I mean, maybe you won’t. But this opinion piece in the Times is pretty spot-fucking-on according to my life research. The title might be designed to pique your interest, but the content is a pretty good combo of common sense, therapy, and life experience.
Here’s a couple of home run points:
We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.
Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.
Mother of god, yes. Lord knows I hit the accelerator on the bullet train to marriage-town back when I was a twenty-nothing, and my logic of “gotta lock this down”, “gonna feel like this forever” felt like indisputable facts at the time.
I regret nothing, though. I wouldn’t be me without those experiences, and besides the ending it was a pretty dang good time. And now that I’ve seen behind the curtain of marriage I’ll be better prepared come the next round.
“Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know.”