Is Your Marriage Suffocating You?

Are you feeling suffocated in your marriage? Perhaps it has more to do with what we expect of marriage rather than having a particularly suffocating spouse.

That’s what Eli J. Finkel, a Professor of Psychology and Management and Organization at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his colleagues would argue.1,2 They have proposed the Suffocation Model of Marriage to explain our current dissatisfaction with our marriages.

It’s neither your partner nor your marriage that is suffocating, i.e., stifling your personal self-expressiveness. It’s an outmoded idea of how to be an individual—be self-expressive—and be a couple at the same time.

Finkel’s Suffocation Model of Marriage

Finkel and his co-researchers analyzed the social context of marriage from the 1700s through the current time and came up with three major eras of marriage, each with quite a different view of why people get married. They are:

The Institutional Era

Marriage in the institutional era (1776-1850) existed at the time when we were mainly agrarian communities, and marriage was the way people procreated, clothed, and fed themselves. Families were the economic unit of society in these agrarian times. Not much emphasis was placed on the “quality” of the marital relationship. Gendered roles were not the focus of marriage because everyone worked and contributed to the well-being of the family.

The Companionate Era

The Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Finkel calls the companionate era (1850-1965) and led to dramatic changes in the idea of why people get married. The replacement of agrarian societies by a new order defined by industrial capitalism not only ushered in the separation of the sexes into different silos, but it also ushered in the theory of the efficient market based on the idea that everyone operates in their own self-interest.

The home was no longer the basic economic unit of society. Husbands became wage earners outside the home. Wives became “homemakers.” As Finkel puts it, marriage became increasingly sentimental in its purpose—it became about spouses loving and being loved, along with experiencing romantic passion for each other. This loving and being loved was understood in terms of the gender of the partners. Wives were supportive, caretaking, and available sexually. Husbands were good financial providers.

The Self-Expressive Era

For Finkel, the third era of marriage, the self-expressive era (1965 to the present), is defined by couples going beyond a companionate marriage. We now also want to be valued as individuals who are interested in self-expression and personal growth.

Finkel points out that looking for personal growth for both partners in our marriages is asking a lot—much more than we have historically. We are putting a greater emphasis on the quality of the relationship process between us as husbands and wives because we want more from our relationships.

Finkel tells us that the average marriage is less satisfying, i.e., suffocating, because we are asking so much from our marital relationship. However, his suggestion that we devote more time to our marriage does not seem like a good idea if the relationships are feeling suffocating!

What Finkel and His Associates Got Wrong

Finkel’s tracing of the different reasons to get married over the ages is both interesting and, I think, helpful in understanding what shapes our expectations about getting married. And, as he notes, the civil rights and counter-culture movements of the ’60s and ’70s, in conjunction with the rise of humanistic psychology, emphasized self-discovery and self-expression.

However, what was a movement of self-expressiveness got interpreted as the self-interest of the companionate era. And self-interest was widely understood as all of us having individual needs that must be satisfied. According to this view, marriages were defined by each partner satisfying the self-identified needs of the other.

This view of how the marital relationship should work is so ingrained in society that we now think of our needs as something concrete and real—as actual things. The term need is a construct used to define what and why things are important to us. If something is important to me in my life plan, then the theorist will say that I need it—and I am entitled to have it!

Let me rant about interpreting what the implications are of living according to the psychological construct of need:

• Needs become demands that we feel entitled to have met.
• Needs are not negotiated because they are entitlements; they can only be exchanged in tit-for-tat or quid pro quo arrangements (I’ll have sex with you if you will spend more time with me).
• Not having your needs fulfilled justifies resentment and, potentially, divorce.
• Your value and that of your partner are often viewed in terms of how well you fulfill needs, not your intrinsic value as a person.

We need more than Finkel’s advice to spend more time fulfilling each other’s needs. We can start by not:

• Viewing self-expression as if it were the same thing as self-interest.
• Viewing what we want in life as needs that we are entitled to have fulfilled.
• Viewing marital interactions as quid pro quo exchanges of needs.

Let’s talk about how we can go about working together to help each other flourish as individuals and as a couple. I call this “collaborative negotiation.”

Collaborative Negotiation: A Marital Relationship Process for the Self-Expressive Era

Most of us who are marrying want a relationship that supports both of our individual life plans. We believe we can accomplish this together better than we can as individuals. Let’s learn to negotiate collaboratively the things that are important to both of us to flourish in the marriage. Here is how to do this.

The Negotiation Process

Whether you are discussing big plans like career choices, talking about a disagreement, making plans for a holiday, deciding if you want to have sex, choosing to go to the movies, etc., the process is the same.

• Approach your partner. Give your partner a heads-up about what you want to talk about because it’s important to give them time to think about it. Set a time to talk—perhaps in an hour, perhaps at a later time convenient to both of you.
• Express what you want. This is the time to talk about why something you want is important to you.
• Remember, every concern of yours is a concern of mine. Remember, do not privilege your preferences over your partner’s.
• Now, you can negotiate. Now you can decide on how to work out a resolution that considers both partners’ wishes and wants.

Negotiation Requires Collaboration

This life-long partnership requires great attention to the maintenance of a collaborative environment of negotiation. Here are some thoughts about what being collaborative means:

• Collaborators are equal. True collaborators are equals, and each is responsible for their part in the process of negotiation.
• Collaboration is the sharing of authority and willingness to negotiate in good faith—you don’t try to privilege your position.
• Collaboration is not capitulation. Collaboration protects individual autonomy. Most of us have a (possibly subconscious) fear of being overwhelmed by others; you do not surrender your self-interest by collaborating with your partner.
• Collaboration is not cooperation. Collaboration is about the process of working together, while cooperation is about the result of working together. For example, I can cooperate with you by stepping aside while you do what you want to do.

Marriage Does Not Have to Be Suffocating

Over the marital eras described by Finkel, the personal, intimate relationship has become more central to what is important in marriage. During the institutional era, economic and reproductive survival was more important than the quality of the relationship. If couples developed an intimate, loving quality in their marriage, that was an extra.

During the companionate era, marriage was organized to support the socio-economic order—it got structured around gender roles and the concept of self-interest—defined as needs—as people’s primary motivation. Thus, happy and satisfying marriages were those in which husbands and wives satisfied each other’s gender-based needs.

We need a new model of how marriages can work for the era of self-expressiveness that does not view self-expression as selfishness, i.e., being primarily motivated by self-interested needs. This new approach to marriage means that you and your spouse can keep perspective of yourselves both as individuals and as a couple at the same time—the sense of “being in this together” while also having “a sense of autonomy.” It works by being collaborative in the negotiation of your individual and joint life plans.