The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

by Eli J. Finkel

Many professions have gone the way of the pharmacist, starting out as the province of men and now filled mostly with women.

masculinity is more fragile; it requires repeated demonstration and social proof.

Fragile masculinity of this sort seems to be a major reason why men have been reluctant to enter female-dominated fields like nursing and elementary school teaching.

As such, our ability to achieve profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life depends, more than ever before, on the quality of our marriage, and a high-quality marriage today is uniquely fulfilling.

Psychologically androgynous individuals have high emotional intelligence, and they’re especially effective at adjusting their behavior to address the demands of a particular situation. They are good relationship partners.

Today’s husbands and wives are not only more psychologically androgynous (both assertive and nurturant), but also much more psychologically similar to each other.

Key point!

These new marriages are not easy, but when they work well, they promote spouses’ self-discovery and personal growth like never before.

“I suppose the most profound statement I could make about our marriage—and I can’t explain it adequately—is that each of us has always been willing and eager for the other to grow. We have grown as individuals and in the process we have grown together.”

Growth

he and Helen facilitated each other’s voyages of self-discovery and personal growth. But

The adoption of this new approach, which focuses less on happiness than on meaning, removes much of the adversarial relationship between personal fulfillment and marital commitment.

Building on ideas from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the psychologist Carol Ryff suggests that a meaningful life results from “the striving for perfection that represents the realization of one’s true potential.”

On life meaning

In contrast, participants who tended to think a lot about the future, or who exhibited strong tendencies to be “a giver,” tended to experience greater meaning, but they were actually less happy.

In short, whereas the happy life is characterized by ease and pleasure, the meaningful life is characterized by generosity, deep engagement with difficult pursuits, and a coherent sense of how the self develops across time.

Happiness vs meaning

For many Americans, building a successful, long-lasting marriage is a central means through which we pursue self-expression and a meaningful life.

Consequently, when spouses undergo difficult periods in the marriage, they perceive opportunities for personal and relationship growth as a consequence of working through the challenges.

VanDellen and Campbell argue that many Americans are choosing the marital analogue of the Upper Falls Overlook Trail instead of the Plunge Basin Trail, and that doing so places their marriage at elevated risk for distress and divorce.

Self-expressive values promote a new moral authority in which human autonomy is sacrosanct.

In fact, many things that were tolerated in earlier times are no longer considered acceptable today, particularly if they violate humanistic norms.” Consider, for example, how norms and laws opposing discrimination against racial and sexual minorities have advanced since the 1960s.

Such results, which have been replicated many times, suggest that people who are highly committed to their relationship exhibit self-delusions that serve to reinforce that commitment.

We’re often happy to endure costs in our relationship if doing so benefits our spouse, and some evidence suggests that providing support is even more strongly linked to feeling good than receiving support is.

On the contrary, it’s precisely when things get difficult that many of us redouble our efforts to strengthen our relationship, either by engaging in effortful relationship-maintenance activities or by recalibrating our expectations.

Those of us in this latter group experience much less conflict between personal fulfillment and marital commitment. Rather, we work hard to make our marriage strong, in part because doing so helps us become the best version of ourselves.

We are like two flowers in one pot. It’s difficult. Sometimes we don’t get enough nutrients for both of us. But when everything goes well, we become two beautiful flowers. So it’s either heaven or hell. —Noriko Shinohara

The all-or-nothing marriage perspective suggests that the major change has less to do with how much we’re asking of our marriage than with what we’re asking of it.

(“I have never met a person that can vibrate at 120 hertz,” observes the psychologist Bryant Paul).

Many changes in the acceptability of alternative, nonmarital lifestyles emerged alongside these changes in sexual mores. From 1970 to 2010, the number of American singles aged thirty-five to forty-four almost tripled, from 12 percent to 35 percent, and the number of cohabiting unmarried couples surged from 500,000 to 7.6 million.

Yes, today’s Americans are asking more of our marriage regarding higher-altitude need fulfillment, but we’re actually asking less regarding lower-altitude need fulfillment.

Pinot as “a hard grape to grow” and in need of “constant care and attention.” He observes that “only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.” But the payoff of such coaxing is immense.

From 1965 until the early 1990s, fathers spent four to five hours per week, and mothers spent ten to fifteen hours per week engaged in intensive parenting activities.

2008, fathers were up to eight to ten hours per week, and mothers up to fifteen to twenty hours per week.

Time spent parenting

the total amount of work new parents do (paid work + housework + child care) increases by an estimated 33.5 hours per week when the first baby arrives, with 63 percent of this increase absorbed by mothers. But even spouses without children are time-starved, in part because we work so much.

Thus, spouses in the early twenty-first century not only spent significantly less time alone together than did their parents’ generation, but they also were significantly less likely to reliably pursue their daily activities together.

Herbert Simon’s observation in 1971 that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” has never been more relevant.

Good quote

Women and men alike are at risk for living in a state that the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls forfeiture—a lack of self-insight resulting from living busy, distracted lives.

“I think a big issue,” says an anonymous wife, “is that we both want to be taken care of at the end of the day, and neither of us has any energy to take care of the other.”

As we’ve seen, the challenge is especially acute for parents of young children. “In the early childrearing years,” observes the sociologist and psychotherapist Francesca Cancian, “the burdens of marriage and parenting are so great that most couples probably have little energy to focus on developing their selves or their relationship.”

We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment. . . . Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

But their dynamic illustrates the point that achieving ambitious goals is hard work, and helping a loved one do so can sometimes require criticism rather than warmth, challenge rather than comfort. It’s hard to reconcile such treatment with the “haven in a heartless world” ethos.

Therein resides the spouse’s dilemma: As we seek to help our partner become the best version of him- or herself, to what extent do we employ critical feedback in order to motivate versus supportive feedback in order to nurture?

But, more important, the spouses helped each other flourish in ways that might have remained out of reach if they weren’t together. They climbed to the top of Mount Maslow and, at least some of the time, invested the resources required for the marriage to flourish at the summit.

The best marriages are able to enjoy exquisite connection at the highest altitudes, but also to lower their expectations as the circumstances dictate.

“the holy trinity of social science”—class, race, and gender—and “exaggerate the differences in American family life across educational, racial, and ethnic lines. Americans have much in common. . . . From the poorest to the most affluent, young adults seek companionship, emotional satisfaction, and self-development through marriage.”

Wealthier Americans are more likely to marry than poorer Americans are—further concentrating the salutary outcomes linked to marriage among the wealthier—and people who do marry are increasingly doing so within their own socioeconomic stratum.

The link between social class and marital outcomes is strong.

In short, although it is an exaggeration to claim that marriage in America is in crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that it is in crisis among the lower class.

In short, poorer Americans have every bit as much respect for the institution of marriage as wealthier Americans, and they have virtually identical intuitions about what makes a marriage successful.

That is, they were less able to prioritize their relationship in part because they felt mentally worn out, a cascade of effects that ultimately predicted diminished relationship quality.

Second, higher-class individuals are especially likely to have the opportunity to achieve meaning and self-expression through their work, which may relieve some of the pressure to maximize the achievement of these qualities through the marriage.