Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
MAY 28, 2016
IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.
Partly,
it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when
we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t
know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a
standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you
crazy?”
Perhaps
we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us
or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about
intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s
perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our
complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our
flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they
don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the
privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that
we are really quite easy to live with.
Our
partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to
understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we
meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve
done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous,
infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they
are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they
cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.
For
most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons:
because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing
business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to
keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation
of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed
loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard
through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight,
reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and
exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling
— has largely been spared the need to account for itself.
What
matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each
other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is
right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been
only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are
barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken
as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of
misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the
traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.
But
though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it
isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well
complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to
recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well
in childhood.
The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.
The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.
We
make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an
optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels
unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many
years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk
loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who
spared us that fate.
Finally,
we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage
will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing
first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a
motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea,
chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped
before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later.
We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that
there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution
of marriage.
Indeed,
marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and
more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house,
with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from
which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And
that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.
We
mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which
the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years:
that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our
every yearning.
We
need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic)
awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and
disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.
There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But
none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit
ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of
suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
This
philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and
agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves
the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon
marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our
grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign
that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.
The
person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every
taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate
differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at
disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity,
it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the
true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an
achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.
