With material needs met, the desire for “self-actualization” is natural, but Finkel’s research confirms what we probably already suspect: “Just as we have increasingly looked to our marriage to help us fulfill higher-level needs, we have decreasingly invested the time and energy required for the marriage to meet these expectations.”
We still believe in romantic relationships, but we often don’t appreciate the effort required to build a healthy one. Worse yet, in combination with investing less time, we often hold dysfunctional mindsets about relationships.
Do you?
Getting Beyond Infatuation
Many relationships begin with infatuation and end when the reality of everyday living bumps up against our mental images. In his book “The Course of Love,” philosopher Alain de Botton writes, “We may so often have seen our partner pushing a buggy, arguing with a toddler, crossly berating the electricity company and returning home defeated from the workplace that we have forgotten that dimension in him or her that remains adventurous, impetuous, cheeky, intelligent, and above all else, alive.”
“The essential error of infatuation,” writes Botton, is “a failure to keep in mind a central truth of human nature”:
“Everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.”
Releasing Expectations by Assuming Good Intentions
Day after day, our partner may violate our expectations. “Countless times over the course of a day, a year, or a marriage,” observes Finkel, “we generate an explanation for why a partner enacted a given behavior.” The explanations we construct via our thinking will go a long way toward determining whether our relationships flourish.
The worst type of explanation, according to Finkel’s research, is one that involves attributing a stable internal characteristic to your partner, a fixed attribute or disposition. For example, your partner arrives late to an event that is important to you. “You never understand what is important to me” flashes through your mind. With that thought, you have attributed the behavior to a fixed disposition. Having made that attribution, it’s easy to feel terrible about the relationship. Less corrosive is a temporary, external explanation for the behavior: “My partner was stuck in traffic.”
We aren’t up to the task of judging, and our judgments eat away at our relationships. “Perceiving our partner’s motives with precise accuracy has value but doing so is virtually impossible,” explains Finkel, “and the tendency to misperceive benign motivation as malignant can trigger an escalating cycle of conflict and negativity.”
When my wife is working at home, she, like I, gets very focused and doesn’t like to be interrupted. If I interrupt, I can expect a curt reply. Her curtness has nothing to do with me; she has a deadline, and if I am more considerate and wait for a more opportune time, she will again be her charming self. If I take her blunt response personally and get lost in my thinking, an insignificant event can be upsetting.
Thus, Finkel advises us to assume good intentions: “If we are confident that our partner is, by and large, a decent person who wants to do well by us, there is a strong argument that we should seek to make attributions that give him or her the benefit of the doubt.”
Finkel asks us to make “a deliberate effort to see the beauty underneath the anger and disappointment and boredom—to look with [appreciative] new eyes.”
With significant conflicts, Finkel recommends that partners think about a conflict in their marriage from the perspective of a neutral third party who’d want the best for all involved. Ask, “How might this person think about the disagreement? How might he or she find the good that could come from it?”
Of course, it’s best to do this in real-time, as a conflict is brewing. Have a little willingness to doubt your interpretation, pause for a moment, and step above the fray.
Cultivate a Growth Mindset
Finkel builds his book, in part, on the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In her books, such as “Mindset,” and her many articles, Dweck maps out two mindsets with opposing beliefs about ability and intelligence. One Dweck calls a fixed mindset, the other she calls a growth mindset. If your views about intelligence are of the fixed mindset, you believe a person’s abilities are set in stone. If you have a growth mindset, you believe abilities can be developed and are built over time. (There are tools online to help you assess your mindset.)
Understanding your mindset can increase your effectiveness in relationships. A person with a fixed mindset is frightened by challenges. They feel a constant need to prove themselves and appear successful. They would tend to hold the belief that some have a natural-born aptitude for relationship skills; thus, to make an effort in a relationship would be an admission that they are too inept to have a successful one.
If a relationship has challenges, those with a fixed mindset lose interest, eschew responsibility, and assign blame. Cultivating the capacity to love, they reason, is only for those who don’t have their natural skills.
Someone with a growth mindset will embrace challenges and see setbacks as opportunities for further learning. Specifically, the capacity to love is something they grow throughout their lifetime. Challenges provide opportunities to grow even deeper relationships.
If you have a growth mindset, the journey toward being more loving is challenging and joyous. You get out of bed curious to see what lessons life will serve up and what you can learn.
If your idea of a committed relationship is limited to a mutually favorable exchange, you will soon be bitterly disappointed. Inevitably, your “deal” will go south, and you will have buyer’s remorse.
We aren’t bound by our past. No matter how many times we have been mistaken, in this moment we can choose again. If you have become cynical about love, know that only mistaken beliefs are in your way, and committed relationships that promote the flourishing of both partners are possible.
If you have a fixed mindset about relationships, you can keep blundering ahead. Or, you can be open to another way. Rather than mentally demand others always behave according to your expectations, you can increase your capacity to love. This other way is simply written and easily said, but mastery of the other way is the journey of a lifetime.
Today, where on your list of priorities have you placed increasing your capacity to love? What excuses do you have for allowing your efforts to lapse? Your answers will determine the quality of your relationship.