We are all longing for the right partner.
We want to meet the person of our dreams. Feel the sparks. Those big feelings that leave no doubt that this individual is the one. We want to form that deep connection with the person who gets us. Who knows just the right ways to love us. We want to love them in all the ways they need it. And to crown it all we want to marry them to conserve this perfect happiness for the rest of our lives.
But only very few of us actually do that.
The divorce rates don’t lie. And carefully watching the people around us probably doesn’t either.
That’s not only our own mistake, though. We just keep marrying the wrong people. For the wrong reasons.
Because, as sad as it is, every human being we meet is the wrong person in their own way. We all are.
There’s hope, though: As long as we begin our relationships with the right attitude, we at least have the chance to live happily ever after. And, who knows, we might even be able to enjoy the things that are wrong. With our partners — and also with ourselves.
The idea of marriage has changed over time.
Back in the day, in western cultures, marriage was all rational. Business. It was about the consolidation of property. About strategic alliances and status. When parents arranged such marriages, no one cared about romantic feelings or a happily ever after.
Then, though, it gradually developed into being all about feelings. It didn’t have to be rational at all, as long as people were in love. Almost like an act of rebellion against the previous rational marriage. The only reason for marriage could be true love. Deliberate reasoning and weighing pros and cons was considered unromantic and uncomprehendingly frowned upon.
With average divorce rates of 50% it might be time to think about the next evolutionary step in marriages, then: the psychological marriage.
One where we don’t get married for practical reasons or for the feeling of being in love alone. In a psychological marriage we carefully get to know each other. And soberly analyze the complexity of our psyches. Our own as well as the the one of our potential spouse.
You don’t know enough to lead a happy marriage.
Most of us don’t do their homework before getting married. We don’t go to marriage school. We just trust our feeling of having found the right partner.
But let’s face it: That’s not enough.
When you make the decision to spend the rest of your life with a partner, you should know what you’re getting yourself into. You should know both parties well enough to have an idea of how future challenges will affect you.
You don’t know yourself well enough.
You think you’re normal, don’t you?
We consider everyone to be normal. Until we get to know them.
Here’s the thing: It’s hard to get to know yourself. Relationships are a wonderful mirror. If you’re alone, you have no one to reflect you your weird ways. And your friends don’t care enough to show you a way a partner would. Have you ever noticed you can become a complete *** when in a relationship? In a way you would never treat your friends? That’s what I mean.
You don’t know your partner well enough.
I’m assuming you don’t have a detailed psychoanalysis of your partner. Sure, you did some homework. Maybe you guys have been living together for a while. You went to visit their family. You had a couple of fights. You made up. Some of you even went so far as to discuss all the seemingly important topics such as money, children, and life vision. They told you about their past and their dreams.
But humans are so much more complicated than that.
What you have is an infomercial about a space shuttle. And now you’re assuming that watching it has you ready to fly it to the moon.
It’s not your fault. That’s how your brain works. It wants to make sense of things. You see a few stripes and your brain sees a face. And that’s exactly what you are doing with your partner. You know a few things and now you think you know them well enough to marry them.
Don’t get married for the wrong reasons.
First of all, think of why you want to get married.
There’s research to support the idea that married people are happier and healthier than non-married people. One of the reasons for that may be the idea of social connectivity.
Still, the divorce rates show that marriage is no guarantee for happiness. Probably mostly because we are getting married for the wrong reasons.
Here are a few:
We want to preserve the sparks.
We have this crazy idea that by getting married we will freeze time and somehow preserve the sparks. We know about the divorce rates but we think that for us it will be different. Even if we are aware of the fact that it will not always be easy, we rarely think about it deeply.
It’s the ‘logical next step’.
Some people get married because they feel like it’s the logical next step. Because everyone around them gets married or they feel pressured by their families or society.
Getting married because that’s what people do.
Being alone is scary.
In my opinion, this is the worst of all wrong reasons.
Be honest with yourself here: If you knew for sure that you would get everything that you hope to get out of your marriage elsewhere as well.
Would you still get married?
If society and your parents wouldn’t care about your status. If you knew for sure you could have sex whenever you wanted. If you were absolutely certain that you would always have a friend in need.
Would you?
It’s interesting how the idea of true companionship still seems to be exclusively reserved for married people.
I don’t think that has to be true. After all, I know quite a few people who have better relationships with their best friends than with their spouse.
Things marriage school should teach us.
It’s not going to be perfect.
Your partner will annoy you. They will drive you crazy at times. And it’s important to realize that everyone else would, too. It’s just who we are as humans: imperfect.
Your partner won’t always understand you.
Let go of that hope. I know in the beginning it feels like they are the only ones who truly get you. And they might be more accurate than most other people. But that won’t always be the case. There will be times when they have no clue how you are feeling. Or when they truly disagree with something that is really important to you.
You won’t understand everything either. There will be times when you just don’t get why they are acting a certain way.They are their own human being with their own crazy thoughts and aspirations.
And that’s okay. Even in a marriage.
Accept that your job is to love. Not to be loved.
Marriage is not like your typical parent-child relationship where a baby is loved just for being.
Secretly, most of us expect that our partner needs to love us the same way. We long for that feeling we had as children and demand from our partners to create that feeling for us again.
Realistically, though, we should switch from being the child to being the parent. And be okay with the idea of putting our own needs aside for our partner every once in a while.
To be forgiving if the partner says something they don’t mean. To hear the need behind the words instead of the words themselves. A snappy ‘Leave me alone!’ could mean ‘I’ve had a hard day at work. It has nothing to do with you. I simply don’t have the energy right now to engage with you. This has nothing to do with me not caring about you. Please give me some time to recover and then I’ll be all yours again.’
This is not to say that you should put up with abusive behavior. The idea is that both of you love each other in this way. There’s never room for abusive behavior.
Accept that marriage entails a great deal of administrative work.
On first thought, people assume that marriage is just sex, love, and companionship. But actually marriage is more like managing your own little company. There are a lot of things to take care of: household chores, driving the kids around, juggling job with personal life, meeting friends and families, budgeting, ..
None of this is romantic or magical. But still, it is the basis of marriage.
Realize that sex and love belong together. And also not.
That is, while in the beginning you might be all over each other, you need to realize that the center of your marriage will be the administrative part. Your companionship. Or your children, if you have any.
Sex will not be it.
Probably the hardest, most hurtful, but also most important thing to discuss before marriage is infidelity. And how you want to deal with it.
Statistics show that 70% of Americans engage in some form of infidelity in their marriage. That doesn’t mean that it will inevitably happen to you. But let’s face it: There’s a fair chance it will become a topic at some point.
Even though just the thought of it may hurt deeply, it’s important to talk about it. How do you want to deal with it? What if you or your partner develop feelings for someone else? Or keep having thoughts of sleeping with other people? Do you want to talk about it once it’s there? Maybe to find out what’s missing? Do you want to keep it a secret? Do you want to experiment with an open relationship?
As much as it hurts, numbers show that infidelity is omnipresent — so we might as well deal with it in a mature way.
Accept that your partner is smarter than you.
At least in some areas. They will be better than you. More mature, more reasonable. Put your ego aside and admire them. Be grateful you get to learn from them.
In the same way accept the fact that you are smarter than them in other areas. And be patient with them if they don’t understand right away what you think is a no brainer.
We are both, teachers and students at the same time.
Realize you’re not as compatible as you initially thought.
In the beginning it might seem that the right person is the one that we have most in common with. In the long run, however, this becomes less and less relevant.
We will change over time anyway. And after a couple of years those same interests might not be there anymore.
What will always be there, however, are differences.
So the truth is, it’s not the person we have most in common with that is a great fit. It’s the one who knows how to deal with the differences.
Final Thoughts
While it seems to be normal in the western world to go to birth preparation class once you’re expecting a child, people do not take classes to prepare for marriage. The divorce rates are the obvious consequence of that.
The challenges in a marriage are no secret.
We all know people who are married — happily or not. We all know people who are divorced. We have so many examples to learn from.
We can always prepare. Do our homework. Putting the fluffy emotions aside and rationally think and talk about how we want to tackle the challenges.
It might not be as romantic, but it’s surely worth it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Meryl Spadaro on Unsplash