The story of an Iranian couple who were unhappily married for 27 years. He had a temper.

Our program ends with a story of knowing your enemy in a more domestic setting: In a marriage. Actor Matt Malloy reads the story by Etgar Keret. "Eight Percent of Nothing" is from a collection of stories called The Nimrod Flip-Out.

Ira visits marital researcher John Gottman, who's part of a generation of researchers that have revolutionized the way we see marriage by observing successful and unsuccessful marriages and trying to figure out what the successful happy ones are doing that the ones who end up in divorce are not. Marriage research and links to marriage education programs for couples are online at www.smartmarriages.com.

We hear Billie Holliday, Keely Smith and Leo Reisman (with Anita Boyer) asking the musical question, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" And, reporter Sean Cole talks about love with Joe and Helen Garland, who fell in love during World War II, but married other people. Thirty years later they met again, felt the same love they felt when they were young, divorced their respective spouses, and finally married each other.

When Janice Powell's husband went to prison, he wrote her a letter every day for eight years. When he was at home, he'd drink and get violent, but Janice said that the years in prison were the best of their relationship.

Host Ira Glass talks with This American Life producer Julie Snyder about a personal regime change that happened when she was a kid, after her parents got divorced and her stepdad came on the scene. She says that by the time her parents separated, literature on what to tell the children was everywhere, and the kids took it relatively well.

Many couples eventually encounter this problem: One person in the couple trots out the same story over and over, and the other person has to just listen. But what do the stories we tell in front of our significant others mean, and what do the significant others really think of them? Ira talks to three couples about the stories they've each told and heard countless times, and why.

The classifieds are populated by people in flux. People selling stuff from old lives in transition new ones.

Scott interviews his 11-year-old daughter about his marriage. She sheds light on the previous three stories in the show.

When it comes to political fighting, there's no more intimate a space than a marriage, where you have to get along. Where you have to figure out how to move on and get over disagreement.

So what if you held onto a high-school crush? Under what conditions would it never go away? Tobias Wolff reads a short story called "Kiss." (38 minutes)

Genevieve Jurgensen and her husband Laurent lost their two daughters, Elise and Mathilde, at the ages of 4 and 7. Actress Felicity Jones reads from Jurgensen's book, The Disappearance: A Memoir of Loss, in which Jurgensen tries to explain her children's lives and their deaths to a friend through a series of letters.

What does it mean to talk like a real Southerner—and why a multimillion industry can't seem to figure it out. Southern expatriate Mark Schone dissects Southern accents as they're portrayed in movies and TV shows.

Writer Achy Obejas reads a piece of short fiction from her book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (11 minutes)

Jackie and Kenny Wharton were kids in the tiny town of Canalou, Missouri, off of old Highway 61. They moved away for 40 years but always dreamed of moving back.

It's possible to turn off your emotions and go on autopilot for brief periods with the people you love, and it's possible to shut them down completely. Writer Dani Shapiro reads from her memoir Slow Motion: A True Story.

The tendency toward self-reinvention is so deep in American culture that we have an entire industry, a self-help industry, telling us how to transform ourselves into someone new. And usually, we see this as a positive thing.

Sarah Vowell tells the story of Page Smith and Eloise Pickard Smith. They were married for over five decades, and died a day apart.

How one woman learned to stop worrying and start spending. Liz Gilbert and her husband Michael Cooper explain how their different ideas about handling money always divided them—until they stumbled into a $10,000 windfall.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through her sense of touch.

We ask 18-year-old Chana Wiliford and her father in Texas if they'd be willing to have a conversation on tape in which each of them gets to ask the other the questions they've never asked before. In the conversation, Chana is half his child, half his peer.