Transcriber: Helena Bowen Reviewer: Denise RQ
Danielle Teller: How many people here
think of themselves as the sort of person who gets divorced?
Raise your hand.
(Laughter)
Astro Teller: Not a lot of hands.
That's what I used to think too.
I felt that divorce was something that happened to other people.
People not as committed, not as loyal, not as caring as I am.
Even when my first marriage it became clear it had to end,
I kept thinking, "But I'm not the sort of person who gets divorced."
DT: In 2010, I was diagnosed with breast cancer
that had already spread to lymph nodes.
This may seem like a strange thing to say, but I view that time in my life as a gift.
It's not that I wasn't afraid of dying; I'm still afraid.
But, my family and friends dropped everything to help me.
I've never felt so loved.
My experience with divorce was very different.
I was shattered and living in this haze of self doubt
and sadness, sleeplessness, and I felt very alone.
AT: When someone gets diagnosed with cancer, we all want to help.
We attach words like survival, battle, brave, and courageous
to patients with a serious illness.
When someone gets divorced, if the word battle gets used,
it doesn't get attached to words like brave,
it gets attached to words like guilt, shame, laziness.
DT: As a society, we encourage behaviors we like,
such as seeking medical treatment, or getting married,
and we discourage behaviors we don't like, such as divorce,
through social narratives.
We all absorb these social narratives from an early age,
and we hardly ever question them.
An idea or a social narrative that society won't let you question
is called a sacred cow, so we were thinking a lot about these sacred cows
as we went through our respective divorces and remarriage.
We talked about them so much that they started to take on personalities
and we gave them names.
Ultimately, we wrote a book about it.
I love these cows, they make me so happy.
(Laughter)
We started to give them names.
Some of them are sly, some of them are judgmental,
some of them are just plain mean.
Whatever their approach though, they all have the same goal:
they want to get people married, and then keep them married.
To show you how they work, today we will introduce you to three of them.
DT: The holy cow wants to convince everyone marriage is good for society,
and that we owe it to society to get married and stay married.
One of the many ways she does this is by exploiting
our deeply engrained cultural sense of the sacredness of commitment.
AT: Have you ever wondered what exactly is being promised at a wedding?
DT: Yeah, we've all know that since we were kids, right?
For better or for worse, for richer or poorer,
sickness, health, for as long as we both shall live.
AT: For as long as we both shall live, what?
DT: I will always love you.
AT: I'm super glad to hear that!
But what does it mean to say that you will always love me?
Can you really promise that your feelings for someone will never change?
DT: If you were applying for your dream job,
you would never sign a contract that said
"I not only promise never to leave this job,
but I promise to be equally enthusiastic about working here every single day
for the rest of my life, no matter how this job evolves,
and no matter how much I change as a person."
But that's actually pretty much what we do when we get married.
AT: So if we took a more clear-eyed view of the wedding contract,
what would it look like?
Let's try out a few.
I, Astro, do promise to act as though I love you, Danielle
(Laughter)
for as long as I shall live.
I promise not to leave you under any circumstances,
no matter how miserable it makes me to stay with you.
(Laughter)
DT: So that's a more realistic contract,
because you're promising something you could actually promise to deliver.
But, I don't want you around if you're going to be miserable.
AT: OK, fair enough, let me try again.
I, Astro, do promise to do my utmost to love you, Danielle,
for as long as we are married.
If a time comes when I do not love you,
I will do everything in my power to rekindle that love.
If that doesn't work, I will end our marriage as elegantly as I can.
DT: OK, that's more specific.
AT: Check.
(Laughter)
DT: And more informative
because now, I know what you'll do if you stop loving me,
but it's so unromantic.
Nobody is going to say that at a wedding.
AT: Alright, OK, one more, one more.
I, Astro, do promise to love you, Danielle, forever.
I'm leaving unspoken what happens if I can't continue to love you
as that's a highly uncomfortable subject right now.
(Laughter)
DT: So that is pretty much the contract that we signed onto when we got married.
It's vague, it has no provisions for what happens if things go sour,
and it is completely unenforceable.
AT: The Holy Cow likes that ambiguity.
She knows that we didn't mean to say that we would stay together
no matter how miserable it makes us,
but she'll point out that we said, "Till death do you part,"
and she doesn't want to have a discussion about what exactly we meant by that
or whether or not that was a reasonable promise to make.
DT: Of course, the Holy Cow is not going to be able to guilt trip everyone
who falls out of love into staying married.
That's where the one true cow steps in.
She is a hypocrite.
If you're single, she'll tell you
that true love is the most noble and important aspiration in the world;
but after you get married she'll say,
"True love? Honey, that's just a myth invented by Hollywood."
AT: The One True Cow first became apparent to me in the different reactions
of friends and family to my first and second weddings.
The first time I got engaged, everyone's just said, "Congratulations!"
The second time, the same people said, "Are you sure that's such a good idea?"
(Laughter)
And it wasn't because they didn't think that Danielle is wonderful,
but they gave a pass to the power of true love the first time
that they weren't willing to grant a second time.
DT: The One True Cow also lurks
in the plotlines of movies, like "Sleepless in Seattle",
which is one of the most popular romantic comedies ever made.
It's the story of this woman named Annie,
who is engaged to marry this sweet, kind of goofy guy named Walter.
One day Annie is transfixed by a stranger's voice on the radio.
The voice of this lonely, widowed architect named Sam.
For somewhat unclear reasons,
Annie decides that this guy she's never met is her destiny,
and she ditches Walter to pursue Sam.
AT: Romantic comedies like this keep us entertained
because they tap into our belief in true love.
We have to want Annie to end up with Sam or the story has no traction.
If we thought her fiancé would make Annie just as happy as lonely, enigmatic Sam,
then we would spend two hours watching this film and thinking,
"She's a lunatic."
(Laughter)
Instead, we spend two hours worrying that Annie is going to get stuck
with her boring fiancé and hoping she can find her way to her true love Sam.
DT: Imagine for a moment a different movie.
One where Annie and Walter get married as planned and then after the wedding,
Annie is transfixed by Sam's voice on the radio.
If Annie is wearing a wedding band instead of an engagement ring
when she falls for Sam,
the movie doesn't seem so romantic or funny, does it?
There could only be two socially acceptable outcomes in that case.
The movie could turn into a tragedy,
or Annie could realize that Walter was her true love all along
and that Sam was just a distraction.
AT: That switch in your mind from "Aww, so romantic!"
to "ugh" that she just talked about, that's the One True Cow at work.
When Annie's engaged to Walter,
we want her to throw caution, and reason to the wind, and chase down her true love,
but if she's married, even by just a few weeks,
we want to sit her down and talk some sense into her.
We want to make sure she understands the truth,
which is that Sam couldn't possibly make her any happier,
that Walter is as good a guy as she's ever going to find,
and that there's no such thing as true love.
DT: All of this can lead to a bad case of social whiplash,
being told before marriage to believe in true love,
and if you miss finding it at the altar, being told that it never existed.
It's not possible for true love to exist on one side of the moment
where someone says, "I now pronounce you man and wife,"
and not exist on the other side.
The fact that our society tries so hard to have it both ways
is a perfect example of a sacred cow.
AT: We only have time to talk to you about three of the sacred cows today,
and we had a really hard time choosing which three.
DT: We decided that even though she's the least entertaining,
the Innocent Victim Cow is the most powerful
and the most cruel of all the cows.
When it comes right down to it,
the most forceful argument our society makes against divorce
is that it harms children.
We know this from personal experience because we have four children,
and we were worried about what effect divorce would have on them.
Once we delved into the scientific literature though,
we were surprised to find there is actually no good evidence
that divorce affects long-term outcomes for kids.
This isn't entirely the fault of the research community.
It turns out that this is a really, really hard question to study.
AT: The first reason it's hard to study is because, this sounds obvious,
but married people are not the same as divorced people.
It's not just that divorced people tend on average to be poorer,
less educated, and have more mental health problems than people who stay married,
it's also that happily married parents tend not to get divorced.
So you can't learn anything meaningful
comparing the children of parents who choose to get divorced
with the children of parents who choose to stay married.
It's apples to oranges.
DT: A related issue is
that even if children whose parents divorce have more problems,
that doesn't mean their parents' divorce caused the problems.
Correlation is not causation.
For instance, did you know that the size of your hand
is inversely correlated with your life expectancy?
It's true.
People with small hands live longer.
Are big hands a health hazard?
No, it's just that women on average have smaller hands than men,
and women on average also live longer than men.
The same principle applies to divorce.
If children whose parents are divorced have a higher prevalence of autism,
that doesn't mean that their parents' divorce made them autistic.
AT: A third problem is
there are so many factors
that go into contributing to the well-being of children.
You know, most of us, as parents, know how mysterious it is
that one of our children grows up to be a reclusive artist,
and another grows up to be a politician.
Or, how any child of mine got musical talent.
It's almost impossible to tease out the effect of divorce on children
from the many, many other genetic, social, and environmental factors
that contribute to and influence how children grow up.
DT: What would be a proper study of the effects of divorce on children?
Researchers would need to randomly assign thousands of married parents to groups:
one where everyone gets divorced, and one where everyone stays married.
Right, imagine if a researcher said,
"You're going to get an envelope in the mail that will tell you
whether you need to divorce next week, or stay married for ten years.
Then we'll test your kids every year to see how they're doing."
Would you participate in that study?
That's why there are no reliable studies about the effect of divorce on children.
DT: Everyone is welcome to have an opinion about how divorce affects children,
but this social narrative that says it's a known fact if you get divorced
your children will be less happy, less successful, less well adjusted,
than if you had stayed married, that's just wrong.
It's misleading, and it's cruel.
AT: On the other hand, no one can say that divorce has no affect on children.
What we should be saying as a society to parents who are considering divorce is
"We just don't know what effect your divorce might have on your child."
The only thing we can know for certain
is that the kind of person most of us grow up to be
is determined overwhelmingly by factors other than our parents' marital status.
DT: There are many, many good reasons to avoid divorce.
Divorce is painful for everyone involved,
including, maybe even, especially for children.
Divorce is disruptive, expensive, it's a huge drain on time and energy.
Most important, some marriages get better,
and it would be a shame to end those marriages prematurely.
AT: On the other hand, there are times when divorce represents the best solution,
and sacred cows get in the way of people making good decisions.
They add guilt, shame, and confusion to what is already an agonizing process.
As a society, maybe, instead of pressuring people
to get married and to stay married,
maybe we should just acknowledge that love is complicated and divorce is hard.
Maybe we should say to people who are struggling in their marriages,
"Don't let these sacred cows bully you.
Work through your problems with compassion
for your children, for your spouse, for yourself.
Whatever you decide and however things turn out,
we collectively have got your back."
AT: We wish for you, and for all who you hold dear
that love be sacred all the days of your life and theirs.
(Applause)