When was the last time you had a 1:1 with your spouse? Not a date night, but a marriage check in on your challenges and improvement areas. Probably not as often as you have with your boss.
“People would never not check in on the job. There are staff meetings all the time, you discuss challenges and clear them up,” psychotherapist Linda Bloom, who has been helping couples work on their marriages for over 50 years at Bloomwork, tells Fortune. “People have the romantic notion that just because they married each other and love each other, everything’s supposed to just flow from that. That’s wrong—you’ve got to have a structure that supports the well-being of your marriage, just like you have the structure that supports the well-being of your career development.”
It’s an important part of what Bloom, who has co-authored four books on marriage with her husband, deems the personal growth marriage—a marriage that she says helps both partners heal from family of origin or relationship wounds and learn relationship skills like communication, conflict management, negotiation, and repair.
It’s what the late David Schnarch, a clinical psychologist, gets at in his 1997 book Passionate Marriage, in which he calls marriage a “people growing machine.” And it’s what Eli Finkel, professor of social psychology at Northwestern University, refers to as a self-expressive marriage in his 2017 book The All-or-Nothing Marriage.
In it, he argues that today’s marriages expect more than ever before. Where we once just wanted security from our partner, we now want them to help us become better versions of ourselves. “A new kind of marriage has emerged, one that can promote self-discovery, self-esteem, and personal growth like never before,” he wrote. Love is no longer enough. Much like in our careers, we’re on a quest for self-actualization.
More expectations, more pressures
Finkel, who wasn’t accepting interview requests at the time of this article, traces the evolution of marriage in his book back to the pragmatic marriage days of the pre-1850s. It was economically advantageous for couples to tie the knot to meet their survival needs. But the Industrial Revolution freed them from that burden, enabling them to marry out of love. When the Civil Rights movement brought individual rights for African Americans to the forefront in the 1960s, it also inspired many women to also fight for a tighter foothold in society as part of the second-wave feminist movement. As more of them entered the workforce, made their own money, and became more independent, they began to view marriage as an opportunity to learn more of who they could become. This ushered in the era of the self-expressive marriage.
“The expectations went way, way up,” says Bloom, adding that more people are becoming interested in personal growth thanks to the destigmatization of therapy and the rise of self-help workshops. After all, 14 more million people began attending therapy in 2022 after little growth the year prior, and social media has made mental health content more accessible.
“A lot of people are looking for marital fulfillment, for a marriage to be a positive experience,” Don Cole, a licensed marriage and family counselor and the clinical director of The Gottman Institute, tells Fortune. “There is an expectation of good treatment in marriages and that marriages should be happy, safe, and sexually fulfilling.”
At the same time, the rising expectations of the standard of living in the U.S. have placed new pressures on marriages. In today’s expensive economy, Cole says, there’s higher demand on two incomes and higher expectations of parenting that didn’t exist 50 years ago. There’s this idea of “I’ve got to be a good parent. I’ve got to be a good earner. I’ve got to have a good career,” he says.
It makes sense, then, that lower-income Americans are more likely to struggle with their marriages. As Finkel explained in a 2017 interview with The Atlantic, what defines a good marriage doesn’t differ among income brackets—but lower-income Americans have more stressors, giving them limited bandwidth to focus on their relationship.
Marriages need the same skills your career does
Achieving personal growth in marriage is akin to climbing what Finkel calls Mount Maslow, a metaphor referring to the famous psychological theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in which humans first need their physiological and safety cups fulfilled, followed by love and belonging and then self-esteem and self-actualization. He posits that it parallels our shifting marriage expectations.
“We can have this wonderful set of experiences with our spouse, a particularly satisfying marriage, but we can’t do it if we’re not spending the time and the emotional energy to understand each other and help promote each other’s personal growth,” he told The Atlantic.
Having these expectations can set us up for disappointment if they’re not met, he posits, but it also makes marriage more rewarding and enriching when they are. It’s important to remember, though, that no one can meet your every single need; he says you need to approach these expectations realistically.
When couples run into issues, Cole thinks they’re more likely to seek help than give up. But the problem is that “we don’t know how to change the dynamics of a marriage that’s not feeling good.” Some are turning to postnups to renegotiate their marriage, but Cole says those are more about getting financial issues off the table in his experience.
It’s good to have high marital expectations, he says. “What the science shows is that people who have the best marriages are the ones who expect the most from them. Lowering expectations is actually a sign of a relationship that’s in failure.” He adds that the problem is often that we don’t have high enough expectations of ourselves, citing an example of a man who doesn’t have high enough expectations of what it means to be with his wife.
Perhaps that’s why it’s typically women who call Bloom for appointments when they’ve hit a breaking point. She says they find their partners aren’t taking enough time to connect with them meaningfully, leaving them feeling lonely. That’s why it’s so important for couples to have 1:1s.
“They don’t connect the dots on why the relationship isn’t working,” she says, adding that our expectations actually aren’t high enough out of fear of disappointment. “There’s too many things that are not being addressed.”
She says that if you’re rising up to a high level of intentionality, commitment, and responsibility to develop the qualities needed for a great relationship that are also needed at work—like resilience, determination, and listening skills, to name a few—then “their relationship will flourish, just as it will in the workplace.”
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