Welcome Paul and Eli from Love Factually

We’re so excited to be welcoming Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel onto the show from the Love Factually podcast!

Paul is a Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and the author of the book "Bonded by Evolution" that offers an exciting new look at the science of attraction and compatibility.

Eli is a professor at Northwestern University, with appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. He also serves as a founding co-director of the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement and as the Morton O. Schapiro Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. His research topics range from marriage to political partisanship. He is the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, a co-host of the Love Factually podcast, and a guest essayist for The New York Times. The Economist declared him “one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology.”

Paul and Eli co-host the podcast Love Factually where they analyze rom-coms and romantic dramas from the perspective of relationship science.

For this episode, we’re going to be talking about the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona and its portrayal of non-monogamy, whether it’s realistic or not, and giving it the Love Factually treatment on Multiamory!

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're doing a fun exploration of non-monogamy in film from both a critical and scientific lens with very special guests today, Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick of the Love Factually Podcast, where they analyze romcoms and romantic dramas from the perspective of relationship science. Eli Finkel is a professor at Northwestern University. His research topics range from marriage to political partisanship. He's the author of the All-or-Nothing Marriage and a guest essayist for the New York Times. Paul Eastwick is a professor of psychology at UC Davis and the author of the book Bonded by Evolution that offers an exciting new look at the science of attraction and compatibility. And today, all five of us are going to be doing our version of the Love Factually podcast treatment of the Hit 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Eli and Paul, thank you so much for joining us today.

Eli: Thanks for having us.

Paul: Yes, thank you. This is so exciting. We are not used to being on a podcast with this many people. So, I'm so excited.

Dedeker: We've heard that a lot. Yeah.

Emily: Well, it's okay. We're quite used to it. We will shepherd you through. It's gonna be fantastic.

Eli: Yeah. We will be the mature, older gentlemen guiding you through your first podcast. Oh my goodness. Definitely need my hand held.

Dedeker: Yeah, there it is.

Jase: Okay, so to start us out, whether or not you have seen this movie, we're gonna give you a quick summary. So, Eli, can you hit us with who's our cast of characters here?

Eli: Yes, the movie depicts the romantic escapades of two American friends in their late 20s who are spending summer together in Spain. Vicky, played by Rebecca Hall, is a conscientious graduate student who believes that love should be safe and sensible. Christina, played by Scarlett Johansson, is an impulsive filmmaker who believes that love should be risky and passionate. The two women meet Juan Antonio, played by Javier Bardem. He's a charismatic painter who treats romance as an art form. His ex-wife is Maria Elena, played to Oscar-winning perfection by Penelope Cruz. She's a brilliant artist with an explosive emotional life. Other notable characters include Judy, an American expat who hosts Vicky and Christina, and Doug, Vicky's normie fiance. So Paul, pretty normie. Those are the chess pieces.

Emily: Doug, I wrote Doug in all caps so many times in my notes. Doug.

Jase: And now something that I love from the Love Factually podcast is that Paul will treat us to his 60-second summary of the plot of this entire movie. On your mark, get set, go.

Paul: Vicky and Christina are spending the summer in Barcelona. One night, they meet Juan Antonio, a charismatic painter who rather directly invites them to Oviedo for a weekend of food, wine, and sex. Vicky is shocked by the invitation, but Christina is intrigued when they both end up going on the trip. During the visit, Christina gets food poisoning, so her burgeoning romance with him is thwarted, leaving Vicky to unexpectedly develop feelings for him. They have sex, but Vicky remains engaged to Doug, who is now coming out so they can get married in Spain. Then, Christina does develop a relationship with Juan Antonio and moves in with him, while Vicky seems lost about what she wants. But then, Juan Antonio's ex-wife Maria Elena returns. She at first tries to exclude Christina, but in the end, they form a relationship together, the three of them for a time. But by the end of the summer, Christina feels the need to move on, we are told, and she had been the glue keeping Juan Antonio and Maria Elena together, so they break up too. Vicky tries to rekindle things with Juan Antonio one last time, but then Maria Elena shows up with a gun and shoots her in the hand. And that's the end of that experiment. And both women return to the US, Christina having grown from her experience, and Vicky settling on something that is less than completely and totally passionate.

Jase: Wow. You made it with two seconds to spare.

Paul: All right.

Jase: Wow.

Paul: All right.

Emily: Very well done. What a very particular skill you have for that.

Paul: It is a very strange skill that I appear to have honed.

Emily: Yeah, everyone in this film is amazing and hot.

Dedeker: Everyone is really hot. Except for maybe Doug.

Emily: Well, but even Doug in his own weird, normie way. In a way, in his Doug-like way.

Jase: Strong chin.

Emily: He brings what he's supposed to bring. And now let me tell you, so like I took a bunch of notes. 90% of my notes are about what Javier Bardem looks like.

Jase: Oh yeah.

Dedeker: I have a prepared list of, let's see, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, 11 statements about Javier Bardem.

Dedeker: Oh, my goodness.

Emily: That have come from this movie. Now, I can either front load all those statements or I can sprinkle them through.

Dedeker: Maybe pepper them.

Emily: Pepper them. Okay.

Paul: I like it.

Dedeker: Do you want to hit us with one of them? Give us one to start it off.

Emily: Let's see. Javier Bardem is a mighty oak. Ooh, that was my first.

Jase: You were writing poetry about Javier Bardem.

Emily: No, no, these are not research notes. This is poetry about Javier Bardem.

Dedeker: You were having some feelings about him. Oh my God.

Emily: Actually, the very first note in my document, so I just got back from Europe myself and I was very jet lagged. And literally the first note was, I am too jet lagged to handle this much Javier Bardem on the screen. Javier Bardem is gonna crawl out of my TV screen like the girl in the ring, but instead of killing me, he's gonna fix every problem in my life. That was another one.

Jase: Wow, that's good.

Dedeker: That would be amazing.

Jase: Incredible. So the two of you probably don't know this, but my background actually, much before all of this, was as a professional hairstylist for a while. And so one of my notes was, everybody's hair is beautiful and perfect all the time at every moment of every day, no matter what's happening. So I also went a little bit off track on some of mine.

Emily: Can I just say right off, maybe a more negative comment, since you guys have been piling on all the good ones, I felt like everyone was just a trope. You got the fiery Latin woman, you have the manic pixie dream girl in Scarlett Johansson, you have the very neurotic woman who is, in my opinion, the Woody Allen character, because many of Woody Allen's movies include that, absolutely. And I feel like she was his voice in this film.

Dedeker: In many ways.

Emily: And then, of course, you have the square in Doug that is just kind of there. He's the finance bro. He's gonna take care of her, but be very boring in the process. So I guess I wished at times, and I had seen this in theaters in 2008, many, many moons ago when I was much younger, and I felt as though I wished that everyone got to explore all of these things a little bit more and with a little bit more nuance.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I'll sort of pick up on that. I was shocked by my own reaction that I felt like this was almost two different movies, and the first movie I didn't particularly care for, and then as soon as Penelope Cruz shows up, I was just locked in. And I actually don't recall having quite an experience of flipping on a movie quite so dramatically. As I did watching this, yeah.

Jase: And it's so interesting that she doesn't show up until more than halfway through the film.

Dedeker: Oh, wow, really?

Jase: Yeah. When she showed up, I looked at the timestamp, and I was like, yeah, this is past the halfway point already.

Emily: Wow. Yeah.

Jase: But she's been mentioned in possibly every single scene that had Javier Bardem's character in it. And so she's been foreshadowed so much, and then she finally shows up more than halfway through the film.

Eli: You know, if I had to engage, Emily, with your observation that there are some stock characters here, I agree with you, but as somebody who spends a lot of his life watching rom-coms for our show, the plot was not at all predictable. I didn't know which way it was going to go. So it is true that Woody Allen here does set up this contrast between the stable guy and the hot Spanish artist guy. And yeah, there's some tropiness in there. But again, from one part of the movie to the next, I really had no idea what was coming. And even by the end, I didn't really anticipate that it would end as it did, too. So I admired about the movie that it sort of broke pretty much all the tropes that you might think of in a rom-com.

Jase: Was this both of your first time watching this film?

Paul: I had seen this in the theater in 2008 as well. I hadn't revisited it since. And I had this vague memory that I didn't like it as much, even as the other Woody Allen films around that time. And then rewatching it, made all those things click back into place. I was like, oh, right. There's a turn, and then I started liking it.

Eli: I had seen it on an airplane, so it must have been around 2008. That was the only time I'd seen it. I hadn't revisited it, but I remembered the scene where Javier Bardem first approaches the two women. It's a great scene. It's so memorable. And then I watched it again here and was like, oh, I see why I remembered this. This is a terrific scene for setting an intriguing plot in motion.

Dedeker: Yes. At that scene, I wrote, Javier Bardem is a tall stack of pancakes that I want to eat, and which I will eat.

Eli: I'm glad you're peppering these throughout, because, you know, you wouldn't want to drop all these at once. You've got them timed perfectly.

Dedeker: Uh-huh. Yeah. We just need a little bit of little olives here and there to keep this going.

Jase: Right. So Eli and Paul, I'm really curious for any reactions that you had to this scene. But the thing that really struck me in this first scene where Vicky and Christina are at a restaurant, they're having dinner, I guess. They're just drinking wine now.

Emily: So much wine for everyone in this film. Good Lord.

Jase: Juan Antonio sees them across the room, 'cause ScarJo's been making eyes with him since earlier in the day at an art exhibit. And he comes up to them, and in this really, really calm, kind of unaffected way, asks them to go away for the weekend with him to Oviedo, and to make love, and that he is interested in making love with both of them.

Juan Antonio: I'd like to invite you both to come with me to Oviedo.

Emily: To come where?

Juan Antonio: To Oviedo. For the weekend. We leave in one hour.

Emily: Where is Oviedo?

Juan Antonio: A very short flight.

Emily: By plane? What's in Oviedo?

Juan Antonio: I go to see a sculpture that is very inspiring to me. Very beautiful sculpture. You'll love it.

Emily: Right. You're asking us to fly to Oviedo and back.

Juan Antonio: No, we'll spend the weekend. I mean, I'll show you around the city and we'll eat well, we'll drink good wine, we'll make love.

Emily: Yeah, who exactly is going to make love?

Juan Antonio: Hopefully the three of us.

Emily: Oh my God.

Juan Antonio: I'll get your bill.

Emily: Jesus, this guy, he doesn't beat around the bush. Look, senor, maybe in a different life.

Jase: And, Vicky's reaction is kind of making fun of him, being like, that's ridiculous. I don't know where, maybe women fall for that, but not us. And Scarjo's like, oh, my goodness. Hello. They have these two very different reactions. But the thing that really struck me was that Vicky's being kind of mean, maybe justifiably, but is making fun of him, being very sarcastic, and that with all of it, he responds with this really calm, totally unfazed sort of reaction to that and just continuing to be almost a little amused by it and then just saying, oh, well, I'm just really interested in you. And to me, watching that, and maybe this is just because some of my background learning years ago, I was like, Pickup Artist 101. This guy's read the game. He knows the moves. And I did some research on this, and there's a term within the red pill literature for what he's doing called amused mastery.

Emily: Oh, I'm curious.

Jase: Before I get into that anymore, I'm curious what other people thought about this scene.

Paul: So it's interesting because I think from a scientific perspective, and this is just going to be kind of a bummer all around what I'm about to say, but all the science that I think we could point to would suggest that there's no way that this is effective even with a guy as attractive as Javier Bardem.

Emily: I could argue with you on that, but I'm gonna put it on the shelf.

Jase: She's gonna eat that stack of pancakes.

Paul: Once you eat him up.

Dedeker: Good Lord.

Paul: And so I'll point to two places, but then Eli, feel free to come in and correct me on this. But there's two things. So there's a bunch of very famous studies where they get hot men and women to do this essentially, go up to people and pretty directly proposition them for sex. The classic version was conducted on a college campus, but there have been other larger replications too in other places. And what they generally find is that if you do this, if it's a woman approaching a man, the man will say yes about 40 or 50% of the time. And the women will say yes about 2% of the time. Now, maybe Scarlett Johansson is in that 2%, and that's all well and good. But the other thing that this has working against it, it's specifically the fact that he's like, either or both, I will have either of you.

Emily: Right, which Vicky really seizes on.

Juan Antonio: Why not? Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain, and this is a chance for something special.

Emily: Right, who exactly are you?

Juan Antonio: I am Juan Antonio, and you are Vicky, and you are Christina, right? Or is it the other way around?

Emily: Yeah, it could be the other way around, because frankly it doesn't matter, because either of us will do to keep the bed warm, I get it.

Juan Antonio: Well, you're both so lovely and beautiful.

Emily: Yeah, thank you, but we do not fly off to make love with whoever invites us to charming little Spanish towns.

Dedeker: Right?

Emily: This idea is, oh, it doesn't matter to you.

Eli: Yes.

Emily: Both of us, it's either of us.

Dedeker: Whatever warms your bed.

Paul: Yes.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah.

Paul: And I don't know what to say other than Vicky's right. Then generally speaking is that when people give off an unselective vibe, that vibe tends to go down in flames. People don't like that. So again, these studies are not conducted with Javier Bardem.

Jase: That'd be an interesting set of research to do.

Paul: I know. That is what we should do.

Dedeker: I would participate in that research because Javier Bardem is my own personal Jesus.

Paul: Yeah.

Dedeker: Oh my gosh.

Jase: Was that another quote that you wrote down?

Dedeker: That's another one, yes.

Dedeker: There it is. Yes.

Paul: Oh my Lord. So yeah, I hate to be kind of a bummer coming right out of the gate. I loved it as a piece of commentary. But yes, typically under most circumstances, this wouldn't work all that well.

Eli: Yeah, you do want to feel like you were chosen, and I agree that many people would react as Vicky did. I just wanted to say one other thing about that scene that really stood out to me, which is, I think the scene does a pretty good job, and maybe the movie more generally does a pretty good job of puncturing the conflation between short-term romance and empty romance. Because I think Javier Bardem's character thinks he is offering something deeply meaningful, and I think he expects to get something deeply meaningful from this weekend-long getaway. And there's a part that I really loved, where Vicky is, as you mentioned, very accusatory toward him. And she says, I think you're still hurting from the failure of your marriage to Maria Elena, and you're trying to lose yourself in empty sex. And he responds, Empty sex? Do you have such a low opinion of yourself? And I think he thinks he's offering a beautiful experience that they'll all have together. But Vicky's mentality is, well, if it's short term, it's necessarily empty. And I think that contrast is on good display throughout the movie.

Jase: For sure.

Emily: Definitely. One of the pieces of research that I looked up was this idea of do opposites actually attract or not? And I think that's sort of just an anecdotal thing that people say, like a little pithy statement, oh, opposites attract. But from the research, there was a big Colorado University Boulder analysis of basically millions of couples. It was a ton of couples. And they saw that partners were more likely than not to be similar, and they analyzed more than 130 traits, essentially finding that Opposites actually don't necessarily attract, that it does tend to be people that are much more similar, that tend to have a longer term relationship, and that those types of relationships Thrive more often than not.

Paul: Yeah, so the similarity attraction versus opposites attract tension is kind of everywhere. The way that I tend to think about this is that when people are meeting for the first time, geez, kind of neither of these things are true. Similarities can attract or repel, and you don't see much on average. The reason that couples end up being similar is mostly because similar people tend to meet each other. I think that's what's interesting about the Vicky, Juan Antonio relationship, that these are probably two people who would not have met in the typical course of everything.

Jase: She would have blown him off right from the start.

Emily: Totally.

Paul: Exactly. But circumstances conspired to give this time together. There is some research suggesting that when somebody that you initially would have written off as being quite different from you, if they then take an interest in you, that's a little exciting. This is, Eli, I'm thinking of there was some art Aaron work a little while back showing that it's this new opportunity for self-expansion. And if I'm gonna point to one thing that this movie seems to understand, it's that meeting other people, getting involved in their lives is an incredible opportunity for self-expansion, both just in that this is a new experience for me, but also in the artistic sense. So I think in that sense, what we're seeing here does make a lot of sense. Them being opposites, that wouldn't pull them together, but upon finding out that there's a connection, could be a little bit of an extra draw.

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Jase: So I'd actually like to take that opportunity to look at some of these relationships a bit more and to talk about the non-monogamy of it all. Compared to the movies that you two cover on your show, they're rom-coms. And so they're mostly all based in this world of default monogamy. That's never questioned. That's just assumed that that's what everyone wants. And so with this, I think there's a couple pieces of that. So one is the looking at how this transition happens. How does ScarJo go through this transition with them? How does she end up in this? And then also looking at Vicky's feelings, where suddenly she's really conflicted about her upcoming marriage. And then later in the film, she does get married and then is still conflicted about it. And so to kind of get into that a little bit, I was thinking maybe one place to start is we'll ease our way in with just the whole they're in a foreign country, they're abroad, they're taking a break from their lives, they're in this kind of liminal space in their lives, which there is research and also a lot of anecdotal evidence. And then there's movies like Eat, Pray, Love or books, I guess, that are then movies. They kind of play on this trope of you go do that to discover yourself and have all these profound realizations about yourself. And it very much seems like it's playing on that a little bit too, that they're able to give themselves the freedom to explore these different ways of being because they're abroad, right? They're not in their real life.

Dedeker: Yeah. Well, it's funny because one of the earliest notes I wrote down was, oh, these two tourists. Right. And not just tourists to Barcelona, but tourists in what is it like to live an artist's life, right? Or what is it like to have these adventures and go away for the weekend? What is it like to be introduced to this artist's father? And I really had mixed feelings about it because I do think that, yes, it's very easy to look at it through this romantic sheen of, oh, wow, how magical to be stepping outside of normal life and to have this experience. And also the negative sheen of, Yeah, you're just kind of showing up just to dabble and just to taste and just to see and then withdrawing yourself as well.

Paul: I think that's a really interesting insight because at least the travel research that I think shows the biggest benefits of travel is the research that looks at couples. So two people traveling together. And I think the work is with romantically involved couples, but you can imagine friends going through the same experience. And I would bet that the results would be the same. And that is you go through a travel experience with someone else, and that generally makes you feel better about that relationship and makes you feel like, oh, you've had these growth experiences together. So I think that's the part that works and makes sense. I mean, you know, Vicky and Christina, I'm not 100% sure whether they're closer at the end of this movie than they were at the start. Maybe not, but they certainly had a lot of self-expanding experience.

Emily: But kind of separately, as opposed to together.

Paul: That's a great point.

Emily: They really did.

Jase: But they still share that all with each other at the end. So it does feel like even through all of this, they've still maintained a closeness throughout. That's where I wanted to go next, actually, is we kind of have this whole travel thing, but then there's the whole, a third is going to fix our relationship.

Emily: Totally.

Jase: And this is, you know, Emily and Dedeker, both Eli and Paul, we're all nodding, because this is one of the biggest tropes or kind of misconceptions that we see come up a lot with previously monogamous relationships who want to open up specifically to add a third, not to fully be polyamorous separately, but to add a third thinking it's going to fix things.

Dedeker: Well, but it's interesting that that's not the traditional, that's not how it starts out, right? It starts out with Juan Antonio with Christina moves in with him right away in the throes of new relationship energy. She moves in with him. They're together. And then Maria Elena, his ex-wife, comes back into the picture. She's had a self-harm crisis. She has nowhere to go. He moves her back into the house, and now all of a sudden, bam, we're thrust into this proximity issue, which is another rom-com trope of, now we're all in proximity, and things are chaotic for a little while, but then eventually, oh, wow, what a miracle. We all have the hots for each other, and now we're this triad together, and we have sex together. And then it's a different route into them spinning this narrative that, oh, you know, this passionate, dysfunctional relationship between Maria Elena and Juan Antonio, it works when there's the missing ingredient, when Cristina is there, that, yeah, that's the thing that fixes it.

Eli: Yeah, that is totally my read as well. It's not just that they all have the hots for each other, but that right from the start, we're to understand that Maria Elena and Juan Antonio have this amazing relationship, but there was an ingredient missing. And then, lo and behold, the relationship is outstanding. And you even get a little speech from Maria Elena to Christina, where she

Juan Antonio: says, Before you, we used to cause each other so much pain, so much suffering. Without you, all this would not be possible. You know why? Because you are the missing ingredient. You are like the tint that added to the palette makes the color beautiful.

Eli: I think this is one of the core ideas in the movie. That you can really find the right geometric structure and everything starts to fit together. And actually, I spent a while in advance of this conversation trying to find out what is the state of the evidence on that research question. And the answer is, I don't think it's been studied well yet. There is research that we can be happy with multiple partners. There's some research I've found interesting that suggests that how happy I am, for example, with a primary partner is largely uncorrelated with how happy I am with a secondary partner. Maybe I'm happy with both, maybe I'm unhappy with both, or maybe some combination of the two. But this question that is of prime interest to me in terms of intellectual engagement of, we look to different people to help us meet different needs. That idea is out there. There's some evidence for that. But this more specific idea that the specific constellation of needs that I have and that you have We're not quite fitting, but there's a puzzle piece that if only we could add it, then we would all be happy together and our relationship would be better. I just don't think the research can speak either way to that.

Dedeker: Well, okay, there's a couple things going on here as far as this depiction. One of them being that there's this huge trope about non-monogamy in general, that it's all group relationships, right? That it's all throuples or quads, which there is some survey data that suggests that's not the case, actually. Like the most common format of non-monogamous relationships is interconnected dyads. So as in Jase is dating me, I'm dating somebody else, they're married to somebody, their wife is dating somebody else, right? That's the most common format. And triads and quads, these group structures are actually relatively rare. And there isn't research yet that determines why is it so rare, but anecdotally we can say that, yeah, this shit is hard. You know, like I actually wrote in my notes, When their triad is falling apart, I wrote down, I have seen this triad blow up before about 20 times. Like, this is very familiar to me, this dynamic. Now, I mean, I have clients that I work with who are long-running triads, you know, who are co-pairing team together or going through all the vicissitudes of life. And being in a triad or being in a quad does bring some benefits, for sure. But it also adds another layer of complication, right? Like, you've effectively gone from, if you're thinking about a dyad, gone from a relationship between two people to six different relationships, right? Six different potential dyads in the mix. And then also the mix of how are we when it's the three of us versus when it's just with you or things like that. And so I think my kind of cheeky response would be that yeah, I don't think we have the research that looks at triads specifically because triads would be hard to study because they're also rare and rare to get them to be functioning and long lasting.

Jase: Yeah, absolutely. That's what I was going to jump in with that we did an episode somewhat recently with some data scientists from field from the dating app. Field and they talked about their data also shows it's interconnecting dyads that actually long lasting triads and especially quads or more are relatively very rare, right? So if you've already got this, roughly five-ish percent of the population doing non-monogamy and now you've got this much smaller percentage even of that, it is kind of a hard thing to study.

Emily: I'm not sure if you both are familiar with the term unicorn hunting.

Jase: Yeah.

Emily: But that is something that maybe some of your listeners are not familiar with, but it's this idea It doesn't necessarily have to look this way, but for a long time it was this idea that a hetero sec, well, maybe heteroflexible couple were curious about potentially opening up their relationship and they are looking, searching for a unicorn, which is generally a hot bi or pansexual woman to come in and be equally attracted to both of them, and then all of a sudden just make everything better. I will say from my like, Anecdata, anecdotal data or whatever, my anecdating. Yes. Well, I'll say from the standpoint of triads in general, I have enjoyed being in triads very much, but also just from the standpoint of our podcast, I do think that three of us has been really great when at times there needs to be some mediation, for example. And, sometimes you need to lift up the other two people or one other person and just having that structure of three. And many ways can be helpful. Of course, yeah, it would be great to have more statistics and more studies done on this in romantic relationships, but in terms of what we've experienced personally, it can be done really well. But I do think that in the course of this film, Christina ultimately realizes she doesn't just want a love that is only about trying to keep two other people together. And I think that that, by the end of the film, is ultimately why she decides she has to leave.

Dedeker: Interesting.

Paul: So I searched far and wide for relevant research literature on this, too. And I ended up in a funny space because one thing that occurred to me was, well, Maria Elena seems very emotionally volatile, and he brings her home from the hospital. And I know what that experience is like. It's called having a child. And that's a common way.

Dedeker: Interesting.

Paul: I don't think Woody Allen meant that. But I was like, oh, wait, this part's familiar.

Emily: Interesting, yeah.

Paul: And usually, yeah, it makes life more complicated, but I think any parent will tell you it just adds dimensions and layers. And I think at least that part, it's perhaps capturing. And maybe there is something more unstable about it. I mean, if you survey folks, you only see a small minority of couples who report increases in satisfaction, relationship quality, et cetera, after they have a gift.

Emily: Sure.

Paul: Yeah, not that common experience. But in terms of the various things you can experience in life, it sure does add a lot.

Eli: I was struck as I listened to the whole discussion. Dedeker, you and Emily, you also found the Scarlett Johansson breakup. Christina leaves them. Totally compelling, right? Totally plausible. And what was so interesting to me about listening to that is I generally liked this movie a lot, but I found that part bewildering. It seemed like they were so happy together. And so I actually think this is one of these cases where you have personal experiences and are immersed in a network where you've seen triads engage much more than I have. I pay attention to the science on this stuff, but that's really different from seeing these things firsthand. Is it just that she thought this role that I have of being the tint, right? Being the fixer for your relationship? She opted out of that? Is that your understanding of why she thought this wasn't working? 'Cause again, my sense was she was kind of grooving on this.

Dedeker: Oh, I see the seeds of the breakup constantly through the whole way that their relationship is depicted. So everything from, well, first of all, already being set up in the fact that she's moved in with this guy right away, very, very quickly. A trope in polyamory.

Dedeker: to the first disappointment, the first signs of their flawed humanity, right? She already has this sense of comparison and insecurity with Maria Elena. And how could you not?

Emily: But she handles it pretty well.

Dedeker: She does handle it pretty well.

Emily: I was shocked at the lack-- I mean, yes, he was talking about how much he loved her and how passionate their relationship was. And she kind of looks a little perturbed by that, but she doesn't fly off the handle. She rolls with it. She deals.

Juan Antonio: You had only known her when I first met her. I mean, her beauty. Her beauty took your breath away.

Emily: Yes, I can.

Juan Antonio: And she was so talented. She was so brilliant. She was so sensual. I mean, it chose me from a hundred men ready to kill for her.

Emily: Uh-huh.

Juan Antonio: We were both sure that our relation was perfect, but there was something missing, you know? Like, love requires such a perfect balance. It's like the human body. It may turn that you have all the vitamins and minerals, but if there is a minor single tiny ingredient missing, like salt, for example, one dies.

Emily: Salt?

Emily: Yeah, she really internalizes that jealousy and allows it to go through her and then just moves on, which I found very impressive.

Paul: Let me build on that.

Dedeker: Let me build my case here. Because no, I actually think, yeah, it's like they do an admirable job. It goes surprisingly smoothly when they're developing their relationship, right? So everything like you're saying, Emily, about ScarJo, feeling that comparison, feeling that insecurity, seeking reassurance from him and getting over it essentially, or moving through it, right? Proactively developing a connection with Maria Elena, with her Metamour, who then becomes her partner, right? To her going out of her way, like give her blessing to the two of them to make love again. But then when they are, she has mixed feelings about it. That felt so realistic to me.

Jase: 100% so, I was impressed.

Dedeker: 100% that sense of kind of maybe aspirational, yes, I want to support you, Anna, and this is what I want for you. And also having to grapple with the reality of this is uncomfortable and I have mixed feelings. But the biggest thing being that even though Christina does so well with all of this, It's still difficult. It's still stuff that a lot of people aren't anticipating having to tackle in a romantic relationship ever, right? And ultimately, we're still living in a world where there's still a lot of stigma and a lot of support for this. And so to me, Christina leaving them, I read it almost more as like a little bit of a cold feet situation, right? Of yeah, this is good, and we're jiving well, and I'm doing well with this, but also like, how can this last? How am I going to tell my parents about this? Am I going to live like this for the rest of my life? And then maybe what you're talking about, Emily, that seed of maybe I'm just here just to make this couple work, right? And that's my only function. I think it's just because I've seen a lot of people abandon non-monogamy, not just because maybe this is uncomfortable for me or it's not working for me, but also it's just like we're in a context that's not super, super supportive of this. Right? And we don't have a ton of healthy role models. And so when people can't visualize, if Christina is not able to visualize what this could look like in 20 years, it's really hard, I think, to weather then the uncertainty of what is my role in this relationship? Do these people actually love me? Do I actually love them? Is this what I want for my life? Like that was kind of how I read all of that.

Jase: So I had a slightly different impression of that breakup than either of you. I feel like all three of us had slightly different takes on it.

Paul: Yeah.

Jase: So I agree 100% with Dedeker, and I think Emily, you probably saw this, too, but there were so many things early on where you're like, Nope, nope, that's not gonna go well. That's not gonna go well. There's a lot of those things. You saw the writing on the wall. But the surprising thing about this movie is none of those things actually happened. She just kind of leaves out of nowhere. And it was a little bit weird. It was a little surprising, because I think what the normal way that would have gone is she moves in really fast. Is all excited about her new relationship energy, her NRE. She does this, gets involved with them, and then after some period of time, when the sort of being on our best behavior because someone's watching starts to dissolve, that Maria Elena and Juan Antonio will fall back into their chaotic, potentially physically abusive patterns. And then ScarJo is going to be in this, oh my God, what's happening? Kind of horror movie situation. I have to get out. That it actually would have taken a longer time to get to this sort of of rude awakening and this bad outcome. I think the way that the movie played it more, I think, was about, kind of unrelated to the non-monogamy thing and was more just about the story that Woody Allen was trying to tell about Christina's character, where it presents her as having this kind of idea of there's suffering and passion, is how she's introduced. She believes there's suffering and passion, and she doesn't know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn't want. And then partway through the movie, after she moves in with Juan Antonio, the narrator, has this line where he says that, you know, she's finally found what she sought. She's the lover of an exciting man, an artist whose work she believed in. And it's like this kind of identity that's outside of herself. And so maybe our most optimistic view would be, as she did start to grow as an artist, realizing, I don't want to just be in this relationship where I just admire these other people that I think are better artists than me or that are older than me, that I want to go do my own thing. So I kind of read that as unrelated, though if she had stayed, it would have been disastrous.

Emily: By the way, Javier Bardem is allowed to splash paint on my body in any country under any jurisdiction.

Eli: Dedeker, was that something you had in advance, or did that just come out spontaneously right now?

Dedeker: Oh, no, this is part of my prepared statements on Javier Bardem. Okay, good, good, good.

Eli: Pepper them in, perfect.

Emily: How many are we down? How many have we done so far?

Dedeker: Oh, we got some more to go.

Jase: Good, good, good, good.

Emily: So what do you two think about all of that now that we've done it? We threw all that at you.

Paul: I find all of that, that helps me to make sense of a lot of what's going on in that part of the movie, which again is very much my favorite part of the movie. I'll just add that I think from the perspective of the little bit of science that we have about folks in polyamorous relationships is that the Scarlett Johansson experience of I am both experiencing a modicum of jealousy and also a modicum of conversion, of excitement for Maria Elena and Juan Antonio as they're getting back together. And I think we're to understand that Maria Elena is also experiencing those two things simultaneously. That seems to be reflected pretty well in what you see, especially when you compare monogamous and polyamorous couples. And so generally speaking, what you'll find is that monogamous couples are really, really high in jealousy. If you ask them to imagine scenarios like this and really, really low in compersion and the ability to be happy for your partner that they're having an experience like this. Whereas polyamorous folks experience the tension between those two things. And so I thought, I bought that Scarlett Johansson, that the Christina character was having a real experience of navigating that tension and that that made a lot of sense.

Eli: Paul, I'm so interested in that research. Does it speak at all to whether that's a selection effect? Certain people are really open-minded and find compersion easy, and so they opt in to consensual non-monogamy rather than monogamy. Or is it that somewhere along the way, the monogamists and the consensual non-monogamists buy into different, let's say, ideologies or worldviews and that they're increasing or decreasing tolerance for these sorts of things is downstream from their learning to have certain moral views.

Paul: I mean, I can't say, I don't know if we'll ever be able to say for sure how much of these differences, and to be clear, these differences are gigantic. I mean, as psychological differences go between different types of relationships, showing that monogamous folks experience large amounts of jealousy, and polyamorous folks experience a little bit of jealousy in situations like these. I mean, it's one of the biggest effects I've ever seen in a scientific paper. So there's gotta be some amount of both in there, but I don't know if we'll ever be able to do the experiment.

Dedeker: Well, we have to shout out a friend of the show, Dr. Marie Tuan, who is a compersion researcher. She's probably listening to this right now, yelling at her podcast machine.

Eli: That was Paul Eastwick. I would highly recommend. He was the one who just spoke.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: I'm sure you'll be hearing from her, Paul.

Jase: All right, I'm ready.

Paul: I'm ready.

Dedeker: Directly. But yeah, I highly recommend anyone listening to, yeah, look into Dr. Marie Tuan's research. She put out a book based on her research called what is Compersion that gets into some of these questions.

Jase: But I do think that you've touched on something a little bit interesting there of where's the cause and where's the effect. But I do think that something we notice just anecdotally with people who are first moving from monogamy to non-monogamy, which is pretty much how everybody does it.

Eli: Right.

Jase: It's rare to find someone who's raised in this and does it themselves, right? You usually have to transition because culturally we all do it that one way. A lot of it is this kind of unlearning of this association that if my partner is with somebody else, what that means is that they don't love me. And so I wonder with the whole compersion and jealousy thing, if that actually might be less of an ingrained trait and more of a, based on the logic of what I've been told is true, I feel this certain way. Because, I identified myself as a fairly jealous person up through college and kind of had this turning point moment that was about how I thought about relationships with other people and how I thought about what love means, that then that kind of switched overnight, essentially, right? There was still a lot of unlearning to do, but that I think that for me it was a mental switch. And so I wonder if that might be the case here too.

Paul: It's so interesting. Actually, I have a question for maybe everybody here. Okay, so here's the thing that I've been able to wrap my head around. I think I've been practicing monogamy for my many years of romantic experience on this earth. And the closest I can get to understanding this experience is what it's like to be friends with an ex. Because I can have the experience of appreciating what we have, and the fact that you have a new partner now does not seem to take away from that.

Emily: Yeah.

Paul: And I'm just curious if that's ever, is that a point of leverage people need to get into this. But you've had that experience, right? That it didn't diminish it. So anyway, but that's the closest I've ever been able to get in the mental switch that you're describing there.

Jase: I love that you're trying to come up with analogies, 'cause that's something I do a ton on the show. Anytime we're trying to reason about something, it's like, what's something close to this? So we can even think about it, because we don't have these cultural blueprints for it. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's that even just using friendship is another one, or we'll use analogies like in-laws, things that are kind of these close relationships, but through your partner rather than through yourself. And that those don't always have to be super close. They're nicer if they are, but they don't have to be for you to be a mature, civil human being with them. So we love those sorts of analogies.

Dedeker: That's, no, that's a really interesting thing to bring up because, yeah, Jase uses the analogy all the time to talk about the Metamour relationship. So as in the relationship between, you know, my partner's other partner, the closest proxy we have is is an in-law like this sense that there's this person in my partner's life that they care about that I didn't get to choose. And we see Metamour relationships run a huge gamut that looks similar to the huge gamut that in-law relationships can run. Everything from very toxic and unsupportive and very combative and all the way up to up to very loving and very friendly and very familial and very close. I was wondering, can we talk a little bit about sex?

Jase: Finally.

Emily: Sure.

Dedeker: Javier Bardem is the pearl in the oyster of sex. I might get that one tattooed. I was kind of proud of that one.

Jase: That's pretty good.

Emily: That's pretty good. I don't know what it means, but it's everything. Cool. Yeah.

Dedeker: I don't think you have to know. You just kind of somatically experience what it means. Or at least I somatically experience what that means.

Paul: He was, yeah.

Dedeker: I wanted to just do a really quick sidebar on the Coolidge effect that shows up.

Emily: Jennifer Coolidge?

Dedeker: No.

Eli: That would be a totally interesting effect.

Emily: I'm like, She's not in this film.

Dedeker: Well, so after Vicky has her night with Juan Antonio, and then he moves on, you know, Vicky's fiance, Doug, surprises her by showing up to Barcelona. We cut to Vicky and Doug have had, like, reunion sex, and Doug comments on, Wow, that was really hot. I was really into it.

Jase: My God, you're a whole different person here.

Emily: What does that mean?

Jase: You were so into it.

Emily: Look, am I not usually?

Jase: Yeah, no, of course you are.

Eli: Yeah, you are.

Jase: I'm giving you a compliment.

Dedeker: And it immediately made me think of the Coolidge effect. Emily, it's actually named after Calvin Coolidge.

Jase: Surprisingly. There's this sexiest of all presidents.

Dedeker: As we all know, there's this apocryphal story. I don't think this story is true, because it's written kind of just like a joke. There's this story that Calvin Coolidge and his wife were being given a tour of a chicken farm. And for some reason, the ladies were in one group, and the men were in another group, and that the ladies group, whatever farmer was leading them on the tour, explained to them that the rooster can mate up to 20 times a day, something like that. And that Mrs. Coolidge said, Will you please tell that to Mr. Coolidge? And the ladies group moved on.

Emily: It's a sick burn.

Dedeker: Then the men's group came along, and then the farmer explained, you, wife wanted me to tell you, made sure that you knew that. Mr. President, that the rooster is able to mate up to 20 times a day, and that Calvin Coolidge said, Is it all with the same chicken? And the farmer said, no. And Calvin Coolidge says, Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.

Paul: Whoa.

Dedeker: Now, my favorite part of that story is that I really like imagining Mrs. Coolidge is just a sex fiend who wants to have sex with her husband 20 times a day, and is really disappointed that he can't perform. Anyway, so because of that story, this is named the Coolidge Effect, which is this idea, and it's been studied mostly in rats, this idea that you can put a male rat in a cage with a female rat, and they will mate and mate and mate and mate and mate and mate and mate until the male is exhausted and doesn't want to mate anymore. But then the instant you introduce a novel female rat, then the male's ready to mate again, right?

Paul: Wow.

Dedeker: And they can track on the brain chemistry level that then, yeah, dopamine surges, right, that the rat is ready to go again. There's been some other research, of course, for a long time, the research really focused on the male side of things, because of course that aligns with our assumptions around men of, well, they need novelty. They need to be having sex with as many different people as possible. This makes sense. There's more research that actually suggests that for women, this is a sexual motivation as well. There's even some research that might suggest that at a certain point in a monogamous relationship, that women may have even a stronger desire for novelty more so than men. So than men tend to. What I thought was funny was that the Coolidge Effect has been studied and documented among several species, but certain species don't, I guess there's certain crickets that don't care about sex. Yeah, those crickets missed the boat for some reason.

Paul: So Eli and I argue about the Coolidge Effect a lot.

Emily: Really?

Dedeker: Okay, are you who is Calvin Coolidge?

Paul: I think I'm a Mrs. Coolidge.

Jase: Well, I don't know.

Paul: I don't know. Maybe I'm President Hoover. I don't know. But I think that the tension here is between when you have sex with a person for the first time, are you then inclined to have sex with someone else or with that person again? And this is where I think the Coolidge Effect, I guess that's the context where I think it's wrong. That if you have sex with somebody once, and I think we see Vicky experience this, that she has the experience, I think if she hadn't had the sexual experience with Juan Antonio, she probably gets over it. And because she has the full-blown passionate experience with him, yes, she does have the passionate sex shortly thereafter with Doug, but now he's got his tendrils into her. And she can't get him off of his mind. And I think that's the more common thing. And I would hazard a guess that that's true for men as well. That the idea that I'm gonna have sex with you to get you off of my mind, and so that I can move on to somebody else, that that actually doesn't work all that well. Eli, defend Mr. Coolidge.

Eli: Well, yeah, we have debated this. It's funny, our show, we do a lot of rom-coms, but we also do a bunch of serious films. And one of, I think, both of our favorites that we did is Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Emily: I don't know if everyone even knows that movie. It is glorious.

Dedeker: I haven't watched it, but I'm familiar with it.

Emily: Gorgeous and perfect. It's wonderful.

Eli: Yeah, if your audience is interested in, you know, 18th century lesbian love affairs on, like, remote windswept islands.

Dedeker: I think that's gonna be like 90% of our audience.

Jase: This is the movie.

Eli: This is the movie. But we did debate this, Paul, and I found you persuasive on this point, that if what the Coolidge Effect is supposed to mean is I have sex with someone and therefore would kind of rather not have sex with that person again, or would prefer to have sex with somebody different, I think I agree with you that the people that we end up having sex with are mostly people that we're kind of intrigued by, and on average, the experience of intimacy that comes with sex, again, sometimes sex is bad and we don't want to do it again, but that's not really what we're talking about here. About satisfying sex, then the experience of having satisfying sex with someone will make you want to have satisfying sex with that person again. Now, the Coolidge Effect is about something a little more technical than that, which is if you have, you know, repeatedly orgasmed with one particular conspecific, like another person, for example, could you reach orgasm again more quickly with that same person versus with a new person? My guess is that that effect is real, that the Coolidge Effect in that relatively extreme case that they are studying in that Coolidge Effect literature is probably also correct.

Jase: It's fascinating, though, because I, and I didn't look this up for this particular episode, but there was another study that we've talked about before where both men and women are more likely to achieve orgasm with their actual monogamous partner than with someone they're having an affair with. Which is interesting, which directly contradicts that assumption.

Eli: Paul, that's closer to you. I mean, I think so.

Paul: Yeah, I think so.

Eli: Right, so I actually think both of these things are true at once. And so, Paul, you really mostly won the argument. We had this argument for a long time. And then on one episode of our show, you sort of won. I think the Coolidge Effect is correct, but only in that weirdly technical situation that almost nobody encounters, right? So yes, if you had sex five times in the same day with the same person, then it strikes me that you could have orgasm quickly, more quickly with somebody else than with that person for the sixth time. But Paul, I think your point is that's not really the way humans go about this whole thing. Sexual experience thing. And I think you're generally correct that you get attracted to somebody, you have sex with them, and you're like, that was good. And I'm delighted to do that again, on average, right? There's exceptions, but I think that's more normal than saying, oh, good, now that I've had sex with that person, where's somebody else that I could have sex with now?

Dedeker: Interesting. I just wanted to point out that Javier Bardem makes love like an exotic, beautiful, colorful sea snail that scientists haven't even named yet.

Jase: Wow. Wow.

Emily: They don't show that in the movie, though. You kind of sort of imagine it once.

Dedeker: Of course they do.

Emily: They show it. They mostly show to know Scarlet Johansson's face in ecstasy, maybe, as he's making love.

Jase: Well, she inferred from that all the information she needed to know.

Dedeker: Guys, yes.

Emily: I guess besides the Coolidge effect and the sex, the sort of yearning and longing that she has throughout the film for Javier Bardem, even after she decides to marry-- Yes, Vicky. Even after she decides to marry Doug and is about to go home and have her big wedding in New York City, she still has this constant question of, But should I? I go blow it all up for this man that I had this one incredible night with. Is there any additional data on that? Because I do wonder how often that happens. I feel like that's a big trope in many romantic comedies. But the fact that Woody Allen decided to end it rather abruptly was also a really interesting choice.

Paul: Okay, so this definitely gets to one of my main issues with the film. And it's at the intersection of Vicky's experience, but also what the movie is trying to say about the Juan Antonio versus Doug distinction. But let me first just note the idea that she had this passionate experience with somebody and it led her to question what she thought she wanted and what she thought she knew about herself. All of that makes sense. I think that would be a common experience that people would have. But I think the part that bummed me out, or at least rang a false note for me, is that-- so she decides, I'm gonna try to go back. I'm gonna see maybe this passionate life is for me. And then Maria Elena shows up with a gun. She's like, this passionate life is not for me. I think what the research suggests that what a person would do at that point is they would double down on Doug, and they would engage in all sorts of motivated reasoning to explain to themselves why Doug was exactly the partner that they had always wanted. But that's not what we get. And I think that's because this is Woody Allen, and if Vicky is the Woody Allen stand-in, well, then Vicky's never gonna be happy with anything. And so, like, she walks away from the movie, like, I'm like, well, I guess everything's terrible, the end. And that's just, like, a little too cynical for my taste.

Eli: Mm.

Jase: Real quick, before this next section, did you know that you can get ad-free early releases of this show as well as access to monthly video processing groups and exclusive private channels on our Discord server, all by becoming a subscriber at a sliding scale pay what you can price. If you go to multiamory.com/join, you can read more, get access to that. We would love to have you as part of our community. In the meantime, take a moment to check out the sponsors on this episode. If any of them seem interesting to you, use the promo codes or the links that we have in our episode description, because that also goes a long way to supporting our show.

Jase: Yes, and I wanted to talk about this whole thing because while I was watching this in my notes, I started writing in all caps, very jagged lines, when I was like, Aunt Judy, shut up! you're giving the worst advice anyone's ever given anybody.

Emily: We haven't even gotten to her. And also the affair that she had in the middle of the film. This is Vicky's aunt?

Jase: Aunt, yeah. Aunt, two sisters.

Dedeker: She accidentally sees making out with another guy. She discovers that her aunt is having an affair. And that's sort of this breaking open, inciting incident where Judy is now this representation of, Don't throw your life away on somebody who feels super unstable and stable.

Jase: Don't settle.

Dedeker: Yes. Yeah.

Jase: But so, yeah, the thing that I wrote down there, we talked about it earlier in the episode, is that whole Multiamory always says, Don't sign anything in the first year.

Emily: Don't throw your life away after one date.

Jase: Don't throw your life away.

Emily: A fair moment with some dude, Dude.

Dedeker: Yeah, just that some dude, but I'll let that slide.

Jase: He is the pearl inside of sex.

Eli: Lots of pancakes.

Jase: Yes. Yeah.

Dedeker: His head is the embodiment of the golden ratio.

Emily: Oh, really?

Paul: Wow.

Emily: Okay.

Eli: He's got such a fact-checking crew.

Dedeker: I don't even need to measure it.

Jase: I can just say, yeah, we got a fact-checker.

Jase: But yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the whole new relationship energy thing. Because I think, yeah, Paul, you bring up an interesting point about the double down on your existing relationship to try to justify it to yourself. Kind of like to resolve that cognitive dissonance of, what does it mean that I enjoyed this, but I made this decision? How do I stop this discomfort? But I think that there's also this phenomenon that we've unfortunately seen come up sometimes when people are first opening a monogamous relationship, whereas their first relationship with somebody else that feels really good and has a lot of passion, and they're having all those NRE chemicals going on, that then there's that temptation to blow up their whole life and leave their wife and kids or leave their husband and whatever, totally change everything, move across the country, whatever, for this thing. And hopefully if we get to them early enough, we always say, I don't care what you think, absolutely do not. If this is meant to be, it'll still be meant to be in another two years. There's no reason to do that and just how much research there is on the parts of the brain being suppressed that make logical decisions. And I think notably for this film, the part of your brain that evaluates fear and risk and danger is suppressed when you're in NRE, which I think for both of them, there were massive red flags about physical safety, just from what they heard about Juan Antonio and Maria Elena early in the film about their violence with each other. I think that when Vicky goes back and Maria Elena shows up with a gun and shoots her in the hand, that what I wrote in my notes is Vicky dodged a bullet. I was like, oh, wait.

Juan Antonio: Wait.

Eli: It's good.

Jase: That works.

Emily: Her hands certainly didn't.

Jase: Yeah?

Eli: I mean, Jase, one thing I find so interesting about that clinical advice that you're offering to people is it sounds like you're saying, if you are in the throes of NRE, you can't trust your judgment. And so what you need is some sort of external set of rules that you need to follow. And did I get that right? I find that to be a really interesting clinical perspective.

Jase: Yeah. Or that you need people in your life to keep you grounded. And that's why I was so mad at Aunt Judy, because she was the opposite of that.

Eli: Right. She's throwing fuel.

Dedeker: Aunt Judy was probably also an nre.

Eli: Yeah.

Emily: Oh, yeah, sure.

Jase: Or just so dissatisfied that she's projecting all of that onto Vicky. But.

Emily: Absolutely.

Jase: But, yeah, like. And I also thought it was interesting that this movie never portrayed Vicky's husband. What's his name? Paul.

Emily: Doug.

Dedeker: Doug. Doug dog.

Paul: Paul.

Jase: Generic man name. Yeah.

Paul: Hey, I don't mind. I mean, look, Doug's not my favorite character, but, you know, I will defend Paul's choices. But I thought

Jase: he was a little annoying, but he was never bad, right? He was still a nice guy. He was still loving. He was still affectionate. I thought that was nice that they played with that nuance rather than trying to make this cut and dry story about, oh, you should always go for the passionate. Thing.

Paul: Right.

Dedeker: Can we get into the Doug of it all? I think Eli and Paul, you said that you had.

Paul: I have some Doug research. So here are my Doug thoughts. I think the issue that I have is that we are set up to understand. It's one thing that Judy's like, pursue the passionate life over the. The calm, stable life. And is that something that Vicky is really in a good position to do? I don't really think so, but, okay, that's advice that one could. But I think the movie is trying to say something else. And I think this is buried deep in Woody Allen's psyche, because I think he does this a lot, which is you've got the passionate, exciting people, okay? And you've got the dull, boring squares. And your life can be this or that, but you better choose the right partner. And boy, the science does not support that message at all, right? Right, new relationship energy is exciting. New relationship energy is passionate. When you're with somebody for a long time, when you're dealing with the trials of everyday life, that can be a little dull at best. It can be genuinely very challenging, but that's a relationship stage phenomenon and it's not a different person phenomenon. And again, I think we're all familiar with how these tropes get spun out online in all sorts of bad ways. I mean, if we're thinking red pill ideas, I mean, this is alpha beta, right? I mean, Juan Antonio is the alpha and Doug's the beta. So it bums me out when that gets instantiated in different people. As relationship stages, though, I totally get it.

Jase: Yeah. Here's my quick little poem. The alpha male doesn't exist except when Javier Bardem's in the room.

Emily: Thank you.

Jase: Okay.

Paul: Okay.

Dedeker: He's the only one.

Jase: I don't believe him.

Emily: He's the only alpha male.

Jase: You literally just described him.

Dedeker: Because Javier Bardem puts on glasses, and I instantly attain enlightenment.

Jase: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow.

Eli: Paul, that's fascinating, that passion is something that's pretty characteristic of most relationships early on and less characteristic of most relationships later on, rather than something that is in perpetuity associated with man one rather than man two. And what's interesting about this movie is that it conflates the problem. So Juan Antonio is exactly the sort of man who would be especially like passion inducing and Doug is, you know, the opposite of that, basically. But I think what you're saying is Woody Allen has sort of confused two things in the movie. And the reality is that most people with the Javier Bardem character will have a hot relationship early on that eventually becomes less hot. And the same with Doug, rather than having it be hot in perpetuity with one of them and not the other.

Jase: Absolutely. I bet their relationship was, well, it wasn't portrayed this way, but I could imagine he swept her off her feet and romanced her with nice dinner. Winders and, you know, it's very Charming.

Eli: Yeah.

Emily: He clearly has a lot of money in New York City. I'm assuming he probably threw a lot of money at her. And the thing that I didn't love was that Aunt Judy kept being like, well, you're, you're gonna get married and then give them a lot of babies.

Paul: Right.

Emily: And that was, yeah, that kind of became all that Vicky was going to amount to in her life, which was

Eli: a little, that was awkward, I guess.

Dedeker: I really didn't love that on her at the beginning. Yeah.

Emily: Yeah.

Paul: Judy is like a reality show producer. She's just getting in there.

Emily: Totally. Yes. Can we talk real quick? 'Cause this kind of is about what we were just discussing, is this idea that Javier Bardem, and I think Maria Elena maybe says it as well, but he at one point says... Maria Elena

Juan Antonio: used to say that only unfulfilled love can be romantic.

Emily: That's a really weird idea that Woody Allen has in this film as well. That I don't agree with at all.

Dedeker: Well, what it makes me think of, I don't think I agree with that on the macro scale that only unfulfilled love can be romantic. However, to bring it back to everyday non-monogamy practice, what it makes me think of is that sometimes people will get into a pickle and they may feel the urge to control who their partner dates. As in, you know, there's what's known as the veto power, right? That generally within the non-monogamy subculture is considered not to be a good thing. To be very good. It's considered to be kind of dysfunctional, but it's also something that a lot of, maybe couples who are newly opening up might resort to this kind of idea that I get final say over your relationship with somebody else. So if it gets too threatening, if it gets too big, if I don't like the person that you're dating, I get to pull the ultimatum and tell you you need to stop dating that person. Right. Which you can understand how it gives an illusion of control and also can create a lot of destruction. There's a very high cost to it. Now, what it made me think of though, is that when I am working with people who are considering this, right, or who wish that they were able to do this, or wish that they could put in some kind of restrictions on their partner, I have to remind them that if you set up a Victorian romance novel situation, it is going to create the opposite effect. As in, the more that you try to hem in your feelings, your partner's feelings for somebody else, the more it creates that sense of we love each other, but there's an obstacle. We love each other, but it can't be fulfilled. And that is like, I think, gasoline on the fire of passion and longing and yearning. It doesn't necessarily mean it's setting them up for a good relationship, but that's what that made me think of, is that again, on the macro scale, I don't agree with that, but I do think on a micro scale, yes, that when you sprinkle in obstacle and that can become part of your romantic narrative, that, yes, that can make things. Feel much, much, much more romantic.

Eli: You know, there is a little bit of research that I think is intriguingly supportive of what you're saying. It focuses less on obstacles than on secrecy, but there is some research suggesting that like all else equal, the more you feel like you're keeping your relationship secret, the more passion that you have. Those are correlations. There's a lot of explanations, but one of my favorite studies in that research program experimentally manipulates the emergence of a relationship and the secretiveness. And the way they do that is through footsie. So they have four strangers come in

Jase: to, not unlike this movie.

Paul: Yeah. It is not a little footsie.

Dedeker: That literally happens.

Eli: That happens not on, like, this podcast, but topic for another day. So, so they have four people come in and they sit at this table, and half the people get these private instructions that are, and, and this was man-woman couples, pairs. They weren't couples in We would like you to keep your feet in contact or not keep your feet in contact. So that's one of the variables. And the other variable is keep secret whether you are keeping your feet in contact or not. And the people who felt most attracted to each other after this 10 minute interaction with, again, strangers were the people who had played footsie or at least kept their feet in contact with one another and didn't let the other people in the room know that they were doing it.

Jase: And I think I'm getting a little hot just hearing about it.

Eli: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jase: 100% Secret footsie.

Eli: Yeah, it is.

Jase: Sign me up.

Paul: It is.

Eli: Jase, it's happening with us in Multiamory.

Dedeker: Should that be the new speed dating? Forget the questions. There's a way you play secret footsie.

Paul: We should have done it.

Eli: We should have done it. I don't know if you know this, we ran a bunch of speed dating events for science here at Northwest.

Jase: It's fascinating. You talked about it a little bit on your episode about the 40-year-old virgin. I thought that was fascinating. Yeah.

Eli: Because we were reminded of, luckily our episodes were not exactly Exactly like that episode of Speed Hitting.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: Well, that's interesting because then I wonder, is that-- I imagine that's another factor intensifying things for Vicky, where she-- Because I don't-- Does she kind of keep a secret the fact that she hooks up with Juan Antonio? Obviously, she's keeping a secret from her fiance. But I feel like she doesn't tell Christina.

Emily: Until the very end.

Dedeker: Until the very end, right. She doesn't even tell Judy until the very end, right? So, yeah, she's keeping a secret. He's also holding onto this as well.

Jase: It could be a part of it. As we're coming to the end here, I feel like I have several more pages of notes, but I'm going to try to hold myself back. I did, however, want to indulge in a little bit of a quick lightning round of maybe interesting things people noticed about the film. So I'll start off with one example, and that's that when Vicky and the guy that she's in class with-- oh, yeah. Ben.

Dedeker: Peter Paul.

Emily: I think it was Ben.

Jase: Another man's name, I think. Ben. Another monosyllabic men's name. Yeah. She goes out to a movie with him. And when I was watching this, I was like, Yikes, this movie is kind of a violent scene of a man grabbing a woman and pulling her in a train. And I was like, what is this movie? And I looked it up, and it's Shadows of Doubt. It's a Hitchcock film. And the film is about this young woman who falls for this older man, and gradually, over the course of the movie, discovers that he's a serial killer. And that scene is where he's found out that she knows and he's gonna throw her off the train. Yikes. And it's like this kind of foreshadowing of what's going on with her and Javier Bardem's character, which is really interesting.

Eli: Wow.

Paul: That's fascinating. That's really cool that you discovered what that was.

Emily: Oh my gosh.

Dedeker: Yeah, the last note that I wanted to put in here is I really latch onto how ultimately the movie is grappling with, it made me think a lot about Dan Savage. I don't remember if he said this on our show or if he said this somewhere else, but he talks about how there's this inherently chaotic nature to sex and romance that as human beings, we're always trying to grapple with, right? To a certain extent, our attempt at relationship, at monogamy, I think at some forms of non-monogamy even, are this attempt at squaring the inherent chaotic, uncontrollable nature of sex. That is a part of sex and romance. And I really had mixed feelings about that depiction in the film, because setting up this sense of, well, yeah, of course, it's the passionate, chaotic Spaniards that are also into this weird type of relationship, when the reality that I see is like, poly people are just like a bunch of Google Calendar nerds who keep spreadsheets and are very meticulous. And our show attracts a lot of those people, a lot of process nerds and formulas and again, this extreme opposite of, I think, people who respond to that inherent chaotic nature to sex and romance with, we're going to throw the whole Google business suite at it.

Jase: Right. That should be part of your membership, is the Google business suite.

Emily: There you go. To your polyamorous membership?

Jase: Yeah, exactly. When you apply for your membership card, you have yours, right?

Paul: The sweetness comes with it.

Jase: Really funny.

Paul: You know, one thing that I found very compelling in here is the way that they use language and the fact that language can be exclusionary. So when Maria Elena shows up at first, the way that she's trying to keep Christina out by speaking Spanish and how Juan Antonio is trying to break that down, but has a hard time doing it. And then we get a lot of English between the three of them for a while. And then at the end, again, what happens? The Spanish returns.

Jase: It goes back to green.

Paul: As they're breaking up. And I thought that was an interesting metaphor for what's going on, but we talk all the time about how important language is in relationships. Now they were talking about in-jokes and stuff. But I thought the idea that it can be the actual language that you speak as well, especially once things get complex with multiple people, I thought that was a neat insight.

Emily: This film talks a lot about art, and we didn't get into the poetry that Juan Antonio's father apparently does this beautiful beautiful poetry. But he says that he doesn't share it with the world because he hates the world. And yeah, all of the things that are happening within it.

Dedeker: They don't know how to love.

Paul: Right.

Dedeker: They haven't learned how to love.

Emily: Yeah, exactly. Which I thought was kind of sweet and kind of sad and a little strange. And just again, was wondering throughout the whole film, what commentary is Woody Allen trying to say here about the state of the world? And thinking about it just through his eyes, like a very strange man, especially now. I don't think that we-- We didn't bring this up at all, but we certainly don't really hear about him anymore. I don't think that he makes films anymore and has kind of been canceled, but most of his films are commentary on something and include at least one very, very neurotic character. And I do think that in this film, Vicky, it was that...

Eli: I think he's still making films. I think he's still doing one a year. I think he might be, like, 90. But yeah, he isn't finding anybody who's willing to release them in America anymore. Got it.

Emily: Yeah.

Eli: If I have-- We love our audience and we will be releasing this podcast to all of them.

Emily: Yes, right. There you go.

Eli: If I get an opportunity to do my sort of speed round thing, I think it's interesting to consider how this film deals with sexual directness. This is, again, in the iconic early scene where Juan Antonio is first approaching the woman. Women, he makes an offer that's very clearly like, we're gonna have this romantic getaway and it's gonna be sexual. And he said, you know, why not? Life is short, life is dull, life is full of pain, and this is a chance for something special. But Vicky is still like clearly judgmental about this. And he has a great line. He says, what offended you about the offer? Surely not that I find both of you beautiful and desirable. And I think this intersects a little bit with our earlier discussion about stigma and consensual non-monogamy. I think Vicky has a little bit of, what you did is gross. It's like a moral transgression that that you'd go at both of us. But I also think there's the bigger question of how many of us are direct like this and say, look, I really find you attractive and I would love to try to sleep with you. I think it would be bizarre to hear somebody do or say that. And in the movie, and again, I know this is tied up in all the Woody Allen-ness of Woody Allen, but the broader question, once you think of it as Bardem rather than Woody Allen, it's an interesting question, why aren't we direct in those sorts of ways?

Jase: Absolutely. And it brings up all sorts of questions about, yes, while being direct may be more honest, but in certain contexts, sometimes just by the size of your physical body as a man or a woman, there's all these other layers of threat and danger and coercion there, even if it's not coming from that place. And so, yeah, it is a complicated thing. And then especially when it's not culturally normative to do that. That it adds that extra layer of the fact that you're saying this maybe makes you extra threatening. Maybe means I can't say no. Maybe we're not equipped for that.

Dedeker: But not just about directness about sex, though, because the piece in that is also that he's direct about, yeah, I want both of you. I would happily take both of you. Right. That does either or both. Either or both. Well, cuts to, to that stigma piece. Right.

Jase: Of, I think, like, admitting that is,

Dedeker: like, not admitting that. Right. Yeah. Like, I I think it's the YouGov poll that basically showed that people, if you rate on a scale of one to six, you know, one being complete monogamy and six being completely open, totally non monogamous, that like most people provided you remove stigma, most people want a relationship that is not 100% monogamous. The majority wants that, but it's hinged on Not at the cost of the stigma. So that's what that makes me think of, is yeah, I think it's complicated to think about just being sexually direct, but the direct honesty about, yeah, I'm actually interested in multiple people, or I would want to sleep with multiple people, or have partnership with multiple people.

Jase: Yeah, absolutely. I had a couple other things. One is, I just want to get this out there, is that at least in my opinion, I'm curious to Dedeker and Emily, but I would say this is not a film about polyamory. And just to be really clear about that, what's happening in this film is not about, not what almost anyone would define as polyamory, who actually is within that community, right? Maybe from the outside people would call it that. This is non-monogamy. It's consensual non-monogamy, yes, but I would not put it under the polyamory umbrella because of how kind of unintentionally they slide into it, I guess.

Dedeker: I would still put it under the umbrella. I disagree with that.

Emily: Okay.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Emily: Okay.

Dedeker: They end up there, like maybe that's,

Jase: yeah, like, okay, maybe they sort of end up there.

Paul: Yeah.

Jase: Okay.

Emily: They do end up there. I found myself thinking a lot about what happened to Christina after the fact, and I could see her getting into a similar type of relationship, but hopefully with a lot more agency. Because to me, I felt like she, again, ultimately got to this place where she was feeling as though she is sort of the glue that keeps this relationship together, and that's not a place that she wants to be. And so I hope eventually she gets to a place where, you know, she enjoys being maybe in a triad or maybe in a multi-person relationship, and she feels like that is the fulfillment of what she's looking for in relationships. Vicky's gonna do the same thing, I'm assuming. That she's always gonna be a Vicky.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Emily: Yeah, Vicky's gonna be a Vicky.

Jase: Another fun fact that Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz did begin dating at the end of this shoot, but they kept it professional the whole time until the wrap party.

Paul: I didn't know that was a big party.

Dedeker: oh, yeah. yeah.

Emily: oh, that's so hot.

Paul: Yeah.

Jase: They kept it professional till the wrap party at the end, and then they got married two years later, and they have two kids now.

Emily: So, yeah, they're still together.

Jase: Yeah.

Dedeker: Wow. They could fight in front of me any day of the week in Spanish.

Emily: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Jase: Dedeker, do you have any final poems to read to us?

Dedeker: Yeah, I think my final poem is Javier Bardem Will cleanse this world of all evil.

Eli: Yes. God, that seems correct.

Emily: Pure lips to God's ears. Let's go.

Jase: I will also say that much like Juan Antonio's character, I have also been listening to Scriabin's Piano Concerto repeatedly since watching this film. He mentions that Scarlett Johansson—I keep calling her that because she's always ScarJo to me—that Christina introduced him to Scriabin's Piano Concerto. And that he's been listening to it since then. And I will say it's great. I do recommend it. Go check it out. I think it's a perfect thing for this film in that he was a very modernist composer, a contemporary with a lot of the atonal composers, but who still wrote music that's digestible and enjoyable by normal people. So I think he bridges that gap between artist and kind of conventional accepted what pretty music is. Wow. I was a composition major in college. That's why this is so interesting.

Emily: And also a hairstylist as well. Yes. Jagged multitudes.

Jase: All right, so we want to try wrapping this up in the way that you two do on your show. Guide us through

Paul: that. Sure. So, yeah, at the end of each episode, we usually rate these movies from one to five stars. And we can just go around here. I'll go first here because I might be the most Debbie Downer. We're about to find out. I give this movie three stars out of five. It, for me, was really helped a lot by everything Penelope Cruz. When she shows up, it feels like a genuinely creative exploration of these ideas. Some of the other parts I didn't like as much, but I end up at three. So, yeah, let me toss it over to

Jase: you, Jase. Boy, yeah, I know. Now I'm on the spot. I actually, gosh, it's hard, right? It depends what lens I'm looking at it through. If it's just like enjoyable movie, I think all the actors were so brilliant. That pushes it up for me, I think I'd probably put it more around a four.

Paul: Okay. All right. I'll

Jase: send it to Emily next. Oh, okay.

Emily: I would put it at a three as well. I actually found some of the dialogue to be a little stilted again until Penelope Cruz got in there. Yeah. I mean, I liked some of the fun, silly, neurotic stuff that Vicky, you know, kind of gave to the screen

Jase: at the

Emily: beginning. But a couple of the dialogue choices, I was just like, Yikes. That doesn't sound particularly truthful. Especially Christina's, unfortunately. I do love ScarJo, but I didn't absolutely adore her acting throughout it. But Vanellope B. Cruz elevates the entire thing. Yes, 100%. Dedeker, how about you? Okay.

Dedeker: I'm gonna give it three stars also, despite my love of Javier Bardem. If someone makes a mashup that is only his scenes, that's like six stars. Stars out of five for me. However, what I did enjoy about this is that I am someone who tends to shy away from any movie that's trying to portray non-monogamy or polyamory because I just have yet to find a fictional depiction that feels like it rings super true, that feels like I can relate to. And so whenever there's yet another triad movie that's coming out or TV series or whatever, I tend to roll my eyes. And attend to avoid it. This one, however, I found myself not necessarily cringing, and maybe it's because it seems like Woody Allen was not necessarily going out there with this intention, I'm going to make a movie about a triad, right? It was, I'm going to make a movie about all these other themes and about the messiness of relationships. One piece of that happens to be this non-monogamous situation, but it's not the whole thing. And so I felt like it was easier for me to digest in that way. Maybe

Eli: it's best I went last, This is five out of five for me. Wow! I watched this recently, right after Paul and I had recorded an episode on the Wedding Singer. And a very different film. Yeah, and I just-- It's hard to explain how many of the movies in this genre have two-dimensional female characters, have no interesting ideas anywhere, have, you can hear the creaking of the gears of the plot at every specific moment. And these were interesting three-dimensional women. And the male characters in the movie care about the three-dimensionality of the women. And I never knew where the film was going. In fact, I was between four and five before this conversation. And the thing that had me curious closer to four was the part where I just didn't really get why the Scarlett Johansson character left the other couple. But it was this call. It was this conversation that made me say, oh, if that's credible from a poly-informed, or at least a consensual non-monogamy-informed perspective, I'm out of criticisms. I love the movie. Wow.

Emily: I love that. I will say that

Jase: something that did win this movie points for me, despite some of the stuff Dedeker brought up of, you know, tend to be skeptical of movies portraying non-monogamy, especially from outsiders, right? He didn't consult with any non-monogamous consultants as far as I could tell. This wasn't really a movie that knew what it was talking about, I guess. It was all from the fantasy mind of an older

Emily: man. a very problematic older man.

Eli: There you go. A specific, disturbed older man.

Jase: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what I did appreciate about it is that the movie played with various things that could have been like, that's the moral of the story, but it didn't commit to any of it. It left it open enough for you to ponder about and think about. And I did appreciate that. I did enjoy that part of the movie. I would say if the narrator were just stricken from the movie, I actually probably would have rated it higher. Really? I hated the narrator. I thought that it's how the director's cut of Blade Runner doesn't have the narrator, and it's so much better. Same thing here. I think the cut without the narrator would have been better.

Dedeker: Eli and Paul, this was so much fun. I'm so glad that you said yes to this. I'm so glad that we got to do this. Just really quickly for our audience, where can people find more of you and

Paul: your work? So you can find the two of us talking about movies on the Love, actually podcast. And you can also check out my book, which is called Bonded by Evolution. You can get that wherever you buy

Eli: books. Yeah. And if you're interested in reading a book about marriage that also engages pretty seriously with consensual non-monogamy, my book is called the All-or-Nothing

Dedeker: Marriage. And for all of you out there, if you go to our Instagram stories, we want to hear from you. What you think, do you think that the non-monogamy portrayed in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is realistic? So again, head to our Instagram page, check out our stories to respond to that. Also, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Jase Lindgren, and me, Dedeker Winston. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com

573 - Is the Non-Monogamy in Vicky Cristina Barcelona Realistic? Film Critique with Love Factually

Welcome Paul and Eli from Love Factually

Transcript

572 - Building Commitment Off the Relationship Escalator