On Marrying The Wrong Person & Other Lessons: And Other Essays (Essay Books) - Hardcover

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We are all desperate, of course, to marry the right person. But none of us ever quite does. The fault isn’t entirely our own; it has to do with the devilish truth that anyone we’re liable to meet is going to be rather wrong, in some fascinating way or another, because this is simply what all humans happen to be – including, sadly, ourselves. Yet – as these darkly encouraging and witty essays propose – we don’t need perfection to be happy. So long as we enter our relationships in the right spirit, we have every chance of coping well enough with, and even delighting in, the inevitable and distinctive wrongness that lies in ourselves and our beloveds.

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II When Is One Ready to Get Married?

It used to be when you’d hit certain financial and social milestones: when you had a home to your name, a set of qualifications on the mantelpiece and a few cows and a parcel of land in your possession.But when, under the influence of Romantic ideology, this grew to seem altogether too mercenary and calculating, the focus shifted to emotions. It came to be thought important to feel the right way. That was the true sign of a good union. And the right feelings included the sense that the other was ‘the one’, that you understood one another perfectly and that you’d both never want to sleep with anyone else again.These ideas, though touching, have proved to be an almost sure recipe for the eventual dissolution of marriages – and have caused havoc in the emotional lives of millions of otherwise cautious and well-meaning couples.

As a corrective to them, what follows is a proposal for a very different set of principles, more Classical in temper, which indicate when two people should properly consider themselves ready for marriage.

We are ready for marriage…

1. When we give up on perfection

We should not only admit in a general way that the person we are marrying is very far from perfect. We should also grasp the specifics of their imperfections: how they will be irritating, difficult, sometimes irrational, and often unable to sympathise with or understand us. Vows should be rewritten to include the terse line: ‘I agree to marry this person even though they will, on a regular basis, drive me to distraction.’

However, these flaws should never be interpreted as merely capturing a local problem. No one else would be better. Everyone is as bad. We are a flawed species. Whomever one got together with would be radically imperfect in a host of deeply serious ways. One must conclusively kill the idea that things would be ideal with any other creature in this galaxy. There can only ever be a ‘good-enough’ marriage.For this realisation to sink in, it helps to have had a number of relationships before marrying; not in order to have the chance to locate ‘the right person’, but so that one can have ample opportunity to discover at first hand, in many different contexts, the truth that everyone (even the most initially exciting prospect) really is a bit wrong from close up.

2. When we despair of being understood

Love starts with the experience of being understood in a deeply and uncommonly supportive way. They understand the lonely parts of you; you don’t have to explain why you find a particular joke so funny; you hate the same people; they too want to try out a particular sexual scenario. This will not continue. Another vow should read: ‘However much the other seems to understand me, there will always be large tracts of my psyche that will remain incomprehensible to them and anyone else.’ We shouldn’t, therefore, blame our lovers for a dereliction of duty in failing to interpret and grasp our internal workings. They were not tragically inept. They simply couldn’t understand who we were and what we needed – which is wholly normal. No one properly understands, and can therefore fully sympathise with, anyone else.

3. When we realise we are crazy

This is deeply counter-intuitive. We seem so normal and mostly so good. It’s the others who are the crazy ones. But maturity is founded on an active sense of one’s own folly. One is out of control for long periods; one has failed to master one’s past; one projects unhelpfully; one is permanently anxious. One is, to put it mildly, an idiot.

If we are not regularly and very deeply embarrassed by who we are, it can only be because we haven’t begun to understand our own narrative.