The Course of Love

Ready for Marriage

They have been married for thirteen years and yet only now, a little late, does Rabih feel ready for marriage. It’s not the paradox it seems. Given that marriage yields its important lessons only to those who have enrolled in its curriculum, it’s normal that readiness should tend to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself, perhaps by a decade or two.

Rabih recognizes that it’s a mere sleight of language that allows him to maintain that he has been married only once. What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance, and emotional homecomings that he has in truth gone through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages—just to the same person.

He is on a long drive down to Manchester for a client meeting. This is where he can think best, very early in the morning, in the car with the roads almost entirely clear and no one to talk to but himself.

Once, you were deemed ready for matrimony when you’d reached certain financial and social milestones: when you had a home to your name, a trousseau full of linen, a set of qualifications on the mantelpiece, or a few cows and a parcel of land in your possession.

Then, under the influence of Romantic ideology, such practicalities grew to seem altogether too mercenary and calculating, and the focus shifted to emotional qualities. It came to be thought important to have the right feelings, among these a sense of having hit upon a soul mate, a faith in being perfectly understood, a certainty of never wanting to sleep with anyone else again.

The Romantic ideas are, he knows now, a recipe for disaster. His readiness for marriage is based on a quite different set of criteria. He is ready for marriage because—to begin the list—he has given up on perfection.

Pronouncing a lover “perfect” can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

However, the problems aren’t theirs alone. Whomever we could meet would be radically imperfect: the stranger on the train, the old school acquaintance, the new friend online . . . Each of these, too, would be guaranteed to let us down. The facts of life have deformed all of our natures. No one among us has come through unscathed. We were all (necessarily) less than ideally parented: we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we lie and scatter blame where it doesn’t belong.

The chances of a perfect human emerging from the perilous gauntlet are nonexistent. We don’t have to know a stranger very well before knowing this about them. Their particular way of being maddening won’t be immediately apparent—it could take as long as a couple of years—but its existence can be theoretically assumed from the start.

Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, “the wrong person.”

This needn’t be a disaster, however. Enlightened romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a “good enough” marriage.

For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a few lovers before settling down, not in order to have had a chance to locate “the right person,” but in order to have had an ample opportunity to discover at first hand, and in many different contexts, the truth that there isn’t any such a person; that everyone really is a bit wrong when considered from close up.

Rabih feels ready for marriage because he has despaired of being fully understood.

Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don’t have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we hate the same people; we both want to try that rather specialized sexual scenario.

It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

Rabih feels ready for marriage because he realizes he is crazy.

It’s profoundly counterintuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good—to ourselves. It’s everyone else who is out of step . . . and yet, maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he has understood that it isn’t Kirsten who is difficult.

They seem “difficult,” of course, within the cage of marriage when they lose their tempers over such petty things: logistics, in-laws, cleaning duties, parties, the groceries . . . But it’s not the other person’s fault, it’s what we’re trying to do with them. It’s the institution of marriage that is principally impossible, not the individuals involved.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he is prepared to love rather than be loved.

We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former.

We start out knowing only about “being loved.” It comes to seem, quite wrongly, the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, and clear up while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful.

We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds “romantic,” yet it is a blueprint for disaster.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he understands that sex will always cohabit uneasily with love.

The Romantic view expects that love and sex will be aligned. We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.

We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core. A single meaningless adventure truly does have a recurring habit of ending everything. It’s impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner’s mind during the “betrayal,” when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defense as often as we like, but we’ll be sure of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as a trustworthy human. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide.

He is ready for marriage because (on a good day) he is happy to be taught and calm about teaching.

We are ready for marriage when we accept that, in a number of significant areas, our partner will be wiser, more reasonable, and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving.

Rabih and Kirsten are ready to be married because they are aware, deep down, that they are not compatible.

The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. 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.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he is fed up with most love stories and because the versions of love presented in films and novels so seldom match what he now knows from lived experience.

By the standards of most love stories, our own real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories—stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.