and earnest characters and the powerful like time limited nature of that beautiful night in Vienna. Yeah, I totally get it. For me, this is a five star movie. Yeah. And it the emotion in it, the depth in it as you were saying. And I really believe what these two characters are experiencing, even though this is an uncommon experience. But I, you know, and I love to how each time I return to it, I see something different in it every time. It felt true. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. We also rate the movies on the rust bolt scale. So the rust bolt is named after Eli's advisor, the late great Carol rust bolt 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. I give this movie four rust bolts. It's doing an incredible job of capturing that, you know, early passionate, starting to attach to each other experience. It's a, it sufficiently uncommon experience that they're having that it's, you know, a lot of things in here would not exactly be the norm that you'd expect to see with most, most couples. And again, the heteropessimism makes me a little bit nervous, maybe not exactly the right message, but overall four rust bolts for me, what do you say? This was five. And I would have happily given it more. I, not only do I think the movie did a glorious job of illustrating some of the things that we as a, as a field as relationship scientists, things that we know and have studied. But I think it was just packed with additional ideas that we don't know anything about. And if I were advising a young relationship researcher, you could do a whole lot worse than watching this movie to try to develop some new research ideas. There's a great point. Well, this has been the Love Factually Podcast. I am Paul Eastwick and I have been here with Eli Fingel and Eli. I will see you next time. I'm looking forward to that. The Love Factually Podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eastwick and Eli Fingel, featuring music from Andrew Fraker and Sons.