Do I?

Marriage for overthinkers

It was only in the weeks before my wedding that I realised I didn’t really understand what the point of marriage is. Superficially, I felt pretty prepared. I had spent the previous month reading a handful of marriage-advice books and enjoyed most of them, but when I tried to explain what I had learnt to a friend I came up short. The books offered useful relationship advice, but ultimately they were a distraction, as it was all just as applicable to any long term relationship, and it was never made clear what makes marriage different. I understood that it would be impossible to fully understand the meaning and everything that is entailed by marriage before having gone through it, but it seemed reckless not to even try. Without this effort of understanding, the wedding would have felt just like a fun party, and been less of a meaningful occasion.

All of this only occured to me about 3 weeks before the wedding, so I did the following in the spirit of cramming for a test. I downloaded another stack of books and started going through them, trying to filter out the ones which were just more relationship advice, or so religiously focused that it was difficult to apply them to my life. There were two books which stood out from the rest, The Course of Love by Alain de Botton, and 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (written before he went off the rails).

Before discussing the ideas I found helpful, I feel compelled to mention the Law of Equal and Opposite Advice, which states that for every piece of good advice that someone hears, someone else needs to hear the exact opposite advice. This is obvious on reflection, as most idioms have a contradictory twin: e.g. "too many cooks spoil the broth" and "many hands make light work". At the centre of Aristotle's idea of virtue ethics is that each personality trait is a spectrum from deficiency to excess, and there is an ideal point called the golden mean somewhere along this line. e.g. courage is the golden mean between recklessness and cowardice, and confidence is the golden mean between arrogance and self-loathing. People are scattered all over these spectrums, and self-improvement is the attempt to inch towards the golden means along each trait, with the threat of overshooting always hanging in the air.

If deference to traditions is a coherent personality trait, as an atheist who is often sceptical of many traditions I think I am a bit too far on the side of undue dismissal, and would benefit to slowly shift towards the golden mean of thoughtful appreciation. This essay is a push for myself in that direction. However, there are many people who are too close to the excess end of the deference to traditions spectrum, whether because they’re from conservative backgrounds or due to their own personal inclination, who choose to suffer through regrettable marriages rather than making the mature decision to get divorced, which is a terrible shame. I expect this essay would be unhelpful for these people, and I think they would probably benefit from thinking of marriage in different terms. This essay is a product of me and my deficiencies, so read at your peril.

With that said, here are the three related ways in which marriage is distinct from a long-term relationship that I came across while reading. I expect there are many more aspects which I haven’t considered, but this was enough for me to be able to say I do and feel like I meant it.

A few of the benefits of marriage:

Commitment device (creating incentives to improve the relationship)

All couples have problems. Some problems are bigger than others. Some problems are so big, so fundamental to a couple's conflicting personalities that these problems would require years of unpleasant work and hardship to solve. Solving these problems may come from each of them adjusting their behaviour and outlook, or more likely by coming to terms with each other's flaws, and learning to live with them. If the couple cannot be confident that they'll still be together in the distant future then it is easier to live with these nagging problems rather than solve them, as the benefits from the solution only come in the long run. A way to incentivise the couple to solve/accept their problems is for them to make some kind of dependable commitment that they will stay together even when it is not in their immediate self interest. Through this vow of commitment, they can push through short term suffering to achieve long term flourishing, whether that comes from resolving their problems, or by accepting them.

Similar to when you are living in a flat for an indeterminate amount of time, and there are a bunch of small annoying problems (the fridge is ancient and a bit gross, the walls in the bathroom could do with painting, and the couch isn’t quite to your taste). As you’re not sure whether you’ll get that job offer in that other city soon, it’s not worth the hassle of renovating in case you’ll be moving out in just a couple of months so you live with it. You end up living in that flat for the rest of your life, and everytime someone tactfully asks whether that’s mold on the bathroom ceiling or just an unorthodox design choice, you tell them, ah well, it would take a whole weekend to sort out, and who knows where I’ll be next year, so what’s the point really?

Ulysses Contract (preventing destruction of the relationship)

Imagine that you’ve been married for many years, and things haven’t been going that well between you and your partner for a year or so (mundane bickering, less and less intimacy, repetitive conversations, etc), and then you meet someone else who’s so fun to chat with and so interesting and so new. You slowly start to think that maybe you’ve made a huge mistake, and that you’d be much happier if you were to be with them instead. If you gave into this desire, it would probably only take a few years before you realised that this person has their own share of issues and problems, and you’d be in a similar position as when you started, but without the benefit of the foundation you had built. As de Botton says: “The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better”. The mistake lies in thinking that there is someone out there who is perfectly suited for you, and it is just a matter of finding them. The tricky thing is that a person’s flaws often only become apparent after spending enough time together, and so when you compare alluring acquaintances with your long-term partner, your partner will be at an inherent disadvantage.

In de Botton’s The Course of Love, he advocates for Enlightened Romantic Pessimism: “Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure… There can only ever be a “good enough” marriage.” He argues that the belief in The Myth Of The Perfect Person is setting ourselves up for inevitable disappointment, and we should not be disappointed with our spouse for failing to meet this standard, but with ourselves for expecting something so impossible. “There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.” Once we accept this reality and come to terms with the falsity of the Romantic view of love (which is based on ideas of passion, intuition, and perfection) we can begin to approach relationships in a more mature way.

Without marriage, the temptation to give up when it gets painfully difficult would be extremely strong. The idea that there is someone out there who is perfect for us is often just too compelling to resist. Marriage makes the decision to drop everything and start again much harder, and so can prevent us from falling into the trap of chasing one person after another. Like Ulysses strapping himself to the mast when sailing past the sirens, marriage binds ourselves to the person whom we most want to spend our lives with, so we can survive sailing past tempting distractions. Thus, marriage is a tool to help us reach a desirable long term goal (a fulfilling and loving long term relationship) while avoiding all of the short term traps of faster gratification by starting a new relationship rather than grappling with the problems of the existing one.

Increasing freedom by limiting choices (increasing our enjoyment during the relationship)

Marriage can be thought of as a (seemingly paradoxical) method of increasing your freedom by reducing your options. The same way that having a strict routine limits your options tremendously, but it also feels incredibly freeing not to be buffeted around by whatever your immediate desires call for, and ultimately get nowhere important. It can be a huge relief to make a conscious decision once and stick to it, rather than making lots of impulsive choices over and over again.

This can be stated in terms of negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from external constraints (e.g. being legally allowed to go to university), while positive liberty is having the capability and resources to achieve your goals (e.g. having the money to go to university). Marriage is an example of how by reducing negative liberty can increase positive liberty. In other words, by being restricted so that you can’t start a romantic relationship with whomever you please (a reduction of your negative liberty), you are able to achieve a deeper and more meaningful relationship with your partner (an increase in your positive liberty).

Deciding on how to approach marriage and its fragility

All of these benefits stem from how marriage helps us to forsake short-term gratification for long-term flourishing, relying on the fact that marriage is a lifelong commitment. However, this raises a challenging question to the modern marriage: do these benefits of marriage hold up in an age where the divorce rate is 40%?

When watching Shark Tank, I find I never fail to be bemused by how the startup founder can say “I have total confidence that this product will be incredibly successful. It cannot fail”, when it’s well known that startups have about a 90% failure rate. But when I reflect on it, perhaps the startup founder is right to delude himself that his work is going to pay off. Maybe humans are not psychologically built to wake up every morning and do hard, thankless work for 12 hours and go back to bed, and repeat this 7 days a week for 2 years knowing that it's overwhelmingly likely to be all totally and utterly pointless. Perhaps unadulterated rationality might not serve human psychology when undertaking such long and difficult projects.

I find the analogous moment equally incongruous in weddings, when the bride and groom take turns promising each other that they will stay together forever and only be separated by death, all the while the well-documented divorce rate of 40% hangs in the air. It seems about as bizarre as two people standing hand in hand in front of all their friends and family, flipping a coin and saying "I know with all my heart that this will come up heads".

The downsides of the blindly optimistic couple are clear: if the marriage does eventually fail, the couple who were 100% convinced of success will be more shocked and devastated than the one who had realistic expectations. It is also likely that the blind-optimists will continue the project long after it would have become clear that it was time to walk away to more rational actors.

But the optimists also have some advantages over the rationalists. For instance, I suspect the rationalist will become disheartened and will give up when there were still decent odds of success if only they had persevered. Or perhaps, fully cognizant of the statistical odds and all of the pain that awaits them, they would choose never to embark on the endeavor at all.

Empirically speaking, I really don’t know whether the blindly optimistic couple or the realistic couple are better off. I suspect the realistic couple would have a healthier marriage, as they have the benefit of understanding the vulnerability of their relationship and so they might be more proactive in preventing things from going badly. But maybe the realistic couple wouldn’t even embark on the journey to begin with. Ultimately I would guess it’s probably a question of personality, and some people are more suited to one method than the other.

In the days before the wedding, I experimented with different wedding vows that lie on the spectrum of blind-optimism to realism:

Traditionally optimistic:
I, John, take thee, Mary, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I pledge thee my faith.

Here’s an expression of love and commitment which probably tends a little too realistic:
I, John, take you Mary, to be my first wife, for approximately 7-12 years if we follow demographic trends, through good times (which research suggests will decline in frequency after the first 18 months), and through bad times (which multiple studies indicate will increase as we age), for richer (though financial disputes are the leading cause of divorce), for poorer (which significantly raises our chance of separation), in sickness (unless it’s something really burdensome) and in health (which actuarial tables suggest will decline starting in our 50s), until divorced do we part, which, given our age, education level, and socioeconomic status, has a 43% chance of occurring before our 10th anniversary. Should we manage to avoid divorce, I tentatively plan to make reasonable endeavours to be faithful until death, pending any unforeseen circumstances or midlife crises.

And finally an attempt at what I’m aspiring to:
I, John, commit to you, Mary, to address problems early rather than letting resentments fester, to seek professional help preventatively, and to have difficult conversations even when it would be easier to stay silent. I recognize that we will both change over time, and that our relationship will evolve with us. When conflicts arise I endeavour to prioritize understanding over winning. I enter this commitment knowing it may fail despite our best efforts, but believing the attempt is worthwhile nonetheless.

I tried to make it clear to my friends and family that if I call them up many years from now and tearfully tell them that things aren't going well with my wife, and that we're planning on getting divorced, I want them to be very clear to me that if I were to give up on the relationship I would not be living up to my values. I want their reaction to be similar to if I had told them that my new hobby is shoplifting, i.e. disappointment, concern, and an enthusiasm to help me get back on track.

I realise that this is a big responsibility I am asking of them. I expect that their first reaction to hearing me at this lowest point would be to want to comfort me, to say that I should do whatever I feel is right, and that they'll support me equally no matter what. And yet I am asking them to go against these instincts and instead be kind, but make it clear that divorce would be a betrayal of my values, and that while it might be a relief in the short term, it probably won’t lead to long term flourishing.

Modern marriage presents us with a deeper paradox than just balancing idealism and realism. The very benefits of marriage I discussed - as a commitment device, a Ulysses contract, and a freedom-enhancing constraint - depend on a belief in its permanence. If we approach marriage thinking divorce is likely, we undermine these core mechanisms: we won't invest in solving deep-rooted problems if we doubt the long-term payoff, we won't be truly bound to the mast if we expect we’ll be untying ourselves soon, and we won't feel the freedom that comes from limiting our choices if we keep one eye on the exit.

I suspect this contradiction to not be rationally resolvable, but I do expect a glimmer of an answer to come from the inclusion of work. It's not that a random 40% of marriages fail, but disproportionately ones which had the least consideration and work put into them. As with all living things, marriages decay, fray, and wear down over time. When investment falls below depreciation, the system crumbles apart. It is only with sufficient work and maintenance can a marriage expect to be able to sustain its resilience. This is determined by the daily choices which a couple makes to stay engaged and invested in each other's lives.

This reveals another paradox of marriage: all of its safety and reliability can only persist through constant effort. If you take these benefits for granted, they will crumble away around you. I expect a successful marriage to require holding these multiple contradictory ideas at the same time: an understanding of the fragility of the endeavour, a deep belief in your commitment, and knowledge that the relationship will require a lot of work to uphold.