I think that there are two extremely harmful narratives that have reached wide acceptance in the last few generations:<p>1) There's a soulmate out there for you<p>2) You shouldn't change who you are for your partner<p>Both of which combine to create the barrage of unhappy relationship stories that you hear today. Really, I think that you can be happy with just about anyone who is willing to listen to you and change their mind when they're wrong.<p>Because you are wrong about something. Maybe it's major, maybe it's minor, maybe it's a "facet of your personality" which is destructive, and you should be willing to update the way that you interact with the world based on new information. Going into relationships as an immutable person is a quick way to dwindle your dating pool down to practically nothing or decrease the quality of the relationship for your partner.
PROTIP:<p>1. Have a longterm vision/goal for your life that is achievable regardless of financial resources/location etc.<p>2. Find a partner in crime who shares that vision and is willing to join you on what will surely be a great adventure known as your life. Life will surely be no bed of roses.<p>3. Stress Test your relationship in some way to ensure the vision/goal is aligned.<p>I decided I should marry my wife following 6 months of hard travel through South America. I figured if we passed that test, we could handle pretty much anything.<p>EDIT: Appreciate all the comments. I have actually been married now for 10 years and have 3 kids. So while its true that the "Test" I am describing cannot mimic the tough slog of real-life, how exactly do you propose to mimic the difficulty of raising kids? If I were to speak to my 20 something self I would still recommend a difficult trip is an easy way to see how easily your relationship will come apart under stress, mainly because you are coming up against unknown/uncomfortable situations and factors.
<i>What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right.</i><p>That is not enough. If you don't have the practical logistics down as well, the odds will be very much against you. Trust is a big factor. Everything is harder when resources are constrained, especially trust.
A comedian once said "Find someone you can tolerate and marry them." The point being that we as society have put marriage expectations so high that they are impossible for most people to meet. True love, the one, etc... are all things that sound great, but just rarely, if ever happen. It will not always be rainbows and butterflies and there will be times where it is a lot of work. Knowing that going in will lead to an attitude of working together.
> <i>The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.</i><p>Yes, it does! OMG, this so laughably wrong. (The whole article.)<p>Who you marry is a big, big determiner of happiness.<p>It's better to be single than to marry the wrong person.
I was really hoping for at least some statistics or research to show what the scale of the purported issue is, and the decision-making processes that lead to it. This reads more as an opinion piece from a marriage counselor (author seems to be a television personality in actuality) than an actual explanation of why people choose the wrong marriage partner.
reminds me of this article...<p><a href="http://markmanson.net/question" rel="nofollow">http://markmanson.net/question</a><p>TL;DR: Don't set goals based on what makes you happy. Instead, decide what you're willing to suffer for.
My grandparents lived long enough to celebrate a 75th anniversary. I remember I was old enough at the time to be cognizant of these issues and I asked them both what "the secret was to a long happy marriage". My grandma said: "well, when I look out the window and see your grandpa drive up in his truck after being away for awhile, I still get a little excited to see him". My grandpa said: "we have sex every night, well, now days we just rub our asses together a little". I think somewhere in there they had some pretty good old timers wisdom.
tl;dr<p>A happy marriage isn't a result of magically picking the right person.<p>My 2 cents: Of course it isn't. A happy marriage is the result of two conscious decisions - one from each person involved.<p>To sum it up with a quote I heard growing up:<p>"'Soul mates' are fiction and an illusion[...] yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price."
Of course, you should not marry or have kids - that way you will be better separated, an easier to tame slave. Thanks for not having relationships, thanks for not having people who stand up for you!
[0]<p>There are so many reasons why the whole marriage thing is a boondoggle. The most pithy is: 'Women marry men, expecting they will change. Men marry women, expecting they won't.' More often than not, both wind up disappointed.<p>Erring a bit more scientifically, the male and female brains are genuinely structured differently and process sensing input differently [1], [2]. It's no wonder they respond to the same situations differently. An anecdote: I've asked dozens of people: "What would you do if you were walking down the beach and you heard the screams of a child drowning?" The men unanimously say they'd dash to the water, tearing their clothes off as they run to the rescue. The women, not unanimously but overwhelmingly, say they'd run to get the life guard.<p>When the stakes are high in a marriage, agreeing on how to react can become very difficult and disagreement can lead to schisms in the relationship. It might be a disabled child, a layoff, a drunken one-night stand, serious accident, or any number of misfortunes. These misfortunes will push people into emotional territory they may have never been in before, and you can't know in advance how they'll react.<p>In the end, if you decide to marry, you're taking it on faith that the two of you will remain committed no matter what. You really have few indicators to go by.<p>[0] Speaking strictly in terms of man/woman marriages, the only place I have experience.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Brain_(book)</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Bazelon-t.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Bazelon-t.htm...</a>
> For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative.<p>I hear this opinion everywhere, and I'm curious to see if there's any bearing to this idea. As far as I'm concerned, loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart all occur with some regularity despite marrying for romantic reasons.
No mention of children, until we get this: "maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged".<p>This solipsistic, navel-gazing age can't die fast enough.
I guess I count myself lucky in that I never bothered to look for anyone, not even in the context of casual sex. For me, people are such a complicated topic that I'd rather share my time with a cat than another human being. It's not to say that I don't enjoy the time I do share with my friend (yes, I literally just have one friend) but I can't see myself having anything but a friend or two in my life. I may be setting myself up for a lonely life in my later years but I've lived this way since college (never had much in the way of friends during my k-12 years). And honestly, I'd rather be lonely than miserable. I can always make a friend, but I can't unmake bad memories of a failed relationship/marriage.
Authenticity and communication I personally think are the two most important traits for a successful relationship.<p>If you don't feel like you can be your real self in front of that person, unable to share with each other your dreams, fantasies, desires, fears, faults and foibles, it is going to be difficult to build a relationship that can last.<p>I’ve been married twenty-one years, and neither of us are the same two people who got married all that time ago. There have been times when we’ve discussed if the two people we’ve become should stay married. There’s been times when love is strained, times when things are just comfortable, and times when my heart still beats faster when she walks in the room.
Part of this was borrowed without credit. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160422073110/http://thephilosophersmail.com/relationships/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong-people/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160422073110/http://thephiloso...</a>
I've found this podcast [1] really insightful. The guy who presents it is Christian, but it's interesting whether you buy the Jesus thing or not.<p>[1] <a href="http://subversivekingdom.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-soulmate/" rel="nofollow">http://subversivekingdom.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-soulm...</a>
It's the long form of this: <a href="https://youtu.be/zuKV2DI9-Jg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/zuKV2DI9-Jg</a><p>The author founded The School of Life - which I think is wonderful.
I thought I had read something like this before. The Philosophers' Mail had some very thought provoking writing but it appears to have gone under.
Oh cool, now NYT columnists are plagiarizing polyamorist marketing. That's so cool how we can engineer better sexual relationships than >250K years of biological and cultural evolution, and all it took was a little postmodern thinking.