Chris Hart: We all want to be happily married, but lots of people don’t make it. Why’s that?
Actually, until recently no-one really cared whether couples were happy or not.
Marriage was all about making a living, children, land, inheritance and so on. So people were only really interested in your family, community and culture. Does that sound familiar?
Your parents are probably still asking!
But nowadays, we expect marriages to be happy. So people only ask whether you’re in love. And we rarely think seriously about why marriages fail. We just assume the couple’s did something wrong, with each thinking we’re somehow special, and won’t make the same mistakes.
AWKWARD SINGLEDOM
But we do. So if there was a course on how marriage really works, what would it tell you?
It would encourage you to make the most of being single. Currently, society makes being single feel really awkward, especially as you get older. Couples stop inviting you round. You feel a freak on your own.
Finding sex is hard. It’s all easier in college, but once that’s over, lots of people marry just to escape being alone.
Or maybe you’re getting on well with someone, and imagine that marriage will make that last forever.
But marriage instantly moves your relationship on to somewhere very different: new responsibilities, expectations, children… Getting on well might not be enough.
You’ll only be happy in marriage if you fall in love with the right person. That’s what being single is really all about. It’s when you learn to understand your personality. Warts and all. And how your personality works out with the people you date.
We first experience love as children. But maybe that love was all mixed up with other feelings. Like being controlled, belittled or neglected. So we’re attracted to the wrong people because we go for what we knew in childhood.
Rejecting kind and reliable partners because their behaviour feels unfamiliar.
And we’re all just a little bit crazy. Like maybe you get angry? Controlling? A wee bit insecure? A bit weird about sex? Or you’re no good at explaining your feelings? Issues like that cause a lot of problems between couples. So you must marry someone who can cope with your craziness.
FAULT‘S IN US ALL
Good marriages are never between perfect people – there aren’t many of those anyway. They’re between couples who can cope with each other’s oddities.
Understanding yourself isn’t easy though. Like when a relationship goes wrong, you’ll tend to blame your partner and ignore your own faults. Your anger, insecurities and so on. When you’re single it’s easy to believe you’re really quite a nice person to live with.
So it’s no wonder no one knows what they should be looking out for.
Naturally, we try hard to get to know one another. But that’s rarely enough. It sounds unromantic, but you also need to understand your faults really well. And to go looking for someone who can cope with them. And you with theirs…