Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [90]
At the very least, we need to recognize that marriage is not a solution to all of life’s problems. In A General Theory of Love, the authors declare, “When they do get down to relating, Americans find they have been tutored for years in the wrong art. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being in love while discounting the importance of loving.” In fact, the relationship itself, for all of its benefits, creates a number of problems all on its own, so much so that one psychologist has called marriage “a disagreement machine.” Evolutionary psychology itself provides little comfort for those who would like to believe that a happy marriage is a simple and natural achievement. As David Buss has noted, “Humans were not designed by natural selection to coexist in niceness and matrimonial bliss. They were designed for individual survival and genetic reproduction. The psychological mechanisms fashioned by these ruthless criteria are often selfish ones.”
Although a successful marriage does bring all sorts of wonderful benefits, we would all be much more likely to achieve that goal if we lowered our expectations about what marriage will do for us. Actually, you can make the argument that we would be better off if we lowered our expectations across the board. When it comes to life satisfaction, Danes easily outclassed the competition in an international survey. One of the reasons is that they have consistently low expectations for the future. But to return to the question of love, it’s not that we shouldn’t include it as one of the considerations when we get married. However, love alone is not enough. Perhaps the question is not why almost half of our marriages end in divorce but, given our exalted expectations, how half of them manage to succeed. I hope this chapter can offer some answers to that question.
WHY IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE TOO MUCH IN LOVE
One place we might look for answers is arranged marriages. Earlier, I cited a study of Indian arranged marriages, which found that those marriages were happier over time than Western marriages. Orthodox Jews who use a matchmaker have reported similar experiences of love continuing to grow after marriage. If we are willing to loosen our grip on the romantic story line, we might just find that our ideas about the course of love and marriage are out of whack. Right now, our ideal image of marriage looks something like this:
We are supposed to be ecstatic on our wedding day and also live happily ever after. Does that look remotely realistic to anyone? Yet that is the rough outline of most pop culture presentations of the romantic story line. Now, let’s look at a graph at what love looks like for arranged marriages:
Doesn’t that seem both more realistic and, ultimately, a far healthier outlook for long-term happiness?
What I’m saying strikes at the core of the romantic story line and at some of our most cherished myths about love and marriage. But the research is there to back it up. Take, for example, the PAIR Project run by Ted Huston at the University of Texas at Austin. Launched back in 1981, the project has followed 168 newlyweds, studying everything from their early courtship to the eventual success or failure of the relationship. His work is unusually revealing because it looks at couples much earlier in their relationship and for a much longer period of time than virtually any other study. And what Huston and his fellow researchers have discovered challenges many of the central elements of the romantic story line.
Let’s start with the idea that you should marry someone you are madly in love with. Who hasn’t attended a wedding where the couple seems completely enamored with each other and thought, I hope I find a love like that. It turns out that our envy of those blissful couples is entirely misplaced. They are more likely to get divorced because