At the Association for the Advancement of Science conference—a general science meeting taking place in Chicago this week—psychologist Eli Finkel from Northwestern University delivered a talk about how marriage has changed over time. He was mainly focused on debunking the notion that people expect more from marriage now than they ever have. “It’s not about more or less,” he said. “It’s about where you are in Maslow’s hierarchy.”
Finkel used psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous theory about the “hierarchy of needs” to explain how marriage has evolved. Pre-industrialization, pairing off was a pragmatic endeavor. “What people looked for at that time from marriage was ability to achieve things like food production,” he said. Marriage satisfied basic needs, such as safety and hunger, at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As Americans began to move from farms to cities, their marriages moved up the hierarchy of needs. Now that basic requirements were met, the “companionate marriage” became more common: people could think about linking up for love and belonging.
In 1960s, the birth control pill emerged and civil rights movements brewed. There were a “slew of countercultural revolutions” and increasingly, people began to look to marriage as a mechanism for personal growth. Finkel quoted the sociologist Robert N. Bellah: love is “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.” Through marriage, said Finkel, “All of us want to become our own unique special butterfly… We want to discover who it is we are and become the best version of ourselves.”
To illustrate Finkel’s talk, I used Venngage to make this infographic. (You need to click through to see the full picture.) It took me less than three hours to watch the talk and produce the infographic. Venngage was very efficient but I only realized after using the service that you must subscribe in order to properly export whatever image you create.
P.S: You can read more about Finkel’s research on marriage in this recent New York Times piece.
