Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [135]
To Felder—admittedly the most jaded of observers—this urge to dodge our own responsibility when love goes wrong is so intense it verges on the murderous. Most people won’t articulate it, he says, “but they wish that their ex or their soon-to-be ex would just die. I’ve had a few of them actually come out and say it: ‘Why don’t you just go and die somewhere?’ But I think they all feel that way. Anger, humiliation, the sense of having been deceived—the veneer of civilization comes off very easily in these situations.”
For those of us who get along with our exes just fine, this claim might sound as over-the-top as Felder’s furnishings. But even if it characterizes only a particularly extreme subset of cases, the degree of antipathy he describes is troubling. And even if many marriages end amicably (or at least non-homicidally), they still end—close to 40 percent of them, these days.* That’s a lot of wrongness about love. After all, most of these people started out smitten. As Felder put it, “Nobody in the history of the world ever got married and said, ‘This is going to last 30 minutes and then we’re going to get divorced.’” So how did all these people go from romance and wedding bells—a veritable idyll of rightness—to concluding that their erstwhile soul mate was wrong for them?
This is not a question divorce lawyers can answer; their job begins when relationships end. To understand why relationships founder in the first place, we need to turn elsewhere—to a caretaker rather than an undertaker of romantic love. We’ve already met one such person in passing: Harville Hendrix, a marriage counselor of more than thirty years’ standing, head of a therapist training and certification program, and author of three bestselling books on relationships. If Felder is a celebrity divorce lawyer, Hendrix is something of a celebrity psychologist; this is the guy Oprah called the “marriage whisperer.”
When I spoke with Hendrix, he started out by noting that we initially experience romantic love in a way that would make our poets and pop singers proud. “In the early stages of love, you actually do experience a kind of merger of consciousness,” he said. “People who are falling in love seem to kind of fuse together for a while.” Unsurprisingly, this fused phase corresponds to the rosiest time in the life of most couples. Eventually, though, some cracks start to appear—both in the feeling of unity and in the couple’s contentment. “At some point you differentiate,” Hendrix said. “You say, ‘I am me and not you, and this is what I think and not that.’” These areas of divergences can be trivial—“‘Actually, I don’t really enjoy that kind of movie,’ or ‘I really like butter pecan ice cream better than vanilla, even though it was fun to eat it with you sometimes,’” to borrow Hendrix’s examples—or they can be more substantive: different religious beliefs, different ideas about raising children, different sexual desires, different attitudes about money. In a sense, though, the nature of these differences doesn’t matter that much, Hendrix says. It’s their mere existence that presents a problem: “The power struggle that happens after the romantic phase is always triggered by something showing up in the relationship that you had denied or overlooked, or that the other person had withheld.”
It’s not that either partner had lied, Hendrix said—although