I usually tell couples considering marriage that there is surprisingly little about their dating experience that will be important to their marriage experience. That’s because our dating culture teaches us to look for romance, while marriage is surprisingly unromantic hard work, that requires a different set of skills than staging a good date.
Increasingly, people are coming to see this. Alain de Botton writing in the New York Times, on “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”, makes a distinction between the Marriage of Reason and the Marriage of Feeling:
..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…
The Marriage of Feeling, though, often has us looking to marriage to solve psychological needs bequeathed to us by our messed-up emotional histories–we marry for companionship when lonely and single, or we marry to recreate a childhood emotional experience (or avoid a childhood trauma), or to take a particularly romantic moment from dating and bottle it for the future. That’s not what marriage is for, argues de Botton, and thinking it is leads us to conclude that the problem is with our spouse–when the real problem is conceptual:
…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.
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