CULLED: WHY YOU WILL MARRY THE WRONG PERSON
Marrying wrong is 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: 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. Nobody’s perfect. The only 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.
Our partners are no more self aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their family, look at their photos, meet their friends and all of this contribute to the sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful generous infinite-kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know who they are yet , 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 get married for logical set of reasons. His father is rich, her family has a flourishing business, there are properties to inherit or because of common religion. And from these marriages emanate loneliness, infidelity, abuse and hardness of heart; after all, its foundation is often exploitative.
In the marriage of feelings, what matters is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their mind that it is right. But even though we believe ourselves to be seeking for happiness in marriage, which isn’t as simple as it appears. Most times however, what we really seek is familiarity- which may end up complicating any plans we might have had for happiness. We make mistakes because we are lonely too. No one can be in the perfect frame of mind when choosing a partner only because remaining single feels unbearable. 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; we marry to make those sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.
Realistically, marriage only tends to move us onto another very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a medium sized house and children, whose stress 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 that we realize that we’ve married the wrong person.
We must not abandon him or her, only the romantic idea upon which the western understanding of marriage was built: That a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy all our yearnings.
We need to swap the romantic idea for a comic, sometimes tragic view- that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us- and we will without any malice do the same to them. That there can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. That 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 likely sacrifice ourselves for.
The person who is best suited for us is not the person who shares our every taste- he or she doesn’t exist. It is the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently- a person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notational idea of perfect complimentarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ‘Right” person.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us. It is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what people 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.
Culled from: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html
Our partners are no more self aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their family, look at their photos, meet their friends and all of this contribute to the sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful generous infinite-kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know who they are yet , 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 get married for logical set of reasons. His father is rich, her family has a flourishing business, there are properties to inherit or because of common religion. And from these marriages emanate loneliness, infidelity, abuse and hardness of heart; after all, its foundation is often exploitative.
In the marriage of feelings, what matters is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their mind that it is right. But even though we believe ourselves to be seeking for happiness in marriage, which isn’t as simple as it appears. Most times however, what we really seek is familiarity- which may end up complicating any plans we might have had for happiness. We make mistakes because we are lonely too. No one can be in the perfect frame of mind when choosing a partner only because remaining single feels unbearable. 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; we marry to make those sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.
Realistically, marriage only tends to move us onto another very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a medium sized house and children, whose stress 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 that we realize that we’ve married the wrong person.
We must not abandon him or her, only the romantic idea upon which the western understanding of marriage was built: That a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy all our yearnings.
We need to swap the romantic idea for a comic, sometimes tragic view- that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden, and disappoint us- and we will without any malice do the same to them. That there can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. That 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 likely sacrifice ourselves for.
The person who is best suited for us is not the person who shares our every taste- he or she doesn’t exist. It is the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently- a person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notational idea of perfect complimentarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ‘Right” person.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us. It is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what people 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.
Culled from: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html
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