This is a long push, about 6,000 words, and it takes ten minutes to read.
But it's worth reading, it comes from the philosopher Alain de Botton.
It looks a bit frustrating — an analysis of nine reasons why you're going to marry the wrong person.
But he mentions a crucial problem: a lot of the pain in marriage comes from the misleading romantic view of love.
"Romanticism convinces people that they are destined to have a Mr/Miss Right. As long as you find him, everything will be solved. He will satisfy all your emotional needs and fill all your emotional voids. With ta, you are never alone..."
"And the reality is,
Each of us is hurt by life to the skin,
And every day, I have to pick up my mood to meet new sadness.
No one is born to comfort, understand, and fill other people. ”
De Botton cruelly punctured those dream bubbles, but in this way, the pressures of marriage can actually be relieved, because:
"Without Mr/Miss Right, then there is no Mr/Miss Wrong..."
We ended up marrying the wrong guy
There is no doubt that no marriage partner will be perfect. It is wise to be pessimistic about choosing a marriage partner.
Perfect marriages are rare, and unsatisfactory is the norm. That being said, when you see the bitter, root-seated incompatibility between some partners, the deep-seated incompatibility between them, you have to believe that not all long-term relationships don't have the usual disappointments and frictions.
It's much more than that — some people shouldn't be together at all.
How did these mistakes come about? They appear so frequently and normally.
Marrying the wrong person is probably the easiest and most costly mistake we make.
We have never explored the issue of "choosing a marriage wisely" more systematically, both at the national and individual levels, as we have about road safety and smoking. It's incredible, it's a crime.
Even sadder than that is that the reasons people make the wrong choices are actually very simple and easy to understand, and there is nothing special about it. Causes generally fall into the following broad categories:
01
We don't know ourselves
When we first start looking for a partner, our requirements for that person tend to be vague, embellished with some beautiful, sensual, but unspecific words:
We would say, looking for someone who is "kind" or "fun to be together", "charismatic" or "adventurous"...
It's not that these requirements aren't right, it's just not precise enough to describe exactly what kind of person makes us happy —or, more precisely, not always bad.
There is madness in each of us, there are different neuroticisms, instability and immaturity, but we know nothing about it, because no one has ever firmly encouraged us to understand the details behind the madness.
One of the most important tasks for everyone in love is to figure out what they are angry about.
You must have a thorough understanding of your mood swings, where these problems are at their root, and what they will turn into people – and most importantly, what kind of people will stimulate your emotions and what kind of people will relieve your irritability.
A quality partnership is not necessarily built between two healthy people (there are not many healthy people in this world), but rather two flawed people, capable, or lucky, to find a safe zone where they can coexist in accommodation between what they call paranoia.
When we have the idea to anyone that "we should be doing well together," it's time to sound the alarm for ourselves.
Because many times, this is exactly the problem:
Perhaps, we will have a tendency to be angry when refuted by others;
Perhaps, we can only feel relaxed if we are addicted to work;
Perhaps, we are not used to having intimate expressions after sex;
Perhaps, we have never learned how to express ourselves when we feel anxious within ourselves.
These problems may seem small, but after decades of accumulation, they can lead to catastrophe. Therefore, we need to be aware of these problems in advance, and we need to pay attention to those who can digest these problems well.
And at the beginning of any date, it's necessary to ask the question, "What's wrong with you?" ”
The problem is that it's not easy to understand your illness. It takes many years, a lot of different experiences.
Before we get married, we rarely explore the complicated side of ourselves. When the beginning of a relationship exposes our own flaws, it's easy to push the blame onto the other person and break up.
As for the friends around you, they will not care about you enough to remind you to face your true self. They just want to come out and have a great night together. Therefore, it is difficult for us to have a chance to see the bad side of our own nature.
When we are alone, we don't yell at us because we're angry, because no one is listening, which makes us underestimate our potential for rage.
When we work alone, we can sleep and forget to eat and stay focused, because no one will urge us to eat, which will give us a sense of control over our lives – and if anyone tries to interrupt this state, you may feel like you are in hell.
At night, we all know how sweet it is to snuggle up with each other. But we don't know how cold and strange we can be in the eyes of our partners when we want to escape from an intimate relationship.
So
The greatest privilege of living alone is,
You will get an illusion:
Feel like a very nice person to get along with.
But it's just because you're so ignorant of your personality that it's no wonder you don't know what kind of partner you're looking for.
02
We don't know other people
This kind of problem is even more serious, because others, like us, have a low level of self-awareness. No matter how kindly the other person is, they are still like us, and they are not able to understand what makes them unhappy, let alone expect them to tell us.
Of course we will try to understand them.
We go to meet their families and maybe go see where they went to school as a child. We look at their past photos and get to know each other's friends.
All of this gives us the feeling of having done our homework, as if a rookie pilot had thrown a paper airplane in the house and thought he could fly it.
In a more mature society, partners complete detailed psychological assessments at the beginning of their relationships and then present them to a team of psychologists for in-depth assessment.
By 2100, such a scenario will no longer be a joke. At that point, people will wonder why it took so long for humans to start doing this.
We need to understand what the person we plan to marry thinks in their hearts, how they see authority, shame, introspection, sexual intimacy, psychological projection, money, children, aging, loyalty, and attitudes or positions toward a hundred things like this. These things are not something that can be learned in an ordinary chat.
Without understanding all of this, when we make judgments, it is easy to be misled by the appearance of the other party. The shape of the eyes, nose, forehead, the distribution of freckles, the smile...
From these appearances, it seems that a lot of information can be read. But it's as funny as looking at a picture of a power station's exterior and thinking it tells us everything about nuclear fission.
With only a small amount of evidence,
Just "project" a series of perfect human designs onto our loved ones.
According to a few tiny, but also imaginative details, the brain makes up the other party's entire personality, and the brain supplement we do is like the human eye when it sees a sketch of a face, it will automatically complete the unpainted parts.
We wouldn't think of this as a picture of someone with nostrils, just eight hairs, and no eyelashes. We ourselves don't even realize that we've made up for the missing parts.
Our brains are always ready to construct complete portraits from small visual cues —and we do the same when we learn about the personality of our future spouses.
03
We are not used to true happiness
We believe we can find joy in love, but things are not so simple. Sometimes we're really just looking for familiarity, and that can twist our path to happiness.
In adult relationships, we recreate some of the feelings we experienced as children. When we were children, we knew and understood for the first time what love is.
Unfortunately, the process of learning love is not always smooth. The love we know as children may be mixed with other, less pleasant emotions: being controlled, being humiliated, abandoned, grossly lacking in communication, and, in short, mixed with pain.
Therefore, when we grow up, we will reject some of the healthy partner candidates we meet, not because they are not good, but on the contrary, because they are too good (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this feeling of perfection makes us strange, and even a little oppressive.
We turn to the subconscious mind in choosing a partner, not because those people make us happy, but because the way they bring us pain feels familiar to us.
We marry the wrong people because the right people make us feel less right – they make us feel unworthy; because we haven't experienced healthy relationships, because we don't ultimately associate the feelings of being loved and being satisfied.
04
It's so bad to be single
When being single has made you unbearable, you are certainly not in an emotional mood that can choose a rational mate. We need to have the awareness to be single for many years before we can hope to build a good relationship.
Otherwise, we probably love "no longer single" more than "the man who made us no longer single."
Unfortunately, at a certain age, society can make single people difficult and hampered by public life. People with companions feel threatened by single men and women, so much so that they are reluctant to invite them to their homes regularly. When a person goes to the cinema alone, he feels like a monster.
It would be better to transform society into a university, or a collective community – public food, shared facilities, endless gatherings, free sexual intercourse...
In this way, those who think they are getting married can figure out whether they are marrying for the benefit of being two people together, not just to escape the disadvantages of being alone.
When sex is only available in marriage, this can lead to people getting married for the wrong reasons: to get sex, something that is artificially restricted throughout society. Now, when it comes to who to marry, people are free to make better choices, not just to satisfy an urgent sexual desire.
Yet our society is still otherwise imperfect. When companionship is only decently obtained between couples, people will choose to live together just to get rid of loneliness.
Now, it's time to liberate "companionship" from the shackles of their relationship. Just as sexual liberators want sexual freedom, they should also make people's companionship free and more accessible.
05
Intuition is overrated
In the past, marriage was a rational business, and the whole meaning was that the land owned by the two families was right. This combination is cold and merciless, and does not give any consideration to the happiness of both parties, and it still makes us feel cold to this day.
Later, "marriage of instinct," or "romantic marriage," replaced "rational marriage."
This ideology tells us that how one person feels about another should be the only criterion for deciding to get married. If you feel like you're "in love," that's enough, no need to ask any other questions. Feelings speak louder than anything.
In contrast, the previous "rational marriage" was too strict and stale, and in contrast, one of the characteristics of "intuitive marriage" is that you should not think too much about why you are married. Analyzing a decision is not at all "unromantic" at all.
Making a few tables to compare the pros and cons is not only ridiculous, but also cold. The most romantic thing a person can do is to have known each other for a few weeks and propose at a sudden moment with a burst of passion.
The old-fashioned "conservatism" is too risky for the happiness after marriage, as if the rashness of the "intuitive marriage" is the premise of the marriage.
06
Love is not taught in school
It's time for a third form of marriage: "psychology marriage."
In this form of marriage, people no longer marry for the land, nor do they marry on the basis of "feelings" alone, but only after this "feeling" has been examined by the mature minds of both parties and received mutual support will they take this step.
In this day and age, we don't know anything about marriage when we get married. We almost never read a book on this subject, and we never spend much time with small children.
We don't look to the root of someone else's married life, nor do we talk to divorced people. When we enter marriage, we don't have any deep understanding of why it fails – thinking that the reason for the failure of a marriage is simply the stupidity of the person concerned, or a lack of imagination.
In the age of "rational marriage," the following criteria were taken into account when marrying:
Who are the parents of the other person
How much land the other side owns
How similar are our cultures
In the era of "romantic marriage", it is necessary to pay attention to the following indicators to determine whether the marriage partner is suitable:
I couldn't stop thinking about each other
I long for the physical existence of the other person
I think the other person is fantastic
I always want to talk to each other
And in the age of "psychological marriage," we need a new set of rules. We should be curious:
The other person will be angry about what
How I would raise children with each other
How we grow together
How we continue to be friends
07
We want to be happy forever
We all have a fervent desire to have the good things alive forever. We want to have a car we love, we want to settle in our favorite country we've traveled to, we want to marry someone we're happy with.
We think that marriage is the guarantee that our happiness in the moment will continue, and it will make all that is fleeting become eternal. Marriage is like a bottle, you can put the happiness you have into the collection.
The happiness that should be cherished the most is when you first have the idea of proposing:
Then you sailed on the lagoons of Venice in motorboats, and the setting sun threw fine gold chips at the sea. I'm looking forward to going to the fish restaurant for dinner in a moment, and at this moment, my lover in a cashmere sweater is snuggling in the crook of your arm...
When we get married, we want to freeze this feeling forever. Unfortunately, however, there is no necessary connection between marriage and this feeling.
Marriage simply won't freeze that moment forever. That moment happened because you didn't know each other very well, because you weren't at work, you stayed in a nice hotel by the Grand Canal, you had a great afternoon at the Guggenheim Museum, you just had a glass of chocolate ice cream...
Marriage doesn't keep the relationship going at this wonderful stage. In that wonderful moment, the recipe for happiness is not in the hands of marriage.
In fact, getting married immediately leads the relationship to a very different state: living in the suburbs, commuting long commutes, and having two children. The only similarity is the person next to you, and that person may still be the wrong person.
The Impressionists of the nineteenth century had a secret idea of the vagaries of the world, and this set of ideas pointed us in a broader direction. In their view, happiness is inherently fleeting, which allows us to look at life more peacefully.
One thing that the Impressionists are interested in is that our favorite things are not static, they are short-lived and disappear without a trace. Impressionism celebrates the joy of the phantom of the floating light, not the happiness of the years.
The peak of life is often short-lived, and happiness does not happen all year round. Following the guidance of impressionism, we should know how to feel the sporadic and seemingly beautiful moments of daily life, and no longer mistakenly think that they can last forever, nor do we have to transform them into a "marriage".
08
We thought we were special
The statistics are not optimistic. Everyone can give many examples of unhappy marriages, and they have all seen the lessons of their friends around them.
Often, we know that a marriage always faces challenges, big and small. But when it's our turn to get married, we don't think so anymore. We take it for granted that this law applies only to others.
This is because, even if half of all marriages end in failure according to rough statistics, they are not so unacceptable, after all, love is already an unattainable thing.
Men and women in love feel as if they have the luck of being in nowhere, and they are in such a good momentum that the risk of marriage is no longer a problem.
We cannot be blamed for quietly excluding ourselves from the universal truth, but it may be useful to us if we are brave enough to put ourselves in the midst of the general destiny of people.
09
We don't want to worry about love anymore
Before marriage, our love life tends to go through many years of ups and downs.
We try to be with people who don't like us; we've socialized with people and broken up; we've been to parties endlessly hoping to meet new people; we've tasted excitement and the pain of disappointment.
No wonder at some point we feel fed up.
We want to get married, in part to end the spiritual drain of love. Those fruitless tosses and stimuli have exhausted our hearts, and the fear of new encounters in the future has made us restless.
We hope that marriage will put an end to the domination of love over the pain of our lives.
But marriage can't end these pains, and it won't end.
How much suspicion, expectation, fear, rejection and betrayal there is before marriage, there will be as much as there will be after marriage. Only from the outside, the married life seems calm, not salty, not light, beautiful to a little boring.
The article, "We Ended Up Marrying the Wrong Man," was published in the Philosopher's Post, founded by De Botton.
He also published a condensed version of The New York Times, one of the Times' most popular articles. In addition to reminding people to re-look at the concept of romantic love, it is also recommended that you give up the fantasy of "lover's eyes out of the West".
"First, when we find that our lovers are no longer perfect, we doubt our own vision;
Second, when the lover points out our shortcomings, we will be emotionally hurt, thinking that the other party no longer loves themselves, and do not think about why the lover must love their shortcomings;
Third, people are rarely self-aware, and many of their problems are often discovered by their partners, but we don't admit it yet. ”
Our strange things are often discovered by our partners.
Married life would not be so difficult if you could face these problems squarely, rather than falling into a dead cycle of fantasy, disappointment, or escape.