9 reasons why we choose the wrong ones and make marriage a big mistake

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

To create a successful union, you will have to understand not only your soulmate, but also yourself.

Any person with whom we decide to start a family is not ideal for us. It is advisable to be a little pessimistic and understand that there is no perfection, and unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, some couples are incompatible on some primal level, their inconsistency is so deep that it lies somewhere beyond the normal frustrations and tensions of any long-term relationship. Some people just can't and shouldn't be together.

And such mistakes happen with terrifying ease and regularity. Failure to marry or marrying the wrong partner is a simple but costly mistake that affects the state, the people around it, and subsequent generations. It's almost a crime!

Therefore, the question of how to choose the right partner for starting a family should be considered both at the personal and state level, as well as issues of road safety or smoking in public places.

It becomes even sadder because the reasons for the wrong choice of a partner are common and lie on the surface. They generally fall into one of the following categories.

1. We do not understand ourselves

When we are looking for the right partner, our requirements are very vague. Something like: I want to find someone kind, funny, attractive and ready for adventure. Not that these desires are not true, but they are very remotely related to what we will actually demand in the hope of being happy, or rather, not constantly unhappy.

Each of us is crazy in his own way. We are neurotic, unbalanced, immature, but we do not know all the details, because no one instigates us with all their might to find them. The primary task of lovers is to find levers by pulling on which you can bring a partner to fury. It is necessary to accelerate the manifestation of individual neuroses and understand why they occur, after what actions or words, and most importantly - which type of people causes such a reaction, and which, on the contrary, calms a person.

A good partnership is not one that arises between two healthy people (there are not so many on our planet). This is what arises between insane people who have been able to reconcile their insanity with each other by a fluke or as a result of some work.

The thought that you might not get along should be an alarming tinkle next to any promising partner. The only question is where the problems are hidden: perhaps it is rage because someone does not agree with his opinion, or he can relax only at work, or there are some difficulties in the intimate sphere. Or maybe the person will not get into a conversation and will not explain what is bothering him.

All these questions can turn into disaster after decades. And we must understand everything about them in order to look for a person who can withstand our madness. You have to ask on the first date: "What can make you mad?"

The problem is that we ourselves do not know very well about our neuroses. Years may pass, but there will be no situations in which they open up. Before marriage, we rarely engage in interactions that reveal our deepest flaws. In an unsettled relationship, whenever a complex side of our nature suddenly emerges, we tend to blame our partner for it. As for friends, they have no motive to push us, forcing us to explore real ourselves. They just want to have fun with us.

Thus, we remain blind to the complex aspects of our character. When rage overtakes us in loneliness, we do not scream, because there is no one to listen to, and therefore we do not notice the true disturbing power of our ability to rage. If we devote ourselves to work without a trace, because other aspects of life are not asked, we end up using work maniacally to feel in control of life, and explode if they try to stop us. Or suddenly our cold and detached side is revealed, which avoids intimacy and warm embraces, even if we are sincerely and deeply attached to someone.

One of the privileges of solitary existence is the flattering illusion that you are a person with whom it is very easy to get along. If we understand our own character so poorly, how can we know who we need to look for.

2. We don't understand other people

The problem is compounded by the fact that other people are also stuck on a low level of self-awareness. They are unable to understand what is happening to them, let alone explain it to someone.

Naturally, we try to get to know each other better. We get to know the families of partners, visit places that are dear to them, look at photographs and meet with their friends. It feels like homework done, but it's like launching a paper airplane and saying that you can now fly the airplane.

In a wiser society, potential partners will get to know each other through detailed psychological tests and the assessment of a whole group of psychologists. By 2100, this will be normal practice. And people will wonder why it took so long to come to this decision.

We need to know the smallest details of the mental organization of the person with whom we plan to start a family: his position in relation to power, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, loyalty, money, children, aging.

We must know its mechanisms of psychological defense and one hundred thousand more things. And all this is unrecognizable during friendly chat.

Due to the lack of all of the above data, we grab onto the appearance. It seems that so much information can be gleaned from what an object has a nose, chin, eyes, smile, freckles … But this is as smart as thinking that you can learn at least something about nuclear fission by looking at a photograph of a nuclear power plant.

We complete the image of the beloved with only a few data. Gathering a whole idea of a person from small but eloquent details, we do with her character the same thing that we do when looking at this sketch of a face.

We do not think that this is the face of a person who lacks nostrils and eyelashes, who has only a few strands of hair. Without noticing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains use tiny visual cues to build a coherent picture, and the same thing happens when it comes to the character of a potential mate. We are not even aware of what kind of inveterate artists we are.

The level of knowledge we need to choose the right spouse is higher than our society is willing to recognize, approve, and adapt for everyday use, so deeply flawed marriages are a common social practice.

3. We are not used to being happy

We think we are looking for happiness in love, but it's not that simple. Sometimes it seems that we are looking for the kind of close relationship that can only complicate the achievement of happiness. We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we experienced in childhood when we first realized and understood what love means.

Unfortunately, the lessons we learned were not always straightforward. The love we learned as children was often intertwined with less pleasant feelings: a sense of constant control, humiliation, abandonment, lack of communication - in general, suffering.

In adulthood, we may reject some candidates, not because they are not suitable for us, but because they are too well balanced: too mature, too understanding, too reliable - and this correctness of theirs seems unfamiliar, alien, almost oppressive.

We choose candidates to whom our unconscious addresses, not because they will delight us, but because they will upset us in the ways we are used to.

We marry wrong because we undeservedly reject the “right” partners, because we have no experience of healthy relationships and ultimately we do not associate the feeling of “being loved” with a sense of satisfaction.

4. We believe it's awful to be lonely

Unbearable loneliness is not the best state of mind for a rational choice of a partner. We must come to terms with the prospect of long years of loneliness for the chance to form a good relationship. Otherwise, we will love the feeling that we are no longer alone, than a partner who saved us from loneliness.

Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes loneliness dangerously unpleasant. Social life is dying out, couples are afraid of the independence of singles and rarely invite them to the company, a person feels like a freak when he goes to the cinema alone. And sex is also very difficult to obtain. In exchange for all the new gadgets and the supposed freedoms of modern society, we got a problem: it's very difficult to sleep with someone. And the expectation that this will happen regularly and with different people will inevitably lead to disappointment after 30.

It would be better if society resembled a university or a kibbutz - with shared feasts, common conveniences, constant parties and free sexual relations … Then people who decided to get married would do it out of the desire to be together, and not because of escape from the negative sides of celibacy …

People recognized that when sex was only available in marriage, it led to the creation of marriages for the wrong reason - to get what was artificially limited.

People are now free to make far better choices when they marry, rather than follow an exclusively desperate desire for sex.

But in other areas of life, shortcomings still persist. When the company starts to communicate only in pairs, people will look for a partner, only to get rid of loneliness. Perhaps the time has come to decisively free friendship from the domination of couples.

5. We give in to instincts

About 200 years ago, marriage was an extremely rational business: people got married to join their piece of land to another. Cold and ruthless business, completely unrelated to the happiness of the main participants in the action. And we are still traumatized by this.

A marriage of convenience was replaced by an instinctual union - a romantic marriage. He dictated that only feelings can be the only basis for concluding an alliance. If someone fell head over heels in love, that was enough. And no more questions, feelings triumphed. Outside observers could only respectfully welcome the emergence of feelings as the indulgence of the divine spirit. Parents may be terrified, but they should think that only a couple know everything better than anyone else.

For a long time, we collectively struggle with the consequences of hundreds of years of unhelpful interventions based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.

So pedantic and careful was the former institution of marriage of convenience that one of the features of romantic marriage was the following belief: do not think too much about why you want to get married. Analyzing this decision is not romantic. It is absurd and insensitive to write down the pros and cons on a piece of paper. The most romantic thing is to propose quickly and unexpectedly, perhaps a few weeks after meeting, in a fit of enthusiasm, without giving yourself a single chance at the reasoning that has caused people to suffer for so many years. This recklessness seems like a sign that marriage can work precisely because the previous kind of "security" was so dangerous to happiness.

6. We do not have schools where they teach to choose a partner

It's time to consider the third type of marriage - a union tied to psychology. In this case, a person creates a family not with a “piece of land” and is based not on a bare feeling, but on a feeling that has passed the examination, and on a mature awareness of the psychological properties of his personality and the personality of a partner.

We are currently getting married without any information. We rarely read books on this topic, spend little time with the children of our partner (if any), we do not question married couples with predilection, and even more so we do not start frank conversations with divorced ones. We enter into marriages without getting to the bottom of the reasons why they break up. Moreover, we blame it on the stupidity and lack of imagination of partners.

In the era of marriage of convenience, when thinking about marriage, a person considered the following criteria:

• who are the parents of the partner;
• how much land they own;
• how the families are culturally similar.

In the era of romantic marriage, there are other signs of the correctness of the union:

• I can't stop thinking about him / her;
• I want to have sex with him / her;
• I find my partner amazing;
• I want to talk to him / her constantly.

A different set of criteria is needed. Here's what is really important to understand:

• what infuriates the partner;
• how you will raise children together;
• how you will develop together;
• whether you can remain friends.

7. We want to freeze happiness

We have a desperate and fatal desire to make pleasant things permanent. We want to have a car that we like, live in a country that we enjoyed traveling through it. And we want to start a family with a person with whom we are having an amazing time.

We imagine that marriage is a guarantee of the happiness that we once experienced with a partner, that it will turn the fleeting into permanent, that it will preserve our joy: walks in Venice, the rays of the setting sun sinking into the sea, dinner at a cute fish restaurant, cozy a cashmere jumper draped over the shoulders … We are getting married to make these moments forever.

Unfortunately, there is no causal relationship between marriage and these kinds of feelings. They were born in Venice, the time of day, the lack of work, the excitement of dinner, the excitement of the first few months, and the freshly eaten chocolate gelato. None of this resurrects a marriage and does not guarantee its success.

It is beyond the power of marriage to maintain a relationship in this wonderful period. Marriage will decisively move the relationship in a completely different direction: to their own home away from work, two small children.

Only one ingredient unites happiness and marriage - a partner. And this ingredient may be wrong.

Impressionist painters of the 19th century were guided by the philosophy of transience, which could direct us in the right direction. They have accepted the transience of happiness as an essential property of existence and can help us live in peace with it. Sisley's painting of winter in France captures attractive but completely fleeting things. The sun shines through the twilight, and its glow momentarily makes the bare branches of the trees less harsh. Snow and gray walls create a calm harmony, the cold seems bearable, even exciting. In a few minutes the night will hide it all.

The impressionists are interested in the fact that the things we love usually change the most, appear for a short time and then disappear. And they capture that happiness that lasts a few minutes, but not years. In this picture, the snow looks lovely, but it will darken.

This style of art cultivates a skill that extends far beyond art itself - the mastery of noticing short moments of satisfaction in life.

The peaks of life are usually short. Happiness doesn't last for many years. Learning from the Impressionists, we should appreciate the individual amazing moments of our life when they come, but not mistakenly assume that they will last forever, and not try to preserve them in marriage.

8. We believe that we are special

The statistics are ruthless, and each of us had many examples of terrible marriages before our eyes. We saw acquaintances and friends who tried to break these bonds. We know full well that marriage can run into major problems. And yet we hardly transfer this understanding to our life: it seems to us that this happens to the rest, but it cannot happen to us.

When we are in love, we feel that our chances of success are much higher. The lover feels that he has had an amazing chance - one in a million. And with that kind of luck, marriage seems like a flawless undertaking.

We exclude ourselves from the generalization and cannot blame ourselves for this. But we could benefit from the stories we regularly see.

9. We want to stop thinking about love

Before starting a family, we spend quite a few years in the zone of love turbulence. We try to be with those who don't love us, we create and break alliances, we go to endless parties in the hope of finding someone, we experience excitement and bitter disappointments.

It is not surprising that at some point we want to say: "Enough!" One of the reasons we get married and get married is to try to get rid of this overwhelming power that love has over our psyche. We are already fed up with melodramas and thrills that lead nowhere. We lack the strength to meet other challenges, and we hope that marriage will end the painful reign of love over us.

But marriage cannot and will not. There are as many doubts, hopes, fears, rejection and betrayal in marriage as there is in a single life. It is only outwardly that the marriage looks peaceful, calm and beautiful to the point of boredom.

Preparing people for marriage is an educational task that falls on society as a whole. We stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are beginning to see flaws in romantic marriages. It's time for a marriage based on the study of psychology.