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September 23 - November 29, 2017
But I came to realize that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras; indeed, they are the best marriages that the world has ever known. In addition, although the average marriage is shaky, many floundering or passable marriages can flourish by adopting strategies pioneered by the best marriages.
Liberals are correct that marriage isn’t a prerequisite for a fulfilling life, that there are diverse routes to marital success, that poverty makes marital success difficult, and that building a successful marriage would be easier if America had more family-friendly policies like paid parental leave and affordable child care.
The Western canon is waterlogged with the tears of women enduring failures in love and marriage—Emma Bovary’s suicide by arsenic, Anna Karenina’s suicide by locomotive, Hester Prynne’s disgrace by scarlet letter—but these women tend not to achieve salvation on voyages of self-discovery.
Such women generally lacked the resources and the freedom to embark on solitary adventures, even if they’d wanted to.
“Life is a test and you pass if you can be true to yourself,”
Good
The pursuit of self-expression through marriage simultaneously makes achieving marital success harder and the value of doing so greater. Consequently, the average marriage has been getting worse over time, even as the best marriages have been getting better.
Perhaps the most significant change in marriage over time has been its conquest by love.
“most societies around the world saw marriage as far too vital an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as
America has witnessed three major eras of marriage: pragmatic, love-based, and self-expressive.
As it became easier to meet their most basic economic and safety needs as a single person, Americans increasingly looked to marriage for love and romantic passion. For many, love became a precondition for marriage, a requirement that remains strong today.
During the third era, from around 1965 to today, marriage has a self-expressive emphasis that places a premium on spouses helping each other meet their authenticity and personal-growth needs.
The historical changes in American marriage—from the pragmatic to the love-based to the self-expressive eras—exhibit striking parallels to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.
If spouses expect their marriage to help them fulfill such needs but are unwilling or unable to invest the time and psychological energy (the “oxygen”) required at that altitude, the marriage is at risk for suffocation—for lethargy, conflict, and perhaps divorce.
we look to our marriage to meet our needs for passion and intimacy and to facilitate our voyages of self-discovery and personal growth. As we’ll soon see, success at these higher altitudes requires the investment of significant time and energy in the marriage.
romantic partners (both spouses and dating partners) can sculpt each other toward their authentic selves over time.
The compliment, when it finally comes, is pretty great: “You make me want to be a better man.”
According to research on the Michelangelo effect, misalignment of this sort is linked to relationship problems and unhappiness.
Indeed, relative to Americans who are unmarried, those who are married are much less involved with friends and other relatives.
Married people are far less likely than never-married people to see their parents, siblings, neighbors, and friends regularly; previously married people are intermediate.
Given this social withdrawal, successful pursuit of our authentic-self goals depends on our spouse much more today than in the past.
Jasmine at age forty. James’s helpful roles have solid lines; his unhelpful roles have dashed lines.
Success typically requires not only compatibility, but also deep insight into each other’s core essence—the sort of insight that helps us know what type of support is most beneficial under which circumstances. Developing such insight typically requires significant investment of time and energy in the relationship.
the amount of time that childless Americans spent alone with their spouse declined from thirty-five to twenty-six hours per week from 1975 to 2003, with much of this decline resulting from an increase in hours spent at work.
What is killing marriage
The decline for Americans with children at home was from thirteen to nine hours per week, with much of it resulting from an increase in time-intensive parenting.
The positive consequence is that the benefits of having a marriage that meets our expectations have grown.
positive effects of marital quality on happiness—that is, marital quality was reliably linked to higher rather than lower overall happiness with one’s life.
The extent to which marital quality is an important predictor of life happiness was almost twice as strong in the 2000s as it was circa 1980.
As its primary functions have ascended Maslow’s hierarchy, and as we’ve spent less time with our spouse, it’s become more difficult for our marriage to live up to our expectations, which means that more of us wind up feeling disappointed. At the same time, as the nature of our marital expectations has changed, the benefits of fulfilling those expectations are larger than ever.
Summary of book
Relative to marriages in earlier eras, marriages today require much greater dedication and nurturance, a change that has placed an ever-larger proportion of marriages at risk of stagnation and dissolution.
To use Miles’s words, American marriage today is temperamental, but those spouses who nurture it can build something thrilling.
As more of us learn how to live successfully within this paradigm, we can potentially usher in the most successful period of marital well-being that the world has ever seen.
The primary consideration for a successful marriage was running a household that fed its residents and protected them from the elements.
Culture is our most distinctive evolved strategy for survival and reproduction.
By scaffolding discoveries across generations rather than limiting them to an individual life span, our ability to function within cultures has placed humans atop the food chain, doubled our life expectancy, and brought comfort to our everyday existence.
Key Point
For the first time, societies could produce sufficient food without the requirement that food production be the primary pursuit of virtually every able-bodied individual.
Protestantism increased the status of matrimony. In contrast to the Catholic Church, which viewed marriage as a necessary evil—a morally inferior alternative to celibacy—Protestant theology viewed marriage as a sacred, morally righteous institution.
During the colonial era, in contrast, each family was a largely self-sufficient social and economic system.
Given these responsibilities, it was a great economic and physical challenge to live alone. Nearly all men and women in New England married, with most rapidly remarrying if their spouse died.
People struggled to reconcile these Enlightenment-era ideas with prevailing views of the family during the early colonial era, which prized hierarchy and obedience.
It was during this period—the 1700s and early 1800s—that love, in its long and ultimately successful battle to conquer the institution of marriage, struck its decisive blow.
on love
“The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to [the] idea that they were soul mates.”
“daily life for every American changed beyond recognition between 1870 and 1940.”
As children became a source of economic burden, rather than economic benefit, parents had fewer of them.
Husbands were expected to work full-time, typically six days per week for ten to twelve hours per day (until labor laws curtailed such long hours).
Traditionally, this authority came from landownership, which was stable and absolute. As the basis shifted from land to wage labor, which was neither stable nor absolute, it became shakier, threatening men’s sense of masculinity.
As urbanization afforded young adults control over their conjugal decisions, allowing them to prioritize personal fulfillment, they increasingly married for love.
Masculine virtue began to focus less on honor, courage, and service and more on a parochial tendency to love and protect one’s wife and children.
