Featured Post from University of Rochester

Watching Holiday Rom-Coms Can Be a Hallmark of a Strong Relationship, Marriage

Nov 8, 2019

2 min

Staying in for a good holiday romance movie, or Hallmark marathon? Ronald Rogge, psychology professor from the University of Rochester, says holiday rom-coms and chill can be great for your marriage or relationship.

Watching and discussing five movies about relationships over a month can cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half, according to Ronald Rogge, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Rochester. Rogge’s 2014 study involving 174 couples was the first long-term investigation to compare different types of early marriage intervention programs. The findings showed that an inexpensive, fun, and relatively simple movie-and-talk approach can be just as effective as other more intensive therapist-led methods—reducing the divorce or separation rate from 24 to 11 percent after three years.

"We thought the movie treatment would help, but not nearly as much as the other programs in which we were teaching all of these state-of-the-art skills," said Rogge, lead author of the study. "The results suggested that husbands and wives have a pretty good sense of what they might be doing right and wrong in their relationships. Thus, you might not need to teach them a whole lot of skills to cut the divorce rate. You might just need to get them to think about how they are currently behaving. And for five movies to give us a benefit over three years—that is awesome."

Overall, Rogge’s research found that couples who'd watched relationship & romance movies together and talked about what they watched, were 50 percent less likely to divorce.

Other holiday-specific movies used in the original study, or that work well to watch as a couple, include “Family Man,” “Four Christmases,” “Surviving Christmas,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Love Actually,” and, of course, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

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Ronald Rogge

Associate Professor of Psychology

Rogge's research focuses on understanding dynamics within romantic relationships and families.

Rom-com moviesMarriageCouples PsychologySex and SexualityCouples and Families

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Apr 28, 2026

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Put down the protest signs already. Retire the “Save Pluto” pins. Step away from the planetary outrage. Seriously. So says University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank in his latest column in Forbes. Frank explains that the real story behind Pluto being stripped of its planetary status in 2006 isn’t about what Pluto lost, but what scientists found. Pluto made news recently when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman replied to a Florida girl’s handwritten plea to restore Pluto’s designation as a planet, saying he supported such a move. Frank has one word for Isaacman: Stop! “Now Isaacman seems like a good guy and I sure don’t want to make little kids cry,” Frank writes. “Still, there’s an amazing science reason why Pluto got kicked out of the planet club.” For decades, Frank explains, we thought the solar system ended with the nine familiar planets, with Pluto being the most distant. But beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast expanse filled with icy remnants from the birth of the solar system. These objects are essentially the leftover building blocks of planets. Pluto, it turns out, is one of them. That matters because this cosmic debris holds crucial clues about how planets form. Studying Pluto and its neighbors helps scientists understand the origins of Earth and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. So, Pluto isn’t an outcast; it’s a key witness to our cosmic history. It belongs to a newly understood class of worlds that are central to modern astronomy. Rather than mourn Pluto’s status and push for restoring its former title, Frank suggests we celebrate its reclassification as the moment astronomers realized the solar system is far richer than they had ever imagined. If you’re a journalist looking for an expert to talk about Pluto — or planets and worlds formerly known as planets — Frank is your scholar. He is a frequent contributor to the likes of CNN, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and MSNBC, and can help your audience make sense of our vast universe.

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