Thoughts and Moments

I recently read The All or Nothing Marriage.  Here are some excerpts:

The major change over time is not an overall increase in how much Americans expect from their marriage, but rather a dramatic shift in the substance of their expectations.  In contrast to our predecessors, who looked to their marriage to help them survive, we look to our marriage to meet our needs for passion and intimacy and to facilitate our voyages of self-discovery and personal growth.

It took centuries for the love-based, breadwinner-homemaker ideal to become the dominant model of marriage in America.  It took only fifteen years to shatter that ideal.

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.

The proportion of spouses whose marriages fall short of expectations has grown.

The science is clear that holding strong destiny beliefs is perilous.  People who believe in romantic destiny tend to become unhappy quickly when relationships go through challenging times.  And, of course, going through challenging times is virtually inevitable in a long-term relationship.

Building a happy marriage requires that spouses successfully navigate a dense thicket of challenges and opportunities, frequently without a good map of the route ahead.

Love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.  Nobody would seek to be successful at playing the violin by waiting for the right instrument to come along, but many of us seek to be successful at relationships by waiting for the right partner to come along.  We would be better served by cultivating our ability to love--to become skilled, mature, and self-aware relationship partners.

A key feature of effective communication is understanding when our spouse doesn't want to talk and, more generally, understanding that he or she is entitled to some privacy.

We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

Achieving ambitious goals is hard work and helping a loved one do so can sometimes require criticism rather than warmth, challenge rather than comfort.  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?

Mothers and fathers in dual-income households spent an average of 33.5 hours parenting the newborn.  If you're married without children, it might be difficult to understand how much the arrival of the first baby changes things.  Where would the two of you find an additional 33.5 hours per week?

Relative to femininity, which typically doesn't require social validation, masculinity is more fragile; it requires repeated demonstration and social proof.