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September 23 - November 29, 2017
An undersexed marriage became unacceptable in the same way that a loveless marriage had become unacceptable a few decades earlier.
The number of women in the workforce grew by 60 percent between 1940 and 1945.
Following the Great Depression and World War II—sixteen years of uninterrupted turmoil—traditional family values were ascendant. Seeking stability, men and women doubled down on the ideology of separate spheres, and many women became homemakers with gusto.
Other industries followed suit, and the inflation-adjusted median salary earned by high school graduates almost doubled between 1950 and 1973.
the G.I. Bill, a monumentally successful piece of affirmative action legislation, helped to elevate millions of families to the middle class, but it also made women especially economically dependent on men.
60 percent of women who enrolled in colleges or universities left without graduating—either to get married (the so-called M.R.S. degree) or out of fear that a college degree would hurt their marriage prospects.
women were legally prohibited from taking out loans or credit cards in their own name. If they worked outside the home, they were routinely (and legally) paid less money than men for the same work.
“Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection,” but “single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favor of Matrimony.”
Relatively speaking, child-rearing in the 1950s was isolated and isolating. The love-based marital ideal, and the image of home life that came with it, strengthened the spousal bond at the expense of women’s broader social networks.
In retrospect, it seems bizarre that people sought to build an institution that separated husbands and wives more than ever before while simultaneously expecting them to serve as each other’s primary source of intimacy and emotional support; spouses just didn’t have enough insight into each other’s daily triumphs and tribulations.
Riesman argued that midcentury Americans had lost their inner compass, seeking popularity rather than respect.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”
Girls were molded to be nurturant but not assertive—to become the sort of warm, cooperative, docile, and unaggressive woman exemplified by ads depicting the ideal housewife.
As it turns out, though, both men and women are, psychologically speaking, from Earth.
The scholarly consensus today is that, at their essence, men, too, have strong nurturant needs and women, too, have strong assertiveness needs.
Good point on difference etween men and women
She refers to people who are high on both dimensions as psychologically androgynous, and she presents evidence that such individuals, whether men or women, tend to be especially well adjusted.
The best people
Sustaining desire in marriage requires the reconciliation of our deep-seated craving for safety and security with our deep-seated craving for mystery and adventure.
“Fire needs air; desire needs space.”
On the other hand, it’s tricky to reconcile the desire for predictability and familiarity with the desire for surprise and novelty—to reconcile the selfless caregiving that’s appropriate when our spouse is emotionally vulnerable with the raw craving that’s appropriate when our spouse wants to be ravished.
As a declining proportion of American marriages consisted of people who were raised during the Great Depression and then endured World War II, the yearning for stability and security lost some of its intensity, and people became less willing to endure an unfulfilling marriage.
What her experience with Aleksandr illustrates is that developing such a relationship is extremely difficult if the partners don’t prioritize each other. They must understand each other deeply, provide each other with sensitive support during difficult times, and help each other savor the good times. Ideally, they’ll also have lots of hot sex.
Main asks of marriage in the selfexpression era
As these ideas gained currency, Americans increasingly looked to their marriage not only for love, but also for a sense of authenticity and meaning.
Individuals, who are confused and terrified by the awareness of their own smallness in a vast galaxy that lacks coherence, are responsible for generating their own sense of identity and idiosyncratic
value system to achieve a sense of meaning.
people who succeed in both developing their own value system and living in accord with it (that is, people who live authentically) can build lives that are deeply fulfilling, even if there is no objective truth undergirding their value system.
How to lead a fulfilling life
“he who has a why to live can bear almost any how,”
Good phrase
Frankl came to appreciate the immense psychological benefits of finding meaning in one’s experiences, no matter how bleak those experiences may be.
“Lives may be experienced as meaningful,” observes the psychologist Laura King, “when they are felt to have a significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”
Meaningful lives
People who succeed in developing, and living in accord with, a significant, purposeful, and coherent meaning system are buffered against existential angst.
that people’s personalities are largely set by the age of five, and that, throughout their lives, they are driven by unconscious and socially unacceptable urges.
people are largely buffeted about by psychological forces beyond their control and against the view that people are inherently oriented toward personal growth.
humanistic perspective, in contrast, people are inherently good, and driven toward personal growth. If they enjoy a supportive social milieu, they will construct creative, productive, meaningful lives filled with love and purpose.
The Humanistic View
One theme within humanistic psychology is that the successful pursuit of self-actualization, the pyramid’s peak, depends on our relationships with significant others.
Successful decision-making requires insightful analysis and sophisticated social skills—the ability to develop and implement good ideas in a complex social environment.
Postindustrialization is linked to education, access to information, and diversified human interactions, which makes people more capable of thinking for themselves and setting their own priorities.
Religious people typically view God’s will as a value base; they don’t feel compelled to ask why it’s important to prioritize God’s will. As Western societies have secularized, “the self has taken on ever more luster as a powerful value base.” The pursuit of self-expression has become a moral good in and of itself. “The moral thread of self-actualisation is one of authenticity
Today it’s the opposite: If you’re not fulfilled by your marriage, you have to justify staying in it, because of the tremendous cultural pressure to be good to one’s self.”
We continue to view our marriage as a central locus of love and passion, and we continue to view our home as a haven in a heartless world, but, for more and more of us, a marriage that achieves those things without also promoting self-expression is insufficient.
“I really feel like someone of ‘mate value’ would be someone who helps me become the best person I can be, the best version of myself.”
In the twenty-first century, marriages characterized by greater gender equality—greater parity in earning, housework, and parenting—are more satisfying, more sexually fulfilling, and at lower risk of divorce.
Although the proportion of American women married at least once by their early forties remains high, the chart below reveals it has, for the first time in recorded history, dipped below 90 percent in the new millennium, and current trends suggest that it might continue to decline.
Getting married has shifted from an event signifying that one is entering adulthood to an event signifying that one has achieved all of the hallmarks of adulthood.
Among Americans with at least a college degree, divorce rates have plunged and marital quality is on the rise.
To achieve optimal communication in the self-expressive era, and to support each other effectively, we need to develop deep insight into our own and our spouse’s psychological experiences—needs, goals, anxieties, frustrations—and to harmonize our behaviors with them. To achieve long-term stability and success, we must remain compatible over time, even as we grow and change.
Spouses must navigate the porcupine’s dilemma—the desire to achieve deep intimacy while remaining invulnerable to pain.
Rather than adhering to traditional gender roles or making long-term decisions early in the marriage and settling into a routine, the relative lack of role differentiation in today’s marriages means that spouses must engage in extensive and frequent communication and coordination.
Even today, the time investment is disproportionately borne by the mother (in heterosexual couples), with 21 of the hours coming from her versus 12.5 from the father.
Sex is a measure of the health of your relationship—an unbiased barometer of how much you desire your partner and how much he or she still desires you.”
“Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest.”
Women’s adoption of assertive qualities has been stronger than men’s adoption of nurturant qualities, a gender difference that is especially large among the less educated.
