Marriage - "A Commitment Of Two People"

Marriage is a bond and it can only be created when two people are ready to accept each other’s flaws. Flaws that are primarily negative, because when you are comfortable in other person’s weaknesses, you are ready to help the other person improve and become the best version of himself. And above all what connects two people is love, and the idea of love is delusional for many folks. 

One of the greatest emotional skills we can bring to love is that correct of awareness of what can legitimately be expected of love. 

Our expectations are never higher, and therefore never more trouble-inducing, than they are in love. There are a range of reckless ideas circulating in our societies about what sharing a life with another person might be like. We see relationship difficulties around us all the time but retain a remarkable capacity to discount negative information. Despite the divorces, failures and loneliness all around, we cling to highly ambitious ideas of what relationships should be like - even if we have in fact never seen such unions in reality anywhere near us.

When love fails, we console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out on this occasion is not that the expectations were too high, but that we were trying to get together with the wrong person. We weren't compatible enough. Rather than adjust our ideas of what relationships are like, we attribute our failures to specific individuals only - and deftly shift our hopes to new targets.

The facts of life have deformed all of our natures. No one among us has come through unscathed. We are, all of us, desperately fragile, ill-equipped to meet with the challenges to our mental integrity: we lack courage, preparation, confidence, intelligence. We don’t have the right role models, we were (necessarily) imperfectly parented, we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we have a precarious sense of security, we can’t understand either ourselves or others well enough, we don’t have an appetite for the truth and suffer a fatal weakness for flattering denials. The chances of a perfectly good human emerging from the perilous facts of life are non-existent. We don’t have to know someone in any way before knowing this about them. 

The failure of one particular partner to be the ideal Other is not – we should always understand – an argument against them; it is by no means a sign that the relationship deserves to fail or be upgraded. We have all necessarily, without being damned, ended up with that figure of our nightmares, ‘the wrong person.’

There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiseled indelibly into the script of life. Choosing who to commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for, rather than an occasion miraculously to escape from the brute facts of our nature.

We simply take it for granted that one person should not be asked to be everything to another. With this truth accepted, we can look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of life beside another fallen creature, for example, never feeling that we have to spend all of our time with them, being prepared for the disappointments of erotic life, not insisting on complete transparency, being ready to be maddened and to madden, making sure we are allowed to keep a vibrant independent social life and maintaining a clear-eyed refusal to act on sudden desires to run off with strangers.

In addition, we believe we seek happiness in love, but what at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well 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 lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. 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.

As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.

We are drawn to challenging people because easier ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling entirely satisfied.

One is never in a good frame of mind to choose a partner rationally when remaining single is so difficult. 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 who spared us being so.

Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes singlehood dangerously unpleasant. Communal life starts to wither, couples are too threatened by the independence of the single to invite them around very often, one may start to feel tainted and frowned upon. When sex was only available within marriage, people recognised that this led some to settle down for the wrong reasons: to obtain something that was artificially restricted in society as a whole. They grasped that lovers would be free to make much better choices about whom they unite with now when they were not simply responding to a desperate desire for sex.

But we retain shortages in other areas. When company is only properly available in couples, we will be driven to create pairs for the very worst reason: simply to spare ourselves loneliness - and are likely then to rediscover an even worse loneliness in the presence of another.

Adv Ishta Saxena

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