Twenty Ideas on Marriage Flashcards
Love is ultimately not just a feeling but a skill that has to be learnt.
1/ Pessimism
The only way to make a marriage work is – curiously – not to expect everything from it. Some of the happiest marriages have been between people who knew that they would, despite their best intentions, make each other a little bit miserable sometimes.
There are deep-seated reasons why happiness will not always be present. Each partner’s character and mind is hugely complex and convoluted. We all had childhoods that left us less than ideally equipped to communicate honestly, to confront our awkward thoughts, to remain calm and to avoid sulking.
A marriage forces a partner to play an unfeasible number of roles in one’s life: they must be a best friend, sexual companion, household manager, chauffeur, cook, accountant, perhaps co-parent, travel-mate… No wonder if we inevitably all fail at a few of these.
2/ Why we married who we married
The psychotherapeutic answer is that we picked them because they felt familiar.
All of us look to re-create, within our adult relationships, some of feelings we knew well in childhood.
We over personalise issues, we don’t explain our distress, we panic, we retreat into silence. We go in for attention-seeking antics.
There is an opportunity to move from a child to an adult pattern of response to our partner’s most challenging sides. There is a properly grown up – less agitated, less fragile – way of handling them that would solve the problem of having married (as we all do) a fascinatingly complicated person.
3/ Being a good teacher
A good marriage depends on odd-sound skill: that of being a good teacher.
Teaching is a skill. It requires patience, an ability to put oneself in the shoes of another and a certain good-humour around the resistance and ill-will of the person in the student role.
4/ Being a good student
The only people who should be loved for who they really are are perfect people – who don’t exist.
The rest of us should accept that a partner may legitimately want to teach us how to become a better version of ourselves.
We should stop judging these attempts at instruction so harshly.
5/ Sulking
The sulker is gripped by the idea that being properly loved means being perfectly understood by someone else.
Sulking builds on some occasional deeply wonderful moments of childhood – typically repeated in the opening days of love – when we have the astonishing experience of being intuitively grasped by someone else in small and large areas.
The real sign of love is not magical insight; it is the willingness to explain and to listen calmly.
6/ Sex in Marriage
It is almost impossible to be married and, in the long-term, enjoy an extraordinary sex life.
There are deep-seated reasons for this. Relationships naturally become very complex arenas of compromise and negotiation; we have to be circumspect, and careful, we have to measure our words and reign in our feelings. However, sex ideally demands the opposite: an uncensored, carefree version of ourselves.
The very forces that keep a good enough relationship going – patience, kindness, compromise, biting one’s tongue – work systematically against the raw drama of sex.
The waning of sex is a sign that a marriage is stabilising, not failing. If we more publically admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent.
And we’d be less haunted by an unreal, secret tantalising idea: that it could all be so different with someone else. It wouldn’t be. The fault isn’t us or our partner: our condition is mostly the strange, necessary price of genuinely sharing a life.
7/ Crushes
We tend to secretly compare our partner very unfavourably to our crush and might get snappy at home as a result: but what really separates our partner from the object of our crush is simple: knowledge.
The truth about the crush is, of course, that they’d drive us crazy too; we just haven’t as yet discovered in what deep ways they would irk, annoy and upset us if we actually did try to share our life with them.
8/ In praise of compromise
We don’t compromise because we’ve given up on love, but because we’ve got a more accurate idea of what relationships can realistically be in the long term.
A wiser option sees marriage as rightly and honourably having a practical dimension: it is an economic alliance, an arrangement for bringing up a family, a domestic management team, a social partnership, an insurance policy for old age. These are deeply serious and dignified human projects. It isn’t our duty to sacrifice them because the flame of mutual delight has died down.
9/ The ironing and the bins
The notion that practical matters have no legitimate place in love makes our lives harder than they need to be.
We should accept the fundamental dignity of the ironing board and the bin roster.
10/ Reading side by side in bed
Reading in bed together represents a major achievement. There’s not really anyone else we could do it with.
When we think of what marriage is for we don’t often think of the small pleasures like this: buying a cheap old vase at a market and a few flowers on the way home; sitting on the floor together and sorting the socks after the wash; watching a TV drama together episode by episode.
A marriage will inevitably contain serious problems – because two complicated, independent people can’t join their lives without friction.
Being able to read in bed together is a major feat; and a sign of deep love. We may be doing better than we think.
11/ Marriage Therapy
Far from a self-indulgence, undergoing therapy is one of the most generous things we could ever do for all those who have to live around us. Those who have spent time in therapy are ever so slightly less dangerous to be around: a little better able to warn those who depend on them of how frustrating and peculiar they might sometimes be
12/ Date Night
It is no insult to a relationship – or to our intellects – to realise that it may be hard to summon up the questions that are truly going to reopen the channels of feeling between ourselves and our partners.
Here then are some of the more intimate, frustration-releasing questions that we might systematically ask:
– In what ways have I hurt you? – When do I satisfy you? – Where do you feel underappreciated? – What would you like me to apologise for? – How have I let you down? – What do you need from me?
Such conversations, handled without recrimination or defensiveness, can save love. They can also help sex to go better, given how often a desire not to be touched is – at heart – the legacy of pent-up irritation and hurt.
13/ Resentment
Over time, every marriage seems to change: there are running disagreements, points of deep tension, sex is patchy, we wonder if our partner might be flirting too much with someone else, there are things we definitely wish we could change about each other, we nag and criticise, we seem to just grunt and sulk instead of having deep conversations. We start to resent each other.
We’ve been judging our relationship by the exaggerated standards of fiction, rather than by the more more modest, and much fairer, benchmark of reality.
14/ Other People’s Marriages
We know our own marriage from the inside – while we generally have only a heavily edited, limited and sanitised picture of the marriages of other people.
We’re intently aware of our own sorrows: the cold silences, harsh criticisms, furious outbursts, episodes of door slamming, bitter late night denunciations, simmering sexual disappointments and the times of aching loneliness in the bedroom.
Getting a much more accurate idea of what other people’s marriages are really like isn’t prying or cruel, it’s a priority in love because it reveals the true nature of the task we’re undertaking.
15/ For the darkest days
In short: it’s not your fault. Everyone when known properly turns out to be unbearable in some central ways. There is no-one you could be married to that would not – at times – leave you feeling desperate. You too are tricky, we should remember.
You feel completely alone; yet you are in a vast (shy) majority.
No-one really understands anyone else. That your spouse doesn’t grasp you in central ways is entirely unavoidable.
We can cope better than we think.
16/ Comforting
An urgent task is to try to understand the particular way in which we, and our partner, need love to be delivered in order to feel that it feel real.
Recognising that there are different styles of help alerts us to the severe risks of misunderstanding. Instead of getting annoyed at our lover’s sometimes widely misdirected effort, we can grasp – perhaps for the first time – the basic truth that these blundering companions are in fact attempting to be nice.
17/ The Partner-as-Child
If we were to regard our partner as a young child however, the mood might soften. This isn’t condescending.
We’re tapping into a constructive way of interpreting the less lovely elements of someone’s character and conduct. We’re seeing them not simply as rational, sophisticated adults who – from sheer malice and selfishness – are behaving badly. Instead we’re recognising how vulnerable they are to hunger, tiredness and their own griefs, anxieties and regrets.
18/ The Weakness of Strength
As a relationship progresses, we often find that it is our partner’s shortcomings that most occupy our attention.
Yet, behind their negative behaviour, there is a powerful logic at work. Every strength a person has is also – in other situations – a frustrating and possibly irritating weakness. Someone may be often very kind and tender – but the same gentleness will sometime means they don’t assert themselves or show much initiative.
It’s always calming to take a moment to remind ourselves that perfect people simply don’t exist.
19/ Closeness
We should have sympathy for ourselves. Admitting to need is inherently frightening. It’s not surprising we should badger or behave coldly rather than simply own up to our fragility.
We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. ‘I really need you; do you still want me?’ should be the most normal of enquiries.
20/ Humour
We want to find a way to be annoyed with, and criticise, one another’s most maddening sides without eliciting a drama, with a special kind of diplomatic immunity that is the gift of comedy.
Exaggerating the exaggeration is a tool for criticising another person without arousing their irritation or self-righteousness. And the laughter we elicit isn’t just a sign they have been entertained; it’s proof that they have acknowledged an attempt to reform them.
George Bernard Shaw understood this very well. ‘If you want to tell people the truth,’ he remarked, ‘make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you.’
