but in any commitment decision the rational brain is an equal partner. This is the time to say, as an acquaintance of mine did: I am going to make a good decision here. We may marry or we may part, but this is my life. I am responsible for my choices. I’m perfectly capable of deciding well.
The obvious reason to step back and appraise, even at this late juncture, is that you’re not the first person on earth to feel this way. Presumably most of the couples that went on to get married walked through most of the same stages of intimacy you did; they felt the same rush of love, the same sense of fusion and destiny—and then they married and then they got divorced. Love and passion are not enough. You’re setting a higher bar.
You do this deeper appraisal because when making a marriage decision you are making a leap against the odds. In the United States, nearly 40 percent of marriages end in divorce. Another 10 or 15 percent of couples separate and do not divorce, and another 7 percent or so stay together but are chronically unhappy. In other words, more than half of the people who decide to marry, presumably driven by passionate love, wind up unhappy. The odds are worse for couples that marry before age twenty-five.
And there are very few things worse than a bad marriage. Being in a bad marriage will increase your chance of getting sick by 35 percent and shorten your life span by an average of four years. There is no loneliness so lonely as the loneliness you feel when you are lying there loveless in bed with another. People go into marriages imagining they are going to sail the open seas together, but when you are in a bad marriage, as George Eliot put it, you are trapped in an enclosed basin.
You step back and appraise because you are aware that to some inevitable degree, you have no idea what you are doing. You will never know what you are doing, but you still want to have the best shot possible. “What is fascinating and almost existentially mischievous about marriage,” David Whyte writes, “is that whatever one side of the partnership wants will not occur; whatever the other side of the partnership desires will not occur, and the whatever that does occur is the combined life that emerges from first, the collision, and then the conversation between the two: a conversation that may seem foreign to both to begin with; something they might not recognize or even think they want.”
So how do you make this appraisal? Since this is the most important decision of your life, you would think society would have prepared you for this moment. You would think that the schools would have provided you with course after course on the marriage decision, on the psychology of marriage, the neuroscience of marriage, the literature of marriage. But no, society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones.
THE THREE LENSES
This is the moment to ask hard questions about yourself. Everybody spends too much time appraising the other person when making marriage decisions, but the person who can really screw things up is you. These are questions such as:
Have you got to the place where you can really do this? D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath.” The ultimate question for yourself is whether you are ready to lose control and be overwhelmed by marriage, come what may.
Do I like the person I am when I’m around him? We all have multiple personalities we project into the world, depending on whom we are around. Does this person bring out your crass, social-climbing self, or your kind, serving self?
What’s my core issue, and does this person fill it? We tend to marry the person who fills our greatest unresolved psychic problem. Maybe you yearn for emotional reliability, and this person is your steady hand. Maybe you yearn for emotional intensity, and this person is your fountain of love.
How high is my bar? Some people say, Never settle: You had better feel insanely lucky to have this person. Others say, Be more realistic: You’re never going to find the perfect person, and it’s better to be in a decent relationship than alone. Jane Austen thought it was “wicked” to settle, and I’m with her. If you