Eli Finkel

Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.

And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Siren of the Nile.

Richard Burton as Mark Antony, rash, impetuous leader of once invincible legion, dreaded adversary on the field of battle.

We wanted to complement our emphasis on love, achieving love through marriage, with a new emphasis on achieving a sense of personal fulfillment in the way of personal growth.

So in the terminology of psychology, we wanted to self-actualize through our marriage.

We wanted to grow into a more authentic version of ourselves.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

She, in some sense, helps to epitomize both the strengths and the weaknesses of this modern contemporary approach to marriage, where we're looking to our spouse, again, not only for love, but also this sense of personal growth and fulfillment.

And

For the first time, you start to see cases where people would say, as I think Liz Gilbert would say, that she was in a loving marriage and he was a good man and treated her well.

But she felt stagnant and she really wasn't willing to endure a stagnant life for the next 30 or 40 years.

And she walked out.

Yes.

This would have been a very, very bizarre thing to say.

And marriage, you know, it wasn't really until the 70s that you started seeing no-fault divorce laws.

It used to be that you had to prove some type of serious mistreatment like abuse or desertion.

Yes, it's a very modern idea that we are entitled to a sense of real fulfillment and personal growth through the marriage.

And if our marriage is falling short, many of us consider it to be a reasonable option to end the marriage for that alone.

Well, one of the most exciting things that happened to me in the process of writing the book is I learned a lot about the history and the sociology and the economics of marriage, particularly reading people like Stephanie Kuntz, because my primary expertise is as pretty much a laboratory psychologist.

I bring couples into the laboratory and I videotape them interacting and I follow them over time.

But these other disciplines, scholars in these other disciplines, adopt a different approach.

So I realized that marriage had, in fact, changed radically in terms of the way we expect it to fulfill our needs in America, that is.

And it used to be that marriage was about basic economic survival.

We've seen that from Stephanie Kuntz and others.

And you can think of that as being at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy toward the physiological and safety needs, really survival-based needs.

And then as we track marriage and it becomes more about love, now we're more toward the middle of Maslow's hierarchy.

And then in the 1960s and then really up until today, we're in this new era where, yes, we're still looking for love.

But now we're toward the top of Maslow's hierarchy where he's talking about things like esteem and self-actualization.

And so our expectations of marriage have basically ascended from the bottom to the top of Maslow's hierarchy over the course of American history.

And one of the ideas that emerged as I was writing this book is that we can conceptualize Maslow's hierarchy not just in terms of a triangle but in terms of a mountain, right?

And the advantage of thinking of Maslow's hierarchy as a mountain in this way is that it brings to mind a number of metaphors related to –

And one thing that we know when we climb up a big mountain is the views get increasingly gorgeous as you get to the top, but the oxygen gets a little thinner.

And so having a successful experience way up there at the top requires that you are able to invest a lot of oxygen, either bring extra oxygen with you on the mountain or invest a lot of time and energy in the marriage to succeed up there.

That's right.

That's right.

That is, it's lovely way up there at the top.

And if we're looking to try to achieve not only this sense of love and connection, but also this sense of personal growth and authenticity through the marriage, but we're trying to do it on the cheap.

And that disconnect is what I'm talking about when I talk about the suffocation of marriage.

That is exactly right.

I think if we think about...

what we're really asking of our marriages these days in terms of the, you know, ambition of these expectations, then we realize that if we're too tired or lazy to invest in the quality of the relationship, that of course we're not going to be able to make the summit attempt.

Of course we're not going to be able to succeed in meeting those expectations toward the very high end of Maslow's hierarchy.

And so the book talks a lot about

how we can, in fact, align what we're asking of the marriage with what the marriage is realistically able to offer us.

That's right.

In the research literature on how we achieve our goals, there's a clunky word called multifinality.

And this is the idea that a given means can serve multiple goals.

So for example, when I walk to work, that might simultaneously meet my need to get to work, but also my needs to get some fresh air and get some exercise.

And so this one activity can serve all sorts of functions.

What's interesting is that's really what we've done to marriage.

right, is that marriage for a long time served a set and relatively limited array of different functions for us.

And over time, we've piled more and more of these emotional and psychological functions.

So instead of turning to our close friends and other relatives for nights out on the town, for deep, intimate disclosure, to a larger and larger extent, our spouse has replaced a lot of what we used to look to our broader social network to help us do.

You make me want to be a better man.

Yeah, he is smitten with her and his desire for her, his being impressed with her and the desire to make her like him more actually makes him want to grow into a better person.

And in some sense, that's the absolute archetype of what we see today.

in contemporary marriage today, we're looking for a spouse to bring out the ideal version of us, the latent version that's inside of us that we can hopefully grow into with enough time and effort.

Yeah, this is a term I actually got from my doctoral advisor, Carol Rustbolt.

Many of your listeners will know that Michelangelo, when he talked about the sculpting process, talked not in terms of revealing a sculpture, but in terms of unleashing it from the rock in which it's been slumbering.

So the sculptor's job is not to create something new, but merely to refine and buff and polish and maybe scrape away the rough edges of what was already nesting within the rock.

That's a really good metaphor for how partners today try to relate to each other.

That is, all of us have an actual self, the person that we currently are, but we also have an ideal self, a version of ourselves that's aspirational.

Like, what could I maybe become if I could be the best version of myself?

And we look to our partners to be our sculptors, to help us until we actually grow toward the best ideal version of ourselves.

The answer is yes.

We do have this power, but it's not easy to do and not everybody is compatible.

And sometimes the version of you that you want to grow into isn't the version of you that I want you to grow into.

And this is a very delicate dance that we play.

And, you know, the best relationships today, the sorts of relationships that I call the all relationships and the idea of the all or nothing marriage, they're well aligned in this sense.

They're able to bring out the best in each other and connect in a way that facilitates each other's personal growth and therefore helps to produce a really profound amount of emotional connection and psychological fulfillment.

The exceptions are people who bring those expectations and are able to meet them.

And this is, I think, the crux of the entire issue.

Lots of people argue that having these high expectations is problematic and it's harming the institution of marriage.

And frankly, among the people who used to argue that is myself.

I, when I set out to write this book, thought I was writing a book about the decline over time in marriage and how we're throwing more and more expectations on this one institution and this one relationship, but we're not investing enough time.

And therefore, we've really created a seriously problematic approach to marriage.

And it wasn't until I reviewed these other scientific literatures and learned more about how things have changed that I realized that's really half the story.

It is true that we are asking a lot more, especially when it comes to these more psychological and love-based needs than we did in the past.

But some marriages are able to meet those needs.

And so what does it mean if you have a marriage that you're looking for to meet these very highest level needs, say, for example, in Maslow's hierarchy, and the marriage succeeds in doing so?

You're able to achieve a level of fulfillment in the marriage that would have been out of reach in an era where we really weren't even trying to meet those types of needs.

So at the same time that these high expectations are weighting us down and making it more difficult to achieve a healthy marriage, at the same time that a marriage that would have been acceptable to us in 1950 is a disappointment to us today because of these high expectations, those same expectations have placed within REACH a level of marital fulfillment that was out of REACH until pretty recently.

It's a hard grape to grow, as you know, right?

Well, I think a lot of us should be pretty careful about Pinot.

I mean, I think that clip does an absolutely masterful job of providing an analogy to how marriage has changed in America in the last, say, 50 years or more.

It's changed from an institution approximating Cabernet,

which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it's neglected, to a much more delicate, fragile institution that requires a lot of tending and maintenance.

So you ask me, who would ever want anything other than Pinot Noir, at least according to how Miles thinks about those grapes?

And I would say a whole lot of people might not want to deal with something that fragile and delicate.

But...

Like he says, those of us who get it right, that is, well, and he's talking about the grapes, when there's the right grower and the right context, the flavors are just haunting and brilliant and subtle and ancient.

And what I think he's saying is this is a high-maintenance grape.

It takes a lot of work.

And if you aren't careful and attentive, you're going to be disappointed in it.

It's going to fail you.

But if you work hard enough, you can have something truly exquisite.

And that is where we are today with the All or Nothing Marriage.

That's right.

We went through a hard time.

I in particular went through a hard time with the adjustment to parenthood.

And I frankly, I think that the reason I had a hard time is the sort of stuff that I'm talking about in the book.

I hadn't sufficiently calibrated or recalibrated my expectations to what life would be like with a newborn.

And the research on this is in fact tricky.

Obviously having a bundle of joy is a wonderful thing and you love the new baby like crazy and kissing that little fuzzy head is one of the most satisfying things we ever get to do in our lives.

But the reality is a recent estimate suggests that it's about 33 and a half additional hours a week of extra time, like of care that goes into that.

And I would ask the couples out there listening who don't have a kid,

Where would those 33.5 hours a week come from?

And then you're complementing that with some sleep deprivation and, frankly, much less time for emotional connection or sexual connection with your spouse.

And is it any surprise that the research evidence shows that the arrival of the first baby tends to be pretty hard on the quality of the relationship, on the marital satisfaction, for example?

And it was during that period where we took a trip to Seattle to see my closest and longest-term friend, one of these life experiences that has always been a source of bliss and joy for me throughout the 30-some-odd years of my life at the time.

And I was miserable.

It turns out that traveling across the country with an eight-month-old is not anything like traveling across the country without an eight-month-old.

And then you're together with your best friend, and there's all the stuff that you used to do.

But now there's an eight-month-old there, and you're not doing any of those things.

And I...

really had a hard time.

I mean, I can't really exaggerate this.

I really struggled emotionally with the adjustment.

And I said to my wife, and I regret saying this, it's hard for me to say out loud right now, you know, I can endure this.

Like I can get past this and I certainly love my daughter, but

I need to stop trying to have fun because if I'm trying to enjoy my life and I'm trying to enjoy you, I keep end up disappointed.

And she was very upset about that.

And, you know, I made her cry.

I'm not proud of this at all, but she cried and thought, what, is this the end of us trying to live a good life together?

Are we just going to hunker down and be unhappy together?

But the truth is this ended up being the lowest point, but also the starting of where I started to recover a little bit

It took that moment before I started to get serious about making life better again.

And one of the major ways I did it was by recalibrating my expectations, yes, but also reinvesting in a way that made sure that I was more connected to my wife than we had been.

And it took some work.

And it did require that we lower expectations in some ways and then try to meet those lowered expectations.

And we were, in fact, able to do it.

But it certainly wasn't easy.

Some of your listeners might be fans of Marcel Proust, who argues that mystery is not about traveling to new places, but about looking with new eyes.

And the love hacks are exactly that.

There are ways that we can try to experience the same relationship, but view it in a different way and therefore be a little bit happier in the relationship itself.

Right.

And I'm not saying it's magic.

I'm not saying it's the easiest thing to do.

But I'm saying that with some effort, we can get a little better at this.

So your spouse is late.

Your spouse is disrespectful.

I mean, ideally not in a huge way.

But your spouse does something inconsiderate.

you have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you.

And in particular, you have control over whether you want to explain that behavior in terms of something about your spouse that's maybe stable and a characterological assessment, like my spouse is always such a jerk.

You can try instead to say, look, my spouse was a jerk just now, but he's under a lot of stress at work.

Or you can think, look, he probably tried the best he could.

You know, there was probably some traffic or some crisis at work.

I'm just going to let it ride.

Now, I'm not saying these are easy things to do because we do have a default to explain other people's behaviors as elements of their character.

But the fact is, and we should be better at understanding this, there are all sorts of things that contribute to why somebody engaged in one behavior over another behavior.

And we have some control over the extent to which we interpret our partner's inconsiderate or rude behavior in a way that's more generous and kind.

And the kinder approach will make us happier in the relationship, and our partner will probably be happier, too.

You also think that having what you call a growth mindset is a useful thing.

What do you mean by that?

So the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford, she's developed this idea that people differ in terms of how they think about various attributes.

So she studies intelligence, for example.

And people differ in the extent to which they think intelligence is something that's fixed and stable and you have it or you don't.

Versus it's malleable and it's something that you can develop over time.

Well, it turns out there's a lot of good research now on the extent to which people feel like compatibility in a relationship is something that is fixed.

You could call this a destiny mindset.

People who think, look, partners are either compatible or they're not and that's the end of the story versus more of a growth-oriented mindset who think –

Look, there's a lot of room where you can develop compatibility.

And in fact, going through difficulties in a relationship isn't a signal that, oh my goodness, we're incompatible people.

It's an opportunity to learn to understand each other better and strengthen the relationship through the resolution of the conflict.

And here again, it's not like we have complete control over the thoughts that we have about these things, but we can try to make ourselves adopt a more constructive, growth-oriented approach to thinking about conflict in the relationship rather than a more destiny-oriented approach that can often view conflict as a deep sign of incompatibility

And that's pretty destructive for the relationship.

That's right.

It's the same logic again, right?

So we have this all or nothing approach.

We expect these high level things.

And many of our marriages are in fact falling short of that.

So one possibility is that we try to invest more in the relationship.

And the second possibility, which we've called love hacks, is how to be more efficient.

But the third possibility, and I actually think we should be pretty serious about this.

There's nothing shameful about making these sorts of sacrifices.

We should ask less.

In what ways can we in our own marriage look to the relationship and see, man, like I have been looking to fulfill this sort of need in the relationship for a long time.

And I'm chronically a little disappointed about how we do as a couple and helping to fulfill this sort of need.

is there some other way that I might be able to meet this need I have, either through some other friends or even on my own?

And there's some research by the psychologist Elaine Chung that looks at what she calls social diversification.

Can you diversify your social portfolio, if you will?

And she looks at the people we turn to when we're feeling emotions that can help us regulate those emotions.

So

To whom do you turn when you're feeling sad?

To whom do you turn when you want to celebrate your happiness?

And she assesses how much people look to a relatively small number of people to do all of those things versus a larger number of people.

And she finds across a range of studies now that people who've diversified their social portfolio, that is, turned to different sorts of people for different sorts of emotional experiences, tend to be a little bit happier.

And so with regard to marriage in particular, we've really lumped a lot of our emotional fulfillment on this one relationship.

And for many of us, we would benefit and our marriage would actually benefit if we asked a little bit less in some respects.

You know, that's right.

And that's a neat way of thinking about it that I hadn't fully processed previously.

In some sense, what we're doing with marriage these days is we've got a heavily stock-loaded portfolio.

And that means that when the market is up, we make huge gains.

But that's a lot of eggs to put in that one basket.

And when the market goes down...

we're going to get hit pretty hard.

And to some degree, that's also a reasonable metaphor for the self-expressive marriage, where we look to one person to fulfill so many of our emotional and our psychological needs.

The payoff can be huge, but there's a lot of risk.

I think this is a valid question, and this is a complexity that comes up when you think about how an institution like marriage changes over time.

I suspect that if somebody transported from 1750 to today, they might look around and say, whoa, that doesn't look like marriage.

I don't even really get what you guys are doing.

Or better yet, if we transported back to 1750 and looked at what people were expecting and how little they were looking for personal fulfillment from the marriage, we would be bewildered.

So one of the more controversial ideas that I play with in the book is when I'm talking about ways that we can ask less of the marriage.

By the way, when I am doing that, I'm talking about how can we strengthen the marriage by asking less of it.

One of the places that I consider is in the romantic or sexual domain.

So is it reasonable for some people to consider some type of consensual non-monogamy?

Now, this is not cheating.

That's the whole idea of consensual non-monogamy.

This is an understanding that we don't need to have complete monogamy all the time.

And you can negotiate an alternative.

In fact, among millennials, this is becoming an increasingly common way of thinking about the ideal relationship.

So this is an ideal option, especially for people who generally are connecting pretty well and they love each other and they're good co-CEOs of the household together, but they're really struggling to sustain a mutually satisfying sex life together.

Those are particularly good opportunities to consider

Could we reduce some of the disappointment and pressure by opening up the relationship in some ways that we can both agree to?

It's certainly a high-risk option, but it's an option that probably will benefit some relationships.

It's like a little 23-second bonus track.

And it's interesting.

I haven't heard it in a while, and even as I listened to it as you just played it, I sort of teared up a little bit because it's been a very significant song for my wife and me in our marriage.

When we were first dating, you know...

People are falling in love and they often say, I love you or whatever.

But I was very partial to this idea of belly full of wine, right?

I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I got to get a belly full of wine.

And eventually saying belly full of wine was our little replacement for wine.

I love you.

And what was neat about the way we used the phrase belly full of wine is it was able to contain like a whole terabyte of information about love and respect and affection in this like one second phrase.

We could turn to each other and just say belly full of wine and just really communicate so much information in that very little space.

just those few words and this is an example of a broader idea that we don't appreciate enough which is that every marriage has its own culture that has its own language and its own expectations and we can leverage the features of how culture works to benefit the marriage with a sort of emotional shorthand that can help express affection and it can be especially crucial

If you're going through a difficult time and maybe things are getting a little hot and maybe you're on the verge of a fight and you can say, hey, baby, belly full of wine, and you might be able to diffuse some of what could have been a pretty problematic episode.

My name is Nick.

The advice I have begins with a statement that you probably may have heard.

We judge others by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions.

And I've heard that a lot of times throughout my life by many different people.

But something I didn't understand was what to do with that information.

Me and my friend talked about it for a long time.

And we came to the conclusion that you must flip those two to really understand

be able to understand others and have empathy for others.

You must judge yourself by your actions.