Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

[SecularMotion]

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html

[TreasonousBastard]

1. just get rid of marriage...

and so many problems will be solved.

[sense]

2. So, you're saying

just get rid of long term relationships? Don't bother to work through difficulties? Make no attempt to figure yourself out, let alone figure out anyone else? Quit working toward becoming a reasonable human being? Cut and run when your beliefs about your perfection are challenged?

Way to grow!

[TreasonousBastard]

3. No. I'm saying get rid of marriage...

it's an obsolete institution that has outlived its initial purpose of deciding paternity.

Now, a couple that wants to have a ceremony to celebrate their love could get "married" but such a ceremony would be stripped of the silly crap we attach to it.

Things like joint ownership, custody of children, estates, end of life concerns and all the other legal things marriage entails might be better left to civil agreements.

[vicman]

5. I agree with you

Marriage is a legally binding agreement that only has to do with property rights. Falling in love, deciding to partner with someone with the sincere intention of walking with them through life, is completely different from the legal contract we call marriage. In fact the societal perceptions and legal obligations we insist upon through "marriage," are more likely to increase the stressors that can destroy sincere human feelings of affection and loyalty to another person.

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

7. But but but... think of the lawyers!

[shrike]

8. Marriage provides many legal benefits, which is why the LGBT community fought for the right to marry

ONLY if the laws were changed, IMO, could it be abolished.

Full disclosure: I myself am married, twenty years.

[TreasonousBastard]

9. I agree-- which is why I would change the law to allow other contractual...

agreements.

I am currently unmarried, so why can't I make arrangements for a trusted friend to handle everything for me, but sex and laundry, that a spouse would?

BTW, a large part of the battle for gay marriage wasn't just the legal benefits, but the social recognition of the relationship. To some, that was more important.

[shrike]

10. Well, I can remember a case in Michigan

Where I grew up. One of a pair of longtime female partners was incapacitated and no longer able to communicate her wishes. Her parents swooped in and took over in the hospital, literally. Her partner had no standing as a spouse, even though they'd been together twenty years.

I also saw an interview with a pair of gay men who'd been together fifty years. One had adopted the other. They'd had trouble with regards to making medical decisions for each other; but now they were father and son, problem solved. (I thought it was quite ingenious) Maybe some gays are too young to remember all that stuff: for others, it was all too real.

[TreasonousBastard]

11. I remember a lot of cases like that...

and I personally know a gay couple in their 80's who were thankful a few years ago to get married so they could have marital rights before one of them died.

I believe the French have arrangement similar to what I was thinking of, but I don't remember many of the details.

[shrike]

12. Yes, you're right about the French. You register your partnership with the city

or government. Doesn't matter what sex you are. (You can still get married; partnership being something different.) Makes perfect sense to me. Partnership laws lay everything out on the table: who gets what if the relationship breaks up. That way, no one ends up on the French version of Judge Judy . . .

People who are going to live together should do their homework. I remember ANOTHER case, one involving heterosexuals. A couple in their forties, living in a beautiful home in California. He was killed in a car accident, left no will. Under California law, she had thirty or so days to get out of his family's house -- she had no right of survivorship. They'd never put her name on the deed.

The cynical side of me wonders if some people don't want to get married because they don't want to share their stuff if they break up. But seriously, if you care enough to live with someone you should be willing to make certain you both would be whole if things don't work out.

[TreasonousBastard]

13. Speaking of California...

I remember some wag saying he gave up on marriage..

"I meet a woman, get laid twice and buy her a house. Same thing."

[shrike]

15. Lewis Grizzard's version of that joke:

"Next time, instead of getting married I'm going to find a woman I don't like and buy her a house."

[Fast Walker 52]

14. but but but society would fall apart without marriage!

[Buzz cook]

4. Hey I was hung over

and I just wanted her to stop shouting.

The second marriage has worked out well though.

[Chan790]

6. Not me. I don't believe in marriage.

So...I'll never have one.

[Blue_Tires]

16. Hell, I can't even find the wrong person TO marry...