Eli Finkel

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.