The famous couples therapist Esther Perel argues that we ask our spouse or partner to become the village. As marriages changed over centuries, it went from a sharing of resources, to pure productivity expectations, to fulfilling desires (especially after the invention of birth control), to financial security, and now to self-actualization. Note that the second clip is from a 90-min long podcast.
Perel said this in an interview with the New Yorker
Because never in the history of family life was the emotional well-being of the couple relevant to the survival of the family. The couple could be miserable for thirty years, you were stuck for life, you married once—and, if you didn’t like it, you could hope for an early death of your partner. Marriage was a pragmatic institution. You need to have it, but, once you’re in it, it’s not a great thing, and certainly not for the women.
And then we added romantic needs to the pairing, the need for belonging and for companionship. We have gone up the Maslow ladder of needs, and now we are bringing our need for self-actualization to the marriage. We keep wanting more. We are asking from one person what once an entire village used to provide.1
Olga Khazan made a similar point in The Atlantic.
Tall, dark, handsome, funny, kind, great with kids, six-figure salary, a harsh but fair critic of my creative output ... the list of things people want from their spouses and partners has grown substantially in recent decades. So argues Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University in his new book, The All-or-Nothing Marriage.
As Finkel explains, it’s no longer enough for a modern marriage to simply provide a second pair of strong hands to help tend the homestead, or even just a nice-enough person who happens to be from the same neighborhood. Instead, people are increasingly seeking self-actualization within their marriages, expecting their partner to be all things to them2
Obviously, the demands apply to both sexes but I’d like to focus on men for this article. Due to unrealistic demands, men are preferring to not get married and prefer instead to cohabitate. 3
The consequences are horrendous. Single men in the US are dying of despair.
The latest CDC data shows that 35,419 single and divorced prime-age (25- to 54-year-old) men died of drug-related causes, a 35 percent increase from the year before. The never-married make up about one-third of the prime-age male population, but compose two-thirds of that demographic’s drug-related deaths. Similarly, the share of prime-age divorced men who succumbed to drug overdoses was nearly twice their share of the population at large.4
Here’s a brief video featuring Perel on masculinity in which she distills the paradox of how men are expected to be traditional and assert their masculine selves and yet are also told to be vulnerable.
Somewhere between Redpilling and Toxic Feminism (a.k.a. everything is due to “THE PATRIARCHY!”), there exists a center that we can live with. Sarah Dawn Moore and other relationship advisors like are finding increasing traction on social media by calling out the failures of contemporary culture in America.
A provocative way to end the article.
Postscript: On a somewhat related note, check out David Brooks’s fine column in the Atlantic, ‘How America got mean.’
Love Is Not a Permanent State of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Esther Perel, Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker.
We Expect Too Much From Our Romantic Partners, Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, 2017
Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner, Pew Research Center.
Opioids and the Unattached Male, Patrick T. Brown, City Journal