The School of Life - Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person & Other Essays

Why You
Will Marry the
Wrong Person
&
Other Essays

Other books in this series:

On Confidence

How to Find Love

Why We Hate Cheap Things

Self Knowledge

The Sorrows of Work

The Sorrows of Love

Why You
Will Marry the
Wrong Person
&
Other Essays

The School of Life

Published in 2017 by The School of Life

70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB

Copyright The School of Life 2017

Designed and typeset by Marcia Mihotich

Printed in Latvia by Livonia Print

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without express prior consent of the publisher.

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The School of Life offers programmes, publications and services to assist modern individuals in their quest to live more engaged and meaningful lives. Weve also developed a collection of content-rich, design-led retail products to promote useful insights and ideas from culture.

www.theschooloflife.com

ISBN 978-0-9957535-6-3

Contents

I
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

II
When Is One Ready to Get Married?

III
How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives

Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We dont expect bliss every day. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Nevertheless, there are couples who display such deep-seated incompatibility, such heightened rage and disappointment, that we have to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal scratchiness: they appear to have married the wrong person.

How do such errors happen in our enlightened, knowledge-rich times? We can say straight off that they occur with appalling ease and regularity. Academic achievement and career success seem to provide no vaccines. Otherwise intelligent people daily and blithely make the move.

Given that it is about the single costliest mistake any of us can make (it places rather large burdens on the state, employers and the next generation too), there would seem to be few issues more important than that of marrying intelligently.

Its all the more poignant that the reasons why people make the wrong choices are rather easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. We ruin our lives for reasons that can be summed up in an essay. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories:

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautifully non-specific sentimental vagueness: well say we really want to find someone who is kind or fun to be with, attractive or up for adventure.

It isnt that such desires are wrong; they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy or, more accurately, not consistently glum.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. Were distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but dont know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do and, most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there arent many of these on the planet), its one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.

The feeling that we might not be too difficult to live with should set off alarm bells. The only people we can think of as normal are those we dont know very well. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or were a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or weve never been so good at explaining whats on our minds when were worried. Its these sorts of issues that over decades create catastrophes and that we should ideally therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: And how are you mad?

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, were rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the difficult side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably dont care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when were furious, we dont shout, as theres no one there to listen and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because theres no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use our jobs to gain a sense of control over life and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us labouring. At night, all were aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on ones own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we arent in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

This problem is compounded because other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.

Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos; we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense that weve done our homework. But its like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.

We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person were planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, and stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, money, children, ageing, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge wont be available via a standard chat. We need a level of insight currently generally only available to psychological professionals at the PhD level.