The basic argument is that for the most part, anyone you marry is the “wrong” person because no person can fulfil all of your needs.
Table of contents
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Rationality alone doesn’t determine our behaviour -- Most of the time, it’s actually our unconscious mind that informs our decision making.
Since people are hardwired to connect with each other, we aren’t – as we like to imagine ourselves – wholly autonomous subjects.
The context and the people around us have a massive impact on our behaviour.
🎨 Impressions
This book made me realise that we don’t need perfection to be happy. So long as we enter our relationships in the right spirit, we have every chance of coping well enough with, and even delighting in, the inevitable and distinctive wrongness that lies in ourselves and our beloveds.
🔍 How I Discovered It
👤 Who Should Read It?
This is for those who are interested in learning about how to effectively manage romantic relationships by seeing them in a novel and un-romantic light. This book holistically and lucidly explains the traps we tend to fall into when finding our partners and interacting with them. It prepares us for a more wholesome, mature love life by minimising tension and conflict.
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
I learnt that...
marriage has an ugly side and coming to terms with it can paradoxically lead to a happier and more sustainable union between partners.
we have a lot of misguided notions about love and much of this can be attributed to our beliefs about romanticism
Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
We are all incompatible. But it is the work of love to make us graciously accommodate each other and ourselves to each others incompatibilities, and therefore compatibility is an achievement of love.
Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
We marry the wrong person because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?"
📒 Summary + Notes
Understanding why we will marry the wrong person
1. WE DON’T UNDERSTAND OURSELVES
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 don’t 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.
The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them.
2. WE DON’T UNDERSTAND OTHER PEOPLE
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.
The level of knowledge we need for a marriage to work is higher than our society is prepared to countenance, recognise and accommodate for – and therefore our social practices around getting married are deeply wrong.
3. WE AREN’T USED TO BEING HAPPY
We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite as simple. What we actually seek is familiarity – which may complicate any plans we might have for happiness. We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant.
But unfortunately, the love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering. What we are looking for is a partner that can make us suffer in the way we need to suffer in order to believe that this love is real.
4. BEING SINGLE IS SO AWFUL
One is never in a good frame of mind to choose a partner rationally when remaining single is unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship. Or we’ll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner.
Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes single-hood dangerously unpleasant. Communal life starts to wither, couples are too threatened by the independence of the single to invite them around, one starts to feel a freak when going to the cinema alone. Sex is hard to come by as well. For all the new gadgets and supposed freedoms of modernity, it can be very hard to get laid – and expecting to do so regularly with new people is bound to end in disappointment after 30.
5. INSTINCT HAS TOO MUCH PRESTIGE
Back in the olden days, marriage was a rational business; all to do with matching your bit of land with theirs. It was cold, ruthless and disconnected from the happiness of the protagonists. We are still traumatised by this.
What replaced the marriage of reason was the marriage of instinct, the Romantic marriage. It dictated that how one felt about someone should be the only guide to marriage. If one felt ‘in love’, that was enough. Feeling was triumphant. We have been in collective reaction against thousands of years of very unhelpful interference based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.
So pedantic and cautious was the old ‘marriage of reason’ that one of the features of the marriage of feeling is its belief that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is marrying. To analyse the decision feels ‘un-Romantic’. 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 – without any chance to do the ‘reasoning’ that guaranteed misery to people for thousands of years previously.
6. WE DON’T GO TO SCHOOLS OF LOVE
The time has come for a third kind of marriage. The marriage of psychology. One where one doesn’t marry for land, or for ‘the feeling’ alone, but only when ‘the feeling’ has been properly submitted to examination and brought under the aegis of a mature awareness of one’s own and the other’s psychology.
In the age of the marriage of reason, one might have considered the following criteria when marrying:
Who are their parents?
How much land do they have?
How culturally similar are they?
In the Romantic age, one might have looked out for the following signs to determine rightness:
One can’t stop thinking of a lover
One is sexually obsessed
One thinks they are amazing
One longs to talk to them all the time
We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:
How are they mad?
Can one raise children with them?
How can one develop together?
How can one remain friends with them?
7. WE WANT TO FREEZE HAPPINESS
We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent; we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with. We imagine that marriage will make permanent what might otherwise be fleeting. Unfortunately, marriage doesn’t freeze the moment at all.
Getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. It is not in command of the ingredients of our happiness at that point. In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
Impressionism is interested in the fact that the things we love most change, are only around a very short time and then disappear. It celebrates the sort of happiness that lasts a few minutes, rather than years. This style of art cultivates a skill that extends far beyond art itself: a skill at accepting and attending to short-lived moments of satisfaction. The peaks of life tend to be brief. With the Impressionists to guide us, we should be ready to appreciate isolated moments of everyday paradise whenever they come our way, without making the mistake of thinking them permanent; without the need to turn them into a ‘marriage’.
8. WE BELIEVE WE ARE SPECIAL
The statistics are not encouraging. Everyone has before them plenty of examples of terrible marriages. They’ve seen their friends try it and come unstuck. They know perfectly well that – in general – marriages face immense challenges. And yet we do not easily apply this insight to our own case. Without specifically formulating it, we assume that this is a rule that applies to other people.
That’s because a raw statistical chance of one in two of failing at marriage seems wholly acceptable, given that – when one is in love – one feels one has already beaten far more extraordinary odds. The beloved feels like around one in a million. With such a winning streak, the gamble of marrying a person seem entirely containable.
9. WE WANT TO STOP THINKING ABOUT LOVE
Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives. It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.
Actionable steps
We need to replace the Romantic template with a psychologically-mature vision of love we might call Classical, which encourages in us a range of unfamiliar but hopefully effective attitudes:
that it is normal that love and sex may not always belong together;
that discussing money early on, up-front, in a serious way is not a betrayal of love;
that realising that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation;
that we will never find everything in another person, nor they in us, not because of some unique flaw, but because of the way human nature works;
that we need to make immense and often rather artificial-sounding efforts to understand one another; that intuition can't get us where we need to go;
that spending two hours discussing whether bathroom towels should be hung up or can be left on the floor is neither trivial nor unserious; that there is special dignity around laundry and timekeeping.
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