Air Date: 9/13/21
The Upgrade by Lifehacker How to Lovehack Your Marriage, With Psychologist Eli Finkel
Jordan
Hey, welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast fromthe team at Lifehacker, where wehelp you improve your life one week at a time. I'm Jordan Calhoun, editor in chief of Lifehacker.
Meghan
And I'm Meghan Walbert Lifehacker's managingeditor.
Jordan
And today we're learning more or less how tohack your marriage, right?
Meghan
Yeah, and that might not sound too romantic,but here to help us is psychologistEli Finkel.
Eli Finkel
There might be periods of our life where,I don't know, there's young kids athome or there's a cancer diagnosis or there's incredible stress at work where we don'thave the bandwidth to invest in the relationship. To do all the things that are, on average,beneficial for the relationship. But we're not ready yet to let go of our aspirations. It's like,how can we keep things strong in the really sort of intense periods where we're not able toinvest as much as we want in the relationship, but we're not ready to let go of our aspirations? And that's where love hacks have their major power.
Jordan
Eli is a psychologist and professor at NorthwesternUniversity, as well as thedirector of Northwestern's Relationships and Motivation Lab. His research focuses onromantic relationships and American politics and sometimes where they intersect.
Meghan
Eli is also the author of the bestselling bookThe All-or-Nothing Marriage: How theBest Marriages Work, which details some pretty interesting research-backed ways toimprove your marriage.
Jordan
And so, Meghan, you are married, right?
Meghan
I am married. Yes.
Jordan
You are indeed married. How long have you beenmarried?
Meghan
In a couple of weeks it will be 13 years.
Jordan
13 years, my god. 13 years.
Meghan
Which is funny because I think...So I got marriedwhen I was twenty six years old,which seemed perfectly old at the time. But now when I look back, I'm like we were kind of young. Twenty-six is kind of young I feel like.
Jordan
Yeah, yeah. You're still learning a lot aboutyourself at twenty six, or at least I was.If I—okay I'm going to put you on the spot here, if you had to explain to just me or tens of thousands of listeners why you got married, but without using love, what would you explainas your reason for getting married?1
Air Date: 9/13/21
Meghan
Oh, interesting. OK, I guess I would say partnership, companionship and I think Iwould say growth. The person that I married is someone that I feel like I can grow with.
Jordan
And that's so interesting. When I put it inthe context of what Eli speaks about inhis book, he talks about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Have you heard of that before?
Meghan
I hadn't before reading the book, no.
Jordan
So for listeners who haven't heard of it before,imagine a pyramid that basically isblueprinting human fulfillment and what people need for it. And at the bottom of thatpyramid it's the simple things that we need for human fulfillment, food, water, shelter, thosebasics. And the idea is that once you get to a certain level of that pyramid, you are thenaspirational for the next rung of that pyramid until you get to the top of the pyramid, whichis like growth and potential and sort of all these lofty ideas that fulfill us at our, at our most.They like feed our souls as humans. So it goes from the basics, food, water and shelter.The next rung up would be safety and health and wellness, things like that, financialsecurity. Then above that would be friendships, romantic relationships, community, familyand above. That would be a sense of purpose. And then ultimately you get to this growthand potential and all of these lofty ideas. Right. And Meghan, your answer sort of spannedthat entire pyramid. You talked about—
Meghan
I want all of those things. Every single oneof them.
Jordan
Yeah, you want, you want, everything. You wantso much from...You want so muchfrom your marriage. No pressure from your partner at all. No pressure for them. And so it'sgoing to be really interesting to talk to Eli. For many of us who want our marriages to giveus all of these different things, it's going to take some either lowering expectations or whatEli describes as love hacks to sort of reconcile those things that you want from your relationship to those things that your relationship can ultimately offer you. And that's whereI guess we can find happiness is like having our expectations run a little bit closer to whatit can actually give.
Meghan
Yeah, and I think we even if we have strongmarriages that have a low conflict, Ithink there's always some hacking we can do to our love.
Jordan
Well, that's what we're all about on this podcast.So let's talk with Eli and figure outhow these lovehacks can help our marriages.
Meghan
OK, let's do it.
Jordan
So, Eli, welcome to The Upgrade. We're so gladto have you.
Eli Finkel
Thanks for having me.
Jordan
Our pleasure. So before we start talking abouthow to have a better marriage, weshould probably start with some context for marriage and how we got to the current view of marriage, that's sort of popular. Right. So can you describe a brief history of why peopleget married and how it's evolved over the decades?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, this was one of the mostfun things to explore when I was workingon the book is we grow up into a certain cultural and historical moment and period. And we2
Air Date: 9/13/21
think, well, that's just the way things work. I guess lately we've seen some interesting highprofile changes, including the national legalization of gay marriage, for example. But yeah,I mean, one of the wild things is if you look across cultures and even if you just look in theUS, the functions of marriage, that is, what do people think that that this relationship thatthis institution is about have just changed radically over the last really over the course of the nation.
Jordan
So what was it like, say, fifty to one hundredyears ago? What were the reasonsthat people got married and what are the reasons that people get married now?
Eli Finkel
Yeah, I mean, the again, if we trust thehistorians and the sociologists, they tellus that that the nation, including the colonial era, had three broad areas of of marriage. Sogoing to the colonial era up until around the eighteen fifties, they call it the Pragmatic Era.Of course, we're talking about the the center of gravity for these beliefs. Obviously noteverybody had access to the types of freedoms and so forth. But but broadly thePragmatic Era of marriage is about really basic survival needs. I mean literally things likefood, clothing and shelter. Nobody was kissing somebody goodbye and heading to theoffice or trying to marry my best friend. Those ideas would have been laughable. And so if you think of this in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we were looking at the bottomright. Literally, things like physiological and safety needs not freezing, having enoughfood...marriage was about that largely. It was nice to love your partner and have a goodsex life. But that wasn't the point. And it really wasn't until about the eighteen fifties withthe broad industrialization that you started seeing a big shift in that. And for the first time,people start to to think that the individual fulfillment of the spouses of the partners was amajor function of marriage and really they wanted to marry for love. The idea had beenaround for a while, but it was impractical and started around eighteen fifty. Increasingly,people wanted to marry for love. And in terms of Maslow's hierarchy, now we've ascendedto the middle level and that was the dominant thread up until really the nineteen fiftieswhen we've got it all figured out and everything was perfect and we finally were able to livethis dream that we had looked for for generations, which is the breadwinner, homemaker,love-based vision of marriage, where she has her sphere of domestic life and he has hissphere of let's call it work life. And they have their their little suburban house in two point, Iguess, three point five kids around them. And they thought that was going to be the end of it and everyone was going to be thrilled and they really were not. And they found it stiflingthat that if it had been the case that women had, women fundamentally need to benurturing but not assertive and men fundamentally need to be assertive but not nurturant,then maybe that solution would have worked. But really what they did is they cleave thehuman psyche in half and men and women both thought this is bogus. And then you'renow getting to our era, starting around nineteen sixty five to the present, which I call theSelf-Expressive Era. Now we're looking at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, way up there for self-actualization. And we think even if we're we're in love with the person, we think this isa good man and a good father. And I love him, but I feel stagnant. I'm not growing and I'mnot going to stay in this relationship for the next 30 years. And really, it's about this senseof self-expression, authenticity, and personal growth. And that's a big priority these days.
Meghan
So it sounds to me like our definition of compatibilityhas changed over the years.So I'm curious what you think. What makes a compatible partnership in this day and age?How do you know if you are going to...Or how can you predict that I'm going to have agood marriage with this person?3