A Steep Hill to Climb: Reconciling the Expanding Demands of Marriage

Finkel, Hui, Carswell, and Larson make a persuasive and interesting case that modern North American marriages are being asked to carry a considerable burden, satisfying an ever widening set of personal needs. Essentially, a partner is expected to be a lover, friend, muse, support provider, and facilitator of personal growth. Yet couples spend less time together, less time with friends and family, and more time taking care of their children than ever before. This constellation of social constraints makes it very difficult for partners to be everything to each other. It seems that something has to give in this marital pressure cooker. All too often, it is the relationship. In short, the authors make a compelling case that the combination of lofty expectations and diminished resources represents a problem in need of a solution. The precise problem that needs to be solved depends on one’s interpretation of the Maslow hierarchy. We gently suggest that casting the needs a relationship satisfies within a mountain metaphor imposes motivational assumptions that may be too upwardly mobile. We contend that the needs the authors identify might also be conceptualized using the metaphor of a web, spun from a central point. Specifically, we argue that the need to feel loved serves as a fulcrum or motivational center within relationships. In this web, spun from both partners’ needs to feel safe and loved, more purportedly basic (e.g., physiological) and high level (e.g., self-actualization) needs take on relationship significance because their satiation (or frustration) simultaneously satiates (or frustrates) the need to feel safe and loved. Within our motivational web, the need for confidence that one is loved is the central motive in interpersonal life, coloring the meaning of other motives. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the need to belong rests at Level 3, a stepping stone to presumably more advanced, and usually more individualistic, motivations. Leary and Baumeister (1995) construed the need to belong as the need for a sense of strong, persistent, and reliable caring by another. In our recent theoretical models of risk regulation (Murray, Holmes, & Collins, 2006) and interdependence (& Murray Holmes, 2009, 2011), we similarly conceptualize the satisfaction of the need to belong as a sense of confidence in a partner’s caring and responsiveness, as trust. Attachment theorists view it as secure attachment (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Both theoretical frameworks contend that felt security or trust is the platform necessary for both relationship and personal growth. Conceptualizing the need to feel safe and loved as a motivational fulcrum or center point within relationships contrasts with the Maslow mountain perspective in several respects. Adopting Maslow’s metaphor, the authors join the need to love and to be loved together within their motivational hierarchy. In our risk regulation framework, these two constructs develop not simply in parallel but in sequence. That is, a person’s confidence that a partner cares (belonging) controls the extent to which love and caring is reciprocated. Conviction that one is loved and will be cared for promotes closer connection with the partner and increased interdependence. In contrast, uncertainty about the partner’s caring results in self-protective distancing and caution and undermines a person’s capacity for a loving and interdependent life. Trust is the soil in which love grows. A great deal of evidence supports the idea that trust is the platform on which intimacy, closeness, and companionate love develop, including longitudinal research on marriage that clarifies the direction of the effect as being from trust to love and satisfaction (Derrick, Leonard, & Homish, 2012). In a sense, the need to belong precedes the process of loving another and experiencing a truly close relationship. Indeed, if one were to embrace the Maslow-ian mountain metaphor wholeheartedly, one could argue that loving and caring for another is a fourth, separate step in the hierarchy, one that cannot be achieved without first satisfying the third step. Adopting Maslow’s hierarchy, the authors also place esteem needs above the satisfaction of belongingness needs. In the sociometer model, Leary and Baumeister (2000) proposed that feeling valued and cared for by others is the very basis of self-esteem. That is, feeling valued comprises self-esteem. It is difficult for us to imagine that esteem needs readily take on a separate life of their own once belongingness needs are satisfied within close relationships. Instead, there seems to be a dynamic interplay between the two as selfesteem rises and falls with short-term daily changes