When Did Marriage Become So Hard?

This episode of Hidden Brain looks into the history of marriage, how we view it today and how we can improve our relationships. The first marriages, researchers say, had nothing to do with love or attraction between partners. If you’ve watched some episodes of Game of Thrones, this comes as no surprise. Back in the day, marriages were established out of necessity, either economic or political, as a way to share resources and make peace with other groups of people. And back then people would usually look for someone in the same area of activity — bakers married bakers, peasants married peasants, etc.

Then comes Jane Austen with her novels about complicated cross-class love stories and changes the rules of the game: love became a serious factor in people’s decision to get married. Towards the second half of the 19th century, our concept of marriage changes again, as the “opposites attract” approach gains traction. This time, the narrative was that men and women are very different and they need each other to feel psychologically complete.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, people married not only for love — which had become, by this time, a sine qua non condition — but also to achieve personal growth, to grow into the ideal version of themselves. Abraham Maslow and his pyramid of needs, starting from the physical ones of food, sex, shelter and moving up to the more spiritual ones, like self-fulfilling, was trending big, so people started applying the same measurement to their relationships.

Nowadays, "modern marriage runs the risk of suffocation”, believes social psychologist Eli Finkel. We don’t reach out anymore to our broader social network to fulfill our many different needs, Finkel says. Instead, we turn solely to our spouse.

So, what to do to get better at marriage? Finkel offers some options at the end, and they’re all pretty well grounded in the day-to-day realities of a relationship. Conflict, in case anyone still doubted, is one of his solutions.