There is one thing that we are so afraid of happening that we use all our solutions to avoid, but the clutches of fate will eventually be upon some of us, and that is:
After getting married, we realise that we are with the wrong person.
The reason may be that in the process of growing close to the other person, we come across many intricacies. We may seem normal to people we don't know well, such as our friends. We usually leave them with the impression that we are "easy to get along with". But in front of our partners, we can easily become irritable because of our differences, or we can become tricky after having sex.
But the thing is, we never knew each other were so complicated until we got married.
In fact, we still put some effort into getting to know them: we visit each other's families, go through their photos, have dinners with their college friends, etc., and all of this effort makes us think that we've done the necessary homework and seem to know each other well enough. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Marriage is like a gamble, a gamble in which we don't really know anything about ourselves and even less about each other before the gamble begins. But it is a gamble that binds two people together to explore a future full of hope and uncertainty.
Throughout history, there have been many seemingly logical reasons for getting married, such as: because her family lives adjacent to mine; his family is well-off and prosperous; her father is a town official, who can serve as a solid backing for me; both parents share the same religious beliefs, and so on. In the midst of these logical and suitable marriages, there was loneliness, infidelity, abuse, chilling, screaming and crying. And the so-called reasons seemed to be the expediencies of snobs. As a result, marriages after that place more emphasis on the feelings of both sides than on those so-called family backgrounds.
The most important thing about so-called mutual affection is that there is a strong attraction between the two people, and deep down they both know that each other is the right choice. In fact, in many cases, the more absurd and unconventional marriage appears to be (e.g., two people marrying within six months of meeting each other, one of the spouses not having a job), the more secure the marriage itself is. Impulse is synonymous with the reasons for all mistakes; intuition is the reason for not being able to find reasons.
It's true that we all want to find happiness in our marriages, but it's not that simple. What we have been struggling to find is actually a sense of familiarity.
We want to find a sense of childhood happiness in our own intimate relationships. However, the love we felt in our early years was often destructive and not that perfect. Love may have been the desire to help an out-of-control adult, the warmth of a deprived parent, the great fear of an angry adult, the insecurity of not being able to voice one's desires.
And so, as we grow up, we often turn down marriage partners, not because they're not perfect, but because they're too perfect --- mature enough, responsible enough, understanding enough. And all of that seems incredibly strange to us. All we're looking for is the familiarity of childhood tinged with angst and pain.
And, of course, we make the mistake of being too lonely for each of us. When we have no tolerance for singleness, we usually can't make truly wise choices. What we need to do is spend some time in quiet solitude and allow ourselves to screen the people around us. Otherwise, we enjoy the mere feeling of no longer being single, not the person who is there for us.
Eventually, we enter into marriage with our partner, wanting to make this feeling of happiness last forever. We remember clearly how we felt when the urge to propose first came to us, and we wanted marriage to be like a bottle that would encapsulate the beauty of that moment. It was probably in Venice, by the lake, on a motorised boat, with the sun setting and the sea looking like it was rimmed with gold. The two of us snuggling up to each other and listening to the deep voices of each other's souls. We want to use marriage to make this feeling permanent, but we don't really know that marriage and these good feelings don't depend on each other forever.
Real marriage is the opposite, we started a day to day life, living in a house in the suburbs, travelling long distances every day to get to where we wanted to go, and our maddening children had long since worn out all our passion. In that wonderful bottle, everything else was far from what it was supposed to be, except for the people we were surrounded by.
The only blessing is that if you find yourself with the wrong person, it's no big deal. We don't need to dump them right away. Only those so-called Romantic ideas about marriage hold that there really is that one person in the world who exists, who meets all our needs and understands every sigh of us.
We need to ditch those Romantic ideas and understand that anyone can make us angry, bitter, pissed off, and disappointed, we likewise bring similar negative emotions to the other person. The feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction within us is never ending, but it's all normal and there's no need to overemphasize the importance of demanding divorce.
"The truth is, choosing who to marry boils down to choosing what kind of suffering to endure." --- This is the advice given by pessimists about pain and suffering in marriage, which sounds a bit strange, but it does relieve us of the stress caused by unrealistic imaginings of marriage. We don't need to blame the other person for anything if they can't help us out of our pain and sorrow, because pain is supposed to be a normal part of marriage, and having conflicts doesn't mean the end of marriage.
In fact, the best person for us is not the one who meets all our idealised requirements (of course such a person doesn't exist at all), but the one who is able to talk to us intelligently about differences. In other words, we cannot find that image of perfection in our minds, and those who are good at tolerating differences and expressing disagreement at the right time are the right choice as a marriage partner. Mutual adaptation is a consequence, not a prerequisite, of love.
The so-called Romanticism is not beneficial to our marriage, it will only make us go further and further in the pursuit of "uniqueness". We will become more and more lonely and isolated because of the pursuit of perfection. We need to learn to adapt to the "mistakes" in our marriages, and treat ourselves and our partners with more tolerance and acceptance of infinite possibilities.
Some People's Ideas
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There is no such thing as perfect romantic love, giving up your fairy tale fantasies. Love requires acceptance of each other's differences and contradictions.
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We can go to someone who can tolerate differences and resolve issues in a calm manner so that the conflict between the two sides is not so depressing and the issue does not rise to the point of ending the marriage as a result.
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What does complete love be like? Probably --- "We've both internally thought about strangling each other, but we're still willing to walk hand in hand together into the next decade."
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Pessimism saves love. Romanticism destroys love.The grave of love is not marriage, but is fantasy.
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Romantic love is a cultural construct.
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"Whoever is wrong means whoever is right".
