The All-or-Nothing Marriage Quotes

“Many marriages ultimately dissolve, of course, but there’s no compelling evidence that people bolt as soon as things get difficult. 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.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“There isn’t just one true and proper way to love, to relate, to bond, to touch. Any style of relationship is the right one, as long as it’s a decision made by the whole person and not the hole in the person.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“Culture is our most distinctive evolved strategy for survival and reproduction.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“...others' ability to influence us depends on how central they are to our lives.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“If it were true that men and women are, at their essence, so profoundly different—from Mars and Venus, perhaps—then there’s no reason why strict adherence to the doctrine of separate spheres would inflict psychological damage. As it turns out, though, both men and women are, psychologically speaking, from Earth.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“Four particularly damaging behaviors are criticism (characterizing the conflict in terms of a fundamental flaw in our spouse), defensiveness (counterattacking rather than engaging with our spouse’s concern), contempt (engaging in insulting, mocking, or hostile behavior), and stonewalling (clamming up when our partner raises a concern). In general, it’s beneficial for each partner to try to respond generously when the other behaves badly, as doing so avoids the escalating cycles of negative reciprocity characteristic of unhealthy relationships.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“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.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. —George Bernard Shaw”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“responsibilities of the colonial wife, who was “expected to cook, wash, sew, milk, spin, clean, and garden,” note Mintz and Kellogg. “Her activities included brewing beer [which was perceived as healthier than water], churning butter, harvesting fruit, keeping chickens, spinning wool, building fires, baking bread, making cheese, boiling laundry, and stitching shirts, petticoats, and other garments. She participated in trade—exchanging surplus fruit, meat, cheese, or butter for tea, candles, coats, or sheets—and manufacturing—salting, pickling,”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“The scholarly consensus today is that, at their essence, men, too, have strong nurturant needs and women, too, have strong assertiveness needs.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“Between stimulus and response there is a space,” observes the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“According to Rogers’s 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. They will discover, and live in accord with, their authentic self. This humanistic emphasis on living in accord with the authentic self received additional support in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which peaks with the need for self-actualization.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“In this version, scholars like Otto Rank, Viktor Frankl, and Rollo May—not to mention philosophically oriented social activists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—emphasize that 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.”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work

“The third prompt was designed to help participants conquer the challenges they identified regarding the adoption of such a third-party perspective:”
― Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work