When was the last time you had a 1:1 with your spouse? Not a date night, but a marriage check in on your challenges and improvement areas. Probably not as often as you have with your boss. “People would never not check in on the job.
There are staff meetings all the time, you discuss challenges and clear them up,” psychotherapist Linda Bloom, who has been helping couples work on their marriages for over 50 years at Bloomwork , tells Fortune . “People have the romantic notion that just because they married each other and love each other, everything’s supposed to just flow from that. That’s wrong—you’ve got to have a structure that supports the well-being of your marriage, just like you have the structure that supports the well-being of your career development.
” It’s an important part of what Bloom, who has co-authored four books on marriage with her husband, deems the personal growth marriage—a marriage that she says helps both partners heal from family of origin or relationship wounds and learn relationship skills like communication, conflict management, negotiation, and repair. It’s what the late David Schnarch, a clinical psychologist, gets at in his 1997 book Passionate Marriage , in which he calls marriage a “people growing machine.” And it’s what Eli Finkel, professor of social psychology at Northwestern University, refers to as a self-expressive marriage in his 2017 book The All-or-Nothing Marriage .
In it, he argues that today’s marriages .