wants? The other person isn’t going to be perfect, obviously. Everybody is selfish at some level, and so you ask yourself, Is this person’s form of selfishness the kind I can live with?
COMPLETION
It’s too bad Jerry Maguire monopolized the line, but marital love really does feel like a completion. It feels like the old story from Plato’s Symposium, of the two separated halves finding together that they form a completed soul. It’s only together that they can really take their full journey. They are ready for a life bigger than anything they could have considered alone.
Dostoyevsky was a man who struggled with his own nature. Through gambling or the sheer chaos of his own nature, he would fall into debt and have to write himself out of debt. One day, with a deadline approaching and faced with the crush of writing an entire novel in a month, he met a stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna. They worked together on The Gambler. Anna later recalled: “Each day, chatting with me like a friend, he would lay bare some unhappy scene from his past. I could not help being deeply touched at his accounts of the difficulties from which he had never extricated himself, and indeed could not.”
Dostoyevsky finished the novel, paid her the equivalent of $1,500 for her stenography, and they parted ways. She found she missed him. “I had grown so accustomed to that merry rush of work, the joyful meeting and lively conversation with Dostoyevsky, that they had become a necessity to me. All my old activities had lost their interest and seemed empty and futile.”
They stayed in touch, and one day in the course of a conversation that was supposed to be a theoretical discussion of the nature of marriage, they had a disagreement over whether it was wise to marry a writer or an artist. Dostoyevsky believed that only a fool would marry such a person. No sane person would accept a proposal from such an unstable type. “Imagine that this artist is me,” he said by way of example, “that I have confessed my love to you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you answer?”
Anna realized that this was no longer just a theoretical conversation. “I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life,” she responded.
She later reflected, “I won’t try to convey the words full of tenderness and love that he said to me then; they are sacred to me. I was stunned, almost crushed by the immensity of my happiness and for a long time I couldn’t believe it.”
They tasted tragedy in marriage. They lost two children. But it turned out gloriously. Anna managed his career, basically opened a publishing house for him, and turned him into a financial and literary success. He never lost his deep respect for what he saw in her soul. “Throughout my life,” she wrote, after his death, “it has always seemed a kind of mystery to me that my good husband not only loved and respected me as many husbands love and respect their wives, but almost worshipped me, as though I were some special being created just for him. And that was true not only at the beginning of our marriage but through all the remaining years of it, up to his very death.”
EIGHTEEN
Marriage: The School You Build Together
Marriage starts as a joy and ends up an education. It starts as a joy because at first you get to spend every day with the person you care about most in the world, the one who makes you happiest just to be around. But then it turns into something else. When you agree to marry, you are agreeing to be completely known, a scary prospect. Living as a “we” instead of an “I” is a transformation of the routines of daily life. The thing you love about the person is connected to the exact thing that will come to drive you the most crazy. Her caustic wit can sometimes feel like cynicism. His emotional sensitivity can feel like neediness. The only way to thrive in marriage is to become a better person—more patient, wise, compassionate, persevering, communicative, and humble. When we make a commitment, we put ourselves into a pickle that we have to be more selfless to get out of.
Marriage educates by throwing a series of difficult tasks in your path. Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee list some of the most important ones:
To separate emotionally