[Edit: Ah crap it seems like I missed a day - yesterday. Oops. Having too much fun assisting and making friends with the junior team! Hehe. Coaching is really enjoyable, depending on who you coach I guess. It was terribly endearing how even after their long debrief and scoldings yesterday when they lost their match, a bunch of them still plopped down by me to queue for 'consultation'. Ahh... Hehe :)]
Read a wonderful article here on the dynamics of marriage, and how we sometimes end up choosing to marry inappropriate partners in modern times. I think this applies beyond marriage too, and this comes at a wonderful time for me while I'm at this juncture.
Some key parts that really stuck -. Points 3 and 9 are really relevant for me right now.
Seven: We want to freeze happiness
We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to own the car we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with
Getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. It is not in command of the ingredients of our happiness at that point. In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
Nine: We want to stop thinking about Love
Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives.
It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.
Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of Romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.
We talked again today; I'd resolutely followed up with him after my not-so-nice self left me feeling kind of guilty. I still don't know why I'm doing this - well I kind of know, but sometimes I still think I'm kind of crazy too. I ask about his life and inadvertently I'd ask about them as well, and it still feels weird hearing about it. It's been less than two weeks after all and they're official already. I knew as much but knowing doesn't pre-empt or prevent the ache that comes despite the knowledge. Still, I keep rubbing the salt in my wounds because now, I've decided, instead of shutting out the pain and focusing on other things, the best way to heal is to throw as much shit as you can at the gaping wound, and tell it to get over itself. Some parts of me - especially the rational part and life-goal part- has long been free; but some other parts of me still stubbornly cling on and pretends (?) to mind and be jealous. I'm figuring that out. At this point, I still can't bring myself to tell him "Thank you for letting me go when I had been so ready to be trapped." It'll come.
Read a wonderful article here on the dynamics of marriage, and how we sometimes end up choosing to marry inappropriate partners in modern times. I think this applies beyond marriage too, and this comes at a wonderful time for me while I'm at this juncture.
Some key parts that really stuck -. Points 3 and 9 are really relevant for me right now.
Three: We aren’t used to being happy
We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite as simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness.
We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering.
As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.
We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.
Seven: We want to freeze happiness
We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to own the car we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with
Getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. It is not in command of the ingredients of our happiness at that point. In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
Nine: We want to stop thinking about Love
Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives.
It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.
Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of Romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.
We talked again today; I'd resolutely followed up with him after my not-so-nice self left me feeling kind of guilty. I still don't know why I'm doing this - well I kind of know, but sometimes I still think I'm kind of crazy too. I ask about his life and inadvertently I'd ask about them as well, and it still feels weird hearing about it. It's been less than two weeks after all and they're official already. I knew as much but knowing doesn't pre-empt or prevent the ache that comes despite the knowledge. Still, I keep rubbing the salt in my wounds because now, I've decided, instead of shutting out the pain and focusing on other things, the best way to heal is to throw as much shit as you can at the gaping wound, and tell it to get over itself. Some parts of me - especially the rational part and life-goal part- has long been free; but some other parts of me still stubbornly cling on and pretends (?) to mind and be jealous. I'm figuring that out. At this point, I still can't bring myself to tell him "Thank you for letting me go when I had been so ready to be trapped." It'll come.
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