“Marriage is so unlike anything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”

These words are from Dorothea Brooke, the protagonist of Middlemarch, and I agree with her. Marriage is like nothing else. It will either make you or break you. There’s not much room in between.

Why do we enter into lifelong partnerships with success rates hovering around 60%, anyway? That’s barely better odds than betting on red at a roulette table. In the so-called old days, marriage was a matter of dignity and survival. Today, we marry for anything ranging from self-actualization to not wanting to be alone while we watch TV. We long, as Plato puts it, “for the perpetual possession of the good.” ¹Then we’re surprised when that good comes to a rude ending.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the “pessimistic” philosopher, thought that marriage was a kind of farce. People rarely make each other happy, he argued. We think our desire for a mate is about us, but it’s not; it’s our evolutionary drive tricking us into reproducing. In his cynical essay “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” he concludes:

Marriages from love are made in the interest of the species, not of the individuals. Certainly the persons concerned imagine they are advancing their own happiness; but their real end is one which is foreign to themselves, for it lies in the production of an individual which is only possible through them. Brought together by this aim, they ought henceforth to try to get on together as well as possible. But very often the pair brought together by that instinctive illusion, which is the essence of passionate love, will, in other respects, be of very different natures. This comes to light when the illusion vanishes, as it necessarily must. Accordingly love marriages, as a rule, turn out unhappy; for through them the coming generation is cared for at the expense of the present. ²

Schopenhauer never married (surprising, I know). I don’t know if that’s because he was wise or because he was a pessimist, but I’m sure you’ve met plenty of Schopenhauers yourself. A lot of them remain single, unwilling to deal with the risks. Plenty of others have been married, only to have their vision of happiness shattered by disappointment and disillusionment.

But what do we make of those people who continue to defy Schopenhauer’s prophecy more than a hundred years later? Happily long-married couples may be a minority, but they’re not rare. They’re everywhere, if you look (and ask). And their happiness is rarely a matter of luck – it’s hard for luck to last over decades. So is marriage actually awful, or is it wonderful?

My unscientific conclusion is that it all depends on your expectations.

Which Variety of Suffering are You Okay with?

I learned about expectations the hard way.

My husband Yun was the only person I fell in love with at first sight. I know, there’s no such thing, right? I thought so too, until I walked into a crowded Sunday school classroom in Bundang, South Korea, and saw him quietly sitting in a corner wearing glasses and a slightly too-big suit. It was as though I’d been zapped by electricity – it happened faster than I could understand.

For weeks, I worked up the courage to talk to him. It was slow going. He was shy, awkward (the bumping-into-walls kind of awkward), and always seemed to have somewhere he needed to go. But he was also sweet and strangely funny. I finally convinced him to come to my home to bake cookies. A couple of months later, in the backseat of a taxi, we agreed that we were serious.

The euphoria wore off as soon as I got back to my room. I was the dog that caught the car. I hadn’t planned for what it would be like to be in a “normal” relationship. I loved Yun, but the idea of commitment paralyzed me. I’d spent months dreaming about the guy I only had fleeting interactions with at church, and now I was getting to know a person who was three-dimensional, complex, and very much not mysterious. My anxiety spiraled so badly that we broke up for three weeks.

“The key to a happy marriage…Is having the right expectations. You can communicate all you like, but if your expectations of each other aren’t realistic, it will never work.”

Not long after we got back together, we visited an older, wiser friend. This friend had been through a horrendous marriage and divorce and was now happily married to someone else. We asked him for advice. I was expecting to hear the usual responses: “good communication” or “shared values.” He said neither.

“The key to a happy marriage,” he told us, “Is having the right expectations. You can communicate all you like, but if your expectations of each other aren’t realistic, it will never work.”

The revelation hit me right in the gut. I knew what my problem was. I expected to be married to someone I was happy with, but I had a hard time knowing – in the words of philosopher Alain de Botton – “what variety of suffering I was willing to sacrifice myself for.” ³What I first felt when I met Yun wasn’t love; it was limerence. It was a scientifically verified state of infatuation. ⁴When real love entered in, infatuation was forced to leave. You can’t love an imaginary person and a real person at the same time. 

With the spell of limerence over (and I admit, I still miss those feelings sometimes), I got to the real work of getting to know Yun. Dating him was fun, but it also forced me to make continual decisions: was I okay with his criticism of Crime and Punishment, one of my all-time favorite books? Could I be happy with someone who had a different sense of humor from my dad? What about all the video games and fried Spam? In what way was I willing to suffer? Of course, he had to make similar decisions about me, too, and I’m grateful he chose to stay. Our relationship worked, and continues to work, because we expect to have the things that matter most – but we don’t expect everything.

So is Plato right, or Schopenhauer? 

They both are. We long for the good, we long to be happy, but we also have evolutionary drives that confuse us over what will make us happy. That doesn’t mean that our marriage is destined for misery. It means we need the right expectations and to surrender our imaginations for something even better.

When Reality is Better Than Imagination

Have you ever been told “your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” while ordering at a restaurant? Over-ordering food is a relatively minor issue. Far worse is having an imagination greater than reality, and that’s the case for most of us. As long as you’re single, you can imagine a person who is anything and all of the things you hope for. No multiverse can hold all the fantasies that your brain can.

On the other hand, when you’re in a relationship with someone you care about, you realize how limited they are, and even worse – how limited you are. You learn very quickly about all your assumptions, flaws, and weirdness. It’s lonely, even terrifying to stare into your spouse’s eyes and realize there’s a soul behind them who is not you, not even close. Marriage is like walking around with a mirror: the other person is a daily reminder of both the things you care about and the things you don’t. It is, as Mary Midgley puts it, “a willing acceptance of the genuinely and lastingly strange.” ⁵

I understand why so many people break up or get divorced. Marriage forces you to be humble. It will make you question things you’ve never had to question, and it only works if both of you are willing to do that. But the lasting strangeness and the difference are precisely what make it wonderful in the long run.

Plato – I can never quite forgive him for this – tells a story of how humans used to be two beings fused into one. Then Zeus split them apart as an act of punishment and ever since we’ve been looking for our other half. One problem I have with this idea of soulmates is that it’s, well, false – there is no “other half” out there stumbling around, looking for us. Another problem is that the allegory of soulmates is not nearly as beautiful as reality, which is two very different people volunteering to fuse despite their different backgrounds and baggage.

Alain de Botton writes, and I agree: 

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species. ⁶

Demented as we sometimes are, we’re capable of one of the most loving gestures imaginable: choosing one person out of the billions and living out the strangeness with them. Especially when we have those moments of frustration that tempt us to reach for the emergency brake.

When Dorothea Brooke talks about the “awful nearness of marriage”, she’s referring to the terror that comes from being so vulnerable to another person. But there is another definition of “awful” in the dictionary, even though almost no one uses it: to be filled with awe and wonder. The marriages that don’t work out are actually the ones with the least imagination – filled with unsatisfied fantasies but also inflexible demands.

The ones that thrive, on the other hand, are filled with curiosity, gratitude, and yes, a sense of awe at the other and a willingness to accept the lastingly strange.

***

Read Next: Alone Together: The Truth About Lasting Love →

1. From The Symposium.
2. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 2, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover Publications, 1966.
3. de Botton, Alain. The Course of Love: A Novel. S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, 2016.
4. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence” to describe the state of infatuation where a person can’t stop thinking about their love object and imagining them in the most ideal light possible. See more in her book, Love and Limerence.
5. Harris, Malcolm. “Rings and Books.” Raven Magazine, Johns Hopkins University, 12 Mar. 2024, https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/rings-books/.
6. From The Course of Love.