The Weight of Desire | Relationships
Are You Really in Love, or Are You Lying to Yourself? Part III
Relationship advice that doesn’t suck
Modern marriage is ubiquitous and is the perfect case study to examine love.
We likely all grew up around many married people. As a kid, all the adults in the room have been married for more years than you were alive. Things looked great on the outside–they had ostensibly happy relationships, kids, and maybe even grandkids, and everything seemed to be above board.
As you started to grow older, you realized that most of these people weren’t happy with one another and saw their partner as a roommate, a business partner, a co-parent, or anything except for the love of their life, the apple of their eye, and any of those other cringy cliche statement Disney told us our relationships would be like.
Over time, you also begin to get a peak under the hood and discover all the other horrors that people hide and the ugly side of relationships. You’ll be able to count on one hand the couples that were meant to be together and had happy life partnerships.
But if we think about it, doesn’t it make sense that this would be the case? Going back to the theme of the second article of this series, I have found from talking to hundreds of couples, reading dozens of books, and living my own life that relationships and love, like everything in life, are a pyramid, and few reach the apex.
Many people will fake it, like people fake wealth and status by buying things they can't afford or glossing up their lifestyle for appearances yet having attained no real wealth or status.
For the vast majority, it’s all surface and no depth.
Few couples are actually in great relationships, there are even fewer that have actually experienced a true sense of love, and sadly many people are either in deliberate ignorance or in an illusion.
Those deluded individuals are the ones that are the first to tell you how they have been married for 10+ years. As if time is any indicator of love.
In reality, they should be the first to tell you they have found someone they can split their bills with consistently, and that person has been splitting bills with them for 10+ years. Many couples divorce or separate due to the “20-year itch”–when the children are grown and have left the home. Since the 1990s, the divorce rate for that demographic has doubled. So much for forever.
There are many societal drivers at play here, and because of the tracking data scientists have done, we can start to understand some hard truths.
These truths are unsettling.
Data scientists have determined that the majority of people marry whoever is closest to them at the point when they are socialized to believe the next milestone in life is to be married.
This milestone is set in different places for different people based on multiple factors like social class, race, gender, education level, career status, location/geography, culture, family, etc. However, to put it in the simplest of terms, your micro-society matters because you will likely mirror your current peer group.
For example, if you are in a micro-society where most people graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, and never leave the place where their job is located. They work at that job for the remainder of their life, then that person will most likely marry right after college or as soon after college as possible.
If you live in a society where most people graduate from college, get a job, and are constantly focused on the next big thing, then that person may not get married until they feel they have hit a certain point in their career.
They may go to graduate school, continue to jump from job to job and climb the corporate ladder, perhaps move all over the country, and not think about marriage for ten years after the person in the first micro society gets married.
This is what leads to all those weird instances of you living in New York and scrolling your Instagram timeline to see all your high school friends from that small town in Wisconsin you grew up in are on baby number three while you still find yourself shouting at people in dark clubs about where they are from.
While there is much variability in when people start to feel that pressure, what we do know from data is that no matter what your micro-society and candidate pool is, at the age of 30 (give or take a few years depending on mostly gender, race, and socioeconomic status) in the U.S. getting married becomes a WILD game of musical chairs.
Yes…30…is Mayday…
Everyone that has gotten married before 30 has sat down, and all the 30 year olds and older who want to get married are still playing the game to find a chair before the music stops. This becomes intense, fierce, and violent — anything to find a chair…any chair.
Data scientists put this dynamic in a more eloquent way by saying, at or after the age of 30, people tend to marry the closest person to them that will say yes.
So, most people actually don’t just marry the wrong person, they marry ANY person, even if it’s a poor match. So why would we think that would lead to anything except a dissatisfied and unhappy relationship at worst and a mediocre relationship at best.
What should you do about this?
First, I suggest that you never settle. If you haven’t found real love, proceed by being single, loving yourself, and focusing on your journey.
Build a fantastic life that you’re proud of. Settling on a life partner to split bills, have a roommate/travel & eating companion, have someone to take care of you or have children with is selling yourself short in the worst way. Full stop.
This won’t lead to happiness or contribute to it and certainly won’t cure loneliness. You are better off single.
Second, please don’t be one of those people who pursue love and relationships as though it is a remarkable feat you must conquer in your lifetime.
I can’t tell you how many people have told me they have made significant life decisions like moving to a city or attending a particular school to find a wife/husband…it’s misguided. Don’t let your life be determined by romantic love. You are not living a failed or imperfect life without it.
Contrary to what society says, being single is not a problem to be solved.
Selecting a life partner is an important decision, but it’s not the only one you will face that will significantly impact you.
We make decisions on life partners for many reasons, and many subtle motivating forces drive it, so it’s essential to bear these things in mind:
- We should be cognizant of the fact that we are often after objects and things for what they say about us and ultimately to bolster our self-conception
- People want to be seen as chosen by someone
- Your models of love, relationships, and marriage aren’t technically yours because your whole life, you are trained on what to want, think, and care about
In short, we inadvertently give other people/society too much power over our lives.
When you feel genuinely worthy and recognize your value, external forces and influences don’t have as much weight.
Bottomline — if you aren’t careful, you’ll end up doing what people think you should do, pick the wrong life partner, and potentially lose yourself.
Live your life, and in the process of living your life, if–by luck–you find true love, hold on to it, and never take it for granted. Nurture that relationship daily to grow the love, connection, and bond so you can hopefully have it for the rest of your life.
If you don’t find love throughout your life, then focus on your love for yourself and your people and then relentlessly pursue whatever is most important to you.
For some people, that means throwing themselves into social causes; for some, that means taking on hobbies; for some, that means getting more involved with family and friends; for some, it means traveling or working more on their career.
There is no right answer here, but there is a wrong answer.
The wrong answer is deluding yourself into tying yourself to a person you “like” now but won’t be able to tolerate in a decade or two.
That’s All Folks!
This is the third article of a 3-part series on love. In this 3-part series, I aim first to provide a framework for evaluating whether you are in love and then go into the implications of real substantive love (not the fake performative love that we so often see). Afterward, I’ll offer a new way of seeing and talking about this phenomenon. If you missed it, Part 1 and Part 2 of this series are linked here.
