marriage
Det er én af de ting, som vi er mest bange for vil ske for os. Vi gør meget for at undgå det. Og alligevel sker det. Vi gifter os med den forkerte person.

Til dels fordi vi har en forivirrende mængde af problemer, som opstår, når vi prøver at komme tæt på andre. Vi synes kun at være normale for dem som ikke kender os særligt godt. I et visere mere selvbevidst samfund end vores eget, ville et standard spørgsmål ved enhver middag i begyndelse af et forhold være: "Og på hvilken måde er du skør?"

Måske har vi et skjult talent for at blive rasende, når nogen er uenige med os eller kun kan slappe af når vi arbejder; måske er vi sensitive omkring sensitivitet efter sex eller lukker i som svar på ydmygelse. Ingen er perfekt. Problemet er at før ægteskab dvæler vi sjælden over vores kompleksiteter. Når som helst tilfældige forhold truer med at afsløre vores svagheder, beskylder vores partner og slår op. Hvod vores venner angår bekymre de sig ikke nok til at ville gøre det hårde arbejde med at oplyse os. Ét af privilegierne ved at være alene er derfor det oprigtige indtryk, at vi i virkelig er ret lette at leve sammen med.

Vores partnere er ikke mere selvbevidste. Naturligvis gør vi et forsøg på at forstå dem. Vi besøger deres familie. Vi ser på deres billeder, vi møder deres studiekammerater. Alt dette bidrager til en følelse af, at vi har gjort vores hjemmearbejde. Det har vi ikke. Ægteskab ender som et håbefuldt, gavmildt, uendeligt venligt lotteri, der foretages af to mennesker, som stadig ikke kender sig selv, eller hvem den anden måtte være, mens de binder sig selv til en fremtid, de ikke kan begribe og omhyggeligt har undgået at undersøge.


Kommentar: Delvist oversat af Sott.net fra Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person (and why it doesn't matter)


marriage
© Marion Fayolle
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.

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.

Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the author of the novel "The Course of Love."