Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
Reason 1–5
Disclaimer: I’m not married, yet. Just trying to make a recap of a really great book I’ve read.
And, to give you more context, read the previous chapter where I wrote about how love stories ruin our love lives.
Without a doubt, anyone we might marry would be a little bit wrong for us. After all, how can you hope to even find the perfect one amongst 7 billions people? What are the chances?
Everywhere you go, there will always be, couples that appear to have married the wrong person. How could this be? Apparently, we always trip into these 9 mistakes.
1. We Don’t Understand Ourselves
More often than not, when we are looking for the one, we come up with non-specific and vague criteria. It is not wrong, but they are not precise enough to describe what we need in order to be happy.
One way or another, we all have our craziness in our particular ways. Even more so, we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s running through our minds. Sadly, no one ever encourages us to figure out why. Yet, when we don’t know ourselves, we expect our partner to be able to handle us when we are crazy mad.
A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people, it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.
Whenever a threat appears and try to reveal the our craziness, we tend to blame the partner — and then call it a day. We go back to being alone and we never takes the opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us. This side that would start to make us cold and strange if it ever feels we are going to be committed to someone.
Alone, we create the flattering illusion that we, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.
2. We Don’t Understand Other People
You’re not alone. Almost everybody is stuck in the same hole as you. They too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.
What we actually need is a PhD-level insight that is only available to a few.
And, we should put our prospective partners through psychological questionnaires and to be assessed by teams professionals.
Why? Cause we need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. When we don’t even understand our prospective partner, how can we be happy? Life is full of surprises, but, it won’t always be fun.
We are collectively a great deal more interested in a beautiful wedding than a tolerable marriage.
3. We Aren’t Used to Being Happy
What could we be searching in love? Happiness seems to be the answer. But it’s not that simple. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant.
It could be that, what we seek is actually familiarity. We want to recreate the love we knew in adult relationships. But, as children, we have very limited knowledge, and we probability will tell you that most likely we didn’t process it well. Heck, the love we receive as children may have come with less pleasant situations. For example: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, etc.
And here comes the plot twist. It’s very possible that we marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong — undeserved.
We marry wrongly because don’t — whatever we may say — ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.
The right ones feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. Not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced, too right.
4. Being Single Is so Awful
For those asians, I bet you realise that after a certain age, society makes singlehood dangerously unpleasant. Sex is hard to come by as well. For every family gathering or whenever you meet far away relation you barely know, they always ask this annoying questions.
Especially for Asians, sex is only available after marriage. It’s a taboo if it’s done outside of marriage. Apparently people will talk bad things about you. Maybe there will be some talks about your parents for not being able to raise you properly. Maybe you will be judged because you are not a religious person and so on.
This culture lead people to marry for the wrong reasons. To obtain something that was artificially restricted in society as a whole.
5. Instinct Has Too Much Prestige
How many types of marriage did you know? Originated back then from the olden days, there was Marriage of Reason. This is the type of marriage that happens when marriage is all about a rational business. Back then, all you had to do was match your bit of land with theirs. Now, sometimes we can still see people who marry to maintain family business, to up their family economic situation, to raise their social status, etc.
Some time laters, came the Marriage of Instinct, the romantic marriage. If one feels that they are ‘in love’, that fact alone is enough. The love should be the only guide to action.
Also, there is the Marriage of Feeling, which is part of the Marriage of Instinct. This one dictates that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is marrying.
To analyse the decision feels ‘unromantic’. To write out charts of pros and cons seems absurd and cold. The most romantic thing one can do is just to propose quickly and suddenly, perhaps after only a few weeks, in a rush of enthusiasm.
Well, I guess that’s it for the first 5 reasons. See ya on the next 4 reasons :)
