Eli Finkel

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.