Shankar Vedantam

You come up with what I think of as a riff on a very famous psychological concept.

Many years ago, Abraham Maslow proposed that human beings have a series of different needs that begin with physical security and end with a search for meaning and fulfillment.

And you say that a similar hierarchy has come to describe how many Americans think about marriage.

Tell me about what you call Mount Maslow.

So to continue your analogy, if we want to get to the top of Mount Maslow, but we have failed to bring our oxygen tanks with us, that's what leads presumably to what you call the suffocation model.

What I love about that analogy is it makes physical almost this psychological process, this effect of our expectations.

All of us can imagine what it would be like to suddenly wake up one morning and decide, you know, I'm going to run a marathon or I'm going to climb a mountain, a very tall mountain, without really any preparation.

And we would recognize that it's not just difficult to do, but potentially foolhardy.

So there have been a few people, Eli, over the years who've tried to explore the same ideas that you have.

Esther Perel, of course, comes to mind.

In her famous TED Talk, she summarizes some of these challenges.

And I want to play you a short clip.

So I love that passage, Eli, but you talk about the same idea in your book.

You give the analogy of a woman who once turned to five different friends for important things she needed, but once she gets married, she turns to her husband for those same five things, and he's not able to provide all of them, and she feels now unfulfilled.

You know, as I read your book, Eli, I realized that it's not just what we expect from our partners that's changing.

We also now expect that we can unlock special things in our partners.

And this is also reflected in the movies.

The 1997 movie, As Good As It Gets, has a scene where a woman who is fed up with, you know, put downs by her, by the man who's trying to woo her, demands that he give her a compliment.

that's maybe the best compliment of my life I found this so revealing in the context of your book Eli Helen Hunt's character is telling Jack Nicholson's character that the thing that makes her feel really good is not what he does for her but what she can do to unlock something special in him

You have a wonderful term in your book.