How we end up marrying the wrong person
philosophersmail.com
philosophersmail.com
My response was, “Everybody’s got baggage. You have to figure out if your baggage and her baggage make a matching set.”
I’ve been married twenty-one years, and neither of us are the same two people who got married all that time ago. There have been times when we’ve discussed if the two people we’ve become should stay married. There’s been times when love is strained, times when things are just comfortable, and times when my heart still beats faster when she walks in the room.
The number one piece of advice that I received that has stood the test of time is being able to communicate. If you are able to share with each other your dreams, fantasies, desires, fears, faults and foibles, you have a relationship that can be built on and can last.
Thank you for some sensible words
My belief is that marriage (at least for me personally) is a lifelong commitment, and divorce is only an option in the cases of abuse or cheating. In that sense, my biggest fear toward getting married is that the person I marry would at some point change who they are ("get bored" in modern parlance) and divorce me.
At this stage in my life (24 years old), I'm slowly realizing that I probably won't ever get married even though I would really like to... I just can't imagine meeting a person I feel so certain and comfortable about. Heck, I can barely even find someone I want to date.
I was speaking with my sister (engaged) the other day and asked her how she knew she had met the right person, and she told me that her fiancé is the only guy ever that she felt like she wasn't playing "mind games" with. That's particularly interesting to me, because I've never been with someone who I didn't feel like I was playing those games with.
YOU'RE going to change.
Marriage is agreeing to let another person have first dibs over wooing the new person you change into, and vice versa.
Well said. And then, divorce happens when one or the other lets their option drop.
In my experience mind games stop when you fall in love. I remember being with one who at one point asked me "Can we stop playing games?" and I agreed.
further: I could have stayed with her if I had continued the mind games. I'm sure of that. But how long would that have lasted? Not forever. Better stop the mind game early and see how long it goes if you feel like it's the one. Maybe that's the true test.
My warning from bitter personal experience: Don't go into a long term relationship without learning from Gottman first!
1) n = number of people you could date in your lifetime
2) Date n/e people without stopping.
3) After dating n/e people, marry the first person who is better than everyone you've dated previously.
This method selects the best candidate about 37% of the time, which sounds bad but is superior to other systematic methods.
Sources:
It did seem, as a man, that women with good personalities improved with age, but that women with average or bad personalities became worse. Age seems to spread people out, in that way, but the well-adjusted people being selected out tended to push down the mode. There were a lot of women I dated in their late 20s who had way too many psychological cigarette burns from Biffs and Jedds ("two D's because..."). Partners of low moral character definitely do lasting damage-- that's obvious in all genders-- and women have more opportunity to get fucked up (and fucked literally) than men in college and their early 20s.
That said, "all the good ones are taken" is probably more panic than reality. I remember in college, people used to descend on the freshman girls "before they get snapped up". It's a fucked-up way to think and maybe it actually has the opposite effect of taking bad people out of the market, because only a fucked-up person would think that for a college senior to stalk September-frosh ("froshing", it was called) is OK.
How To Marry The Right Girl: A Mathematical Solution
Let's look at it, though. For the first 15-20 years (subject to debate) you don't know anything about this problem. You don't know who you are, everyone's changing fast, you're blinded by sexual desire, etc. For the last 30 years, your reproductive viability is reduced for men and zero for women. This puts the "choosing window" at, say, 20 to 50. That would mean that one doesn't settle down until 32 at the absolute earliest, and that most people would do so in their 40s (and have only a few years to bear children). Most people don't want to wait that long to settle down, and for good reasons.
One major one is that the pool of available singles declines in quality as you get older. The Secretary Problem assumes a uniform distribution of quality over time. It's not true (and, in fact, insulting) to say that "all the good ones are taken", but I definitely noticed a change in the average quality of dates from 20 to 26 (when I met my wife and left the dating game). You still can find great people at any age, but the distribution evolves. Because people improve with age (fuck VCs and how they think about that) there's some push at the high end, but that's not offset by the disproportionate rate at which either (a) "the good ones" are taken, or (b) the messed-up people become better at hiding themselves, which is my preferred theory.
(I have no idea whether that decline of available mate quality continues after 26, or if it levels off or even reverses. I know some high-quality people who are single at 40, but have no concept of the aggregate dating scene at that age.)
Empirically, people don't "hold out" during 1/e of their window because, unlike with the Secretary Problem, the payoff in choosing the 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match is quite high (maybe 0.8 to 0.99) compared to the payoff (0.0 by definition) of never meeting someone as good as the best during your hold-out period.
The 2nd or 3rd-best theoretical match could also have a negative payoff (divorces you, takes half your money + child support + alimony). You can lose a lot more marrying the wrong person than never marrying at all.
1. Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to. Don't settle; make sure you could happily be married to the person, but don't pass up an acceptable partner.
2. Stop worrying about whether you could have met someone better.
Satisficers are happier than maximizers. Don't be a maximizer.
"Marry the first person you meet whom you could happily be married to"
Which implies that for each person, either you could be happily married to them or you could not be happily married to them. My point is that there are probably many people who you could marry and increase your happiness, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should marry the first one you encounter, because of the significant opportunity cost.
Ouch.
... as spoken by a philosopher, one of the most professionally distant stereotypes of mind. Engagement is hard, mmkay? You only get out what you put in to life. Risk aversion is hardly dashing.
The reasons marriages are failing so much these days is that we live in a culture that does not value, or even understand, what marriage is. Marriage works when both partners treat it as a lifelong partnership and they work to overcome their problems. If you were to engineer a marriage between two people with perfectly matched personality types, phobias, etc, they'd still end up divorced in a few years if they've been taught to think of marriage as a temporary exchange of romantic favors "until I get bored" or "until something better comes along".
We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:
- how are they mad
- how can one raise children with them
- how can one develop together
- how can one remain friendsPerhaps we should rethink it as "we'll remain married as long as we are both happy in it."
Marriage may just not have to be forever.
However, if you change that to "we'll keep doing this until we don't feel like doing it", that's not really much of a commitment anymore, is it? After all, doing something you enjoy doing until you don't feel like doing it anymore, is pretty much what you do anyway, by default.
What is marriage, really, except a promise to try and keep going and work things through, even when you don't want to anymore?
Or more likely, people don't realize at all the degree to which their behaviors and decisions are instinctual, and are confusing the rationalizations that are layered on top for the actual explanation.
Why do two dogs choose to mate?
Your comment might be more applicable to eastern societies where mating before marriage is taboo. One only get to mate with the one they "chose" to marry.
People do that, too.
Neither is anything at all like the decades-long commitment of a good marriage. While it may seem like sex is the main feature (and it is important), as someone who maintained a relationship for twenty years (she passed away five years ago) I can assure you that it's far from the only factor involved.
Or rather, the relationships do make sense, but they are unaware or unwilling to consciously recognise the reasons why.
On the other hand, feeling when you're happy or not is something anyone can do.
I hate the way to young people marrying out of "it makes sense" while guy goes to strip clubs every weekend and girls dream about some sexy guy taking them for a date. Its sick and sounds like pathology. Its really, really wrong.
Mortgage/Taxes is not the reason to get married. Love is. If you call me romantic, I am sorry, but it seems you didnt really seen true love.
(But no, I don't completely agree. It's just that it's a good question to answer, because it's so obviously partially right.)
Well we all have to make sacrifices in a partner, but when there is this overarching feeling that you're with the wrong person, then, you're probably with the wrong person.
I think the more conscious decisions you're making about someone, the more likely you are to be wrong, but that's my 2 cents.
Edit: My ex-fiancee was the one who gave up long before I did, when I was still trying to make things work.
My wife and I did premarital counseling. I highly recommend it. We learned a lot about ourselves, each other, and us as a couple.
(We did it with our pastor and a couple we respected. But I recommend it regardless of religious ideology.)
My relationships are still limited by the fact that couples must "agree to disagree". This piles up and eventually there are too many disagreements to ignore.
Basically if you look at the hard data and examine the strong correlation between the aggregate divorce related TV advertising spend over the last 50 hears and the number of divorces in the USA a clear picture begins to emerge.
This is just another marketing success story where PR firms spent billions to educate a market.. to help the divorce industry reach "product / market fit"
Marriage has been reduced to a transaction, a mere token in the consumer economy. The big question in my mind is, was this multi-billion dollar, multi-generational PR campaign coordinated out of greed by the divorce industry or is it an attempt by sinister forces to gradually bend the zeitgeist of western civilization in a certain ?dehumanizing? direction ? I suppose attempting to trace causation is not the most efficient means by which to remedy the situation, but yet these thoughts arise.
If you're truly interested, why don't you get in touch with the writer, tell him what you'd like to know, and ask how much he'll charge to supply it. He's likely to be pleased, and you may get what you're after.
50% of marriages end in divorce,
the other 50% end in death.
Mazel tov.Personally, I was told this by an old Sailor. "If she is willing to live on a boat in order to save up money; You better marry her. It takes a special type of woman to live on a boat. If she is willing to put up with the cold, and misery of daily boat life--she is an angel, or really loves your ass?"
I think that this is the wrong approach.
Anybody is suitable for marriage, on the condition that their culture says that there is no other realistic option than to stay married. That is the reason why both of you will do what it takes to make it work, and believe me that it will work.
In that respect, women from the wrong (western) communities are simply not suitable for marriage. Pick randomly a woman elsewhere and you should be ok.
Your baggage about women is not welcome here.
After having children, of course she would have to change! It's irrational to expect otherwise.
The important part is tolerating and accepting change.
That is why I have never considered and would never consider to marry a woman from a mainstream western community. The fact that it is culturally an easy option to move on, turns them into unsuitable marriage material. I would just be getting into an accident waiting to happen.
Prince Charles and lady Diana only divorced because it was culturally acceptable and rather easy to do. Otherwise, they would still be married today. Especially Diana would have learned how to deal with the drawbacks of that, and probably not be more unhappy for it.
My divorce was a "good" one. We agreed, and make the best of it together, not just for the kids' sake but for each other's as well. Still, I never wanna do this again.
According to other people I've talked to, the books I've read, and the therapists I've been to, the idea that couples divorce too easily is simply false. I'm sure you can find examples to point to, but, at least around the Nordics, it simply is not the case.
If you marry a woman who would divorce you in a wink, the reason is you not getting to know her beforehand, not some divorce-culture.
I don't think it is about how "easy" it is. It's about when is divorce considered the "right thing"? In the west we often consider divorce the right option based on feelings and desires. Don't settle. You have the right to be happy etc.