How many times have you dreamed of finding the man to marry, be happy and live in a perfect world? Well, we tell you that all that time was wasted, because in the end we always end up with the wrong one, why?
In part, it’s because we face a variety of problems when trying to get close to others. Only to those who don’t know us well we seem normal. In a wiser and more self-aware society than ours, a common question on a first date would be: «And what neurosis do you have?»
Maybe we have a tendency to lose our temper when someone disagrees with us or we can only relax when we are working; perhaps intimacy after sex is difficult for us or we remain silent in the face of humiliation. Nobody is perfect. The problem is that, before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Every time a relationship threatens to expose our flaws, we blame the other and call it a break. As far as our friends are concerned, they are not so keen to go to the trouble of enlightening us. Thus, one of the privileges of being alone is the honest impression that being with us is a piece of cake.
Nor could we say that our partners are more aware. Of course, we make the attempt to understand them. We visit their relatives. We look at his photos, we meet his schoolmates. All this helps us to have the feeling that we know something about each other. It is not like this. Marriage ends up being a kind of hopeful bet that two people make who do not yet know who they are or who they will become, who come together in a future they are unable to conceive of and have been careful to avoid investigating.
For most of human history, people married for a set of logical reasons: because their land adjoined; the groom’s family had a flourishing business; the father of the bride was a magistrate in the town; there was a castle to maintain, or the in-laws and in-laws agreed to the same interpretation of the holy scriptures. Loneliness, infidelity, abuse, coldness and screams emanated from those very reasonable marriages that reached the children’s room. In retrospect, the marriage of reason was not reasonable at all; he was often helpful, intolerant, and abusive. That is why what came later, the marriage of feelings, was not required to explain itself.
In the marriage of feelings, what matters is that two people feel a mutual attraction arising from an irresistible instinct, that their heart tells them is the right thing to do. In fact, the more reckless the marriage (perhaps they just met six months ago; one of them is out of a job or they are both just out of their teens)the safer you feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction that rebels against so many centuries of unreasonable reason.
Although we think we are looking for happiness in marriage, it is not that simple. What we really seek is familiarity, which can greatly complicate those happiness plans we had. We are seeking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings that we knew so well during our childhood. The love that most of us thought we experienced in our early years was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: the feeling of wanting to help an out-of-control adult, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth, or being frightened by their anger, of not feeling confident enough to communicate what we wanted.
How logical it is, then, that as adults we are rejecting certain potential spouses not because they are bad, but because they are too good. —too balanced, mature, understanding and trustworthy— because in our hearts that suitability is alien to us. We marry the wrong person because we don’t associate feeling loved with being happy.
We also make mistakes because we are so lonely. Nobody can be sane enough to choose a partner when staying single seems unbearable. We have to be totally at peace with the idea of spending many years alone in order to be selective for the good; Otherwise, we risk being more in love with the idea of not being alone than with the person who spared us the pain of continuing like this.
Finally, we get married to eternalize a pleasant feeling. We imagine that marriage will help us encapsulate the bliss we felt the first time the idea of joining in marriage crossed our minds: maybe we were in Venice, on a boat, and the late-afternoon sun turned the sea gold; we talked about those parts of the soul that no other person had ever understood before, and we had plans to have a risotto dinner soon after. We got married to perpetuate these feelings, but we didn’t see that there wasn’t a solid connection between those feelings and the institution of marriage.
Indeed, marriage certainly takes us to a very different and more administrative plane, perhaps taking place in a house, with a long walk to work every day and screaming children who kill the passion from which they were born. The only ingredient in common is the couple. And we may have been left with the wrong ingredient.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we realize we married the wrong person.
We should not abandon that person, but we should abandon the romantic idea on which the Western understanding of marriage has been based for the last 250 years: there is a perfect being who can satisfy all our needs and each of our desires.
We need to change that romantic view by a tragic (and to some extent comic) awareness that all human beings will make us feel frustrated, upset, and disappointed, and that we will do the same. We will never stop feeling empty or incomplete. But none of this is extraordinary or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to engage with is simply about identifying which specific variety of suffering we would like to give ourselves more to.
This philosophy of pessimism offers us a solution to much of the angst and turmoil surrounding marriage. It may sound strange, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure our romantic culture puts on marriage. The failure of a relationship that could not save us from our sorrow and melancholy is not an argument against the other person or a sign that a union deserves to fail or improve.
The best person for us is not the person who shares all our tastes (such a person does not exist), but the person who can intelligently negotiate differences in tastes, the one who is good at disagreeing. Instead of this imagined idea of the perfect complement, it is precisely the ability to tolerate differences with generosity that truly indicates who the person is. “less flatly wrong”. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it should not be your precondition.
Romanticism has been useful to us; it is a hard philosophy. It has made many of the situations we experience in marriage seem exceptional and terrible. We end up alone and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal”. We should learn to get used to the idea of our “lack of suitability”, always trying to adopt a more flexible, fun and kind vision before its multiple examples in ourselves and in our colleagues.
Taken from the New York Times