Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We don’t expect bliss every day. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Nevertheless, there are couples who display such deep-seated incompatibility, such heightened rage and disappointment, that we have to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal scratchiness: they appear to have married the wrong person.
How do such errors happen in our enlightened, knowledge-rich times? We can say straight off that they occur with appalling ease and regularity. Academic achievement and career success seem to provide no vaccines.
Otherwise intelligent people daily and blithely make the move. Given that it is about the single costliest mistake any of us can make (it places rather large burdens on the state, employers and the next generation too), there would seem to be few issues more important than that of marrying intelligently.
When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautifully non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is “kind” or “fun to be with”, “attractive” or “up
for adventure”.
It isn’t that such desires are wrong; they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently glum.
All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t quite know the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out.
An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and, most
importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them.
A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.
The feeling that we might not be too difficult to live with should set off alarm bells. The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t know very well. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s on our minds when we’re worried.
It’s these sorts of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we should ideally therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: “And how are you mad?”
The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the “difficult” side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day.
With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know whom we should be looking out for.
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.
Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos; we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.
In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.
We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, and stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, money, children, ageing, fidelity and 100 things besides.
This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat. We need a level of insight currently generally only available to psychological professionals at the PhD level. In the absence of this, we are led – in large part – by what they look like. It matters immensely, of course. We keep thinking how beautiful they look.
There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles … But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us the essentials of nuclear fission.
The time has come for a new kind of marriage: the Marriage of Psychology, where one doesn’t marry either just for practical reasons (land, money, etc.), or for intuitive reasons (“strong feelings”), but where our aspirations are properly submitted to examination and soberly understood, over many months, in the light of the daunting complexities of our respective psyches.
Presently, we marry without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the subject, we never spend more than a short time with children, and we don’t rigorously interrogate other married couples or speak with any sincerity to divorced ones. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to why marriages fail.
In the Romantic age, we might have looked out for the following signs to determine rightness: an inability to stop thinking of the lover, a sexual obsession, a belief that they are an angel, a longing for constant contact. For the age of the Marriage of Psychology, we need a new set of criteria. We should wonder: how are they mad?; how can we raise children with them?; how can we develop together?; how can we remain friends?; how can we accommodate our competing needs for extracurricular sex on the one hand and loyalty on the other?
Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.
This is an edited extract from ‘Collected Essays by The School of Life‘, which is out on Thursday 26 October.
The School of Life is a global organisation that aims to help people lead more fulfilled lives through useful resources and tools.